Stanley Fish

Audio

Transcript

Ramona Koval: According to Professor Stanley Fish, the kinds of sentences we can read, and even write, are many. They can reassure or explode like hand grenades. They can invite us in or exclude us. They can caress us or assault us. In the end they can even save us. An American literary theorist and law professor among his many titles, Stanley Fish is the Davidson-Kahn Distinguished University Professor of Humanities and a professor of law at Florida International University. He's the author of numerous books and essays, and his latest book, How to Write a Sentence and How to Read One describes the art and practice of making and recognising a good sentence. He joins us now on the phone from his home in Miami. Professor Stanley Fish, welcome to The Book Show.

Stanley Fish: It's a great pleasure to be here. I just wish I were also in Australia.

Ramona Koval: Well we wish so too. But we'll have to just settle for this, at the moment. But I want to know from you, how can sentences save us, and from what?

Stanley Fish: Well what I meant by that was a comment on a paragraph by the great American author Gertrude Stein in which she talks about the way in which a reader who harnesses herself to the unfolding of a sentence gives herself to the unfolding of the sentence. Finds in that obedience, in that fidelity to the sentence's structure a self that is perhaps better than the self that she would have found had she just tried to create sentences on her own. So it's a sermon on Gertrude Stein's part about the religion of art, and inviting us all to be acolytes in that religion.

Ramona Koval: And it's self-improving, then.

Stanley Fish: It can be self-improving. When I tell my composition students that the last thing I want to hear them do, or try to do, is express themselves. They are of course shocked, because they have been taught that expressing themselves is what writing is for. I say no. We're going to put you in the service of great sentences. And if at the end of all of that you still want to express yourself, then you may be allowed to do so.

Ramona Koval: Well before we get to how to take apart and how to put together a good sentence, what for you is the lure of the sentence?

Stanley Fish: The lure of the sentence is that it's a little world. That is, a sentence is an organisation of items in the world, and because there are many items in the world and sentences have to in most cases be a reasonable length, the act of selection is also the act of creating a universe, both for you and for your readers. And that's indeed a difficult thing to do, especially if you're trying to do it in the context of an intended effect that you want to achieve. So I tend to think of it as an achievement like an athletic achievement. As you know, when you watch some sports performers you wonder at their ability to do things that you are unable to do, even though you have some of the same rudimentary physical capabilities.

Ramona Koval: Like arms and legs...

Stanley Fish: Yes. We're all able to speak and produce sentences, but then we read a sentence by a master, and we say to ourselves, 'How did she do that? How could I do that? Probably never.'

Ramona Koval: Well you know, you say a good sentence of course in the hand of a master is something to marvel at, but you also say that a good sentence can turn up at any moment and not necessarily just in great literature. We'll look at literature in a moment, but you give examples of sentences that have popped up in unlikely places. For example, in the movie The Magnificent Seven. What's the sentence that you marvel at there?

Stanley Fish: Well that's a sentence spoken by the bandit who has been asked doesn't he ever worry about the peasants whose goods he steals, even as winter is coming on. And he says in response, 'If God hadn't wanted them sheared he would not have made them sheep.' And that sentence, which leaks out of his mouth in the middle of a scene and then is passed by is really a marvel of concision. And also quite wonderfully designed with the parallel 'sheared' and 'sheep'. The sentence falls into two phrases. It more or less feels like the whip that he is carrying.

And I heard one the other day, just the other day. Christopher Walken as you probably know is an American actor and he was commenting on the fact that he doesn't have much of a social life. And he gave as a reason, this: 'I make a better impression when I'm not around.' And I thought that was a wonderful sentence. 'I make a better impression when I'm not around.'

Ramona Koval: Now why is that a wonderful sentence? Let's look at it.

Stanley Fish: It's a wonderful sentence because 'impression' is a very precise word, and it suggests that when you appear in company with someone, your presence, your person -- perhaps your voice -- is impinging on that someone's senses. 'He made a good impression on me.' But what Walken is saying is that I make a better impression when there is no impression of me. When you don't yet know anything about me, then you may have a better opinion of me than you would have had, had I really made an impression on you.

Now notice how laboured my account of that sentence was. I had to go in circles. And how concise and precise Walken's sentence is.

Ramona Koval: But it's also because it's absurd, isn't it, because an impression is made when something is pressed into something else, so that it has to present to make an impression. And it's absurd to think that you can make an impression when you're not there.

Stanley Fish: Well...and it's also a comment -- his comment -- without acknowledging it, that as a social being he's likely to be a failure. So that in order to forestall that failure he in fact doesn't move in social life and therefore makes a better impression by not having made one.

Ramona Koval: You also talk about another unlikely place, perhaps, in a court case, the case of Lee v Weisman. What happened there?

