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.

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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.

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It’s fine to talk about the importance of the humanities, but it’s finer to practice them. In the humanities of language and literature (two subjects which can be separated only academically), how well we come to appreciate what we’re reading depends to a great extent on how well we understand what the language is doing. Perhaps we can even say that the pleasure of reading lies in the grammatical details, because we are reading meaning as it is conveyed in a particular linguistic structure, with all that is both said and implied there. To find meaning, to understand the human condition and what values it embodies, is the inherently pleasurable work of the humanities. And we all, as Aristotle said, desire by nature to know.

The American novelist H. L. Davis wrote a short story entitled “Open Winter,” and the first sentence of the tale gives us a compact illustration of a prickly point of grammar: the participle. A participle contains a lot of information in a very compressed space, and understanding how it works can bring out implications folded into the explicit statement. Here is Davis’s opening sentence, which (conveniently enough for teachers) includes each of the three participles in English (I have italicized them for easier reference):

The drying east wind, which always brought hard luck to Eastern Oregon at whatever season it blew, had combed down the plateau grasslands through so much of the winter that it was hard to see any sign of grass ever having grown on them.

A participle is one of three kinds of verbals in English grammar (the other two being the infinitive and the gerund), and a verbal is nothing more than a word built from a verb but acting as a noun or an adjective. The term participle means taking a part, or portion, and its name refers to the fact that a participle has taken part of itself from a verb and part of itself from an adjective: hence, a verbal adjective. It’s an ingenious device, but it demands a little reflection to appreciate all the nuance it can convey.

The three participles in English are named present, past, and perfect. A present participle always ends with the suffix –ing (though not every word ending that way is a present participle). We read the word present in present participle and we no doubt think of time, but we will be taking the wrong road if we think here of time as what the clock on the wall says. That kind of time we call absolute, because past and future will mean something in reference to the actual present moment shown on the clockface. Participial time, however, is relative, not absolute, and it means a moment in reference to the time of the main verb of its clause, whatever that time might be. We might better call a present participle a contemporaneous participle, because the time it is depicting is felt to be present, or copresent, with the time of the main verb.

We as readers are to understand, then, that the drying east wind with which Davis opens his story was drying (that is, making dry) the grasslands at the same time that it had combed down the plateau. (The fact that drying precedes the noun east wind adds a twist to this explanation, but we can continue on confidently here without going down a path where even angels at the moment might fear to tread.) The verb phrase had combed down is the main verb of the sentence, and it is a past perfect tense, depicting a time prior to another verb (was in the succeeding clause). That past perfect tense is built by combining the auxiliary verb have (here in the form had) with the past participle of a verb (the second kind of participle), and so we see a picture in which the drying east wind had many times combed down, or destroyed, the plateau grasslands long before the time when it was hard to see.

But hard to see what? Not just any sign of grass, but grass having grown on the grasslands. The phrase having grown illustrates the third kind of participle, the perfect, which is constructed by combining the present participle of the auxiliary verb have (having) with the past participle of a verb. The term perfect in grammar always means completed and therefore past in some sense, whether absolute or relative, and since participles are a kind of adjective, grass having grown means grass that had grown before the time when it was hard to see. The verb had combed down in the main clause, therefore, is establishing the point of comparison with the present participle drying, and the verb was in the subordinate clause is doing the same for the perfect participle having grown.

There is no verb in the present tense in this first sentence, but time oscillates vitally from some moment in the past to a moment further in the past, up again to a more recent past, and back again to a time before that. All that temporal change creates mental energy as we read closely, and if we can give ourselves over to it as we feel the rhythm that the grammar signifies, our appreciation of the story (and admiration of the writer) is all the greater. And appreciation is a kind of intellectual pleasure, which disposes us to insight, the real purpose of the humanities.

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Coming Up in February

Davis’s short story is one of 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.

