Surface and Depth

Draw a square in your imagination, and then from the two top points extend diagonal lines to transform that square into a cube. A few more lines up, down, and crosswise, and what you first perceived as a flat surface has taken on volume, another dimension. We can accomplish this same effect in written composition, and the technique lies in grammatical design.

When we write in sentences and paragraphs to describe or explain a set of circumstances, we are composing what is called prose. The opposite of prose is poetry, whose intent is not to indicate ideas, but to evoke the feelings that accompany those ideas, to appeal not only to the mind, but to the heart, which holds the mind, as well. The noun prose refers to our ordinary, everyday language, and that noun is connected to the adjective prosaic, meaning the factual, the usual. We might even say the flat and  two-dimensional—or so it appears most of the time. But very often the closer we look at the commonplace, the richer a scene of supporting players and overhanging background comes into view.

Here is a passage from a very short and preoccupying little story entitled “The Use of Force,” by the American writer William Carlos Williams. The narrator is a physician (as was Williams himself) who has come to the home of a young girl sick with a fever for days. Her worried parents have summoned the doctor, and she, terrified and silent, will not let him approach:

As I moved my chair a little nearer suddenly with one catlike movement both her hands clawed instinctively for my eyes and she almost reached them too. In fact, she knocked my glasses flying and they fell, though unbroken, several feet away from me on the kitchen floor.

The second sentence here illustrates how a participle, the word flying, can combine in one word what would otherwise be more routinely asserted separately in another distinct clause. To write she knocked my glasses flying is to overlay two clauses: she knocked my glasses and they flew to the floor. That would be the flat, factual, police report-like depiction of the event. But a participle is an adjective built from a verb, and so resolving the latter clause into the participle flying superimposes the two events into a richer, because more involved, object of thought. The participial scene points to the fact that the glasses flew to the floor, but it does not say so flat out. The idea is still there, but it remains seen, not explicitly heard. That creates a larger, quicker, more sophisticated moment in which to contemplate the consequences of the event. Technically. flying now modifies glasses, and since glasses is the direct object of knocked, and therefore in the predicate of that clause, the participle flying is acting as what is called an object complement. The term complement always refers in grammar to an element in a predicate.

Another sentence of Williams’s in this same story illustrates one more way the participle can amend mere factual statements into a more energetic scene for the reader to step into. After their daughter had lashed out at the good doctor, her mother and father, Williams writes, “almost turned themselves inside out in embarrassment and apology.” “You bad girl, said the mother, taking her and shaking her by one arm.” We will usually say that the participles taking and shaking are modifying the noun mother, but that, to be exact, is only half correct. A participle is a verbal adjective, and to its adjectival extent we can accurately speak of its modifying, by way of describing, the noun with which it is associated.

But the additional verbal character of a participle points to something else. Where nouns work with adjectives, verbs work with adverbs, and so these two participles, taking and shaking, are doing more than adjectivally modifying the noun mother: they are also bringing the reader’s attention to the actions the mother is effectuating, and that allusion keeps the energy underway as we imagine the scene unfolding on more than one visual level. A circumstantial depth has been added, and that makes what we are reading more complex and therefore more interesting. When a participle modifies a subject in a predicate like this (and here that predicate is implied, not stated: taking and shaking her is an abridgement of the two clauses she took her and shook her), the syntax is termed a subject complement.

There are still more participial constructions than just these, but all come down to this: participles can add an unsuspected dimension to a sentence and scene. Where a subject and verb together make an indicative, two-dimensional statement, a participle will add volume to that planar area, extending the lines of the simple subject and predicate into a more theatrical three-dimensional space by pointing hintingly, winkingly to the enlivened circumstances surrounding the central action. We know this is the case, and we can appreciate it as we read, when we understand what the participle is—a linguistic device of impressive subtlety.

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Another Short Course Coming in February

Williams’s story, along with three others by Jean Stafford, H. L. Davis and Elizabeth Parsons we have looked at in recent weeks, will be 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 in the past, we will examine each week 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 next week, 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.

I hope you can join us for a winter of close reading as we await the welcome of spring.

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