The 'sentence' according to Stanley Fish

The reward for the effacing of ourselves before the altar of sentences will be that "incidentally" (what a great word!)—without looking for it—we will possess a better self than the self we would have possessed had we not put ourselves in service. Sentences can save us. Who could ask for anything more? (Stanley Fish, How To Write A Sentence)

It's not too surprising to me that Stanley Fish, America's premier scholar, teacher & writer, respected everywhere for wide erudition in general and in particular for his famous reader-response approach to literary studies, should write a text on the nature & uses of the 'sentence', aptly titled How To Write A Sentence: And How to Read One (Harper Collins, 2011). A book on the sentence in the age of fashionable dissonance (such as Ron Silliman's New Sentence), & the wildest experimentation with language and poetic form imaginable might strike some as both suspicious & odd. But to me it's welcome relief from the countless bizarre language manifestos that have informed the act of writing today. If the author appears a little condescending it's understandable given the appalling misuse of language prevalent among even academics. Fish's book couldn't have come at a better time.

The tone throughout is friendly but pedagogical; the procedure is even schoolmarmish but very user-friendly, with author offering a series of easy to grasp grammatical principles based on the very best models (some even his own). Here are the ABCs not for the illiterate but literati. Consider the claim, among the many that Fish offers as axioms of effective writing, that "forms are the engines of creativity" (30), clearly privileging formal arrangement of parts over parts by themselves, or content, even suggesting simple substitution exercises as a way to put sentence principles such as this to work. Rewriting Lewis Caroll's "Jabberwocky" opening in ordinary usage, for example, is a good way in which to show the clear and logical relationship of part to whole (the "formal requirement" of sentence construction) & see that without form content, however ingeniously contrived, is empty or "a mere pile of discrete items" (33). Again, schoolmarmish, yes but who talks anymore about the primacy of form or, for that matter, of the forms of argument? The only other work that's as plain and outspoken about 'form' is perhaps Timothy Steele's Missing Measures: Modern Poetry and the Revolt against Meter (though here it's metrical form the author is hoping to resuscitate).

If talk of content filling form sounds platonist (& certainly Chomskyan), and suggests the most feasible sentence paradigm this simple subordination of content to grammatical form makes possible, it's clear the sentence is, as Fish says, "a mold into which innumerable contents can be poured" (31). And since form is the receptacle of content, it follows for Fish that language is what gives shape to our reality, its almost boundless capacity for creativity and the interesting literary nuances we especially strive for in our poetry: effective writing is, in a word, a matter of style (40-43). In his own words, "The language's resources are finite, but the effects that can be achieved by deploying them are not, and the skill of writing is to find those (formal) resources that will produce the effect you desire." (44) There aren't so much appropriate topics for writing as individual styles in the sense that nothing substantive can be said about anything without exploiting first the "(formal) resources" of the sentence:

[Sentences] promise nothing less than lessons and practice in the organization of the world. That is what language does: organize the world into manageable, and in some sense artificial, units that can then be inhabited and manipulated. If you can write a sentence in which actors, actions, and objects are related to one another in time, space, mood, desires, fears, causes, and effects, and if your specification of those relationships is delineated with a precision that communicates itself to your intended reader, you can, by extrapolation and expansion, write anything: a paragraph, an argument, an essay, a treatise, a novel. (7-8)

Sentences will tend to have the force of propositions, to be nicely layered into an evolving thought, mood or impression, the product of the author's controlling intelligence & constrained always by the logic of sense (It's not surprising Fish even offers the great analytical philosopher J. L. Austin's work How to do Things with Words as a kind of classic analysis of sentence structure).The subordinating style, for example, (or hypotaxis) is a type of construction in which it's more important to pay attention always to the relationships of causality, temporality and precedence embedded in a sentence than to a bare display of content alone. The additive style (or parataxis), on the other hand, opts for a more natural, spontaneous & unpredictable presentation of materials, foregoing control & artfulness in order to give a more vital immediacy to things. But whatever the style (and, of course, there are always interesting overlappings) the principle of priority of 'form' over matter always prevails.

Principle prevails even when confronted (as Fish is) with the example of the wilful looseness and extreme circularity of a Gertrude Stein,

If a sentence is a structure of logical relationships—the mantra I urged on you only a short while ago—what exactly is a sequence of words that, like Stein's, pushes logic and coherent, consecutive thought away? At its furthest reaches the additive style may achieve a degree of looseness, of associative nonconnectedness that is radically antithetical to sentence making, at least as I have wanted you to understand it. (73)

or the even more challenging, more subtly interiorized windings of a Virginia Woolf narrative (78-79) where both a subordinating (exquisitely controlled) and a more prominent coordinating (more imaginatively untethered & free-roaming) style intertwine. In an earlier post on Virginia Wolf I characterized, in regards to what I considered to be the essential poetic qualities of her prose, Wolf's masterly sentence use (which I named the 'Sentence') as comprising the most insightful juxtapositions & contrasts (never just connections) between the human condition and a readily available language of passion & death. Fish's analysis of both Stein & Woolf have crucial implications for the posterity of the 'sentence' as an organizing principle of reality & language since it appears that skill, whether in tightly- or loosely-knit structures, alone underlies the writer's craft: in other words,  'formalism' serves as a foundation on the strength of which even creative stylistic digressions must be seen after all as variations on an ideal pattern.

Before you can follow these "rules," which amount to the flouting of the decorums of hypotactic prose, you must first master those decorums; you can't depart from something with confidence unless you are full practiced in the something you are departing from. Behind every paratactic, additive, associative sentence—even the ones written by masters like Woolf and Stein—is the subordinating, tightly designed, and controlled sentence that is not at the moment being written.  (84)

Mastery of the "formal components" is the sine qua non of effective writing: in fact, the sentence can change the very appearance of reality and subject it, in the hands of a master, to the most skillful nuances & indirections. And it takes, of course, an equally adroit reader to see that. In short, good writing must turn to good reading else it would be seen as an empty 'form'. From the the carefully placed first and last sentence to the one that refers only to itself (to name only a few of the techniques by which the 'form' of expression can mold the reality it names), writing seems designed to lead readers through a series of interpretive strategies made possible by style: and this richness is the result of cleverly arranged "formal and content categories" in which the sentence will invariably appear once it's read.

I've covered only the essentials of Fish's wonderful little book, leaving out a lot of the brilliant individual analyses, and certainly enough of the text's design and development to emphasize the primacy of form. Fish is an unabashed Formalist (notwithstanding the attention he's given to content & writers who've experimented with 'form' to great effect), & the message may be really a veiled warning to a postmodernist world more interested in uninformed irony & the dismantling of grand narratives than in harvesting the transformative potential of an effective writing style (as he argues in his classic Is There a Text in this Class?). The point is to "think of language as an experience rather than as a repository of extractable meaning": in short, as form infused with significant content. (67) The spokesperson of Interpretive Communities, Stanley Fish is committed to a view of writing as shared insight & of  "artfully made sentences" as the most elegant means of attaining it. Ambiguity for its own sake is clearly anathema.