A Series of Fortunate Events

We are in the death throes of another semester, with some students desperately clutching at frail lifelines, others letting go in despair and sinking, while still others, avoiding the shoals, sail freely to dock.  Overseeing, comforting, communicating, judging, negotiating, encouraging, and recuperating preclude attention to a blog no one is currently reading, and so explains the interlude in posts.

My reading time is generally relegated to early morning sessions at Caribou Coffee, with snatches here and there for essays and abstracts. 

I’ve spent the last third of the semester exposing students to the rhetoric of sentence-level emphasis through tropes of sonority:  parallelism, series, anaphora, alliteration, and antithesis, using explanations and exercises from Copia.

There is nothing like teaching a concept or trope for focusing my attention on it in my own reading.  Hence, while engaged in a Doris Lessing essay, “Censorship,” recently, I came across this passage about how black writers were treated in South Africa during apartheid.  She imagines an aspiring writer living

…let us say, in old Soweto, and his working conditions make it hard for him to sustain creative energy, and then he cannot help observing how the black writers still in South Africa are treated.  (1)Those who have fled, sometimes a few steps in front of the police, are in exile in London and New York and in universities which these days so often give shelter to victims of persecution.  (2) He heard some are drinking too much, dying young, often not writing much.  (3) In the evenings he sits at a table where his mother and then his wife have cleared the supper things, he lights the oil lamp, he gets out his exercise book, he takes up his biro, and then—he stops.  (4) What he would like to write about are his daily struggles, the miseries of poverty, the attentions of the police, the efforts of his women to feed him and the children, how it feels to watch and—this is the worst—how his talented children are going to waste (74,5).

The first thing to notice is how long this has been going on:  “his mother and then his wife have cleared the supper things.”  What is of immediate interest is the consecutive series Lessing employs.  The first is a polysyndeton, a series with no commas, only conjunctions:  “in exile in London and New York and in universities…”  The “ands” are cumulative—S. African black writers are in big, important places, and the accumulation of place implies a large number of them, or perhaps a large proportion.

Sentence 2 is asyndetonic, with no conjunctions, only commas:  “He heard some are drinking too much, dying young, often not writing much.”  The first element appears causal to the other two, though it is curious that the dying comes before the writing in order.  A pauper’s death, perhaps, with nothing left behind.

We see in the next sentence the would-be writer, stuck in South Africa, engage in his nightly ritual, abbreviated by his knowledge that to write the truth would force him from his home, too:  “he lights the oil lamp, he gets out his exercise book, he takes up his biro, and then—he stops.” Ordinarily we wouldn’t see the pronoun repeated, but the anaphora focuses our attention on the hapless South African rather than his actions, which are arrested in mid-gesture.  Winston Weathers would call this series normal, a three-part, short list, joining the last with “and.” Even the normal pattern, though, is interrupted by a dash and a Caesura.

Lastly, Lessing lists his struggles—they are bounteous—in a six-part series.  So much is going on simultaneously in this sentence, aided and abetted by the linearity of language overcome by the shortest of pauses in a string of commas.

The series is a simple device, hardly worthy of our notice, certainly my notice, until I discovered Weathers’s essay, “The Rhetoric of the Series,” originally published in CCC in December, 1966.  I came across it in Rhetoric and Composition, published in the mid-seventies before we threw over our interest in sentences in the interests of holism.

Weathers’s discussion addresses three features of any series:  length in terms of the number of items in the series, parallelism, and conjunctions.

The important point, first, is to recognize that to emphasize anything, it must contrast with its surroundings, the background.  The three-part series with a single “and”—red, white, and blue—is that backdrop.  Waldo is hard to find because he blends in to the similarly colored and shaped characters in the cartoon.  Similarly, we hardly notice a standard three-part series.