Stanley Fish: That was a case, the last big school prayer case in the United States Supreme Court, where Mr Weisman brought a course of action because a prayer had been read at his daughter's middle school graduation. Now the prayer had no content, certainly no doctrinal content. You would forget it ten seconds after having read it. But nevertheless, the Supreme Court decided that the fact of it, the fact that there was a prayer, exerted what it called a 'psychological coercion' on young Miss Weisman and her fellow students. And [Justice] Scalia became extraordinarily agitated. He commented that as a fellow jurist had said, this form of jurisprudence, religion clause jurisprudence, was becoming so complicated that it began to look like interior decorating. Then after having reported that, he said to his colleagues on the bench: 'Interior decorating is a rock-hard science compared to psychology practised by amateurs.'

Now what makes that sentence so good is of course that the amateurs he's speaking of are the other eight judges sitting to his left and right. They are the last word in the sentence, and the sentence is like a projectile or a spear, thrown at them, and it picks up speed as it goes along. It's quite a performance.

Ramona Koval: So that sentence, I mean you sound like you agree with the sentiments in the sentence, but...

Stanley Fish: No, I have no interest whatsoever in the sentiments.

Ramona Koval: Well I was just going to say, do you admire sentences that you have no interest in the sentiments in -- or in fact you disagree with the sentiments. You think...

Stanley Fish: No. At least for the purposes of writing this book and also for the purposes of teaching writing, I make a very firm distinction between forms and the content that those forms can carry, and I express a great deal of interest in the forms and a negative interest in the content. In fact I'm likely to say that the enemy of learning how to write is content. And you should practise with forms that have as little content as possible, and certainly you should never practise with forms that have a content that you're interested in.

Ramona Koval: So we should read the Jabberwocky.

Stanley Fish: Yes. And that's one of my examples in the exercise I give to my students.

Ramona Koval: Well tell us about that one. Remind us of that.

Stanley Fish: Well, the famous first stanza:

Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

And what I ask my students to do is to replace the nonsense words with English words in a sequence that makes sense. And they can all do that. So that part of the exercise is very simple. But then I ask them, how is it that you were able to do what you did? More precisely, how is it that you know what words or class of words will fit into what slot in this four-line portrait? And the answer of course is that the structure, the syntactical or grammatical structure is there in the background and is exerting a pressure for certain kinds of words to fill the slots as opposed to others. And by learning this, students begin to learn how sentences are put together, by putting in between words relationships that tie them in a way that makes their presence in a sentence seem inevitable and right.

Ramona Koval: Well we're going to get to what you call your theology, about your idea of that word 'grammar'. We are going to talk about grammar here today on The Book Show just in a moment. But I just wanted to talk about some examples first. Ernest Hemingway of course famously recommended, and his practice was to write short sentences. Plain, short sentences. But good sentences aren't necessarily short and concise and you include in the book a sentence which takes up more than a page, and that isn't even all of it. This is Martin Luther King's letter from a Birmingham jail. Do you want to read it, or shall I?

Stanley Fish: You should read it.

Ramona Koval: Well, it starts ..., so something's come before, and it says

,,,when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick, brutalize and even kill your black brothers and sisters with impunity; when you see the vase majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her little eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see the depressing clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing a bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son asking in agonizing pathos: "Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?"; when you take a cross-country drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading "white" and "colored"; when your first name becomes "nigger", your middle name becomes "boy" (however old you are) and your last name becomes "John", and your wife and mother are never given the respected title "Mrs"; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of "nobodiness"; then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait.

Now, that is so fantastic...

Stanley Fish: Isn't it fantastic?

Ramona Koval: It is. It's very moving. And what is it about it, because...

Stanley Fish: Well it's a very simple structure, really. It's a series of 'when' clauses. And the power of the sentence is in part because what precedes it is King saying that people have asked him and his colleagues to wait a little while longer before the injuries that they experienced are redressed. Why don't you wait? This is his answer. Now the answer, formally, comes in the last clause that you read. Then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait.

Ramona Koval: But we have to wait, don't we, all the way through. We're waiting too.

Stanley Fish: Yes, we have to wait, and long before we get to that last bit, we understand, because the very piling up of the 'when' clauses, each of them containing what for most of us would be an unbearable personal injury, exerts such a pressure that not only do we want the sentence to end so that we can reach the conclusion we already know, we participate with King in the desire for that entire set of practices to end. It's just, as you said, an extraordinary piece of work.

Ramona Koval: Stanley Fish, you say the first sentence, or the opening sentence to, say, a book, is a promissory note. What is it promising?

Stanley Fish: Well it depends. But it's a promissory note because for example if someone asks you to write a first sentence, your response would naturally be, 'A first sentence of what?' Because a first sentence is understood to be introductory, and therefore it has to in some sense telegraph -- perhaps in a general way, perhaps in a more specific way -- everything that's going to follow it. So that a first sentence, I say, has an angle of lean. It leans forward, and many first sentences are presented in a way that allows their unfolding to be in effect the entire work: the entire essay or the entire novel. So if you write a first sentence that has in mind all the sentences that are going to follow it, it's going to have a particular power.

