Grammar, and the rhythm and the magic

In response to a query about that last post, I'm moved to expand: Embracing grammar does not mean an author must sacrifice rhythm or style. That's the point Francine Prose starts to make here: "Mastering the logic of grammar contributes, in a mysterious way that again evokes some process of osmosis, to the logic of thought."

Let's explore that.

My interpretation of what Prose is saying is that understanding the way sentences are structured will give writers more power, not less, when it comes time to play with that structure -- to, at their creative will, "break the rules," and break them well. The thing is, in writing, the rules are infinitely bendable. Writers can choose "wrong" words (from a pedant's viewpoint) but go on to employ them in such a way as to make them, in context, seem more "right" than the reader could ever have imagined. What doesn't work is the writing that takes the rules and abuses them to such an extent that a sentence becomes impossible to comprehend -- or just plain groan-inducing. (How many times have you read tortured prose where the writer was obviously trying to stretch a bit too hard? Take my word for it: Editors run into that sort of thing almost daily.) At that point, the breaking of the rules serves no one -- not even the author, for who wants to read a book made impenetrable in its gobbledygook?

In the very same chapter in which Prose makes the case for grammar, she also says it's "essential to find a style manual with a loose interpretation of the whole concept of style[*], lest you be advised against ever writing the sort of sentence fragment that animates the Philip Roth passage" (a mesmerizing excerpt from American Pastoral that she cited earlier). "Which is why, I believe, it's necessary to hold the concept of clarity as an even higher ideal than grammatical correctness, and why it's essential to read great sentences -- that is, the sentences of great sentence-writers -- along with your style book."

Let's linger on that word for a moment: CLARITY. In all the verbal pyrotechnics a writer may employ, it comes back to that. At the end, do we understand what we just read? After a 181-word sentence -- which is the length of a Virginia Woolf sentence Ms. Prose uses to make her point -- are we still breathing? Is the brain electrified, or is it confused? This is where Prose goes on, after her discussion of grammar, to write at length on the importance of rhythm, using the Woolf sentence and those of several other writers as examples. And she illustrates her point with a couple of lovely sentences of her own (again on Woolf):

Because as her sentence winds on, everything proceeds in an orderly progression from that participle "considering" and that introduction of "illness" as the noun that can subsequently be summoned up by the pronoun "it." Pausing to breathe at each comma, we find ourselves amid a series of dependent clauses that break over us like waves, clauses that increase in length, complexity, and intensity as the aspects of illness that we are invited to consider grow more elaborate and imaginative, whisking us from undiscovered countries to deserts to flowered lawns and down into the abyss from which we are lifted by the voice of the dentist whom we mistake for God welcoming us into heaven.

Comma. Participle. Clause. Pronoun. See how that works? What she's saying is that the building blocks are all still there, that they can be applied to the most dazzling and unconventional of sentences by Woolf, by Roth, by Joyce or by Hemingway. But they're employed in a way that makes sense, one that breathes with the help of -- wait for it! -- the happy little pieces all coming together harmoniously. In fact, speaking of harmony, here's another Prose analogy: "It's helpful to consider the parallels to music, the way that, at the end of a symphony, the tempo slows down and the chords become more sustained or dramatic, with overtones that reverberate and echo after the musicians have stopped playing."

Where that music becomes discordant, though, is in the misapplication of some of the building blocks. I'm going to play with Prose's own sentence here and rearrange the commas. Note how the random insertion or deletion of the commas impedes the breath, even changes the meaning, and turns this into something less than lyrical:

Pausing to breathe, at each comma we find ourselves amid a series of dependent clauses, that break over us like waves clauses that increase, in length, complexity and intensity as the aspects of illness, that we are invited to consider grow more elaborate and imaginative, whisking us from undiscovered countries to deserts to flowered lawns and down into the abyss from which we are lifted by the voice, of the dentist whom we mistake for God welcoming us into heaven.

Enh. Feel like you're hyperventilating? I sure do. The haphazard placement of the commas destroys the sentence's natural flow. The good news is that even without having all the comma rules memorized, talented writers can usually still get by, helped by their natural ear for the language. (And as the above example should illustrate, even people who aren't writers have enough of an ear to recognize when something is off. This is what I referred to in my earlier post.)

I've mentioned before how I often get e-mail from old friends or new acquaintances (even parents) asking me to please forgive them their sins of syntax, goofs of grammar, perversions of punctuation. What's truly amazing (even heartbreaking) to me is when they include these kinds of caveats up front, then go on to write an amazingly gorgeous letter. A letter in which, sure, they've bent or broken some rules, or used nonsense words, or made-up words (something I do all the time, by the way), and yet from a writerly standpoint, there is absolutely nothing wrong with what they've done. I'm frequently left dumbfounded by these apologies, but then I realize it all comes back to the root problem: These people are convinced they're abusing the writing because they feel unclear on the rules, insecure about their mastery of them; and if they're unclear on the rules, they think they must be breaking them, they must be committing embarrassing gaffes -- they're just not sure which ones.

This is again where grammar becomes a tool -- to if nothing else relieve these writers' paranoia. Some writers obviously have more of a natural gift for rhythm, for the layering of clauses, for the ingenious use of vocabulary. What's funny is that in exercising their gift, they're most likely already using most of the helping tools of grammar. They just don't realize it.

* To this, I'd add that it's helpful to have not just one style manual, a "loose" style manual, but rather a collection of manuals of style and usage to weigh the advice of various authorities and then make an informed decision of one's own. By studying the ideas of different experts, you pick a variety of tips and tricks, not just the ideology of one grammarian.