How to Write a Sentence

by Stanley Fish

  The idea—the core idea of humanism—is that the act of reading about great deeds will lead you to imitate them, a sequence the young John Milton experiences when he reads Dante and Petrarch, finds himself moved by them to “more love of virtue,” and comes to see that before he can presume to write of virtuous things, he must himself be virtuous:

  He who would not be frustrate of his hope to write well hereafter in laudable things ought himself to be a true Poem; that is, a composition and pattern of the best and honourablest things; not presuming to sing high praises of heroic men, or famous cities, unless he have in himself the experience and practice of all that which is praise-worthy.

  (An Apology, 1641)

  This sentence, a mini-essay on the relation between ethics and aesthetics, enacts what it describes. It argues implicitly against the commonsense assumption that the craft of writing is one thing, the moral worth of the writer another. Milton insists that the two are one, and that without the latter, the former is impossible. The somewhat clotted opening of the sentence—“He who would not be”—holds us up until the sentence opens up with the word “hope” and the briskly audacious, smoothly flowing declaration that if you want to write a good poem about good things, you must yourself be the thing you write about, “a true Poem.” The question raised—what exactly is a true poem?—is acknowledged by Milton when he promises, with the professorial “that is,” a clarifying definition. But by the logic of his message, no definition will be sufficient, because the state of true poem-hood cannot be described from the outside. It is a feature of one’s inside, and if it isn’t, no amount of words will explain it. So what follows the “that is” is a series of words and phrases that are themselves in need of an explanation no discursive elaboration could possibly provide. The words “composition” and “pattern” nicely join the perspectives of writing craft and moral probity: what you can compose depends on what you are composed of. The words that follow—“best” and “honourablest”—raise the same questions as “true Poem”: What exactly is the best and the most honorable? And a bit later, what is heroic? Again, the answer will be found, if it is found, “within himself”; that is where the “experience and practice of all that which is praise-worthy” reside. The objects of the sentence’s high praise—heroic men, good poems, honorable deeds—never acquire explicit and visible shape in the course of its unfolding, for if they did, the sentence—itself a true poem because of its reticence—would betray itself. The sentence refuses to give up its contents.

  If deeds are good and praiseworthy by virtue (literally) of the spirit from which they issue and not by virtue of the figure they cut in the world, one performs them because one must (they well up, as Milton says in the same piece, “unbidden”), and not in anticipation of the effects they may or may not produce. In 1660, on the eve of the Restoration and the dashing of his political hopes, Milton himself performs such a deed when he writes a one-hundred-page tract knowing in advance that it is likely to fall on deaf ears:

  Thus much I should perhaps have said though I were sure I should have spoken only to trees and stones, and had none to cry to, but with the Prophet O earth, earth, earth! to tell the very soil itself what her perverse inhabitants are deaf to.

  (The Readie and Easie Way to

  Establish a Free Commonwealth)

  Behind this relatively brief sentence are echoes of at least five myths and Bible passages, with allusions to: (1) Orpheus, whose singing was so beautiful that stones hurled at him by his enemies refused to hit him; (2) Midas, whose wife or hairdresser (depending on which version you read) tried to keep secret the truth about his ass’s ears by whispering it into the bulrushes only to find that the winds spread it everywhere; (3) Jason and Cadmus, each of whom, in different mythological traditions, is said to have sown dragon’s teeth from which sprang up armed men whose threat was then diminished by a stone thrown into their midst; (4) Ezekiel, the hero who at God’s command prophesied over a valley of dry bones as winds breathed life into them and made them into “an exceeding great army” (Ezekiel 37:10); and (5) Jeremiah 22, in which God cries, “O earth, earth, earth, hear the Word of the Lord,” and warns that “if ye will not hear these words . . . this house shall be a desolation.” So, in sum and in the background: a truth that will eventually be heard despite efforts to suppress it; a poet-singer who is the medium of a reviving and enlivening spirit; legions who will someday spring up; a God who punishes the wicked and rewards the righteous in his own good time, maybe (for how can we know?). The “maybe” part is represented in the sentence by an artfully placed “perhaps”—“Thus much I should perhaps have said”—an adverb that acknowledges the uncertain status of his own performance. Does he speak without concern either for the audience or for the effect his words may or may not have? Or does he even now, as what he calls the “good old cause” seems to be expiring, harbor the hope that his words will be the seeds that, when sown, will spring up into an “exceeding great army”? The hesitation conveyed by “perhaps” hangs over what follows it. “[T]hough I were sure” doesn’t tell us whether he is sure or not. When he joins the Prophet in crying “earth, earth, earth,” is he saying that only the earth will listen and of course it does not; or is he appropriating to himself the Spirit that speaks through Jeremiah and prophesies the destruction of his enemies? Is the deafness of earth’s inhabitants dispositive? Does it signal the end of reformation’s story? Or is it merely one more instance, in a very long history, of the obdurateness of those who resist God’s word (as conveyed by his anointed servant, by his Orpheus) and are doomed to be cast aside when the truth they cannot hear is unmistakably revealed? The power of the sentence inheres in its refusal to resolve this basic ambiguity. It is at once relentless in its judgments and (properly) tentative about when and whether those judgments will be realized. Another sentence that knows the truth, but will not deliver it up.

