Excerpt from Sentence-Making “Notes on the Act of Writing” — Grant Maierhofer
My thought is me: that's why I can't stop. I exist because I think… and I can't stop myself from thinking. At this very moment —it's frightful—if I exist, it is because I am horrified at existing. I am the one who pulls myself from the nothingness to which I aspire.
—Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea
I value no one’s opinion more than Gordon’s [Lish] when it comes to assessment of fiction and while in his class I took notes I have profited from reading again. I try to live by many of his phrases: Stay open for business. Be Emersonian: say what no one else has the courage to say and you will be embraced. Reveal what you would keep secret. You will stay awake when writing such a story; you will also write very, very carefully with so much at stake. Each sentence is extruded from the previous sentence; look behind you when writing, not ahead. Your obligation is to know your objects and to steadily, inexorably darken and deepen them. To be in Gordon’s company when he was talking about fiction was to be in full-out writer mode. Let the performance be insane!
—Christine Schutt
THE WORLD BEING EVERYTHING THAT IS THE CASE
For a long time I’ve wanted to write something about sentences. I don’t necessarily want to write something about sentences that treats them grammatically, although that would probably be part of it. I say that because I’m not a grammarian. My education in these respects came after my more formative educational years—at least as it regards English and use of language—as I was either ignoring lessons in my primary education, on drugs, hospitalized, in rehab, or whatever other things children get up to from five or so years old until eighteen. I think naturally there were some aspects of language that appealed to me, or at least aspects of art, and in the end I associate most aspects of art with aspects of language, possibly because of how I turned out. I’ve wanted to write something that others could look at who were interested in sentences, and I’ve most wanted to write something that other writers could look at and feel positive about their own relationships to sentences. I have an anxiety even posturing like this as if I have something to impart, because what in the hell do I know, but I’m trying in good faith, and sincerely, and without a sense of being better or smarter than any living being, just being a person trying to approach the notion of a sentence. I got very interested in the idea of the sentence as this locus of expression and communication in my early twenties, and that’s continued until now, when I’m thirty-one, and I’m interested in trying to write something about sentences, in this regard, as something to be regarded and a point of engagement that enriches living, and enriches writing. There are precedents for this work, from Lish—who manages often to meld it into his fictions—from Lutz, from Virginia Tufte, but I’m going to attempt and trace it autobiographically to put it into more direct application for anyone encountering this.
This would be sentences as they regard writers, then, and as they regard readers, but mostly as they regard writers. I say this because it took me some time to understand the ways in which sentences regard writers. Someone who writes poems goes into a poem knowing the import of a line, or a stanza, or at least they learn it very quickly. This is where your focus is rewarded. If you can make a line good, then you can hopefully continue to make good lines, and maybe in twenty of them you’ve made a good poem. Prose, though, is different, it’s strange. We think about things like characters, or moods, or elements we want to include, or content, murder, violence, torture, whatever else. It can take some time, though, to bring the focus just so that it allows you to see the mechanical apparatus you happen to be working in, which is the sentence. We think about a story we want to tell, we think about how someone spoke or the way a room looked, but we do this first more often, and skip the means by which we’re getting any of these things accounted for, and that is the sentence, and that is the focus of this work.
Let’s start with an example.
I pulled off my coveralls and proceeded to fuck a hole into the earth.
In linguistic terms, this sentence can be parsed into noun-phrases, verb-phrases, etc. In grammarian terms, we can pick apart the pieces of this sentence to gain some understanding of how it’s working. I’m not as concerned with these things, though, not really. A version of this sentence has been in the back of my mind for a long time. I wanted to write about someone fucking a hole in the ground, or fucking a hole into the ground. It’s possibly important that the words are what kept repeating themselves in my mind, which is usually indicative of something I need to write. Probably the image appealed to me too—I like loners, and people who just got off work and want to do something visceral to remind themselves they’re a human being. I liked that these things were kind of implied by the sentence, which is a rarity. You can sense relatively quickly the kind of person who might get up to this kind of thing. Definitely, though, the aspects of the language appealed to me most. “Fuck” is a satisfying thing, one of the greater resources we have in the English language. The world is littered with examples of “fuck” being a satisfying thing, linguistically and otherwise, but especially lingistically. There’s a scene in the TV series The Wire that illuminates this probably better than anything. Two cops go into an apartment where a woman was murdered. They unpack the scene in a way that clearly wasn’t done by the cops who handled the scene at first. Using only the word “fuck,” two cops from Baltimore are able to communicate and commune exactly as they need to, dissecting the scene and doing fairly elaborate forensic evaluation while only uttering the same word over and over and over again. Fuck. Fuck.
