[Harper; 2011]
Stanley Fish’s How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One opens with a criticism of Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style, which promotes moderate, orderly paragraphs and cautions against dialect, jargon, and the word thrust. “Omit needless words,” Strunk commanded in 1919, and generations of Americans would proceed to edit by subtraction. Meanwhile, the models from Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics, published three years before, were forming the basis of structuralism, which would attempt to reduce the narrative phenomenon to a tidy, predictable grammar.
The sterile systems of structuralism would eventually be transcended by some of the same people who outlined them, but nearly a century after its first printing, Strunk Jr.’s little book of peeves is still sitting on nearly every college bookshelf, whispering in the ears of students who vacillate between people and persons and crushing the dreams of unique writers who wish they could be more unique. But Stanley Fish believes that this overwrought focus on grammar and semantics is not only ineffective, it’s detrimental. The sentence, Fish says, is where students should be looking.
Take this sentence from Jonathan Swift’s A Tale of a Tub:
Last week I saw a woman flayed, and you will hardly believe how much it altered her person for the worse.
Fish explains that the power of this sentence, its muted horror, is complemented by its form, which can be easily reproduced. Simply “put together two mildly affirmed assertions,” he says, “the second of which reacts to the first in a way that is absurdly inadequate.” He provides the following example: “This morning I awoke after twenty minutes of sleep and it is amazing how tired I was.” Lame, by Fish’s own admission. The framework is there, but it’s missing the wordplay and the gravity. Here’s mine: “I met a man at the supermarket whose wife just died, and you should’ve seen how lost he was.”
Neither of these imitations is a match for the original, of course, because Swift wasn’t just playing with the word person; he was criticizing a society. But Fish is not suggesting that great sentences are equations with arbitrary values; his point is that, if you master the forms now, you will have them at your disposal later, when you do have something to say. This contention would be stronger, perhaps, if there were a chapter on weak sentences, one in which Fish showed how inert, but meaningful, sentences could be galvanized by complementary structures. He also leaves the discovery of the forms he touts largely to the reader, as there are no tables or sentence diagrams to be found, and the index is composed of authors, not terms.
This is for the best, however, as it allows Fish to move past forms and discuss sentences that resist dissection—sentences that undermine expectations and make conventional prose seem stiff and artificial. Sentences like the opener to Catcher in the Rye:
If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.
Apart from loose terms like additive and associative, Fish does not try to pin down the artful contempt of this sentence. He points to its ability to be both spontaneous and reflective, and he contrasts it with the biographical precision of a line from David Copperfied: “To begin my life with the beginning of my life, I record that I was born [as I have been informed and believe] on a Friday, at twelve o’clock at night.” But he does not attempt to emulate it.
This eclectic appreciation, which places unexpected names like Joan Crawford and Antonin Scalia next to those of masters like Henry James and Gertrude Stein, fills the awkward gaps between works of art and reproductions and gives the book a value beyond its “how-to” pretense. From beginning to end, Fish’s love of sentences—of first sentences that pull us in and final ones that leave us yearning—of beautiful sentences that wed style and substance and other ones that do whatever—of “evanescent instants” in which well-worn words become something mysterious and novel—is transferred to the reader.
“A narrative is a long sentence,” wrote Roland Barthes, who, like Stanley Fish, appreciated both order and entanglement. In this way, How to Write a Sentence is about much more than what lies between periods; it’s about why we love literature.
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