The potential beauty in succinctness

Dublin-born Brian Dillon has been collecting sentences and describes as “affinity” a scrupulous but perplexing attachment to the written expression with a full stop.

In Suppose a Sentence, Dillon makes these mementos into the 27 one-liners, a literary hitchhikers pickup over the course of his research.

A series of essays prompted by a single sentence from Shakespeare to Gertrude Stein, John Ruskin to Joan Didion, the book explores voice, language, and style with the subjectivity of reading.  Dillon also explores not only how the sentence works and why but also, in the course of the book, what the sentence once was, what it is today,  and what it might become tomorrow.

Orwell’s good prose is like a windowpane. Dillon is more tolerant of smudges of ambiguity, embracing constructions such as Eliot’s which demand a second or third reading, whose meanings are obscured by thick layers of metaphor and misdirection, as every comma, semicolon demands attention.

Although we are used to monosyllabic messaging governed by tweets, it is a critical reminder of the potential beauty, that can be fabricated in succinctness.

Walter Benjamin:” Our life, it can be said, is a muscle strong enough to contract the whole of the historical time”. D.H. Lawrence: “ And my diamond might be coal or soot, and my theme is carbon.”

John Ruskin: “had fitted, as the air for human breath, so the clouds….”

In George Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language” no diatribes against “foreign words and expressions”. They are all foreign, waiting to be found.

In Shakespeare, the last words are rarely the last. “O, I die, Horatio,” Hamlet declares about fifty lines from the end of the play that bears his name and six lines before his own finish. “ The rest is silence”. Not quite, or not always.

A single sentence, Dillon argues, can evoke an entire text. “ What have we got but our phrases, piling up?”.

Shakespeare’s contribution is just four letters, courtesy of the death of Hamlet.

“The sentence does not lose its way exactly, but somewhere forgets itself, and the reader slips with it, smiling”.

   In a passage from George Eliot’s Middlemarch, “Our moods are apt to bring with them images which succeed each other like the magic-lantern pictures of a doze, and in certain states of dull forlornness Dorothea all her life continued to see the vastness of St Peter’s, the huge bronze canopy, the excited intention in the attributes and garments of the prophets and evangelists in the mosaics above, and the red drapery which was being hung for Christmas spreading itself everywhere like a disease of the retina”.

 

Suppose a Sentence by Brian Dillon, Fitzcarraldo Editions £10.99, 200 pages.