I needed something else, though, some way of frontloading the sentence to pave the way for this phrasing I’d grown so fond of. The double l, then, is needed. “Pulled,” “coveralls,” these two words are connected, they’re bound. The double f between them, too, “off,” is contributing to this sort of weight they’re handling. Pull off. Pull off coveralls. I pulled off my coveralls. It’s rhythmic but not in a repeatable way, which seems important. The rest of the sentence isn’t going to simply do this again, it’s going to veer out, and look for some new rhythm, something unpleasant possibly, something jagged. To start though we have that rhythm, or arhythm. It follows the act itself, too. Someone wearing coveralls, not overalls, not khakis, but coveralls, has just done something deeply unpleasant, something bound with work, something ugly. Possibly they’re fat as Santa. Possibly they’re emaciated and the coveralls fell off them like the robes of Christ when he was made to carry his cross to his crucifixion. Whatever you’re picturing, the pull, the coverall, pulling off the coverall opens not just an image, but a necessary lulling, the sort of hypnosis a human being enters in the final stretches of their day’s work. They’re tired, they need to get home, but before they can completely decompress and sit down in front of the TV, they’ve got to do something with this lulling. The sentence, then, embodies the journey, with its sounds, its symbols, to impress upon the reader’s consciousness as much as one might be able to this utterly dull state, this moment, to make the way for the fucking, the proceeding, the hole in the earth we’re anxious to visit after the clacks and baubles have laid the path. The relieving from the dull monotony of the human’s working day is built into the language as it must be. At the same time, I don’t want to imply this sentence is lifting the entirety of what the thing would come to need to be, quite the contrary really, but it is a start, and an honest, language-based start, and beginning there commits you to something which will pull from your inner sense of its working.
***
A sentence is a sort of commitment the writer makes only so that they’re then able to carry out the remainder of whatever it is they find themselves thusly needing to write. You have to begin, and you have to begin in such a way that you’re not entirely holding on. Something else is guiding you, and in the process of enacting this something in language you’re then pushing yourself to a small problem, the only solution to which is to finish writing these sentences in the order your transcription would appear to dictate. Learning to hold onto these bits of language as they present themselves can often mean the writing of an entirely new project. For me, it’s bits of phrasing like the previous example, and they’ll change in the process of remembering them, and I’ll carry them with me, hoping that someday I’ll get to put them down as rightly as I’m able. Becoming attuned to one’s interior language is as important as registering the mastery of others at their craft, and often more important, and more generative. Devoting time to listen to yourself seriously guides you not only to compelling work, but satisfying work for you. Nicholson Baker talked once about the work he needed to do to get his book The Anthologist written. He’d sit in a chair with a camera facing him, and he would talk about everything he knew about poetry. The book winds up taking the form of a sidestepped introduction to an anthology of poems, but the language to get the thing started didn’t present itself fully until he sat down and just started talking. The language does exist within, and these are steps one can take to finding it and mining it for its worth.
When I set out to write a sentence I’m shutting off certain parts of my brain while cranking high the parts of my brain that contribute to the physical act of writing something down. There’s an arcade in the town next to mine I like to visit with my wife and children sometimes. There’s a game there that I’m guessing most people have tried. It’s essentially a large wheel. You pull down on this stocky metal lever and the wheel spins, eventually arriving at a number which corresponds to the amount of tickets you’ll receive for that spin. One day I found myself really hitting it on that machine. In that build up I got excited, and I tried to simply physically repeat my pulls on the lever until high numbers were reached again. I don’t know why it happened, exactly, but I started to get bad spins when so focused. What I needed to do was let my mind sort of hover there a moment, noncommittal, but open to the world, and then push with my hands sort of removed from me, physical but separate from my thinking self. With a spin or two I found I got the jackpot, something that’s never ever happened to me in a situation like that—I consider myself pretty unlucky, really, at least as it regards this kind of thing. Now whether this practice did in fact directly correspond with me getting the jackpot is immaterial. It did, but those machines are so finicky that to assign causation is meaningless. What mattered was I did it. I entered that state, vaguely meditative but present, doing something but not tasking myself with really doing something. Probably this sounds tenuous or unreliable, but it’s close to what I’m saying. You position yourself to get something written, and you open your mind to language, and you put something down, and you find that this something calls for something else, and so on, until you’re comfortable putting a period to the whole mess. Kay Redfield Jamison highlights the ways in which a manic-depressive temperament might be conducive to art-making, in her work Touched With Fire, that you need the manic state to get something put down, and that the depressive state following makes your critique of your work that much more biting, so that in this procession a work is created, and refined, and readied for the world to engage with. I agree with this in a lot of ways, but I think the benefits of this kind of practice highlights something else in turn. To get a draft written, it helps to be a little dumb, at least as it regards the creation of the thing. If you’re not trying to be smart, and you’re letting yourself sort of dumbly enter into the process of the thing, to push it somewhere without thinking too much about it, you’re rewarded not only with word count, but with work that genuinely surprises you. Though he’s fallen out of favor, Kenneth Goldsmith’s writing on dumb-smart, dumb-dumb, smart-smart, and smart-dumb writers and artists distills what I’m talking about nicely: I am dumb. Dumb is an ill-prepared slacker, riding on hunches and intuition. This aspect of intuition gets at what I’m talking about. Of course there are writers who are engaged on every level and utilizing their smarts to get something finished—Robert Sapolsky seems like one, and David Foster Wallace probably was, and Zadie Smith seems to be one a majority of the time—but at some point trusting in that intuition, the internal voice that seems to speak out when we listen to it, helps us to develop a relationship with our own inner language, and it’s that language that will give newness to the work we’re trying to accomplish, it’s the kind of thing that allows a writer like Jeffrey DeShell to engage with Melville’s Pierre, but to do so in a way that feels entirely novel, in Peter: an (A)Historical Romance, or for DeShell to engage directly with films and filmmakers in Arthouse, but doing so intuitively and opening new doors for the writing he’s doing by following where the source text takes him. Plenty of writers talk about transcribing the pages of other writers, and it’s a highly educational endeavor, but not enough is talked about the moment when you’re transcribing and you start to intuit something different, and your own mind and voice begins to take over, and suddenly you don’t need the source text any longer.
