by Stanley Fish
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
The narrator, Nick Carraway, has been recalling Jay Gatsby’s faith in a future that will bring him his dream: Daisy Buchanan and everything she stands for. We are all, Carraway muses, like Gatsby, running toward a promised land “that year by year recedes before us.” This last sentence mimes the treadmill we are on, mocking our efforts at acceleration with a series of b’s—“beat,” “boats,” “borne,” “back”—that keeps bringing us to the same place. We try to get ahead, but the current, both of life and the sentence, flows ceaselessly backward, carrying us again and again into the past, which is of course the sentence’s last word. It says, here we are again.
The Great Gatsby is thought to have been modeled in part on Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899, 1902), also about a man who, like Gatsby, remains a mystery and seeks after meanings and values that elude him. In Conrad’s novel, the metaphor of a water journey made against resistance is sustained from the opening lines to this last line:
The offing was barred by a black bank of clouds, and the tranquil waterway leading to the utmost ends of the earth flowed somber under an overcast sky—seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness.
The phrase “barred by a black bank” might have been an alliterative pattern Fitzgerald was remembering when he wrote the last sentence of The Great Gatsby. Unlike Fitzgerald’s sentence, Conrad’s open up and flows, but its forward movement doesn’t bring us anywhere, or, rather, it brings us too far. The “offing” is a part of the sea that is distant but visible from the shore; it marks the distinction between shore and what lies beyond it, and between what is sea and what is not sea. But the first thing we learn about the offing is that we cannot see it because it is barred by black clouds; so our line of vision shifts downward to the “tranquil waterway.” Normally a positive word, “tranquil” is vaguely ominous; the waterway is calm, unruffled, free from agitation, in short, empty and vast, so vast that it has no end (and therefore no beginning or middle); it flows “somber,” that is, dark, gloomy, in shade (from the Latin sub umbra); it flows “under an overcast sky,” and while “under” suggests a separation between waterway and sky, the word “overcast”—dark, obscuring—brings the two together in a gloom; and what the waterway flows into is an even vaster darkness. “Black” “clouds,” “somber,” “overcast,” “darkness”—all words with the same connotations, and together they create the “immense darkness” waiting for us at the end of the sentence. The darkness refuses to perform as a period; it just keeps stretching on.
Both Fitzgerald’s and Conrad’s sentences work against the fact that sentences move in time and promise to deliver us somewhere at their conclusion. Their sentences, as we have seen, either flow backward or take us nowhere or take us to the mouth of an unfathomable immensity; they deny us the comfort that sentences, especially last sentences, normally provide, the comfort of being able to order objects and events in comprehensible patterns of cause and effect, past and present, near and far. All those distinctions—distinctions in the absence of which ordinary life could hardly be lived—are casualties of these sentences, and this is even more spectacularly the case with the last sentence of Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838), where whiteness does for Poe what darkness does for Conrad. Water is again the (apparently) conveying medium. Two men in a boat are increasingly unable to see anything in front of them as a white “ashy material” covers everything. And then a huge “shrouded human figure” looms ahead, and, suddenly, the abrupt (non)end:
And the hue of the skin of the figure was of the perfect whiteness of the snow.
“Hue” means color, and a figure is something that stands out against a ground. In the absence of a ground, a figure could not be seen, for if it were the same as everything surrounding it, it could not emerge into visibility. That is precisely the case here; the figure that looms before Pym and his companion is indistinguishable from the background frame that would, if it only had a hue, allow it to be picked out. What the unhappy travelers meet in the last second of their voyage is the end of perception. Perception requires both distance and difference (you’re one thing, I’m another), but here there is neither. White snow, white skin, white everything. Skin is usually a covering of something, but in this sentence, it is skin all the way down (a point made formally by the four nested “ofs”). The skin is not only white; it is a perfect white, a white without blemish, without seam, without beginning and end, and therefore without the capacity to provide the reference points that make seeing “it,” as opposed to anything else, possible. In some religious discourses, this is the desired state, the undoing of perceptual distinction in a union with divinity in which the aspirer and the object of aspiration are indistinguishable. Identity, as a function of difference, is no more, and the peace of God and eternity reigns. Obviously not the case in this sentence, where the undoing of perception and of any basis for judgment or decision is the occasion of horror, not unlike the horror Conrad’s Kurtz proclaims in Heart of Darkness.
