There are those who believe—and this is the traditional view—that language and thought go together, that how well we use language is a mark of how well we understand the experiences we undergo. Language and the consciousness we enjoy, in other words, are complements of each other. Kinds of language represent various states of mind, from mere perception, through rational consciousness, to self-awareness—that is to say, from mere nouns, through sentences, to poetry. Past that is silence.
From this traditional perspective, let’s look at a short passage, two sentences, from the novelist Henry James’s short biography of the American writer Nathaniel Hawthorne. James’s Hawthorne was published in 1879, and as we’ll see, a lot can change linguistically and mentally in almost 150 years. By linguistically I mean the complex rhetorical structure of the passage, and by mentally I mean the readiness and patience we might or might not presently have to see and relish how such rich language presents an expensive insight of its author. The question to ponder is whether our preference for simpler language runs the risk sometimes of understanding the world simplistically.
Here is the passage. James is discussing Hawthorne’s religious background and the influence it had on his work and style. Our interest here, remember, is on James’ own style, and on the intricate way he presents his thought across these two sentences:
The Puritan strain in his blood ran clear—there are passages in his Diaries, kept during his residence in Europe, which might almost have been written by the grimmest of the old Salem worthies. To him as to them, the consciousness of sin was the most importunate fact of life; and if they had undertaken to write little tales, this baleful substantive, with its attendant adjective, could hardly have been more frequent in their pages than in those of their fanciful descendant.
That’s difficult stuff, but why? The first sentence, though elaborate, should cause us little trouble, although we might have quickly to remind ourselves of the history between Puritanism and Salem, Massachusetts, where witch trials were held in 1692 to extirpate the dark sources of a presumed diabolism. That reference, then, throws a drop in front of which we can contextualize the central assertion of the sentence to follow, namely, sin. Those witches of Salem sinned under the Puritan strain of religion (and we cannot help but hear the overtones in the noun strain as both lineage and emotional tension); and in order to explicate the complex connection of Puritanism and sin and Hawthorne’s own preoccupation with it, James has written an almost architectonic sentence (hence its difficulty) that requires us, if not to remember, then to catch the reflections among his words as we read.
Here is what I mean. The sentence opens with a transitional phrase, to him as to them, and the pronouns force us to recall their antecedents: to Hawthorne and to his ancestors, the old Salem worthies. Pronouns always carry a risk, because readers may be confused about their referents. Here, though, they serve their purpose well, because they keep our attention to the task at hand, referring only indirectly to their nouns as they usher us from the first sentence on to the main assertion in the second: that to the Puritans, and to the Puritan Hawthorne, it was all about sin, or better, the consciousness of sin.
After the semicolon one-third of the way through this second sentence, our own mental strain now peaks with the phrase this baleful substantive, with its attendant adjective. What could that be referring to, and why could James have not just said, plainly and directly, what he meant? A substantive is an old grammatical term for a noun, and James certainly means to use it as a synonym for the noun sin, the chief idea of the passage. But when he refers to its attendant adjective (adjectives, we remember, modify nouns), there is no adjective attending on that noun when it is used earlier in the sentence; the adjective he is referring to is baleful, meaning pernicious, and that adjective modifies substantive, his synonym for sin, not the noun sin itself. The two references to sin are overlaid, or their lights mix, so to speak, and we are expected in that brighter flare to think about the idea of sin first in its bare presentation, and then again through its synonym substantive, where, indeed, it is modified by the adjective baleful. This reflection of one reference off another intensifies James’s judgment of that Puritanical preoccupation and enforces the point on his readers. The common standard of writing simply and directly would not have served here the valuable thought James had in mind. To have written simply the baleful term sin could not have been more frequent would not have carried the point and effect of the complicated reference James chose to construct; it would have merely baldly stated what James wanted us to see instead as accruing, across his sentences as across generations.
We are demanded of in reading language so deliberately designed as are these two sentences. We are required to remember the antecedents of pronouns where we would have preferred simple restatement; we are expected to recognize the main assertion by the framing device of the semicolon; and most challenging of all, we are pressed to appreciate the way in which the two parts of the second sentence, before and after the semicolon, reflect their ideas off each other: from the nouns sin and substantive to the idea of baleful sin. Such grammatical intricacy, almost a woven tapestry, is part and parcel of the complexity of the idea, both historical and religious, which James wishes to point to, a wealth arguably less enjoyable had his language been simpler.
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