Writing is the practice of creating problems for yourself, then developing solutions to those problems. You’re opening the lines of communication and letting them be open, remain open. If you sit down knowing every single thing you want to get down, you’ll find you run out of things to say rather quickly. If you allow yourself to dwell a bit in the uncertain act of putting language to ideas, to thoughts, to scenes, to anything written, you’ll find you’ll be rewarded for that openness, given means to get the thing written in the particular fashion it begs to be written in.
Back to the hole in the ground.
proceeded to fuck a hole in the ground (earth).
Qualification in writing is often a sort of tepid endeavor. You want to avoid it. It’s associated with the passive voice. It’s associated with making excuses, with dancing around something. This is valid, but it also ignores a great strain in the history of writing. It precedes writing, actually—in speech. The recordings of speech and the repetitions of speech. We might know the outcome of the Peloponnesian War. We might know brass tacks. X won, Y lost, halved, the remaining went home. This wasn’t the endeavor, then, not really, not solely on its own. We wanted people who waffled, who could linger over things, first in speech and then in writing. Like dance proper the sort of dancing a writer, or a speaker might do can be as equally compelling as the digestible bits someone might take away from a fact-based piece of reporting. So I didn’t just pull off my coveralls, or this character didn’t, as I’ve never owned a set of coveralls, excepting this sort of leisure set of coveralls I wore alongside my brother when we rushed to a high school dance after stopping at a secondhand store. I or he or they or she proceeded thence, thereafter, to fuck a hole into the earth. Initially it was ground. In my head it was at first ground. A person fucks a hole into the ground. It makes sense. A person fucks a hole into the ground. Nobody talks about the earth except for sanctimonious types. Maybe, though, maybe with the injections of the cuss, with the “fuck,” maybe with the pull and the coverall, maybe then we can allow this bit of antiquity. Not ground, then. O.K., earth. I fucked a hole into the earth. No. I proceeded to fuck a hole into the earth. This is what was done. I pulled off my coveralls and proceeded to fuck a hole into the earth. Thank goodness. Thank the heavens for this. Thank the living goodness for this fucking ordeal. Sure. You can see the pullings on the thing itself and see where they’ve led to this unique bit of momentary language. Even if it’s all you know, all you take from a thing written, it’s enough. It ought to be enough.
I think now the sensible thing is to look at some sentences from elsewhere, sentences that I did not write, to try and ascertain just what makes them seem to tick, and to return this knowledge to the task at hand of approaching writing not as something bound by rules and orders, but as something bound up in the human spirit, a register that we can look for and find through the process of composition.
So then the order is that a white way of being round is something suggesting a pin and is it disappointing, it is not, it is so rudimentary to be analysed and see a fine substance strangely, it is so earnest to have a green point not to red but to point again.
If I’m to be entirely honest, when I’m looking at this sentence I don’t want to start at the beginning in my mulling over its qualities. For whatever reason, it’s that “it is not” that grabs my attention firstly. We have this sort of preamble, this physical description of something that’s vaguely mathematical but vague too in that this vaguely mathematical thing is disappointing—to whom and just why? But the follow up here: “and is it disappointing” (is there an implied question mark here? I wouldn’t necessarily bet on it) quickly followed then by “it is not,” so is this in answer to the disappointing? I’m not entirely sure. We’re used to the setup it is… is it not? and here we have its opposite, but even then it’s just slippery enough to elude being a mere opposite to that construction. Possibly too there’s something to be extracted from Stein’s quasi-manifesto on writing “Composition as Explanation,” first given as a talk and then published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press. In some ways as elusive a literary work as Tender Buttons, “Composition as Explanation” tries nevertheless to pin down Stein’s approach to sentence-making as it bears on her own practice. “Everything is the same except composition and as the composition is different and always going to be different everything is not the same.” Stein is talking about the intervention of art-making, of writing, of composition, and she picks apart this idea by pointing to differences and sameness, by discussing time within the context of a work and time outside of the work. She advocates a sort of constant awareness of the thing at hand, and this in-the-moment writing explains how she arrived at a sentence like the one included here. There’s a movement to it, wherein whatever’s just been said is being left behind in the name of utilizing this process of composition and embracing a lack of similarity. In fact trying to make this the operative mode of the whole ordeal, moving away from similarity to the artifice at hand, and pressing on it until the same sentence can be reversed awkwardly upon itself just like the opening and closing constructions “Everything is the same/everything is not the same.”