***

I was fooled the other day by the first paragraph of a recent piece by Sam Kriss in The New York Times Magazine, “Why Does A. I. Write Like…That?” The opening was apparently the work, or an imitation of the work, of artificial intelligence, and the author’s point was to illustrate how passable and ubiquitous this prose without a mind has become today.

In hearing so much about artificial intelligence and machine writing, and like everyone else encountering its language and presence at every turn, I am fast coming to the conclusion that a large measure of the discussion about A. I. is missing the point. Whether the language today’s machines produce is lifelike or not, whether it is convincing and indistinguishable from natural language or not, is merely a necessary question in the quest to better the efficiency of the technology. The linguistic engineers will work and worry to smooth out the phraseology and contemporize the syntax, but their efforts will remain objective and their object will always be a usable and profitable product. Their attempt to replicate the human serves that end in view.

Producing objects, after all, is what the applied sciences and their industries do, by definition and rightly so. When we do something, we want to do it well because we are making something to accomplish an external purpose both pragmatic and practicable. So the question about machine writing, and all the more about artificial intelligence, should not be how well it is working; all concerned better be asking that question. The real query is, what is it trying to do? And if the quick answer to that latter question is to make a machine that acts and appears as human as possible, personality and all, then a third question should obtain: why? Is not producing the information—an airline reservation, a bank balance, some medical advice—enough without the pretense of a human relationship?

Implicit in every question of purpose is an assumption about the nature of the agent. How we answer why the imitatively human manner of artificial intelligence should preoccupy us so will help us articulate just what we believe real human nature, the agent creating the technology, is in essence. With our belief about that in hand, then, we will be able to decide more rightly whether we should limit the reach of A. I., or let it roam wild and free to enter into every interest its creators have in their own hearts, including matters once classed as the artful and more distinctively human. Industry is after something the humanities are not. Both the applied sciences and the arts are productive, but the former produces a pragmatic object of prescribed end, while the latter produces an object not pragmatic but noetic. It is a question of fabrication versus realization, a transitive versus copulative movement of the mind.

We come to be able to accomplish something in the world objectively through technology, but we come to understand ourselves intuitively through an art as something more than an imitable personality. If we are prepared (and we might very well be) to assert that our machines too can imagine extralinguistic realities, or if we persist in confusing an image with signage, evocation with indication, then we have our answer: we are assuming that human nature itself is nothing more than a contraption, something put together by nature, and therefore ultimately bounded by itself, self-enclosed and self-referential. There is no such thing as an extralinguistic reality, this view might continue, because we can have all we could ever wish to have through the manipulation of metalinguistic elements. To suggest that we comprehend meaning subsisting through form and not produced by the form, linguistic or otherwise, is to this way of thinking hopelessly naïve and scientifically unfounded.

That, however, is not the traditional, long-standing, transcultural understanding of the meaning and purpose of art and language. Complementary and not opposed to the outward looking sciences, the humanities are understood to look inward, past the cogitating mind, first to its reflecting conscious surface and then more deeply still, more contemplatively to the mind’s awareness, watching for what is arising to its insight as the source of meaning looks for the next shape to take through the hands of the artist. To understand this as we read or write or paint or sculpt or dance, we must be able to give ourselves over to the artist whose integrity we trust; otherwise, we naturally hold ourselves aloof from what we are trying to understand and remain forever at a conceptual distance. But to give our trust to what we know in our heart is a machine demeans us. The human being writing is not arranging syntax to manufacture meaning, but to symbolize what has been inwardly seen and felt, what concurs with being human. The work of the arts is from this inward ideal, from a vision of meaning prior to the medium in which the artist will give it form. Only this interior depth can give what is meant by the resonance or timbre or maturity of a poem or paragraph or building.

But we seem instead bent on simulating this deeper human presence, and the result, like that first paragraph of The New York Times piece, is a now normalized duplicity we conspire on one another. We accept trickery as part and parcel of our being together. After long years of self-promotion and competitive self-advancement, we take it now as the regular course of business that of course our politicians lie, of course what is advertised is not true, of course the way things really are must more often than not be dusted with sugar. Let’s not be quite so idealistic, we tell ourselves, and with that sophistical self-defense we shape our own future, needing no greater cause, absent turning inward in the direction the humanities bid us, than the wish to make the world just what we, each of us individually, assertively, competitively, wants it to be.

