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Category Archives: Life Sentence

December 21, 2017
Life Sentence

The Being of the Sentence

By Jeff Dolven

In our eight-part series Life Sentence, the literary critic Jeff Dolven takes apart and puts back together one beloved or bedeviling sentence. The artist Tom Toro illustrates each sentence Dolven chooses.

©Tom Toro

There are so many ways to pin a sentence down: the completeness of its thought, the correctness of its grammar; its rhetorical purpose, its narrative closure. Does any of them touch its being?

Night after night this message returns, repeated in the flickering bulbs of the sky, raised past us, taken away from us, yet ours over and over until the end that is past truth, the being of our sentences, in the climate that fostered them, not ours to own, like a book, but to be with, and sometimes to be without, alone and desperate.

John Ashbery is a poet of sentences. No one writing since Milton has had quite so much syntax at his disposal. “Soonest Mended,” the poem from which this sentence is taken, is composed in lines, which make for another order of punctuation—and they make a difference, as you can see if you read the original. Here, though, I want to set the prosody aside in favor of the prose of Ashbery’s commas, and the way the wandering structure sounds the question of what, after all is said and done, a sentence is. After so many formal queries in this column, after trying out so many different frameworks and idioms, permit me a moment of existential free fall. Read More
December 14, 2017
Life Sentence

The Schizophrenic Sentence

By Jeff Dolven

In our eight-part series Life Sentence, the literary critic Jeff Dolven takes apart and puts back together one beloved or bedeviling sentence. The artist Tom Toro illustrates each sentence Dolven chooses.

©Tom Toro

The question: Are you ill? The answer:

Kings do not collect the money, in this way the letters have been taken away from me, as I that at last of those that particularly believe as I at last chipecially think, and all are burned.

A sentence, an ordinary sentence, is an image of sanity. It collects the wits. A sentence that doesn’t work out can usually be written off as merely careless, or rushed, or as the stumbling of a non-native speaker. Sometimes, however, the failure is more ominous. The question above was posed sometime early in the last century by the German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin, and the answer came from one of his patients; it appears in a 1913 study translated into English as Dementia Praecox and Paraphrenia. Kraepelin, or whoever took down the words, must have followed the usual cues of spoken cadence in deciding where the sentence started and stopped. In between, the relation of the parts is unsteady. Imagine someone you love calling you up late at night and speaking that sentence; it would be very frightening.

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December 7, 2017
Life Sentence

The Sentence That Folds Neatly in Half

By Jeff Dolven

In our eight-part series Life Sentence, the literary critic Jeff Dolven takes apart and puts back together one beloved or bedeviling sentence. The artist Tom Toro illustrates each sentence Dolven chooses.

©Tom Toro

W. H. Auden was a compulsive aphorist. His poems and prose are heavily salted with wise maxims; here’s one from a notebook he kept when he arrived in America, in 1939, published much later as The Prolific and the Devourer:

The image of myself that I try to create in my own mind in order that I may love myself is very different from the image which I try to create in the minds of others that they may love me.

It strikes home, yes? Perhaps because, for all my public bonhomie, I have so many more serious things on my mind. Or because the love I want from others will aways have a measure of fear in it, fear of my rigor or my temper—but really, all I want is to bring out the best in them. Or because I am so considerate, so habitually obliging and flexible—but I do have my own views, and when the time is right, I will make them heard. Whoever I am, Auden’s aphorism knows me, certainly better than others do, perhaps even better than I once knew myself. Read More
November 30, 2017
Life Sentence

The Sentence That Is a Story

By Jeff Dolven

In our eight-part series Life Sentence, the literary critic Jeff Dolven takes apart and puts back together one beloved or bedeviling sentence. The artist Tom Toro illustrates each sentence Dolven chooses.

©Tom Toro

The first thing I want to do is give you the sentence, so here it is. I typed it, and now you read it, in that order:

And the first thing I wanted to do, but I did not do it, was pray.

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November 16, 2017
Life Sentence

The Insouciant Sentence

By Jeff Dolven

In our eight-part series Life Sentence, the literary critic Jeff Dolven takes apart and puts back together one beloved or bedeviling sentence each week. Artist Tom Toro illustrates each sentence Dolven chooses.

© Tom Toro

Americans are particularly bad at lying, thought Oscar Wilde. Whatever he would say of us today, his views in 1891, when his essay “The Decay of Lying” was published, were clear enough:

The crude commercialism of America, its materialising spirit, its indifference to the poetical side of things, and its lack of imagination and of high unattainable ideals, are entirely due to that country having adopted for its national hero a man, who, according to his own confession, was incapable of telling a lie, and it is not too much to say that the story of George Washington and the cherry-tree has done more harm, and in a shorter space of time, than any other moral tale in the whole of literature.

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November 9, 2017
Life Sentence

The Sentence That Is a Period

By Jeff Dolven

In our eight-part series, Life Sentence, the literary critic Jeff Dolven takes apart and puts back together one beloved or bedeviling sentence each week. Artist Tom Toro illustrates each sentence Dolven chooses.

© Tom Toro

How do you read a sentence by Gertrude Stein aloud? What she puts between periods is often fragmentary and repetitive, unhelpfully underpunctuated, reliant on a series of appositions and flat ands to hold it together. There is a decision to make. You could read it with a take-it-as-it-comes evenness of tone, as though the point were to reject the sentimental habits of the speaking voice. Or you could read it as though you understood it, or even as though you were trying to convince someone that what it says is true. As though you were delivering an oration:

In the practice of orations and the relief of fears, in the practice of orations and the relief of fears, in the practice of orations and in the relief of fears, he we and they, they and we and he, he and they and we and in the practice of orations and in the relief of fears may we accept that which when sent is not only acceptable but in a way need not be regarded as a surprise.

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