Returning, then, to the beginning, “So then the order is that a white way of being round,” I assure you the moment from which this is plucked offers little in terms of comprehension of the meaning or message or signified of what’s being enacted here, and possibly this is for the better. Stein’s writing, and especially Stein’s writing in Tender Buttons, from which this is pulled, is a sort of pure writing, a linguistic act that doesn’t necessarily call for any referent, and can simply exist as it likes to there upon the floor, or in your lap, with no more logical underpinning than a cat sprawling on the rug throughout the day occasionally stretching itself and digging its claws into the fabric. “[A] white way of being round is something suggesting a pin and is it disappointing, it is not, it is so rudimentary to be analysed and see a fine substance strangely, it is so earnest to have a green point not to red but to point again.” This sort of thing, often I think it proves frustrating for people because the assumption is she’s just kind of clacking away on a typewriter or with her pencil and seeking no stable entity for the work, trying to tell no story, not even really offering us a poem consisting entirely of language because we have so many of the little dull bits of sentences that kind of make us frustrated and mad, like any child might be able to do this sort of thing and thus it can’t possibly be taken at its face value. Stein’s adherence to a kind of Cubist writing can help a bit, as can situating herself in her milieu, but asserting that one way of reading takes primacy over any other is part of the trouble Stein was working against in writing in such a way. Why would we compel ourselves to read something that departs in so many important ways from what we’ve been led to believe reading should be?
This is a tough point to argue, but an important point to argue in the broader practice of sentence-making. Stein sat down and worked on things physically and tried to put the whole of being into what she tried to write down and she was removed at least by one distance in the sense that her expression was more important than what was actually expressed. So like the lecturer grunting, making jokes besides, rambling on tangents trying to find their way to wherever it is they once were, Stein writes a sentence that contains materials we’re used to having read in other people’s sentences, but we’re left with the physical matter there and made to figure out on our own just what in the hell is the use of such a thing. Like every other thing, the sentence is an apparatus with which a person can aspire to achieve some sort of desired effect. The less knowledge there is about this desired effect, the better for you and the better for whomsoever should encounter your sentence, should the situation be as open and welcoming to the human spirit as possible. Often these two things are at odds. You write something because of the point you’re trying to make. Your reader reads the same something because they’re hoping to tap into some mood, some aspect of being, or some sort of truth about the state of the human spirit. It gets tangled, is what I’m saying. Intent on both sides blurs the messaging, so it’s important to let the messaging fall secondary to the sort of presence you’re hoping to occupy as the writer of this thing, this sentence. Nicholson Baker has said that poetry is slow motion prose. Whether this is true or not it conveys something about sentence-making that often doesn’t register for people who find themselves making sentences: it is on the same plane as poetry, as the line, as the stanza. It is an apparatus the writer has at their disposal and it should be treated as seriously as the poet treats the contained space in which they’ve got their shot at conveying their humanity. Whether a sentence is sped-up, in Baker’s estimation, is not for me to say, but the process should be treated as reverentially as some divinely tetched poet taking dictation in an opium den in 1880s Paris. As a writer of sentences you are taking dictation from something burrowed in your guts and learning to access that—to open yourself up to that—is half the battle of taking sentence-making seriously.
Thinking in these terms then it seems useful to perhaps rearrange the sentence to see what else might be making it tick.
So then the order is that a white
way of being round is something
suggesting a pin and is it disappointing,
it is not, it is so rudimentary
to be analysed and see a fine substance strangely,
it is so earnest to have a green point not to red but to point again.
It’s definitely more palatable in this formation. I think the long sentence, especially the long sentence that utilizes a good bit more of filler, is immediately daunting for a reader while being exhilarating and natural for a writer. There’s something here that I think needs parsing. Loud relentless guitar music can be infinitely entertaining and compelling for the performer, but it’s less likely to maintain the attention of a listener than something more digestible. I think writing and reading are similar. If we see a brick of text on a page that’s unbroken, depending on the context we’ll feel some kind of way about it. In Proust, sure, that’s par for the course, and part of the endeavor, so it’s not too surprising. In the work of a linguistically dense writer like, say, Christine Schutt, or Garielle Lutz, the sentences themselves are so immense and evocative that shorter bursts of paragraphs and even broken off sentences seem to fit the experience, to follow the mood of the writer and the reader too. If, on the other hand, we’re reading something about how to replace a sink, long billowy sentences would prove frustrating, as they might in a spy thriller, a Twitter thread, a text, or other spaces in which a sentence has a function that often precludes meditative, expanded sentences.
Stein, it must be said, probably occupies aspects of both examples here. Especially within Tender Buttons, where shorter bursts are the rule but the wording and syntax is so incredibly dense and expressive that even one sentence—even this sentence—can feel simultaneously daunting and gleeful, overwhelming and subconscious. The stanza-fication model does seem to help. “So then the order is that a white/way of being round is something/suggesting a pin and is it disappointing,/it is not, it is so rudimentary/to be analysed and see a fine substance strangely,/it is so earnest to have a green point not to red but to point again.” So we can now picture an item, possibly a little pin, with a white portion on the top where perhaps you’d push the pin, and possibly the actual point is painted green? There may be redness too? It’s so rudimentary to be analysed, so is it rudimentary to be the object of analysis? Or is this item so simple as to transcend analysis? Or is this entire sentence made of such rudimentary materials as to preclude analysis?