The wish to deliberately create a false appearance of the real and true is tantamount to the wish to deceive. And if that is true, that intention takes us onto moral ground, by which term we need mean no more than its original intent: what pertains to human character, the source not only of our thoughts, but of our actions as well. Why we wish to fool one another, it seems to me, might prove a better question to consider about machine writing and the fortunes of artificial intelligence. Why do we not instead prefer the truth?

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A Word About Last Week

Last week’s post went out as usual Tuesday morning, but because of a technical problem I still don’t fully understand, a number of subscribers did not receive it. I believe the problem has now been fixed, and for those who missed it, you may read last week’s post here: Ante and Post. My apologies for the mishap.

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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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I was speaking the other day with an older friend I hadn’t seen in a while, and he asked me what I was reading lately. I mentioned this and that, and then asked him the same question. He said he was getting interested in philosophy—not the kind of thing professors in the universities talk about, he said, but practical philosophy. I took the point: time is of the essence, and increasingly so for both him and me. But still I wondered, practical for what?

To be sure, my friend wasn’t talking about what used to be called (though sounding odd today) the servile arts, useful skills such as cooking and building and trading which help us keep life and maintain it more comfortably. But where is the point between the practicalities of life at the one end and academic irrelevancies at the other? If we set our course on the belief that only the material counts, then the answer is clear and quick: practicalities and more of them, please. But if we start to suspect that our thoughts and feelings amount to more than neural activity alone, then we’re left to find just where that difference is between the intellectualism my friend was uninterested in and a real life of the intellect.

The British mathematician P. E. B. Jourdain retells the story that Plato took great exception when he learned that some of his contemporaries were using “mechanical instruments for solving certain geometrical problems.” “Manual labour, “Jourdain writes, “was looked down upon by the Greeks, and a sharp distinction was drawn between the slaves, who performed bodily work…and the leisured upper classes who speculated” (The Nature of Mathematics). To speculate, however, did not mean to the classical world what it means to us today. We will speculate on something to guess at or approximate its meaning, the same risky opinionating we often undertake in business and real estate dealings. But to Plato and the traditionally metaphysical world behind him, to speculate (or in the Greek equivalent of that Latin verb, to theorize) meant just the opposite: to perceive ideal realities with the light of the intellect was to know with certainty the constituting truth of the natural and human worlds alike.

Knowing such philosophic truth for Plato and his kind was, then, the most practical thing one could learn. And because the intellect—which meant not abstract conceptualizing, but interior vision—could alone find the source and principle of things, there was, and remains, that “sharp distinction” not only between applied knowledge and immaterial truth, but also between merely playing with words and awakening to the truth of ideas. These same confusions show up still today when we lose patience with what we think are the niceties of language, believing that to worry over points of grammar and usage—such as the difference between less and fewer, or preferring concrete over abstract nouns, or any of the myriad other such distinctions a careful writer makes—is to be preoccupied with irrelevant academic frippery. But when we remember that language, in its classical estimation at least, is meant to line out a path to truth, then the condition in which we keep that royal road is singularly important to the practicality of finding stable meaning.

In the end, we’re left with deciding for ourselves what, if any, relationship is possible with permanent realities, whether we conceive them as static entities or moving patterns. That he believed such things and such a possibility in fact existed was the reason Plato became alarmed over restricting geometrical truths to their practical applications, where, indisputably, their discovery had originated. Those truths, like all truths, were to be seen in their material operations, not identified with them, for to do that would be tantamount to reducing truth to facticity, justice to power, and beauty to mere excitation. Ideas would then no longer be real images of that which, after long searching, one finally became aware, but simply cerebral sparks—brilliant, indeed, but signifying nothing. Which of those we suspect is true will decide in the end what and how we read and write.

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