Building Language

A reasonable case could be made, I think, to compare the language arts to the building arts. Both proceed on a plan, both involve materials to assemble, and both construct those materials into a design which offers shelter, one for the body and the other for the mind. And the comparison is instructive: if we regard the sentences we write as compositions—constructions we put together, we can set ourselves up to look for shapes which will be able to make our thoughts not only clear, but compelling as well.

Becoming proficient at anything means learning first from those who already know how to do it well. We have to have models and we have to understand them, how they’re constructed and on what design. Let’s look at an example from Katherine Anne Porter’s short story “Flowering Judas” (originally published in 1930 and readily available now, along with many other fine pieces, in Short Story Masterpieces, edited by Robert Penn Warren and Albert Erskine, Dell, 1982). A young woman, Laura, is being sung to by a man who waits for her every night, “pulling at his kinky yellow hair, thumbing the strings of his guitar, snarling a tune under his breath.” Porter then says of this man:

He scratches the guitar familiarly as though it were a pet animal, and sings passionately off key, taking the high notes in a prolonged painful squeal.

Can we not instantaneously sense (I almost wrote sniff) something about this man from that one keen sentence? Perhaps not (yet) of his moral character, but still something about his character in general: unrefined (he scratches his guitar), sentimental if not almost mawkish (his guitar seems a pet), and zealous (he sings and squeals passionately). We compose such a first impression from Porter’s vocabulary, but those individual words comprise only the materials she then must assemble into a sentence which has, if not consciously as we read it, a design perceptible when we analyze it. And understanding how a sentence is built is worth the doing, because it is the design we discover, the intelligible structure, which arranges a collection of words into a picture-producing statement.

We can classify sentences by three types: simple, compound, and complex. Porter’s example here is a complex sentence because it includes a subordinate clause (as though it were). Its other two clauses (he scratches and [he] sings) are independent, and they serve as load-bearing points, to each of which is attached a dependent element: the subordinate clause is affixed to the opening independent clause (he scratches), and the participial phrase (taking the high notes) is fastened to the second independent clause (he sings). As compositional elements, phrases are considered subordinate. The result is a design both balanced and parallel, a simple pattern we could express schematically as A B A B, where the letters A represent the independent clauses, and the letters B the dependent elements. In the terminology of classical rhetoric, such an arrangement is called an interlocked word order.

Balance and parallelism represent respectively steady weight and unfaltering order, qualities which make it easier for readers to mentally redraw the naturalistic image. The parallelism is not grammatically perfect (the first subordination is in the form of a clause, the second in a phrase), but reading with attention, we can still feel the sections crest and ebb, independent, dependent, independent, dependent. This linguistic patterning, like all design, is evidence of intelligibility, that there is something whose significance is to be felt (even if not seen) and understood: something reliable because it is meaningful. Like any self-respecting building, prose is built; it is a construction, not something simply jerry-built to catch an effusion of words. Real design and build as we find it in prose such as Porter’s can reveal the significant in the commonplace, and help us perceive more acutely what we might have overlooked too quickly.

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