To be analysed and see a fine substance strangely, I quite like that. Intaking something simple and seeing it strangely, a fine, either fine as in sand, or fine as in O.K., and rendering it strangely, this substance, this matter. And would Stein even care to be looked at in this way? She wrote the thing. She put it out into the world in this state, this recursive state, so it would seem the least she’d allow us was this sort of picking apart. It’s a sentence sort of containing six different lines, of thought or poetic sequencing, and all together they don’t necessarily point to any one thing, but refer back to the lingual act of writing, the saying of the thing in such a way as to embrace possibly its musicality—though there are far more musical moments in Tender Buttons, so perhaps what’s being embraced really is its vagueness, a testament to how the saying of the thing can only lead you further from the thing at hand, the case. The world being everything that is the case, but we here don’t have a world, or a case, and we’ve got to reckon with the existence of the text nevertheless. It’s frustrating, but there are avenues in, even if the avenues are fogged over, and the street signs have eroded with time, the saying of the thing can sometimes prove to be enough, so we should let it.
***
There’s a moment in Salman Rushdie’s memoir Joseph Anton where he’s engaging with an audience at an Italian book festival, and someone is wondering whether political positions or ideological motives were necessary in literature. Someone, either Rushdie or one of the Italians, says that literature is about sentences. At first glance this seems like possibly a bit of a reduction, or a reductive way of looking at literature, but when you learn to open yourself up to this as the ideal locus of your attention as a writer, as a person who attempts to enact literature, it becomes clear how true it really is. Yes, writers can tell stories, yes they can wage arguments, yes they can attempt to encapsulate experience, and yes each of these things can suffice as motive when you sit down and try to figure out how it is you’re going to say whatever it is you think you might like to say. However, learning to think of the sentence as first and foremost the thing deserving of your attention, you’re then capable of accessing a level of communication that eludes mere communication, and transcends to a level that might be seen as mystical—or spiritual in the bare sense of the human spirit, the spirit of human being. It’s a bit like the attempt to distinguish between art and entertainment. Entertainment is often seen as a sort of derision, which we belittle while uplifting art. In fact, and surely enough has been written on this, the lines are far blurrier, and our sense of what entertainment is and what it does is dreadfully overdue for a revising. Often the notion of prose, or sentences, is seen as mechanical and unromantic, where poetry is shot through with a sense of being romantic, being expressive. The case seems to be far more complicated than we’ve been interested in realizing, and this is written as much as a way of thinking about writing as it is a testament to the superior qualities of good prose, good sentences, whereas they’ve been thought of as largely mechanical things en route to some sort of meaning in creative writing—a term I tend to detest, though what it’s used in reference to could not be more important to me—circles.
Possibly a good analogue are the materials that go into the painting of artworks. Beginning with vague tints achieved through mixing berries and the like before someone underwent the painting of a bull on the wall of a cave, the materials of painting have doubtless improved, but they consist of the same elements. Color, whites and blacks, and the perspective one reaches when looking at something straight on and attempting to enact something. Similarly, writers have used a set of materials that may have changed in terms of speed, accessibility, and aspects of design, while the apparatuses of speech, and emphasis, have remained relatively static. The results of these dynamics, though, have experienced drastic shifts—the work of Pollock seems huge here, the same tools, but employed in a way that broke the sound barrier for visual art—the sprawling approach to sentence-making in a work like Moby-Dick, or the intuitive and relentlessly referential approach in James Joyce’s later work, but the basic tools advance only slightly, and even then writers and painters are still called upon to use these things to enact something drawing from the same well. Often contemporary writers and artists romanticize slightly older forms of writing or visualizing something and make their presence known by relying on antiquated material to process our contemporary world.
Sentence-making, then, can look like Pollock, and certainly it does in Burroughs, in Schutt, in Jason Schwartz. It can also look drastically simple, like Rothko’s images of blocks of color. And then too the comparative framework of music is helpful. Stripped down to its simplest elements, music is sound and silence. Painting is presence of paint and non-presence. Writing is word and no-word. Embracing this model, and not overwhelming oneself with trying to vomit forth an entire work, conceived in the mind and carefully worked over until it transcribes wholesale, makes the process of writing not only more intuitive and rewarding, but more likely to remain open to the possibilities that haven’t yet been tapped. This inner thing, this voice, or Khora, to use Gordon Lish’s phrasing from Julia Kristeva, can prove limitless once it begins to be called upon, and in the ensuing pages we’ll try and figure out avenues that help us in visiting, and revisiting that pool of language held in the skull of every being living.
