Once (it was in Mississippi, in May, in the flood year 1927) there were two convicts. One of them was about twenty-five, tall, lean, flat-stomached, with a sunburned face and Indian-black hair and pale, china-colored outraged eyes—an outrage directed not at the men who had foiled his crime, not even at the lawyers and judges who had sent him here, but all the writers, the uncorporeal names attached to the stories, the paper novels—the Diamond Dicks and Jesse Jameses and such—whom he believed had led him into his present predicament through their own ignorance and gullibility regarding the medium in which they dealt and took money for, in accepting information on which they placed the stamp of verisimilitude and authenticity (this so much the more criminal since there was no sworn notarized statement attached and hence so much the quicker would the information be accepted by one who expected the same unspoken good faith, demanding, asking, expecting no certification, which he extended along with the dime or fifteen cents to pay for it) and retailed for money and which on actual application proved to be impractical and (to the convict) criminally false; there would be times when he would halt his mule and plow in midfurrow (there is no walled penitentiary in Mississippi; it is a cotton plantation which the convicts work under the rifles and shotguns of guards and trustees) and muse with a kind of enraged impotence, fumbling among the rubbish left him by his one and only experience with courts and law, fumbling until the meaningless and verbose shibboleth took form at last (himself seeking justice at the same blind fount where he had met justice and been hurled back down): Using the mails to defraud: who felt that he had been defrauded by the third-class mail system not of crass and stupid money which he did not particularly want anyway, but of liberty and honor and pride.
The sentence is from William Faulkner’s The Wild Palms, from a chapter he also published as a short story, “Old Man,” in 1939. At over three hundred words, perhaps it is a bit overwhelming. I’ve examined it several times, and it appears grammatically correct. (Microsoft’s grammar-checker does not flag it, but then again, that disturbs me more than comforts me.) The heart of its power lies in the use of parenthetical expressions along with well-crafted parallel construction, and it underscores Faulkner’s consistent vision that no single story can be told without telling many stories, each story woven into the other, and only by swallowing the world in great-big-enormous-indiscriminate gulps and digesting thoroughly can anyone ever truly “know.”
I love reading sentences like this. I love hearing conversations spoken in this manner. It requires the listener to truly use his or her brain, to hold like a food server an entire dinner on a tray, balanced on the shoulder, to later rearrange plate by plate to the proper diner. Sentences like this can make one smarter.
I fear the postmodern brain can no longer stomach such sentences—mentally—maybe even physically. This isn’t a screed about Yankee minimalism versus Southern verbosity. Also, so much has already been written and broadcast about the dumbing down of American culture that I hate to add to it. I will joyfully remark that both Ezra Pound and H.L. Menken damned the United States as cultural and intellectual backwaters in the early decades of the last century, so not much has changed. But, cultural critics continue to make that cry. Just recently, for example, Nicholas Carr waded in with his book, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, suggesting that the Internet and its sea of hyperlinks is reducing any user’s ability to comprehend what is being read, that having to constantly evaluate hyperlinks and decide whether to leave what is being currently read and travel to a new text distracts from the reader’s focus.
Is the typical hypertext different from Faulkner’s strings of parenthetical expressions?
I suppose one argument against the comparison is that Faulkner’s text is still linear, and that the parenthetical expressions come at the reader one thought at a time. The reader doesn’t have to decide whether to explore in depth that parenthetical expression or not.
Returning to my original question, whether or not the postmodern brain can still comprehend, much less appreciate, a sentence like the one above, I grow uncomfortable trying to label a cause. Is the cause—the Internet, the iPod, youth culture, music, drugs, TV, gaming, texting, consumerism—an accurate cause or a scapegoat? Because I can’t answer that question, and because I am so tired of enduring so many obvious scapegoats in politics and the culture wars, I’m not comfortable diagnosing anything. Instead, I will point to artifacts.
I teach first-year writing to college freshmen and sophomores. To say they have come to college unprepared to communicate in their native language is a pathetic joke. Very rarely do I meet students who can compose a simple sentence. I count myself fortunate that the state college where I work admits high school students whom the school believes can take college level courses early. These are the students who will apply and win admission to the higher tiers of education, so I’m not just dealing with those students who couldn’t be accepted elsewhere. The most common issue nearly all of students face is the sentence fragment. Not just one or two—I’m talking entire essays, three to five pages, of fragment after fragment.
I find it fascinating; is it a reflection of their brains or their culture?
On a secondary note, the students who come closest to composing sentences like the beautiful one above are my Latino/Latina students. Somehow or another, beginning with Spanish or being fluent in Spanish enables these students to create masterfully long sentences that only require a little bit of correcting, mostly punctuation. I confess I am not a Spanish speaker. I have to let others comment on that. However, I will say this: To those who are English-only proponents, keep in mind what that suggests—Latino/Latina students have better control of the English language than native speakers.
Many years ago, one of my mentors said in passing that mastery of grammar leads to masterful analytical thought—and vice versa, that being sloppy with grammar makes one a sloppy thinker. I’m not ready to say I agree, but I’m moving closer to that agreement. I wonder if there is some sort of Ur-skill involved, meaning some other skill that facilitates both grammar mastery and masterful analytical thought. Should teachers try to locate and identify that Ur-skill, or should teachers focus on the two lower level skill sets in the hope the Ur-skill is muscled through exercise? Again, I’m not sure, but I can say with certainty that my students swim, or more aptly, flail, in a sea of fragmentary thoughts and expressions.
