Improvised Treasures

Suppose a Sentence is in part a challenge Brian Dillon set himself, to move “from one fragment to the next” without design, “feeling for the route.” Reading the book – 27 essays on 27 sentences from 27 authors – is like being taken on a guided tour of the fragments: the reader is led on a winding, but sharply incisive, jaunt through the words, the ideas, the anatomy, the flesh, and the “spectral presence” of these sentences. There is pleasure in this casual flânerie, but in an age of speed and disconnection it is also hard not to be lured into Dillon’s persuasive tract on reading with all one’s senses, teasing out the craft and ideas with fluid but devoted attention.

The essays are in chronological order and begin with a sentence from Shakespeare, but it is no great canonical quotation. Rather, the Bard’s legacy is contained within a one-paragraph essay on an alternative final line of Hamlet appearing in the 1623 Folio edition: following “The rest is silent” comes this: “O, o, o, o.” Dillon asks: “What are they telling us, these four diminishing ‘O’s’?” ‘O’ appears elsewhere in Shakespeare, “as proclamation and sometimes as oral or typographic pun”, as in Antony and Cleopatra: “this little O, the earth”; the cries of Othello, “O! O! O!”; and the sighs of Lady Macbeth, “O, o, o”. Scholars dispute their oral nature, whether they should be performed as “discrete cries” or a single outpouring of feeling.

Suppose a Sentence begins and ends with these instances of ‘O’ in literature: first in Shakespeare, then in Anne Boyer’s book from 2015, Garments Against Women, in which she recounts a story which appeared first in Rousseau’s Emile, then in Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, of a little girl who, desperate to begin writing despite being as yet unable to read, used a needle to carve the letter ‘O’, over and over. According to Rousseau, one day she caught sight of herself in the mirror, spying her face looking “awkward or ugly”, and in an act of feminine vanity renounced her ‘writing’ practice – an idea which Wollstonecraft “dismisses as ‘ridiculous’”.

Boyer expands the breadth of the story: “every O could have been, also, every letter and every word for the little girl: each O also an opening, a planet, a ring, a word, a query, a grammar.” Dillon continues: “O, o, o, o was a revolutionary code, and when she put down her pen it was because she had already written what she needed to write.” And this, rather neatly, is the last line of the book.

It is interesting to think about words as symbols or cyphers, about the writer putting forth a code for the reader to decode, or to write their own narrative from. Indeed, Dillon often writes as though he is solving a riddle, inviting the reader in with “what more, what else?” and bringing the reader into cahoots with his exploratory conclusions – “there, we have solved it.”

The essays are often interested in the grammatical and (non)sensical feats of the authors, as with Virginia Woolf’s 181-word opening sentence to ‘On Being Ill’, written during the “dream-fugue of sickness”, in which “we embark on a mysterious paratactic excursion, with no punctuation and no hint, for what seems an age,” of a destination or resolution.

Many of the sentences are long, with multiple clauses and improbable twists and turns, and many seem poised at the brink of falling apart. This precarity gives them an artfulness, and an aliveness, as if they are merely resting at one phase of their potential mutability. This becomes apparent when there is some variation, unintended by the author. One peculiar reproduction occurs with a sentence by Hilary Mantel from a piece written for the Guardian marking the 20th anniversary of Princess Diana’s death. The same sentence was reposted on a news site elsewhere, altered with bizarre synonyms which render almost incomprehensible a sentence which was only just balanced. Mantel’s sentence begins: “If Diana is present now, it is in what flows and is mutable, what waxes and wanes…,” but in its odd adaptation all lyricism is lost as it becomes “…it is in what floods and is mutable, what waxes and decreases….” In other examples, the sentence is undone at its endpoint, as with Anne Carson’s sentence from ‘Flaubert Again’, which flips at the last moment: “…this exasperating, non-negotiable, obliterating motion forward into the dark – the dark what?” The essays involve both the piecing together and prising apart of these language fragments, the making and the undoing. A fragment is something broken or destroyed in some way, and in the reading or remaking, it creates new forms. 

The internal logic of sentences becomes a theme. Returning to Boyer’s, we have a short essay that marvels at the “merciless logic” of her paragraph-like sentences. These sentences have “an uncommon solidity; they are logical and unlyrical, sitting on the page more like monuments than fleeting pensées.” The sentence in question contains alliterative tautology (“Inadmissible information is inadmissible”) and much repetition of “poor”, “people”, and “poverty”, the effect of which Dillon interprets as graphic, as opposed to sonic: “The repetitions are not like [Gertrude] Stein’s which are all made for the ear, but possess a graphic force.” Letting one’s eyes fall on the paragraph-length sentence, the ‘i’s’ of the first line are followed by a proliferation of ‘p’s’ and ‘o’s’. It might also be sonic, the repeated plosive ‘p’s’ and the rounded ‘o’s’ having a sonic resonance, a gentle rolling force.

