{"id":118693,"date":"2017-11-30T11:00:42","date_gmt":"2017-11-30T16:00:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=118693"},"modified":"2017-11-30T13:24:00","modified_gmt":"2017-11-30T18:24:00","slug":"the-sentence-that-is-a-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/11\/30\/the-sentence-that-is-a-story\/","title":{"rendered":"The Sentence That Is a Story"},"content":{"rendered":"

In our eight-part series\u00a0Life Sentence<\/a>, the literary critic Jeff\u00a0Dolven takes apart and puts back together one beloved or bedeviling sentence. The artist Tom Toro illustrates each sentence\u00a0Dolven chooses.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

\u00a9Tom Toro<\/p><\/div>\n

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:<\/p>\n

And the first thing I wanted to do, but I did not do it, was pray.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

<\/p>\n

The sentence is the last line from an essay by Kristin Dombek, \u201cLetter from Williamsburg<\/a>,\u201d which appeared four years ago in The\u00a0Paris Review<\/em>. If you haven\u2019t read it, now is a good time, right in the middle of this column, or in a few minutes, after you\u2019re done. In case you wait till later, I\u2019ll say now that it\u2019s about sex and the loss of faith, the two of them connected in ways that the essay itself can best explain. The sentence I quote comes after Dombek recalls her discovery of the world without God in it. The first thing she wanted to do was pray, but she did not.<\/p>\n

Like many good sentences, maybe all of them, the power of this one has to do with the other sentences it might have been but is not. Reading is an incessantly predictive business. We make constant guesses as we go about where a sentence is headed, and when it\u2019s over, the guesses linger as a background against which the writer\u2019s choices are made visible. For example, the sentence is not, \u201cI wanted to pray, but I did not.\u201d That would have been the simplest way to say it, simplest because it hews to the subject-verb-predicate order most basic to English. \u201cI wanted to pray.\u201d What story could be simpler? More a structure than a story, perhaps, but one that shores up some assumptions about the order of things: first there is an \u201cI,\u201d an agent; then the agent does something; and then something comes of it. There\u2019s comfort in that basic arrangement. It secures our grammatical place as authors of our deeds, up in front of them and calling the shots.<\/p>\n

This sentence does not become a story till its second part, \u201cbut I did not.\u201d The not-doing after the wanting is what carries it into the terrain of narrative. There are now two events, the second a transformation of the first. That transformation is the minimal condition for narrative; two things happen, one because of the other. But still we are a long way from what Dombek\u2019s sentence does. Let me try out another she didn\u2019t write: \u201cThe first thing I wanted to do was pray, but I did not.\u201d This one has her compound subject, which pushes the first \u201cI\u201d a little ways into the interior. (The compound subject is the noun phrase \u201cthe first thing I wanted to do.\u201d) This version of the sentence still tells its minimal story, wanting then not doing, and tells it in order. What it misses is the way Dombek\u2019s \u201cbut\u201d interrupts the main clause, pushed a couple words into the interior from the far side. There is no real grammatical consequence to the change, but rhetorically it makes all the difference\u2014rhetorically and narratively.<\/p>\n

Narrative is what I want most to think about here, even though it is usually taken to operate on a much larger scale, that of paragraphs and chapters. Narrative theorists distinguish between a story\u2019s fabula<\/em> and its sujet<\/em>: between the sequence of events and the sequence of their presentation. (The terms are those of the early twentieth-century Russian formalists.) Dombek\u2019s sentence plays the two off against each other. For isn\u2019t the story, the fabula<\/em>, that she wanted to pray first but then she did not? And yet as Dombek writes it, \u201cbut I did not\u201d intercepts the object of the want, slips in before the praying, as though she were afraid that if she said it she would already be doing it, already praying. And so the order of events gets confused. You could almost say that the interruption is an event itself, something that suddenly happens in the middle of the sentence, something we had not been expecting.<\/p>\n

Which is to say that a sentence can not only tell a story but a sentence can be a story. Its organization is shaped not only by grammatical rule and rhetorical purpose but by narrative principles of suspense, reversal, revelation\u2014a kind of plot whose characters are phrases and clauses that arrive early or late, in key or at cross-purposes. The story of Dombek\u2019s sentence, the one she actually wrote, gets a couple of additional twists. It begins with an \u201cand,\u201d as though this moment of revelation, or antirevelation, might have been (at least at the beginning of the story) just another thing happening in the quotidian parataxis of ordinary life. Then there is the \u201cdo it\u201d she adds to \u201cbut I did not.\u201d It is a stab of desperate emphasis. It also makes a distinction that we might have missed but that Dombek needs: it is not the wanting that she did not do, but the praying, whether she stopped wanting or not.<\/p>\n

So what is the plot of this sentence? What is the story? Something like wanting, then stopping before you can even say, before you let yourself say what you want, or wanted; and that still leaves \u201cwas pray\u201d at the end. Subjects precede verbs the way wanting precedes doing, isn\u2019t that right? But what if the wanting keeps going after, and what if the doing comes along before you know what you want? Action itself has a grammar: subject, verb, object; wanting, doing, and the consequences. That is the truth ordinary sentences preach every time we use them. But Dombek\u2019s sentence, arranging its events to defy its grammar, tells a different story, about how quitting comes right in the middle of wanting, a sentence-story telling its own truth against the grammar we expect. Grammar is good for talking about life, even about God and sex\u2014we could hardly do without it\u2014but that does not make it a reliable model of how we live.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Jeff Dolven\u2019s poems\u00a0first appeared in\u00a0<\/em>The\u00a0Paris Review\u00a0in 2000. He teaches at Princeton University, and his new book,\u00a0<\/em>Senses of Style,<\/em>\u00a0which looks at the work and lives of Thomas Wyatt and Frank O\u2019Hara, will publish\u00a0in January.<\/em><\/p>\n

Tom Toro is an American cartoonist whose work appears regularly in<\/em>\u00a0The New Yorker,<\/em>\u00a0Playboy,<\/em>\u00a0The American Bystander, and elsewhere. His book of Trump cartoons,\u00a0<\/em>Tiny Hands<\/a>, is available now through Dock Street Press.<\/em><\/p>\n

Read\u00a0earlier installments of\u00a0Life Sentence\u00a0here<\/a>.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In our eight-part series\u00a0Life Sentence, the literary critic Jeff\u00a0Dolven takes apart and puts back together one beloved or bedeviling sentence. The artist Tom Toro illustrates each sentence\u00a0Dolven chooses. 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: […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1291,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[31258],"tags":[31896,231,3685,11476,31222,31681,31895,31898,31897,29695],"class_list":["post-118693","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life-sentence","tag-fabula","tag-grammar","tag-jeff-dolven","tag-kristin-dombek","tag-letter-from-williamsburg","tag-life-sentence","tag-parataxis","tag-russian-formalism","tag-sujet","tag-syntax"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe Sentence That Is a Story by Jeff Dolven<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"The newest installment of Jeff Dolven\u2019s Life Sentence column. 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