Exercise #20: Syntactic Symbolism
Virginia Tufte, Dawn Tripp, Mitchell S. Jackson, James Salter, Toni Morrison, Garielle Lutz, Brian Evenson, Benjamin Percy, S.A. Cosby, Paisley Rekdal.
Hi friends,
It’s hard to believe it’s August already! Here in Phoenix, we’ve had the heaviest monsoon season yet in my seven years of living here, so it’s been unusually humid these past few weeks, and relatively cool—by which I mean it’s only been in the 90s instead of 115. On my trail runs, the desert plants have looked greener than usual for this time of year, thanks to all the water, but so much at once also created flooding which toppled some giant trailside saguaro cactuses, some of which were probably 150 years old. At the same time, the rain has slowed what was looking to be a brutal fire season, and I’m optimistic that means we’ll make it through the rest of the summer with a minimum of further damage to the landscape here. Hopefully you’re healthy and safe where you are, in this year of harsh weather and the continued pandemic.
My book launch for Appleseed has come and gone, and I couldn’t be more grateful to everyone who already bought a copy or who attended one of my events. Putting a book into the world is always a dramatic experience, but this time out it’s felt particularly celebratory thanks to there being so much visible enthusiasm around the novel. I’m thankful for how many people are reading and enjoying it already, and I hope it keeps finding its way to more readers in the weeks and months ahead.
One piece of advice I always offer new authors is that the best insulation I know from the pressure of a book’s launch is being as deep as possible into the next project: this time around, I’m already at work on my next novel, and this month I had final edits due on my craft book, Refuse to Be Done, which I turned in yesterday. Soho Press revealed David Drummond’s cover for the book a couple of weeks ago, but I haven’t shared it here yet, so here it is:
I wrote Refuse to Be Done before I started this newsletter, and I’ve purposely tried not to repeat much material here, so it’ll be fresh even for those of you religiously reading these exercises. It’ll be out March 22, 2022, and is available for preorder now.
Enjoy this month’s exercise, be safe, be kind, and happy reading and writing!
Yours,
Matt
What I’m Reading:
The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell by Brian Evenson. Evenson is one of my all-time favorite writers, and his new collection might be his best yet. These stories exhibit all his trademark uncanniness, but he puts his familiar tactics to new use in more overtly science fictional stories and in a strain of ecological horror I haven’t seen in his work before. I’m helping him launch the book this Tuesday, online at Powell’s, if you’d like to join us.
The Ninth Metal by Benjamin Percy. This is my favorite Ben Percy novel since Red Moon, and I’m excited to read the next books in the Comet Cycle it kicks off. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how writers work to make fictional worlds they can return to over and over to expand with new stories, and it’s exciting to know Percy’s doing the same. He talks about that ambition here, in this essay at Lit Hub.
Razorblade Tears by S.A. Cosby. This is the best crime novel I’ve read in ages. (And a fantastic audiobook: I switched between print and audio for this one.) It’s incredibly paced, smart as hell, with great characters and fantastic prose. “Time was a river made of quicksilver. It slipped through his grasp even as it enveloped him.”
Appropriate by Paisley Rekdal. An important and necessary and complex book on the ethics and practices (and joys!) of contemporary writing, as seen through the lens of cultural appropriation. The best book on writing and literature I’ve read this year.
Exercise #20: Syntactic Symbolism
This summer, I’m teaching a handful of guest workshops centered around sentence acoustics and style, in which my goal is to offer participants new ways of seeing and hearing the possibilities inside the sentence and the paragraph in fiction. Part of this class involves working through a number of examples of interesting prose that I’ve gathered over the years, attempting to breakdown how they do what they do. Inevitably, one of the technical terms I use that creates the most excitement in attendees is syntactic symbolism, a term I learned from Virginia Tufte’s Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style, a book I’ve mentioned in this newsletter before and surely will again.
So what is syntactic symbolism? Tufte defines it as sentences and paragraphs whose construction somehow mimics or suggests the object or action the words are describing: "a syntactic symbol is a verbal, syntactic pattern intended to be read for a nonverbal movement or development of some kind: language arranged to look or sound like action.” She writes:
Prose is linear. It is read and said to move… the movement may resemble accumulation or attrition, progress or other process, even stasis, or any of these interrupted, turned, reversed. In space or time or both, it can go in any direction as continuous or repetitive, accelerated or retarded, smooth, halting, or halted. The variety is enormous… Here syntax as style has moved beyond the arbitrary, the sufficient, and is made so appropriate to content that, sharing the very qualities of the content, it is carried to that point where it seems not only right but inevitable.
That point where it seems not only right but inevitable. In Garielle Lutz’s well-known essay “The Sentence is a Lonely Place,” she reference Susan Sontag’s term "lexical inevitability,” the point at which a sentence feels preordained and impossible to improve; here Tufte offers a very similar goal for the writer, as well as a way of recognizing sentences of the highest quality.