Ramona Koval: You quote Nathaniel Hawthorne's opening sentence to The Scarlet Letter, written in 1850. Have you got that nearby? I will I read it and then we can talk about it.

Stanley Fish: You're a very good reader, so I would love for you to read it.

Ramona Koval: All right. I shall do that, right now.

A throng of bearded men, in sad coloured garments, and grey steeple-crowned hats, intermixed with women, some wearing hoods and others bareheaded, was assembled in front of a wooden edifice, the door of which was heavily timbered with oak, and studded with iron spikes.

It certainly creates an atmosphere, doesn't it? What makes it a good opening sentence?

Stanley Fish: What makes it a good opening sentence is paradoxically the fact that it has no narrative elements. Although there are many good opening sentences that do have narrative elements. This particular sentence is carried by colours. Darks, mostly. A throng of 'bearded men', and you're I think intended to imagine darker beards. In 'sad' that is sober coloured, dark garments. So that the word 'coloured' is in a way a joke, because there is no colour. And then you get 'grey steeple-crowned hats', as if the hats, the grey hats, didn't have anyone inside them or underneath them. 'Intermixed with women', that phrase suggests all the softness and caring that is only going to be there in that clause and is not going to reappear in the sentence. And then you get the door at the end of the sentence, which is the only genuine actor, in the sentence, 'which was heavily timbered with oak, and studded with iron spikes.' A door which seems to have an agency of its own, and an agency which points toward you in a threatening manner. So even as you finish this first sentence -- don't know anything about the place in which this is occurring, you do know that you wouldn't want to live there. What about this Agatha Christie opener? 'In the afternoons it was the custom of Miss Jane Marple to unfold her second newspaper.' Now what does that tell us?

Stanley Fish: Now that's a beautiful sentence, and partly because of its simplicity. One of my favourites. It tells us, partly by the formalisation of 'Miss Jane Marple' that the figure in this story, the person referred to in the first sentence, is very orderly and proper. And the word 'custom', it was the custom, reinforces that. It's something she does daily. I think the brilliant word in the second half of the sentence is 'second'. To unfold her second newspaper.

Ramona Koval: So she's a big reader, this woman.

Stanley Fish: Not only that, but you are being told -- without being told -- that this is a person who doesn't let anything pass her by, who is determined to notice everything, and to pay attention to everything. She is also a person living in a small town from whom you are unlikely to be able to hide anything. And that's of course exactly the character of Agatha Christie's heroine.

Ramona Koval: Now you've got this other opening sentence by Jane Austen, in Pride and Prejudice, but you don't have that in the opening sentences section. The one that goes 'It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.' I feel as if you're not really made about this first sentence.

Stanley Fish: I use this as an example of an aphoristic sentence, and a sentence that tells you that the person who wrote it very carefully planned it. So it's an example of one of the two main styles that I discuss in the book, this I call the subordinating style, although there are other technical names for it. When you read this sentence you are aware that you are being guided in your reading and also in your thinking by an omniscient voice. And part of the effect is the effect of the proverb, 'a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a good wife.'

Ramona Koval: But it's ironic, though, isn't it. She's giving you the flavour of the whole book, which is kind of irony about the way rules are applied in society.

Stanley Fish: It's also an irony that you learn to recognise as the tone of the first person narrator and perhaps the tone of Jane Austen. And you can see that, if you left out the first clause, 'It is a truth universally acknowledged', and the sentence just read, 'A single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife,' it would be a quite different sentence, because 'It is a truth universally acknowledged' is said with a twinkle, or even tongue in cheek, and invites you to perhaps contemplate the possibility that it is not a truth, universally acknowledged. And so...

Ramona Koval: Exactly. And so if it was a truth universally acknowledged I wouldn't have to say it is a truth universally acknowledged...

Stanley Fish: Absolutely right. One of the first exercises I ever devised for my freshmen, way back when (I won't tell you the year) is I gave them two sentences. One was 'He is sincere.' Second sentence: 'Doubtless he is sincere.' And I asked my students which sentence more strongly asserts his sincerity? And the good students saw that the word 'doubtless', although it seemed to intensify the assertion of sincerity, actually by its very presence raised a doubt.

Ramona Koval: Well let's talk about your theology now, Stanley fish, because you say, 'This is my theology: you shall tie yourself to forms and the forms shall set you free.' The forms are grammar, aren't they?

