What does it mean to say that one thing implies another? The derivation of the verb is instructive: to fold in, or to enwrap, and the first consonants of its original Latin verb (plicare) can be seen also in our verbs implicate, explicate, and even in the noun diploma, a piece of paper apparently originally folded di, twice. Implication lies at the heart of reasoning, that peculiarly human mental force which tries to find something more in what we have already come upon. In that way we might even say that reasoning is ironic.
All of which can lead us to the question, how much can we see by looking closely at a writer’s language? We see the construction of the sentences on the page, but what can that reasonably imply? The author V. S. Naipaul, for example, opens his autobiographical essay Reading and Writing with this sentence, which if we read it closely, can reveal much about the writer’s written voice:
I was eleven, no more, when the wish came to me to be a writer; and then very soon it was a settled ambition.
We need read no further to know something of the person we’ve met as we begin this essay. One mark of intellectual strength is the ability to build a linguistic structure that will sustain simultaneously multiple levels of awareness, and if we take the trouble, we can find those ranks here with some quick grammatical analysis.
Naipaul’s sentence begins with a simple, independent assertion, I was eleven, and when we assert, which means to declare something true or false, we are speaking from the rock-ground of rational statement, that level where things make sense to us and where we expect others to be when we live and work cooperatively with them. It is where our everyday world transpires, and our everyday mind sees our everyday world made up of things acting on one another. This sentence begins, then, at ground level.
Immediately, though, the parenthetical phrase no more (parenthetical because it is set off with commas) signals an interior deliberation, and with that we find ourselves having stepped out of the world of the known and into the world of private conjecture. A parenthesis is an aside, a rumination spoken aloud, and it is as if we hear the writer’s mind at work: I was eleven, I don’t believe that I was any older. Had the writer composed his sentence like that, he would have been converting his parenthetical deliberation into a second independent statement; that would have made the two clauses of equal independent rank, keeping both assertions still at rational ground level. Instead, he implied what he decided not to declare.
It would also have been a more prosaic, more common, less interesting because less intellectually rich way of saying what this in fact rich mind wanted to convey. And the same would have been the case had Naipaul applied the predication of the second statement to the first assertion: I was no older than eleven. In this compacted version, any expression of doubt or deliberation is gone; a fact has presented itself to the writer’s mind, and a conclusion was drawn and stated in the predicate. The prosaic is concerned with the obvious, but the style of a sentence (as the demeanor of a person) is sophisticated when all that is known is not necessarily said, but alertly implied.
There follows, then, a subordinate clause, when the wish came to me to be a writer. That construction establishes a third level of awareness, because what is subordinate stands under something superior. Thus far, therefore, the writer’s voice (and since this is an autobiographical essay, we are justified in assuming it also implies the writer himself) has begun on the common ground of a simple assertion, reflected upon itself in the parenthetical, and now returned to augment the original independent thought. When the sentence concludes by next attaching another independent clause after a semicolon, it reveals the sophisticated tenor of the author’s thinking.
A semicolon is a break in the mental flow of a sentence, somewhere in intensity between a period and a comma (both of which marks it contains). It will usually take the place of an omitted conjunction, but here the conjunction and is retained. The effect is to create a diction midway between the formal and the conversational, exactly another instance of a compelling control of levels. The result presented to the reader is of a rich complexity—not complication—which both attracts and intrigues. A much less interesting—because flatter and more obviously sectionalized—way to begin would have been simply to write: I was eleven when the wish came to me to be a writer. Then very soon it was a settled ambition. Naipaul’s mind was too distinguished for such literal plodding.
The English philosopher R. G. Collingwood, in his essay “Form and Content in Art,” defined the classical in matters of art as “the spirit of perfect design, craftsmanship, mastery of material and construction; it is the formal spirit, the spirit whose aim is to achieve perfect form, perfect lucidity and expressiveness.” It is concerned, says Collingwood, not only with the what, but with the how, the manner, the form, in which the artist has brought forward a thought. And to the degree that both artist and observer—writer and reader—are concerned to discern what the form might imply, the likelier it will be that the work succeeds in opening hidden new worlds of meaning and pleasure.
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