It is against that backdrop that the alternatives stand out, as would Waldo if he were twice the size of other characters.  Donna Gorrell, my mentor while working on an early version of Copia and the author of Style and Difference, insists that style is largely marked by a departure from the norm, and she pleads with English teachers to encourage deviation.  Asyndetonic (red, white, blue) and polysyndetonic (red and white and blue) series are noteworthy variations on the normal structure.  The parsimonious but authoritative two-part series (Would he leave home, his family—"Censorship"  again) or the abundance of the four-or-more part series are the other variations. 

Abundance is on Thoreau’s mind in “Walking,” which he celebrates by quoting the English traveler Sir Francis Head: 

“in both the northern and southern hemispheres of the New World, Nature has not only outlined her woks on a larger scale, but has painted the whole picture with brighter and more costly colors than she use in delineating and in beautifying the Old World…The heavens of America appear infinitely higher, the sky is bluer, the air is fresher, the cold is intenser, the moon looks larger, the stars are brighter, the thunder is louder, the lightning is vivider, the wind is stronger, the rain is heavier, the mountains are higher, the rivers longer, the forests bigger, the plains broader” (160).

Paralellism is apparently mandatory in Head’s head, to the point of putting the comparative –er in unfamiliar territory.  Such abundance can characterize a continent or signal suffering, as in Martin Luther King’s eleventh paragraph of “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” where he describes in a nearly page-long paragraph why blacks have waited for equality long enough.  The examples form an immense series of clauses connected with semi-colons and “when.” It’s a symphony of sonority and worth a closer reading than I can give here.

The series can also serve the ironist through the juxtaposition of elements.  I’m thinking primarily of Pope’s “Rape of the Lock,” Canto II, ll. 137-8:

            Here files of pins extend their shining rows,

            Puffs, Powders, Bibles, Billet-doux.

The inclusion of Bibles in a collection of toiletries is classic diminution.  Donald Barthelme gets into the act in “The Teachings of Don B.”  The title character, a sort of anti-guru of the drug-crazed sixties, responds to the narrator’s request to be his pupil:

…he warned me, states of nonordinary reality could not be attained by just anybody, and if just anybody did, by accident, blunder into a state of nonordinary reality, the anybody might bloody well regret it.  Yankee culture was a fearsome thing, he told me, and not to be entered lightly, but only with a prepared heart.  Was I willing to endure the pain, elation, shock, terror, and boredom of such an experience? (3,4).

Later, Don B. advises the narrator, “The four natural enemies of the man of knowledge are fear, sleep, sex, and the Internal Revenue Service.” His technique, taken from standup comedy, is to finish the otherwise coherent series with an absurd anomaly, the punchline, the joke.

The series.  More than simply red, white, and blue.

P.S.  If you really want to see the power of the series in the service of abundance and irony, read Edward Abbey's "The Great American Desert."  You can find a copy of it online, though I doubt it's legal.  Otherwise, mine is in The Best of Edward Abbey, but you can also find it in his The Journey Home.

References

Barthelme, Donald.  The Teachings of Don B.:  Satires, Parodies, Fables, Illustrated Stories, and Plays. Kim Herzinger, Ed.  New York:  Turtle Bay, 1992.

Gorrell, Donna.  Style and Difference.  Boston:  Houghton Mifflin, 2005.

Lessing, Doris.  Time Bites:  Views and Reviews.  “Censorship.” New York:  Harper, 2006.  72-78.

Pope, Alexander.  “The Rape of the Lock.”  The Poems of Alexander Pope:  A One Volume Edition of the Twickenham Pope.  Ed. John Butt. Bungay, Suffolk:  Metheun, 1963.  217-242.

Rhetoric and Composition:  A Sourcebook for Teachers.  Ed. Richard L. Graves. Rochelle Park, NJ:  Hayden, 1977. 95-101.

Thoreau, Henry David. “Walking.” The Essays of Henry David Thoreau.  Ed. Lewis Hyde. New York:  North Point Press, 2002. 147-178.