***
To continue the conversation about the form sentences might take, and what we might glean from these forms when trying to generate our own work, the use of examples seems prudent. The notion of an opening sentence, in particular, would appear to try for more than a sentence situated in the middle of some humdrum paragraph about a rainy morning. To again use Lish’s coinage, for him the opening sentence is the attack sentence, which seems useful at least to begin. As previously stated, I think of writing as a process of causing problems for oneself—in the work and possibly outside of the work, though long stretches of my life have gotten muddled in the latter and I’ve done far more with the former in writing—and finding ways to solve those problems. Similar to an attack, though conceived slightly differently, your opening sentence should be a commitment, a promise, of something that’s going to follow after, something you’re ideally not entirely certain of when you write such a sentence. It’s opening a communication, and opening yourself to this exchange, which you’ll then encounter sentence-by-sentence until you feel you’ve finished the thing. I remark on this later, but the longer I write the more I find that little fragments of opening sentences or closing ones will present themselves, and often the best means of utilizing these is to let them marinate, rather than scribble down every possible thing, because the longer you’re able to do so, the more that sentence is likely to lead to another sentence, and still others, until the thing takes shape powered entirely by its phrasing.
There are of course as wide a range of how an opening—or any—sentence could look, could sound, so we’ll engage with several to try and take in their singular purposes. First, the great genius Raymond Federman, and the opening salvo from his Double or Nothing:
Once upon a time two or three weeks ago, a rather stubborn and determined middle-aged man decided to record for posterity, exactly as it happened, word by word and step by step, the story of another man for indeed what is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal, a somewhat paranoiac fellow unmarried, unattached, and quite irresponsible, who had decided to lock himself in a room a furnished room with a private bath, cooking facilities, a bed, a table, and at least one chair, in New York City, for a year 365 days to be precise, to write the story of another person—a shy young man about of 19 years old—who, after the war the Second World War, had come to America the land of opportunities from France under the sponsorship of his uncle—a journalist, fluent in five languages—who himself had come to America from Europe Poland it seems, though this was not clearly established sometime during the war after a series of rather gruesome adventures, and who, at the end of the war, wrote to the father his cousin by marriage of the young man whom he considered as a nephew, curious to know if he the father and his family had survived the German occupation, and indeed was deeply saddened to learn, in a letter from the young man—a long and touching letter written in English, not by the young man, however, who did not know a damn word of English, but by a good friend of his who had studied English in school—that his parents both his father and mother and his two sisters one older and the other younger than he had been deported they were Jewish to a German concentration camp Auschwitz probably and never returned, no doubt having been exterminated deliberately X * X * X * X, and that, therefore, the young man who was now an orphan, a displaced person, who, during the war, had managed to escape deportation by working very hard on a farm in Southern France, would be happy and grateful to be given the opportunity to come to America that great country he had heard so much about and yet knew so little about to start a new life, possibly go to school, learn a trade, and become a good, loyal citizen.
Firstly I think it’s most important to think in terms of permission, and what the sort of sentence just quoted in toto affords someone trying to figure out just how in the living hell they’re going to manage to write anything. When I was younger, and fresh out of rehab, I knew that I wanted to continue writing. I’d started in there. My mother gave me a notebook I think and they had a computer. I wrote this weird alien story about alcoholics and drug addicts, since I was surrounded by alcoholics and drug addicts. I knew that I was at a turning point wherefrom I would not be capable of living if I gave back into drinking again, doing drugs again, and so I had to figure out things that I would do with my life now that I would not be dying before my twenty-first birthday. I read what I could in there. I know they had some primal therapy stuff, I enjoyed that—later I greatly enjoyed videos about it and the connection that existed between its creator and the musician/artist who would set up a grand piano, then record himself slowly destroying it with an ax. So I left treatment, and I felt like writing was this thing that certain people were probably best-suited to do, and I had no idea whether someone like myself—sort of an idiot but compelled by that—could ever really write something. I went to the public library a lot, and I ordered books online a lot, and I realized after reading certain things—the one that stands out is The Place of Dead Roads by William Burroughs, but there were countless others, and there are others still day after day—I realized, anyway, that the act of writing could take a lot of different shapes, and just about any shape I might in fact feel I needed it to take for it to work for a person like me (largely an idiot).
So when I read a sentence like Federman’s, the first thing I take from it is permission. If Raymond Federman can open his book like this, if he can reach out to a reader and sort of grab their lapel in this way, and say to them listen, and look, I’m going to tell you how I’ve perceived things in my life by writing to you in a way that might not seem welcoming, but it is welcoming, and if you’ll give me your time I’ll give you what I can, and I’ll try and be truthful with you in terms of my sense of what a writer (pathetic), can do. I don’t mean Federman is pathetic. I mean the construct of the writer is probably a little pathetic, which Federman seems entirely aware of. There’s a sense of permission, then, from Federman, indicating that we are free to exist with his work, and to carry his work forward, and to communicate and commune with others in this sense because it’s worked for him, so why not? You have to read widely for a time to find the things that are going to say this expressly for you, but you will find them. It can become a little difficult, as your interests may narrow or broaden depending, but if you allow the process to continue the things that need to reach you will.