Another name for the state of perceptual dissolution, the state in which separateness and independence are no more and we are one, as Wordsworth said, with the rocks and stones and trees, is death, imagined either as nothing—that seems to be Poe’s imagination—or as the portal to everything. The relationship between peace and death is what Mr. Lockwood thinks about in the last sentence of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847), as he stands above the graves of Heathcliff and Catherine, who are finally at rest after lives of drama, turmoil, and pain:
I lingered round them, under that benign sky, watched the moths fluttering among the heath and harebells, listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass, and wondered how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth.
The four verbs that describe Lockwood’s posture—“lingered,” “watched,” “listened,” “wondered”—have the effect of stilling action and presenting a mental state that is without perturbation or movement. No straight-line motion of either body or mind, just a gentle musing that mirrors the gentle fluctuations of nature—the fluttering moths, the soft winds that breathe rather than blow, the grass that is slightly ruffled but not really disturbed, all under a calm (“benign”) sky. When the sentence finally moves forward with the report of what Lockwood is wondering, it names for a second everything it has excluded—unquietness—but its point is that, at least in this moment, unquietness will not even be imagined for those who, after a lifetime of agitation, slumber. “[S]leepers in that quiet earth” puts the seal on the cessation of activity, and presents us with a sense of resolution that feels like a benediction.
Benediction is what George Eliot reads over the life of her heroine Dorothea Brooke in the last sentence of Middlemarch (1900). Dorothea’s “finely-touched spirit” produced benign effects in the world, but not “widely visible” ones:
But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts, and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.
Eliot wrote in a Protestant tradition that privileges the interior action of faith over the performance of great deeds. The idea (Eliot would have encountered it in the poetry of Milton, especially Paradise Regained) is that right being—the state of a well-ordered soul—is itself an action. Dorothea’s being, we are told, is the source of her effect. It is an effect that is said to be “diffusive”; that is, it spreads everywhere, a statement that at first seems hyperbolic, until it is glossed in a way that generalizes Dorothea’s example to the point of universalizing it. The gloss begins by assuming what it does not pause to argue for: “Good” in the world is growing, and then it attributes that good and its growth not only to Dorothea (a single attribution would have been implausible) but to all the Dorotheas of whom
we necessarily know nothing. The phrase “unhistoric acts” tells it all: acts that are not played out on the world’s stage, acts that are interior, acts that will go unrecorded. How could such acts be efficacious? What is their medium? The answer is that you and I are; we are invited by the sentence to consult our own lives and then to inventory everything in them that is “not so ill,” and finally to acknowledge that the good we have experienced and perhaps practice is “half owing” to those many who, although hidden from view, live “faithfully,” that is, with a resolution always to be true to an internal code of values, and infect the world with a virtue that is contagious. “[H]alf owing” leaves room for individual efforts; even if the presence of a Dorothea touches and awakens us, we must still do our part, although that part may be as theatrically modest as the part she provides. And if we do our part, our reward will be as Dorothea’s—to rest in “unvisited tombs,” a phrase that might in some other sentence have the sound of melancholy and failure, but here rings with quiet triumph. Faithful souls need no external signs of their worth to validate them; visits would be superfluous; persons of Dorothea’s “finely-touched spirit”—and oh, how wonderful to be one—need neither tombs nor visitors. They are their own monuments, as is this quietly thrilling sentence.