  The first sentence of Francis Bacon’s essay “Of Truth” (1625) also hoards the truth but disguises the deed by shifting blame for it to a surrogate:

  What is Truth? said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer.

  The sentence distances itself from its content twice, first by attributing to Pilate the question it seemed to ask, and then by attributing to him the action it performs. Pilate will not stay for an answer to the posed question, but neither will the sentence, which transfers its reticence/indifference to him. The key and damning word is “jesting.” Pilate has been interrogating Jesus, who has told him, “Everyone that is of the truth heareth my voice.” It is then that Pilate asks, “What is truth?” ( John 18:38), and immediately goes out to speak to the Jews who had brought Jesus to him. In short, he makes a philosophical quip about truth—who can know what the truth is?—and walks away, not recognizing that the Truth stands before him in the person of the man he has been asked to judge and condemn. The irony is that he will not stay for an answer he didn’t even have to seek. There it is, in plain sight (like the letter in Poe’s “The Purloined Letter”), in the flesh, as directly visible as you might like, but wholly invisible to darkened eyes. The joke’s on him and also on any reader who expected an answer the sentence withholds.

  The idea of a truth that is at once plainly accessible and wholly hidden is central to religious thought. A sentence from John Donne’s Devotions (1624) is a veritable dissertation on it and a rhetorical tour de force to boot:

  My God, my God, thou art a direct God, may I not say a literal God, a God that wouldst be understood literally and according to the plain sense of all thou sayest, but thou art also (Lord, I intend it to thy glory, and let no profane misinterpreter abuse it to thy diminution), thou art a figurative, a metaphorical God too, a God in whose words there is such a height of figures, such voyages, such peregrinations to fetch remote and precious metaphors, such extensions, such spreadings, such curtains of allegories, such third heavens of hyperboles, so harmonious elocutions, so retired and so reserved expressions, so commanding persuasions, so persuading
commandments, such sinews even in thy milk, and such things in thy words, as all profane authors seem of the seed of the serpent that creeps, thou art the Dove that flies.

  This is, again, a sentence about itself or, to be more precise, about its inability to characterize its addressee, “My God.” Its basic syntactical structure is simple: “Thou art . . .” The problem is to fill in the dots. The first part of the sentence tells us that there is no problem at all, for the object to be known and described is “direct,” “literal,” and “plain,” words implying that little in the way of interpretation is required. Not only does this God mean what he says, but what he says can be “understood literally,” that is, with no reaching after a meaning that is perfectly present. But God’s literalism—the instantaneous conveyance of his intentions—is a feature of eternity where those to whom he speaks dwell within him; he is always, in a sense, speaking to himself; there is no distance to be bridged; no translation, in the root sense of being carried across space, is necessary. Mortal men and women, in contrast, live at a distance from one another—that’s why they have to write sentences—and at an even greater distance from a realm to which they have no access. Their perspective is limited by time and space, and because the discursive structures they employ reflect that limitation, the literalism they can achieve—the literalism of the here and now—is spectacularly inadequate to the literalism Donne celebrates as God’s. That is why his sentence does not end with the proclamation of God’s “plain sense”; the real question is how do we get even a glimpse of that plainness when the instruments (of cognition, understanding, human language, sentences) at our disposal are actually obstructions, are in the way?

  The answer is to refuse the confines of the medium and deploy it as a springboard to truths it cannot express; use mortal language while bending, stretching, and even breaking it at the same time. That is what Donne does after the turn in his sentence “but thou art also . . .” But before he continues, he parenthetically warns away the “profane misinterpreter,” who might mistake his intention (a danger that increases as earthly literalism is left behind). A profane misinterpreter is a secular interpreter, an interpreter who because he is not spiritual is literal in the wrong way. Donne knows that no mere imprecation can protect him from those who do not have within them that which moves him to write. He just has to clear the decks before he flies.

  And fly he does as he at once characterizes and performs the language in which God speaks. It is a language that is always pointing away from itself to something that transcends it, something that is, literally, out of this world. It is figurative, that is, always departing from ordinary meaning. It is metaphorical, that is, rubbing two literalisms together so as to produce something never imagined before. And once its flight pattern is established, the language soars higher, moving not only into allegories (double-sided discourse) but “curtained,” obscured allegories; not only into figures, but heights of figures, figures of figures; not only into hyperboles, but third-heaven hyperboles, hyperboles that reside where God lives, where what is said is “unspeakable” (2 Corinthians 12:4) because it does not have to be spoken. Just before its end, the sentence descends to earth and to the literalism it strives to leave behind—“the seed of the serpent that creeps”—before it rises again with the final completion of the “Thou art” pattern: “thou art the Dove that flies,” which means, impossibly, that Jesus is simultaneously the one baptized by John in the river Jordan and the Dove that descends from above (that is, from himself ) to confirm the baptism and his identity as God. Quite a trick, and while Donne’s sentence does not, could not, match it, it gets as close as we are likely ever to get in merely mortal prose.