Stanley Fish: They are, but not in the traditional sense of listing the parts of speech or learning how to recognise them. The forms that I'm talking about are the forms of relationship between words. In other words, if you take a list of words, as I often do, and ask students to make a sentence of them, students will always be to do that by adding a few other words. And when I ask them again to tell me what it is that you just did, what enabled you to turn an inert list into a sentence, they will finally see, and some of them see very quickly, what you have to do is embed the words in logical relationships. That's what writing a sentence is all about. And so my key master rule, I guess it is, although I don't like that work, is 'A sentence is a structure of logical relationships.'

So what I teach my students how to do is both build structures of logical relationships and analyse the structure of the logical relationship of sentences written by master writers. And in doing that, the concentration and the focus is always on the forms and never on the content. And I introduce my students to forms that could generate hundreds of millions of contents, but what I want them to do is become masters and mistresses of the form.

Ramona Koval: I was of the generation where learning -- formal grammar was in the process of being junked when I was at school.

Stanley Fish: Yes, that unfortunately is still the generation that rules at the moment.

Ramona Koval: Is this a sadness for you?

Stanley Fish: Absolutely. Because there are several mistakes involved. One mistake is that people think that if you just read a lot and read good literature or good essays, you will by some form of osmosis become a practised writer. But the two crafts and skills, while related, are not the same. Reading is in general an easier practice to master than writing. Writing or composition often terrifies people who are asked to do it, and what I try to do is familiarise them with the forms that, when internalised, will enable them to say something when they have something to say.

Ramona Koval: You have a method, and to explain it you invoke the poet Wordsworth and the film Karate Kid. How do they help?

Stanley Fish: Well, the Wordsworth poem, which is a wonderful poem, 'Nuns fret not at their convent's narrow room; / nor students at their pensive cells' [sic] says to us that constraints which may seem to be confining are actually enabling. Because when you have constraints and are asked to move within them, you become self-consciously alert to what you are doing and to the resources that you have for doing it. Now The Karate Kid, a movie in which a young man is being trained to fight in a match but is being trained not by simulating a match but by performing formal, empty physical exercises, like waxing cars or painting fences. The point of the instruction in The Karate Kid is that if he can (the kid, that is) can indeed produce these forms on demand, when he comes to a match and he must in fact engage in a consecutive activity, he won't have to think about what forms to employ because the forms will have become part of his repertoire. And I just extend that to my principle of learning how to write.

Ramona Koval: Do you think that the great writers were in love with sentences? Do you think they practise them...I just wonder whether sometimes they sort of automatically wrote in ways that they could think, and in ways that they could hear people speaking around them.

Stanley Fish: They being what, great authors?

Ramona Koval: Well you know, great writers. The great writers of the world. I sound like an encyclopaedia. Do writers necessarily understand the sentence? I'm not sure that everybody actually is in love...they probably should, but do they?

Stanley Fish: Yes, I believe they do. There's of course a long tradition of this kind of instruction. I certainly didn't make it up. You can find it in classical writers like Cicero and others. And in the classical world the task of imitation was the one in which student writers were trained. You were asked take sentences, or passages, of famous authors and then try to imitate the form of the sentence but not the content of the sentence, but to write your own sentence which had the same form. And I think that is the kind of exercise that many young writers were trained on. It's like practising scales before you begin to play melodies or tackle a sonata or a symphony. You have to practise scales for a long time. And that is, I think, what you have to do in learning how to write.

Ramona Koval: You use the analogy of your wife the painter, she's able to explain a painting in a gallery because she understands the techniques used. She understands the paint.

Stanley Fish: Yes. And she's done it. In other words, she's gone through the technical achievement, or she has performed the technical feats that I have never myself even attempted. So that while I have a general idea -- gee, that's a good painting, or gee, that painting seems to have some power in it -- she can tell me why, and she can tell me the kind of formal obstacles that the painter was either able to overcome or take advantage of. And so she there is the teacher and I am the ignorant novice pupil.

Ramona Koval: Well just in our last half-minute, you've got an epigraph from the playwright and poet Kenneth Koch:

One day the Nouns were clustered in the street.
An Adjective walked by, with her dark beauty.
The Nouns were struck, moved, changed;
The next day a Verb drove up, and created the Sentence.

Stanley Fish: Yes, I think I would like to have you with me at every interview, because you read things so beautifully.

Ramona Koval: I've had a lot of practice, that's all.

Stanley Fish: Yes, that's a wonderful quote. When I saw that I thought, well this was written for me, so that I could quote it in this book, because it says everything. That is you have all these words just standing on the street corner, not talking to one another, not going anywhere because nothing is connecting them. And then suddenly the verb shows up and all of them are related to one another in relationships of logic and structure, and there is a sentence.

Ramona Koval: Thank goodness for the doing words, Stanley Fish.

Stanley Fish: Absolutely.

Ramona Koval: Thank you so much for joining us on The Book Show today.

Stanley Fish: It was my great pleasure.

Publications

Title: How to write a sentence and how to read one

Author : Stanley Fish

Publisher: Harper Collins