But what do these lexically inevitable, syntactically symbolic sentences look like in practice? Here are a couple of my favorites, as well as some commentary on how I see them working:
“She says my name, her voice a whisper stripped, like winter, her voice like a river pulling down through stones.” —Dawn Tripp, A Game of Secrets
There’s so much to admire sonically about this sentence: the alliteration of “whisper” and “winter,” accompanied by the assonance of the i-sounds inside “whisper” and “stripped” and “winter”; the way the v in the repeated “voice” moves into the center of “river”; the way the sentence elongates and pauses as the syllable counts of the phrases climb in the first two phrases, then shorten in “like winter,” before spilling out into the long final phrase. For me, the relative pause of “like winter” creates the stage for the syntactic symbolism of the final phrase, “her voice like a river pulling down through stones,” which feels so much like the thing it describes, perhaps because of the iambics of the syllables, the way “pulling down” creates that movement in the mind, and the sinking sound and sense of the word “stones” at the end of this long, rhythmic sentence.
"My girl's a spectacle up there, syncopating and twirling and shimmying and stomping in heels tall enough to fall from and die, a semaphore for the sound." —Mitchell S. Jackson, "Head Down Palm Up"
Again, there’s so much to admire here sonically—I love the consonance of the l-sound in “heels tall enough to fall from and die,” as well as the way the matching shape of heel/tall/fall creates an acoustic zone in that part of the sentence—but for me what makes it syntactical symbolism is that entire second phrase, “syncopating and twirling and shimmying and stomping in heels tall enough to fall from and die,” in which the narrator’s stripper girlfriend is almost suspended in motion by the four verbs connected by and rather than set in a comma-separated series. Jackson promises a spectacle in this sentence’s opening: with the structure of the middle phrase, he delivers it.
"Down past the bridge there were great skirts of ice along the banks, and people already out, men in overcoats, women bundled against the cold. They skated in blinding sunshine, scarves about their necks, shouting to each other, the ankles of the smallest children folding like paper." —James Salter, Light Years
A two-sentence sequence this time, united by various sounds that continue between the two sentences. Note especially the movement of the k- and sk- sounds as they appear in different positions and in different forms in different words: skirts, banks, overcoats, cold, skated, scarves, necks, ankles. I love the second sentence here so much, with its four phrases whose back and forth rhythm feels almost like the left-right-left-right motion of the skating it describes, leading to that brilliant last image: “the ankles of the smallest children folding like paper”: listen for the complete absence in that last simile of the k/sk sounds that dominated, giving way to softer sounds, as gentle as the action they describe.
"Shadrack rose and returned to the cot, where he fell into the first sleep of his new life. A sleep deeper than the hospital drugs; deeper than the pit of plums, steadier than the condor's wings; more tranquil than the curve of eggs." —Toni Morrison, Sula
Sula is one of my favorite novels, and this is one of my favorite moments in it. The second half of this passage is not a complete sentence: it’s a fragment serving, I think, as an appositive for sleep as it appears at the end of the previous sentence, and probably could/should have been connected to that sentence with a comma instead of separated by a period. But I like it better this way, in part because the fragment standing alone deepens the syntactic symbolism: can you feel the way this not only describes falling deeply asleep, but also mimics the sensation? Deeper, deeper, steadier, more tranquil. (Note also how the two uses of sleep rhyme internally with the two instances of deeper, creating a progression of sound between the two sentences.) This is a beautifully built piece of language, with its four rich but varied comparisons, its elongating phrases whose length also create a kind of deepening, its gorgeous and surprising final image. Lexical inevitability indeed.
Your exercise this month is to write a 500-word fiction in which you indulge in syntactic symbolism at the level of the sentence and the paragraph, in service of creating a sonically interesting passage that is also an invocation or recreation of the action it describes. If you’re unsure how to proceed, look at the examples above, or return to passages from favorite novels or stories to identify and study other instances of syntactic symbolism, which might be easier to see now that you know the term.
Good luck! See you next month!
P.S./Update: Right after I hit send, I remembered this favorite sentence from Zora Neale Hurston’s “The Gilded Six-Bits,” which feels like a whole scene: “Shouting, laughing, twisting, turning, tussling, tickling each other in the ribs; Missie May clutching onto Joe and Joe trying, but not too hard, to get away.” I’ll leave you this one for you to break down on your own!
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Matt Bell’s novel Appleseed was published Custom House in July 2021. His craft book Refuse to Be Done, a guide to novel writing, rewriting, & revision, will follow in early 2022 from Soho Press. He’s also the author of the novels Scrapper and In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods, as well as the short story collection A Tree or a Person or a Wall, a non-fiction book about the classic video game Baldur’s Gate II, and several other titles. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Tin House, Conjunctions, Fairy Tale Review, American Short Fiction, and many other publications. A native of Michigan, he teaches creative writing at Arizona State University.
Hi Matt! Just want to let you know that the link to preorder your book from Bookshop.org is broken. Looking forward to reading it when it comes out!