Turn Every Page: Eloquence and Writing
Today's selection is from Chapter 11 of Mark Forsyth, The Elements of Eloquence (Icon Books, 2016), a book about parts of speech, rhetorical styles, and good writing that is, surprisingly, laugh-out-loud funny at times (I recommend the audio version). Forsyth's book is a useful desk reference for writers, ready at hand when you need a little inspiration or to vary your style. It is also just a fun read about the multi-faceted nature of the English language.
In Chapter 11, Forsyth talks about hypotaxis and parataxis. It's part of his overall argument throughout the book that English prose could be a bit more interesting. For all the good advice about writing clearly and succinctly that is out there, Forsyth makes a compelling argument that we should also attend to the rhetorical flourish, the turn of phrase, and other things that make our writing something worth reading.
In that way, it is similar to Gary Provost's advice about sentence length as recorded in Roy Peter Clark, Writing Tools (Little, Brown 2008). Read this out loud and you will see what he means.
“This sentence has five words. Here are five more words. Five-word sentences are fine. But several together become monotonous. Listen to what is happening. The writing is getting boring. The sound of it drones. It's like a stuck record. The ear demands some variety. Now listen. I vary the sentence length, and I create music. Music. The writing sings. It has a pleasant rhythm, a lilt, a harmony. I use short sentences. And I use sentences of medium length. And sometimes, when I am certain the reader is rested, I will engage him with a sentence of considerable length, a sentence that burns with the energy and builds with all the impetus of a crescendo, the roll of the drums, the crash of the cymbals - sounds that say listen to this, it is important.”
What Provost's insight is to sentence length, Forsyth's is to overall style and flourish. Now, to Chapter 11. “Parataxis”—it’s like a Groucho Marx joke: “A pair of taxis? I only needed one.”
Before we get to hypotaxis, we need to go through parataxis. Parataxis is like this: it's good, plain English. It's one sentence. Then it's another sentence. It's direct. It's farmer's English. "You don't want to buy my cattle. They're good cattle. You don't know cattle. I'm going to have a drink. Then I'm going to break your jaw. I'm a paratactic farmer. My cattle are the best in England."
Parataxis is the natural way of speaking English. It's the way English wants to be spoken. English is a basically uninflected language. Everything depends on the word order. It's all subject-verb-object. "The man kicked the dog." "The cat sat on the mat." "The angels have the phone box." In Latin and German, it's different. Words can be moved around, but you still understand the sentence because of the endings. "Nauta amat puellam" and "Puellam nauta amat" both mean "The sailor loves the girl." English isn't like that. It's paratactic. It's linear. It's one sentence. Then it's another.
They don't have to be sentences, they could be divided by commas. They could be divided by semicolons. There's a class of people who get very worked up about such things. They're lonely people. They tend to have stains down the fronts of their shirts. They'll tell you that dashes should be used only to subordinate complete sentences. You must forgive them. But you can get around the punctuation problem by using conjunctions, and just keep your sentence going and going forever and then chuck in a few buts, but not too many, and then a couple of thens, so listen carefully to people telling a story, and you'll find that usually there are no full stops and it's just conjunctions and they go on and on forever. . . .
There's nothing wrong with parataxis. It's good, simple, clean, plain-living, hard-working, up-bright-and-early English. Wham, bam, thank you ma'am. Orwell liked it. Hemingway liked it. Almost no English writer between about 1650 and 1850 liked it. The alternative, should you or any writer of English choose to employ it--and who is to stop you?--is by use of subordinate clause upon subordinate clause, which itself may be subordinated to those clauses that have gone before or after to construct a sentence of such labyrinthine grammatical complexity that, like Theseus before you when he searched the dark Minoan mazes for that monstrous monster, half bull and half man, or rather half woman, for it had been conceived from, or in, Pasiphae, herself within a Daedalian contraption of perverted intention, you must unravel a ball of grammatical yarn lest you wander forever amazed in the maze, searching through dark eternity for a full stop.
That's hypotaxis, and it used to be everywhere.
Remember to turn every page. Enjoy your weekend. Please let me know whether you need anything.
Best,
Aaron