by R.P. Burnham
The time is somewhere in the future, and Dick and Jane do not live in a simple sentence world anymore, nor do they watch Spot run, for it has been many years since last he wagged his happy little tail. Instead they live in a world of dependent clauses, conditional adverbial modifiers, subjunctive moods, compound-complex sentences, and transformational grammar: it is a world beyond balanced and periodic sentences, a world of spasmodic syntax, a world where even horror cannot be simple. Dick does not say to Jane:
JANE, SEE THE MUSHROOM CLOUD.
SEE IT RISE IN THE AIR.
HEAR IT BOOM, JANE.
FEEL IT FRY YOUR SKIN.
He only sees it in his mind’s eye, lying there in waiting, so that instead of receiving direct utterance it gives a certain ambiance to his words and makes the future tense tentative.
Dick and Jane, though older, are just as typical as they were when they helped us all learn to read. Their middle-class upbringing led to a middle-class life when they reached the age of adults, for though you may think of them as living in a timeless world of icecream cones and the sound of baseball bats on hot summer afternoons, of mailmen pulling pennies from little boys' ears and little girls crying because their older brothers tease them, like you and me they had no choice but to grow up and become aware of all the complexities and responsibilities of life. Dick works in the city and commutes by train; Jane sells real estate in the suburbs. They have, to be sure, their good days, but as with you and me not everything worked out the way they dreamed it would. Jane sometimes feels that because she is a woman, nobody in the world appreciates her full humanity, that instead of recognizing her abilities the world pushes and cramps her into the stereotyped role of a woman. Dick has been passed over for promotion more than once, so that sometimes he has a waking nightmare that has him forever working joylessly at a deadend job. Both of them felt a certain war was an abhorent moral perversion, but both of them paid their taxes and thus learned how tight a web the world weaves around the possibility of innocence. Both of them have seen parents, relatives, and friends die; both of them have felt the deep chill of fear in contemplating their own deaths, but both of them cannot struggle into religious faith, for a century of carnage and deathcamps and bleak philosophies mock the believing mind. When the frustrations of their jobs, the impersonality of numbers, the horror of history, the absence of God, and a thousand other things that pull them two ways, three ways and always are added up, Dick and Jane often feel that words can barely express, or at best can only approximate, the swarming vortex of conflicting emotions inside them, and it makes them feel like a child trapped in an abandoned refrigerator whose screams cannot be heard.
But in their heart of hearts Dick and Jane remember the simple sentences. They remember how the first person nominative singular pronoun is such a skinny and lonely but still bold single letter "I," and they recall that the verb must agree with its subject so that there is no suffix "s" on it, making it indistinguishable from the infinitive, and it pleases them to recognize that the present tense of the verb "love" is really a timeless present, and most of all they delight in the grammatical knowledge that it is a transitive verb that takes the direct object "you," so that all three words are bound up into a unity; and so even though simple, "I love you" is still their favorite sentence. Sometimes when they think of those words and say them to each other's eyes, heart, and believing mind, they recapture that simple sentence world which seems to them to be like the pure source of a polluted stream, and then they can sleep well in the night world of tortured syntax.
LITBIZ MAGAZINE INTERVIEW WITH
William Shakespeare and Fyodor Dostoyevsky
William Shakespeare Fyodor Dostoyevsky