I do not mean to suggest that the only last sentences worth paying attention to bring either dissolution, the effacing of difference, or the “peace which passeth understanding.” Some last sentences refuse both these positive and negative resolutions and keep their tensions and tumults alive till the end. Here is the last sentence of E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924). Fielding, an Englishman with “a belief in education,” has just said to Dr. Aziz (they are both on horseback), “Why can’t we be friends now? It’s what I want. It’s what you want.” Aziz does not reply, but the whole world does:
But the horses didn’t want it—they swerved apart, the earth didn’t want it, sending up rocks through which riders must pass single file, the temples, the tank, the jail, the palace, the birds, the carrion, the Guest House, that came into view as they issued from the gap and saw Mau beneath, they didn’t want it, and they said in their hundred voices, “No, not yet,” and the sky said, “No, not there.”
Nature’s indifference to man is a prime trope of pastoral poetry; the seasons unfold, plants and flowers live and bloom again; the sun shines on fresh meadows, but men and women (the words are the Greek poet Moschus’s, in his lament for Bion), “once we have died, in hollow earth we sleep, gone down into silence, a right long and endless and unawakening sleep.” In Forster’s sentence, however, nature is an active participant in the political world and signifies her preferences in unmistakable and myriad ways: by the movement of the horses; by a landscape that will not allow the two would-be friends to ride side by side (the participle “sending up rocks” suggest that the narrow pass the rocks create is being formed right now, in the sentence); by inanimate features of a cultural landscape that insists on its own hegemony and will not give up anything (palaces, jails, guesthouses); by signs (birds and carrion); and, as if these “hundred voices” saying, “No, not yet,” were insufficiently loud and clear, by the overarching sky itself, whose voice is even more emphatically negative: “No, not there.” This is an overdetermined no if there ever was one. The sentence could have gone on forever and the chorus of nays would only have been augmented, never softened. This is a last sentence that lets no one off its hook.
The peace that eludes Dr. Aziz and Fielding, the peace Dorothea has earned, the peace Cathy and Heathcliff may enjoy in their shared grave, comes to Faulkner’s Benjy as the surrey he is riding in goes clip-clop at a steady pace. Here is the last sentence of The Sound and the Fury (1929):
The broken flower drooped over Ben’s fist and his eyes were empty and blue and serene again as cornice and façade flowed smoothly once more from left to right, post and tree, window and doorway and signboard each in its ordered place.
The serenity Benjy achieves depends on a regularity of sound and motion that quiets the thoughts he can’t quite have. Although the sentence describes a scene of which he is the centerpiece, he, as an active consciousness, is absent from it. The drooping flower has more agency than he does. The connective “and” promises a reaction to the flower, but none comes, just the report of Benjy’s empty eyes. He becomes an object in the landscape; the blueness of his eyes merging with post, tree, window, and doorway, all flowing together in a cinematic moment gloriously without content, but full of order, not the order of man’s plans, but the order of things; formalism triumphant in the stilling of mind.
CHAPTER 10
Sentences That Are About Themselves
(Aren’t They All?)
As we near the end of our time together, let’s look back and see where we’ve been and how far we’ve come. I began with a tendentious thesis: in learning how to write sentences, it is best to begin with forms and pay no attention to content. A sentence, I declared, is a structure of logical relationships; the relationships are finite and learnable; the contents that can find expression in the structures formed by the relationships are infinite and incapable of being catalogued. So it follows, I argued, that content will be a distraction and that the skill of writing well-formed, clear, and tightly organized sentences will be acquired by focusing on forms. I explained that what I meant by “forms” is not the list of parts of speech or kinds of clauses or grammatical errors found in many textbooks, but the logical forms that link actor, action, and the object of action in a way that make available simple and complicated predications. It is a matter, I said, of practice, of becoming so familiar with the tools in advance of any particular use of them that when an occasion of use turns up, you and they will be ready. I then came up with a few exercises (there are many more) that would help.