  The extraordinary power of language to communicate a reality its forms cannot present is not limited to instances of religious yearning. It is both the accomplishment and often the explicit subject of those who profess the religion of Art. Here are two sentences by worshipper Joseph Conrad.

  The first is from the preface to The Nigger of the “Narcissus” (1897), which begins by declaring, “A work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line.” A few sentences later, Conrad elaborates:

  And it is only through complete, unswerving devotion to the perfect blending of form and substance; it is only through an unremitting, never discouraged care for the shape and ring of sentences that an approach can be made to plasticity, to colour, and the light of magic suggestiveness may be brought to play for an evanescent instant over the commonplace surfaces of words, of the old, old words, worn thin, defaced by ages of careless usage.

  The first part of the sentence names the requirements—complete devotion, perfect blending, unremitting care—phrases that seem preliminary to a celebration of art’s ineffable power, but in fact turn out to be preliminary to a celebration of sentences, of their “shape and ring.” “Shape” suggests something firm and crisp, something self-contained; but (another surprise) the firmness is valued as a way to something decidedly not firm, to “plasticity,” an availability to being molded and remolded. The shape of an artfully made sentence, like a piece of sculpture, can be turned this way and that, revealing from each new perspective new meanings, new shades, new colors; and in that way it can become the vehicle of a “magic suggestiveness,” magic because nothing in the mere surface form—the form that might be grammatically parsed—hints of it.

  As Conrad’s sentence proceeds, it moves into the very realm of the suggestiveness it invokes while refusing, as it must, to arrest it; it is glimpsed, here and in the sentences of other artists, only in an instant, and that instant is “evanescent”—that is, transitory, fleeting, capable of being intermittently experienced, but not of being captured and pinned down. The miracle, and the magic, is that such moments of evanescence can be produced by language that in its mundane uses sits inert on the page. The phrase “evanescent instant” is poised between “play” and its adverb “over,” which then deposits us on “the commonplace surfaces of words.” The evanescent instant has occurred in the space between the action and its usual commonplace result, has occurred, as it were, in the syntax; but it can be sustained for a microsecond only, and the sentence ends with an almost elegiac caressing of the threadbare material out of which the marvelous can sometimes be made: “old, old words, worn thin, defaced by ages of careless usage.” The barely submerged image is of a coin, a piece of currency, exchanged and made use of many times until it has almost been worn away and seems incapable of regaining a pristine value. Except in sentences like this one where there is no careless usage at all, and more than a hint of the evanescent instant that makes language, at least for a microsecond, magical.

  Two years later, in Heart of Darkness, Conrad’s aesthetic reappears as a description of Marlowe’s tale-telling:

  The yarns of seamen have a direct simplicity, the whole meaning of which lies within the shell of a cracked nut, but Marlowe was not typical (if his propensity to spin yarns be excepted), and to him the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of one of these misty halos that sometimes are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine.

  The sentence’s independent clause is as directly simple as the yarns it reports; its meaning, like the meaning seamen deliver, is easily extracted. But when Marlowe’s atypicality becomes the sentence’s subject, meaning become elusive and is ever receding. First we learn that in Marlowe’s yarns, meaning, rather than being a kernel wrapped inside the prose, is on the outside. But what does it mean for meaning to be on the outside? The successive clauses that labor to tell us only deepen the question. Look at the “it” in “enveloping the tale which brought it out.” “It” is the meaning that is brought out by a tale enveloped—everywhere surrounded and enwrapped—by, guess what, the meaning; the meaning is its own membrane. But that’s not quite it, because it is too visually specific; hence the qualif
ication “only as a glow brings out a haze.” A glow is a light produced by something else; it is a second-order phenomenon. A haze, an opaque vapor, is the effect of a glow; it is even more insubstantial, a third-order phenomenon. But that’s not quite it either. It—the meaning, the glow, the haze—should be understood not as itself but like something (“in the likeness”), like a misty halo, a cloudy luminescence, a light that is dim and barely seen; you can’t be sure you see it, because its illumination (a word that names what the sentence withholds) is spectral, ghostly, and a form of moonshine, that is, of talk that is either visionary or foolish. Which is it? The sentence doesn’t tell us, and we leave it not quite knowing of what kind of moonshine it itself is made or what meaning really is.

  Conrad was (for a time) a friend and collaborator of Ford Madox Ford’s. Ford admired Conrad’s writing and, in his 1911 essay “The Critical Attitude,” paired him with Henry James. The two were united, he said, by “an extreme literary conscientiousness”; that is, both cared only for their art. The compliment could be extended to Ford himself, who wrote in the preface to the 1927 edition of The Good Soldier (a novel nearly every sentence of which merits a place in this book), “I have always been mad about writing—about the way writing should be done.” The madness, in several senses, is shared by the novel’s narrator, John Dowell, who pauses frequently to reflect on the act of writing. In fact the construction of the story is his obsession, as we can tell from the famous first sentence: