to impale him—the door, moving it seemed under its own power, opened.” Not James by any means, but a passable cheap imitation.
Once you’ve done it a few times, you can produce sentences like this forever. The skill is no different from the skill involved in turning three-word sentences into one-hundred-word monsters. It’s just that instead of trying to cram as much as you can into the spaces between the words, you’re trying to embed propositions in complex logical structures. Most of all you are practicing subordination, the art of arranging objects and actions in relationships of causality, temporality, and precedence. It is one thing to say, “x is the case,” and then to say, “before x was y,” and then to say, “x caused y,” and then to say, “linking x and y was z,” and then to say, “x is more significant than y.” It is another thing to say all of these in a single syntactic unit that breathes design and control. (This distinction does not imply a judgment of superiority; as we shall see, the additive style—one assertion after another—can be as artful as the style that embeds.)
The technical term for the accomplishment of the subordinating style is hypotaxis, defined by Richard Lanham as “an arrangement of clauses or phrases in a dependent or subordinate relationship” ( A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms , 1991). Hypotaxis, Lanham explains, “lets us know how things rank, what derives from what” ( Analyzing Prose , 1993). (The fact that “hypotaxis” is a Greek word tells you how old the classification of styles is.) The James sentence is a modest version of the style. More elaborate versions can go on forever, piling up clauses and suspending completion in a way that creates a desire for completion and an incredible force when completion finally occurs.
Near the end of Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, Sailor (1891, 1924), the hanging of the title figure is presented in a sentence that delays the event by filling in its circumstances. As a result, when it finally occurs, it has been freighted with layers of meaning:
At the same moment, it chanced that the vapory fleece hanging low in the East was shot through with a soft glory as of the fleece of the Lamb of God seen in mystical vision, and simultaneously therewith, watched by the wedged mass of upturned faces, Billy ascended, and, ascending, took the full rose of the dawn.
The action of the sentence and its main clause are simple: “Billy ascended.” But he ascends in the context of allusions to both the Annunciation—the upturned faces play the role of the shepherds—and the Crucifixion. By the time he acts, Billy is both sacrifice and savior, the slain lamb and the lamb whose blood redeems; he is the centerpiece of what the sentence describes as a “mystical vision.” Because we have been made to wait for the filling in of the vision, which comes complete with viewers of what might almost be a large Renaissance painting, the moment of ascension seems static and staged; motion is stopped. But the “and” that follows “ascended” functions as a release—we experience it as a pregnant pause—and the present participle “ascending” initiates an upward movement syntactically, visually, and thematically. (One hears an echo, perhaps, of lines 11 and 12 of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 29: “Like to the lark at break of day arising / From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven’s gate.”) Like the gaze of the “upturned faces,” our gaze soars upward, missing entirely the pain of the hanging; and the sentence misses it too, coming to rest where Billy rests, in the glory of the full rose (a pun on “rise”?) of dawn. He is risen.
Where in Melville’s sentence the clauses preceding the main event lean backward, in this famous sentence from Martin Luther King Jr.’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail (1963), they lean forward, straining to get where you know long before the end they are going to go:
. . . when you have seen
Once you’ve done it a few times, you can produce sentences like this forever. The skill is no different from the skill involved in turning three-word sentences into one-hundred-word monsters. It’s just that instead of trying to cram as much as you can into the spaces between the words, you’re trying to embed propositions in complex logical structures. Most of all you are practicing subordination, the art of arranging objects and actions in relationships of causality, temporality, and precedence. It is one thing to say, “x is the case,” and then to say, “before x was y,” and then to say, “x caused y,” and then to say, “linking x and y was z,” and then to say, “x is more significant than y.” It is another thing to say all of these in a single syntactic unit that breathes design and control. (This distinction does not imply a judgment of superiority; as we shall see, the additive style—one assertion after another—can be as artful as the style that embeds.)
The technical term for the accomplishment of the subordinating style is hypotaxis, defined by Richard Lanham as “an arrangement of clauses or phrases in a dependent or subordinate relationship” ( A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms , 1991). Hypotaxis, Lanham explains, “lets us know how things rank, what derives from what” ( Analyzing Prose , 1993). (The fact that “hypotaxis” is a Greek word tells you how old the classification of styles is.) The James sentence is a modest version of the style. More elaborate versions can go on forever, piling up clauses and suspending completion in a way that creates a desire for completion and an incredible force when completion finally occurs.
Near the end of Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, Sailor (1891, 1924), the hanging of the title figure is presented in a sentence that delays the event by filling in its circumstances. As a result, when it finally occurs, it has been freighted with layers of meaning:
At the same moment, it chanced that the vapory fleece hanging low in the East was shot through with a soft glory as of the fleece of the Lamb of God seen in mystical vision, and simultaneously therewith, watched by the wedged mass of upturned faces, Billy ascended, and, ascending, took the full rose of the dawn.
The action of the sentence and its main clause are simple: “Billy ascended.” But he ascends in the context of allusions to both the Annunciation—the upturned faces play the role of the shepherds—and the Crucifixion. By the time he acts, Billy is both sacrifice and savior, the slain lamb and the lamb whose blood redeems; he is the centerpiece of what the sentence describes as a “mystical vision.” Because we have been made to wait for the filling in of the vision, which comes complete with viewers of what might almost be a large Renaissance painting, the moment of ascension seems static and staged; motion is stopped. But the “and” that follows “ascended” functions as a release—we experience it as a pregnant pause—and the present participle “ascending” initiates an upward movement syntactically, visually, and thematically. (One hears an echo, perhaps, of lines 11 and 12 of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 29: “Like to the lark at break of day arising / From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven’s gate.”) Like the gaze of the “upturned faces,” our gaze soars upward, missing entirely the pain of the hanging; and the sentence misses it too, coming to rest where Billy rests, in the glory of the full rose (a pun on “rise”?) of dawn. He is risen.
Where in Melville’s sentence the clauses preceding the main event lean backward, in this famous sentence from Martin Luther King Jr.’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail (1963), they lean forward, straining to get where you know long before the end they are going to go:
. . . when you have seen
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