The next step was to introduce the notion of styles, arrangements of formal features designed to produce a certain effect and project a certain vision of the world. These are also innumerable, but three, I observed, are general enough to serve as teachable examples: the subordinating style, which ranks, orders, and sequences things, events, and persons in a way that strongly suggests a world where control is the imperative and everything is in its proper place; the additive style, which gives the impression of speech and writing just haphazardly tumbling out of the mouth or the thoughts of a writer who is not worrying about getting every particular just right; and the satiric style (more a thematic than a formal category), employed as a weapon by writers who want to harpoon persons, parties, or society as a whole. I illustrated these stylistic categories with sentences written by master writers who were of course trying to say something important with them, but my reading of their prose emphasized the formal resources they were deploying in ways that might be imitated by anyone willing to work at it. I hazarded some imitations myself, noting always that they were imitations of formal devices and were therefore uninteresting or even puerile in content.
And, finally, I acknowledged that in the end, content must take center stage, for the expression of content is what writing is for; and I turned my attention to sentences that could not be regarded as stand-alone monuments, because in order to read them, never mind analyze them, it was necessary to take account of the substantive concerns that led to their being written. First and last sentences, I observed, are obvious instances; a first sentence is the preface to something, to a set of propositions or to an unfolding idea, to a meditation on the complexity of life or to a political statement (or to a thousand other things); and a last sentence is the conclusion or coda to that same something; and so to talk about first and last sentences is to talk about the role they play in a structure of content, and that is the way I have talked about them in the previous two sections. I passed from a focus on craft to a focus on meaning, from analyzing sentences to reading them. The idea was that if you know how sentences are put together in the abstract—as formal devices for delivering a nonformal payoff—you will be that much better able to engage
with them, to take their measure in full, to receive what they have to give. Hence the formula “sentence craft equals sentence comprehension equals sentence appreciation.”
But in reading over the pages I have written, I have become aware that they have been staging a drama or a contest between what we might call the instrumental view of language—language as the disposable vehicle of a subject matter it serves—and a view of language as a formal system that refuses to efface itself before the demands of content and instead claims generative and determining powers; meanings serve it and not the other way around; it is its own subject matter. Almost without my knowing it, the unfolding of my argument mirrored the struggle between these two views. In the opening chapters, I concentrated on language’s forms, but matters of substance kept seeping in; in the later chapters, I surrendered to content, but my analyses always wanted to return to form. In this final section I will bring the two strains of the book together by looking at sentences whose content is their form—sentences self-conscious about their own composition, sentences that meditate on their own limitations, sentences that burst their limitations, sentences that invite and resist interrogation, sentences that proclaim their power, sentences that withhold their power, sentences that are great in part because they are so determinedly self-reflexive and aspire to the condition of pure objects.
First a sentence from Philip Sidney’s An Apology for Poetry (1595) that at once tells us what a sentence can do and does it:
Who readeth Aeneas carrying old Anchises on his back that wisheth not it were his fortune to perform so excellent an act?
The sentence is about the effects of reading it. The main effect is produced by the speed of the first three words. By writing “Who” instead of “He who” and by leaving out the preposition (either “of ” or “about”) between “readeth” and “Aeneas,” Sidney delivers us to the main image of his sentence—Aeneas carrying his elderly father to Sicily after the defeat of Troy—by what feels almost like fuel injection. Usually, “readeth” would be a verb signifying distance, but the sentence rushes past the word and inserts us directly (or so it seems) into the scene. Then the sentence slows down in preparation for a reflection on the experience it has delivered. “[T]hat wisheth not it were,” in contrast to what precedes it, is labored, convoluted, and indirect. The prose seems to stand between us and the wish whose negation it negates. And then it opens up again, to name that wish—“to perform so excellent an act”—a wish the reader has already realized insofar as he has been moved by the experience of reading the sentence, of performing it, to admire; and if admiration, can emulation be far behind?