Imitation Sequence, Step 5: Altering the Syntax
The last shall be first and the first shall be last!
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This is the fourth step in a sequence of imitation exercises. The rationale and outline is here. The first step here, and the second, and the third, and the fourth. If you try this stuff, tell me how it goes!
I have already mentioned my love for this opening clause from W. E. B. DuBois’s The Souls of Black Folk:
Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question:
I love it because the sentence reaches a sense of completion only at the very end. Look how each bit makes the reader anticipate something more.
Between me
Between me and the other world
Between me and the other world there is
Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked
Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question:
There is an inexorable momentum about that clause. Now watch what happens if you “normalize” the word order.
There is ever an unasked question between me and the other world.
The sentence becomes grammatically viable at the halfway point. “There is ever an unasked question,” could be a standalone sentence. The “gist” arrives in the middle, making the “between me” part a sort of spandrel, an adjunct that the rushing reader may elide.
The fourth step in our imitation exercises is to monkey with the order of things, the words, the phrases, the sentences. There are many ways to monkey, but the key thing is ask, at every turn, “why this order?” What does this order of things do for the passage?
Some changes of order don’t make much of a difference. For example, the DuBois passage goes on like this:
Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question: unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it.
Not much happens if we switch the order of the “by” phrases.
Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question: unasked by some through the difficulty of rightly framing it; by others through feelings of delicacy.
All I can say is that putting “the difficulty of rightly framing it” in the first position feels like an offense against rhythm. There is no “the” between “through” and “feelings,” and this seems smoother and so better fit for that first position. I wouldn’t fight for that interpretation, though.
But if you pay attention, you’ll find that some alterations of syntax make a big difference. For example, DuBois goes on, in this passage, to a pair of three-part series that are parallel.
All, nevertheless, flutter round it. They approach me in a half-hesitant sort of way, eye me curiously or compassionately, and then, instead of saying directly, How does it feel to be a problem? they say,
[A] I know an excellent colored man in my town; or,
[B] I fought at Mechanicsville; or,
[C] Do not these Southern outrages make your blood boil?
At these
[A’] I smile, or
[B’] am interested, or
[C’] reduce the boiling to a simmer,
as the occasion may require.
If your passage has series of this kind, I recommend that you change their order. In the DuBois passage we could, on one hand, jack with the parallelism, so that DuBois smiles at the news that someone fought at Mechanicsville rather that at the story of the excellent colored man in someone’s town. So, instead of A-B-C, A’-B’-C’, we’d have A-B-C, B’-A’-C’. It would make DuBois’s character change a bit. He’d be the type of man who smiles at war stories.
More significantly, if we kept the parallels but reordered the pairs, we could deprive this passage of some of its energy, and lower the stakes of DuBois’s book. As written, the series ends with the revelation that sometimes DuBois’s blood does boil at Southern outrages. The polite man who smiles at and performs interest in his interlocutors labors to suppress anger, to reduce the boil to a simmer. He carries a hidden heat. The stakes of the whole book are raised by this revelation of his having to work to keep his outrage in check. If we change the order, so that the series ends with a smile, this is lost:
they say,
[A] Do not these Southern outrages make your blood boil? or,
[B] I fought at Mechanicsville; or,
[C] I know an excellent colored man in my town.
At these
[A’] I reduce the boiling to a simmer, or
[B’] am interested, or
[C’] I smile,
as the occasion may require.
When the boiling and its reduction to a simmer are put in the first positions, we are not left, at the end of the sentence, with the afterimage of a man politely suppressing his rage. But that afterimage is essential to understanding the stakes of DuBois’s book. The reader must sense that The Souls of Black Folk attempts to communicate the African American experience, so that African Americans can become, as DuBois later puts it, co-laborers in the kingdom of culture, so that the pot, justly inflamed, won’t boil over. Stop the outrages or get seared by the boil. This is the subtle intimation of the order of the passage. There is no threat, here, only an implied whisper of alarm. Do justice, friend, or lose peace.
So this is the next step: change the order of the words, the phrases, the clauses. See what happens. Think about it. Share your thoughts.
