Ante and Post

The point of theory is practice. When we’re trying to learn how to do something better, like revising what we’ve written, for example, the more we understand the rules of the game, the better we can control the board. And in the triathlon of language, that theory includes instruction about where to place pronouns in relation to their referents.

Pronouns are words that refer to something indirectly, giving us a way to avoid repeating the same noun over and over again: Peter bought a new car, but when Peter tried to take the new car to work the next morning, the new car wouldn’t start. That repetition would get old fast, and so pronouns make it possible to refer to a noun already mentioned without again naming that noun outright: Peter bought a new car, but when he tried to take it to work the next morning, it wouldn’t start. The word to which a pronoun refers is called its antecedent, and the derivation of that Latin term, to go before, names the primary requirement in using pronouns: the antecedent must closely precede its pronoun in order to avoid confusion and ambiguity.

That is the standard explanation and governing rule, but we have another way to use a pronoun which creates a more sophisticated sentence structure when the ideas we are treating may call for a higher diction. The British novelist and essayist H. E. Bates wrote an insightful critical appraisal called The Modern Short Story (1941), and in a chapter entitled “American Renaissance,” he discusses how Hemingway, under the influence of Sherwood Anderson, upturned the American novelistic style. Bates argues that

Hemingway broke up every known type-face with which the American short story had ever been set, and cut for it a more austere, revolutionary, and yet more classic design than it had ever known. In doing so Hemingway brought down a hammer on all writing done to a fancy design; he stripped of its impossible periodic splendour that style of writing which reaches its limits in the intricacies of Henry James; he sheared away the literary wooliness of English as no one had ever done before.

I have italicized the section relevant to our discussion here. We should note first, however, that this whole passage is just beautifully crafted, clinging tightly to the metaphor of typesetting and illustrating dramatically with the violent image of a hammer crashing down on the status quo what Bates believes was Hemingway’s revolutionary reform. The subject matter is such—and this is important to observe—that it will support not only Bates’s own sophisticated rhetorical style (ironically, similar to the style Bates is saying Hemingway worked against), but also a more involved grammatical use of pronouns. In the italicized section, there are two instances of the pronoun its, and both uses refer to the same noun (or noun phrase), style of writing. Notice that this one referent takes up its position midway between both of the pronouns referring to it, and in that design (pace Hemingway), only the latter in the phrase its limits works in the standard way, where the antecedent precedes the pronoun.

So how are we to understand the way in which the first instance of the pronoun its is working? The technique, in fact, is quite simple, and it is encapsulated in its nomenclature: postcedent. Whereas an antecedent appears before, ante, its pronoun, a postcedent appears after, post, its pronoun. Thus the referent, or postcedent, of the first instance of its in the phrase its impossible periodic splendour is again the noun phrase style of writing, which is now placed after it pronoun; in that delayed position it serves to explicitly confirm the idea anticipated by the pronoun, which appears at first to be without an apparent reference (the semicolon prevents us from thinking that design could be the antecedent).

This grammatical device of the postcedent matches the rich, complex, mature insight of Bates’s claim about Hemingway and the direction in which he turned the American narrative. This is what good writers like Bates (and Hemingway very differently) do: they coordinate the full meaning of what they wish to communicate with a linguistic framework that will do justice to their meaning, both indicative and suggestive. Such quality of writing is achieved by understanding what theoretical structures are possible to execute (or shun). Theory, as laborious as it can be at times, is just the other side of practice.

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