The second thing that I think of when I read a sentence like Federman’s is the notion of bits of cigarettes, and spit, and piss, and whatever else, that coated the surface of Jackson Pollock’s paintings alongside his paint, and ink, and blood and whatever else. There’s a consciousness in the sentence that’s multiple—the opening, “Once upon a time two or three weeks ago,” is the first indicator of it, and it persists throughout the thing—and thus we’re not really just reading one quiet somber individual’s reflection of World War II, or its documentation, or its aftermath as it relates to writing. We’re reading multiple iterations, multiple attempts at saying something that’s too complicated to say right out—and here Joyce’s moocow opening to The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man rings a bit—and so he’s got to try, and try, and try until the words seem to build atop one another and a register is found that seems to reflect the spirit in which this thing is being written. The detritus on top of the detritus on top of the words on top of the words on top of the consciousness, so that the end thing looks like ten things, and in reading it through the sentence second guesses itself as much as we do in processing the thing. Stability is abandoned in favor of the risk of cringe, of overwhelming humanity, or being too forward, or taking a chance at something different. Our response then can be to sort of turn away, to say this thing doesn’t look like things I’ve come to understand as the kinds of things I’d expected to find here. Sure. You can do that. I’ve done that. I probably do it every time I try to read Finnegans Wake and I’ll probably keep doing it until I’ve either read the thing or shot a hole through it at the gun range. Something can feel too much, and that’s O.K. We can assume Federman felt his feelings too much when trying to sit down and yet again begin a book and yet again be positioned as a person in this field of great artifice, this prose-making, this sentence-making, and trying to do something significant while also trying to not bore yourself to tears. So first, or second, that multiplicity.
Returning though to the sentence itself.
Once upon a time two or three weeks ago, a rather stubborn and determined middle-aged man decided to record for posterity, exactly as it happened, word by word and step by step, the story of another man for indeed what is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal, a somewhat paranoiac fellow unmarried, unattached, and quite irresponsible
We have here the movement from a man to another man, a story to another story, a time to another time. Every time we think we’re shored up and settled into what this thing will in fact consist of, it’s undercut again and we’re left less and less stable with every passing phrase. The notion of recording, though, of a figure deciding at some point in their life that it was their time to record something, is useful in a setup like this. If you begin, say, by mentioning that you’re fifteen years old and don’t have much to say, the form it takes or the eventual content must compel the thing—this fifteen-year-old better face great dramatic elements, some drastic something, if their narration won’t be made to be the thing, although there’s ample evidence a bland, or young, or average narrator needn’t lead to bland or average narration, often quite the opposite is true. With this setup, though, of a figure deciding, in the actual substance of the sentence, that they are going to record this thing, that they are at a point in their lives when they have decided to record this thing, regardless of what might tumble out thereafter, your relationship to the ensuing material is such that we’re not only more forgiving—of odd progressions, endless digressions, whatever else—but we’re more attuned to the sort of thing that’s going to ensue thereafter. He’s recording word by word and step by step, and this in the same way that we are encountering Federman’s sentencing. We have the decision to record, and then we have the movement to another man, the real content of this word by word account we’re going to be witnessing, this man a bridge and not a goal, and thus we’re settling into the sort of rhythm a bridge affords, especially when compared with a goal. The goal implies stoppage, a finish, something up there we can look to and expect to reach at some point, whereas a bridge is perceptible from far off, but when you’re on one your sense of movement sort of stalls and the finish simply seems to happen when it happens. It’s tempting to extrapolate to the whole of Double or Nothing to see if this transpires, but it’s unnecessary—though it’s a book that everybody should probably read, or Federman is at the least a writer people should read, and certainly people who are trying to write things should read him, he’s incredible in completely unexpected ways from book-to-book. We’re witnessing a bridge, though, and not a goal, and the layered bricks and metals and people and cars and whatever else that goes into a bridge is being delved into right now in this moment in this sentence.
And then, what follows: who had decided to lock himself in a room a furnished room with a private bath, cooking facilities, a bed, a table, and at least one chair, in New York City, for a year 365 days to be precise, to write the story of another person—a shy young man about of 19 years old—who, after the war the Second World War, had come to America the land of opportunities from France under the sponsorship of his uncle—a journalist, fluent in five languages—who himself had come to America from Europe Poland it seems, though this was not clearly established sometime during the war after a series of rather gruesome adventures, and who, at the end of the war, wrote to the father his cousin by marriage of the young man whom he considered as a nephew
Listing is a resource that will never stop providing things for writers. The listings here of the situations, the items in the furnished room, provides brief crackles of energy that bring stuff to the brain, unexpected stuff that readers might not even realize they harbor associations with. There’s something here I’ve come to think of as an FC2 style—FC2, or Fiction Collective 2, begun by writers like Ronald Sukenick and Jonathan Baumbach, and was the publisher of Federman—which is not limited to FC2 books but is something I’ve observed there frequently, the sort of layering that happens with phrasings like “lock himself in a room a furnished room,” somehow, and I don’t know that I understand it perfectly, that addition can almost function like a comma, a break in the initial phrasing. The prepositional phrase “in a room,” is arguably a bit humdrum but somehow with that added “a furnished room” we’re hearing the sort of voice that might be frantically leaving a voicemail after some ordeal has taken place. It continues, too, with something like “for a year 365 days to be precise,” and continues with every iteration of this new figure the old no longer new figure that’s compounded upon. There are ways of indicating to your reader that you’re aware of the sort of cumbersome approach you might be taking to writing this thing you’re writing, and this I think is one of the stronger ones. It’s apparent too in a work like Beckett’s Molloy, wherein the vast majority of text you experience is one long—over one hundred pages and it’s dense, it’s Beckett after all—relentless paragraph. Beckett, being the dramatist he is, and being so fixated on the fundaments of language, gives enough evidence of this being a comic enterprise, a compounding, human, rambling, digressive, and comic enterprise, that it’s a bit as if the pressure is off of you. Reading this bit of the opening sentence from Federman there’s some of that apparent. The repetitions, the layerings taking place function like field recordings at the end of a piece of music, momentary lilts that feed into and add onto the experience in a manner that’s ambient rather than deadly serious and up front. The writer is trying to write something, and needs to siphon through several iterations of what he’s trying to write to figure it out, and so we’re allowed to witness this processing and it becomes messy in the way true communicative efforts are.
