Pattern and Feeling

The English art historian and philosopher Herbert Read wrote, among a long list of important titles, an excellent little work entitled The Meaning of Art. Composed for the general reader and not exclusively for the scholar, Read’s short introduction makes an important point early on: a work of art comprises both objective pattern and personal sensibility, which is to say that in a work of art, we spectators or readers are moved both by the skillful arrangement of parts and by the feeling which that structure, as Read puts it, releases in us.

By a “work of art” we do not have to mean only those grand achievements known famously to culture, nor even consequential compositions by serious artists of every type. All of us, each human person by definition, is potentially an artist; that, at least, was the traditional view of human nature, and under that assumption we are justified in looking for pattern and feeling in every form of art around us. In literature, that includes the construction of sentences, each of which is a possible artifact worth appreciating artistically.

The writer Elizabeth Parsons, in her short story “The Nightingales Sing,“ composed two interesting sentences which we can regard as a set piece to illustrate two literary devices writing artists employ. The last phrase of the first sentence comprises what is called in grammar a nonrestrictive modifier, and the last two clauses of the second demonstrate the rhetorical designs of balance and parallelism. Each of these artistic techniques can elicit a particular feeling (or sentiment, or emotion) in the reader reading closely:

Joanna let herself in the front door and turned to wave to Phil, who waved back and drove off down the leafy street, misty in the midnight silence. Inland, the fog was not as bad as it had been near the sea but the trees dripped with the wetness and the sidewalk shone under the street light.

A modifier in grammar is any element (word, phrase, or clause) which regulates or changes the way (the modus) some other element behaves. In Parsons’s first sentence, the phrase misty in the midnight silence has been uncoupled from the relative clause immediately before it by a comma. Commas cut, so when we dissever one thing from another with that punctuation, we are trying to disassociate what would otherwise belong grammatically or logically together. The word misty is an adjective, and we would rightly expect it to modify the immediately preceding noun, street: thus the leafy street was misty in the midnight silence, an unusual but effective, almost poetic, description of the way the scene appeared to Joanna as she turned and waved a friend goodbye after an unexpectedly alluring evening together.

But the comma there says no to that interpretation, at least to it as the exclusive interpretation; it is telling us instead to look past the noun street to some other element earlier in the sentence. The comma, in other words, is making the phrase nonrestrictive, which means descriptive, not defining or circumscribing. Were there no comma before the adjective misty, then we could not look past the noun street; we would have to understand that the author had intended to define only the street as misty, because the absence of the comma would have made the same phrase restrictive, whereby it would limit the meaning of the noun it was cemented to. But here with the comma, the adjective misty is now a free radical (as the scientists might say), unattached to street and thus able to describe something else as well.

But what? The fact that there is no immediately clear answer to that question is what makes this a well-crafted and full sentence. Did Phil now appear misty in the distance as he drove away? Did Joanna herself grow misty and tearful as Phil left? Grammatically and compositionally, both of those interpretations are possible, as is too the first one, that the physical street was misty and wet. One of these meanings, or all of them? Who could say definitively? And therein lies the richness of a finely drawn literary scene in which we recognize that painfully delicious bittersweet feeling over someone we might just be on the verge of loving: painful at his leaving but delicious in the expectation of his return. And all this heady ambiguity so effectively sparked alive by the presence of a simple comma.

The artistry of Parsons’s second sentence appeals more to the rhythmic ear than the rational eye. Read that sentence aloud, and you will hear the balanced cadence of the last fourteen words, constructed in two clauses and joined at roughly the midpoint with the conjunction and. Compositional balance refers to the material heft of syntactical sections, here all but even with six words before the conjunction and seven after it. That balance, moreover, is carrying two structures which are parallel in their grammatical design: simple subject plus simple past tense verb plus adverbial prepositional phrase. The formal proportions and syntactical uniformity of those two rhetorical configurations elicit in us a feeling of authoritative truth, that there is some certainty to be espied in the fact that even inland, where Joanna’s Phil was heading off, the trees were wet and the sidewalk shone—misty, again, as things might very well appear where love is also aborning.

We do ourselves an injustice if we try too hard to keep apart what we think from what we feel, for where could our emotional life exist other than amidst the living forms which have called out those very feelings? This is the anciently sanctioned observation that form and content can only theoretically be separated one from the other, when for example we might wish to understand conceptually, off stage so to speak, what our attention encounters. But when we want more than our imaginative ideas about something, when we want to get closer to what has presented itself to us, we must look directly and intensely at the forms before us. There we might very well find ourselves peering into unexpected vistas the closer we regard the shapes an artist has rendered.

***

Coming Up in February

Like the short story by H. L. Davis which we looked at in last week’s post, Parsons’s story is another of the five we will be reading and discussing in an upcoming new offering of Writing Smartly’s four-week online short course called Reading Closely to Write. As we have in the past, each week we will examine the grammatical structure and stylistic design of sentences from one or two short stories written by celebrated authors. Each story averages about fifteen pages, and our effort will be to see more deeply into the meaning and implication of the author’s written composition.

The exact dates and time of the course will be set in early January, but if you have questions in the meantime (or if you would like to express your intention to enroll), please email me directly at ultimo@writingsmartly.com.

A winter of reading to welcome the spring.

***