Dillon has titled this essay 'Like how if', taken from the central clause of the long sentence (“…like how if a group of poor people are in the room with one not-poor person the poor people without conferring about it work together to carefully conceal their own poverty for the benefit of the other, not-poor person…”). Without initially noticing this, I read the title as disconnected words acting as a descriptor of Boyer’s style of writing, which Dillon analyses in terms of its “short adjectives, adverbs and prepositions”. I was thinking too of the truncated title of Ali Smith’s novel, There but for the. You might hear the rest: there but for the grace of God go I (paraphrased from a sentence in the Bible and allegedly uttered by the 16th century reformer John Bradford). The brain seems nonetheless to make an odd sense out of the abbreviation, with the metamorphosing from preposition to noun, leading to an uncertainty as to the placement of stresses on the words.

The title of Dillon’s book refers to Gertrude Stein, whose 1934 portrait of Christian Bérard includes the line, or command, “Suppose a sentence.” The ambiguous verb suppose, meaning to presume, imply, or to assume the existence of something, could in this physical context of a “supposition made concrete” mean something closer to invention, the fabrication of a conceptual thought on the page. In the essay’s chosen sentence (another paragraph-length example), suppose appears multiple times and in its repetition begins to lose fixed meaning. Dillon ends with a salute to treating words as things themselves: more than the concretisation of abstract thought, words are objects, images, sounds in themselves, “apt to burst with force”.

Another writer attuned to the graphic and sonic force of words, Joan Didion was a staff writer at Vogue magazine in the early 1960s, but this was in a largely anonymous capacity in the early years. Assignments involved “short, unattributed paragraphs”, covering subjects from the construction of the Guggenheim to the death of Marilyn Monroe. She also “composed” captions for photographs, which demanded significant editorial attention – hence this chosen sentence, cool and sparse: “Opposite, above: All through the house, colour, verve, improvised treasures in happy but anomalous co-existence.” It begins with what, out of context, would appear an odd stylistic choice, but perhaps quite fitting to Didion’s (then unattributed) voice, until you realise that it refers to a photograph. After this direction, the sentence continues, verblessly. Punctuated with the central tight staccato of “colour, verve, improvised treasures”, unbroken by and, it stretches out either side from the languor of lullaby (as Dillon notes, “All through the house” has a “slumberous familiarity” with “It was the night before Christmas…”); and into that neat appraisal of the objects’ “happy but anomalous existence.”

Dillon continues to investigate the graphic quality of sentences with what might be more internally seen and sought by the writer. As Dillon notes, in her captions Didion was constrained not only by word limit but by the available space of the page design. The writer might be guided by a picture in the mind, as Didion explained in ‘Why I Write’, written for the New York Times in 1976: “The picture dictates whether this will be a sentence with or without clauses, a sentence that ends hard or a dying-fall sentence, long or short, active or passive.” The phrase “dying-fall sentence” struck me, and on re-reading the introduction to Suppose a Sentence I noticed Dillon using it too, and again in the essay on John Donne. It rings in my ears with the opening words of Twelfth Night, with Duke Orsino longing for an excess of music to overwhelm his love-sick being: “That strain again! It had a dying fall.” I always hear a stress on dying with that line, or rather on the first half of the word, so that, in its cadence, the descent has begun partway through the word, and has landed with “fall”. This musical term for a ‘diminuendo’, a decrease in volume, is used in the literary sense for a sentence that steadily fades. This cadence – from Latin cadere, to fall – links the written word to the oral word in an interesting way: is it the pacing or the syntax that makes the sentence seem to drop away? How does it pick up in the next sentence? – but we are not dealing with those subsequent sentences here, only the chosen fragments.

What sticks at the end of the book, other than a long reading list, is the imagery and sounds of the text. Many of the sentences contain something visceral, bodily and tactile, from the imagery of John Donne’s winding wombe to the breadcrumbs crushed underfoot in Clare Louise-Bennett’s short story. Others contain the opposite – or perhaps it’s just another side of the same quality – in being replete with imagery of the dark, of death, of ghostliness, of absence; from Anne Carson’s dread and darkness, to Hilary Mantel’s living-dead, to the tangible silence of those Shakespearean ‘O’s’. There is form in the formlessness, the chosen words bringing that ephemerality to life in the reader’s eyes and ears. Where sound is involved, it is a little like looking at a bright light which leaves an impression on the eye. I’m reminded of a line from Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead: “They say sound never dies, but travels on in space.” The sounds of words, bursting forth, linger in the forms they have created and, hopefully, stay with us as we continue the tour with our own reading.

Grace Crabtree is an artist and a founding member of Chasing Cow Productions. She graduated from the Ruskin School of Art last summer and is doing the Correspondence Course 20/21 at Turps Banana.