Now finally the closing: curious to know if he the father and his family had survived the German occupation, and indeed was deeply saddened to learn, in a letter from the young man—a long and touching letter written in English, not by the young man, however, who did not know a damn word of English, but by a good friend of his who had studied English in school—that his parents both his father and mother and his two sisters one older and the other younger than he had been deported they were Jewish to a German concentration camp Auschwitz probably and never returned, no doubt having been exterminated deliberately X * X * X * X, and that, therefore, the young man who was now an orphan, a displaced person, who, during the war, had managed to escape deportation by working very hard on a farm in Southern France, would be happy and grateful to be given the opportunity to come to America that great country he had heard so much about and yet knew so little about to start a new life, possibly go to school, learn a trade, and become a good, loyal citizen.
It would appear a necessity to mention the X * X * X * X, as it was then featured as part of the title of a book (without the asterisks) on Federman’s works by Larry McCaffery, Thomas Hartl, and Doug Rice. It’s one of the more recognizable components of this long sentence that’s at the very least recognizable as an example not only of a long sentence but of a sentence that’s worth returning to and paying some attention to. Why is it significant—the X * X * X * X? Does it refer to a year? Does it refer to those who’d been exterminated? These questions are sort of the point. It’s left as it is, opened as it is, and it’s the thing that we people reading need to reconcile, though more mildly than some of the more glaring moments in notable sentences in notable works throughout history—the Whiteness of the Whale, say, or the green light on the dock. Like Hester’s A, I guess, it’s a thing that can fluctuate amid the surety of the rest of the thing. The references to that particular war, that particular concentration camp, localizes it surely. The slippery, slipstreamy remaining components though, these are less sure, these are more open, and thus the Xs and the *s point to that remaining openness, that remaining uncertainty, so as to welcome the openness of the remainder of the thing. The wave of information here simultaneously calls to the waves of information we’re often piled with at the beginning of long novels, as well as the likely redundancy of same, or the redundancy of these constructions we’ve come to expect in long novels or in novels of any length. It’s as if Federman is saying “this couldn’t be more important, and I can’t wait for you to forget all of it,” and the brokenness of the remainder of the text seems to welcome it too. If details like this in novels are cast aside, what’s left in the sentence that we’re able to draw from? If the fictional factual matters are so heapingly laid on our heads then what are we to take from this experience? An oratory, an address, a performance, I’d hazard. Federman’s is an approach of one writer who recognized the need for breaking down the walls at the asylum where compelling fiction had been sort of locked up, and his method is one of over-saturation, of engaging redundancy as a structural apparatus in the context of the postmodern novel. A reader’s eyes might sort of glaze over here, but possibly that’s part of it, the way we glaze over an evening of TV watching, until we’ve drunk some caffeine and Paths of Glory comes on at two in the morning, and we’re shaken by the experience. These would seem to be some applications of the sort of sentence at hand here.
At some point, on the website Twitter, the artist and writer Brad Phillips talked about a serve in a tennis match as though it were a perfect sentence. Or, rather, he wrote that he wished he could explain—I’m paraphrasing—why this serve in a tennis match seemed like a perfect sentence. Tennis, either table tennis or tennis proper, seems a useful metaphor for the kinds of things Federman is doing at the end of this long, tennis-y sentence: “that his parents both his father and mother and his two sisters one older and the other younger than he,” it’s almost easy to feel your head moving back and forth while reading such a thing, following the writer’s apparent trajectory while also being at least partly mystified by the process of its ensuingness. We get the digression here, and the whole of life put into this spot, like Stein trying to tell the story of a family, the history of a family, in its completeness, to its completion. Rather than stopping, and matter-of-factly recounting just the facts as they’ve ensued, instead the digression is needed to harken to the speech act to harken to the process of actually trying to do such a thing, and the rhythm of it is quite like tennis at its best, or more aptly probably table tennis at its best—this sort of more modest thing, playful while being deadly serious to its greatest practitioners, volleying back and forth in a small room with oneself as we try to put together the matter satisfactorily.
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Grant Maierhofer is the author of several books, most recently The Compleat Lungfish.