Before the word processor, before Whiteout, before Post It Notes, there were straight pins. Or, at least that’s what Jane Austen used to make edits in one of her rare manuscripts. In 2011, the Bodleian Library acquired the manuscript of Austen’s abandoned novel, The Watsons. In announcing the acquisition, the Bodleian wrote:
The Watsons is Jane Austen’s first extant draft of a novel in process of development and one of the earliest examples of an English novel to survive in its formative state. Only seven manuscripts of fiction by Austen are known to survive.The Watsons manuscript is extensively revised and corrected throughout, with crossings out and interlinear additions.
Janeausten.ac.uk (the web site where Austen’s manuscripts have been digitized) takes a deeper dive into the curious quality of The Watsons manuscript, noting:
The manuscript is written and corrected throughout in brown iron-gall ink. The pages are filled in a neat, even hand with signs of concurrent writing, erasure, and revision, interrupted by occasional passages of heavy interlinear correction.… The manuscript is without chapter divisions, though not without informal division by wider spacing and ruled lines. The full pages suggest that Jane Austen did not anticipate a protracted process of redrafting. With no calculated blank spaces and no obvious way of incorporating large revision or expansion she had to find other strategies – the three patches, small pieces of paper, each of which was filled closely and neatly with the new material, attached with straight pins to the precise spot where erased material was to be covered or where an insertion was required to expand the text.
According to Christopher Fletcher, Keeper of Special Collections at the Bodleian Library, this prickly method of editing wasn’t exactly new. Archivists at the library can trace pins being used as editing tools back to 1617.
Any serious reader of Haruki Murakami — and even most of the casual ones — will have picked up on the fact that, apart from the work that has made him quite possibly the world’s most beloved living novelist, the man has two passions: running and jazz. In his memoir What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, he tells the story of how he became a runner, which he sees as inextricably bound up with how he became a writer. Both personal transformations occurred in his early thirties, after he sold Peter Cat, the Tokyo jazz bar he spent most of the 1970s operating. Yet he hardly put the music behind him, continuing to maintain a sizable personal record library, weave jazz references into his fiction, and even to write the essay collections Portrait in Jazz and Portrait in Jazz 2.
“I had my first encounter with jazz in 1964 when I was 15,” Murakami writes in the New York Times. “Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers performed in Kobe in January that year, and I got a ticket for a birthday present. This was the first time I really listened to jazz, and it bowled me over. I was thunderstruck.” Though unskilled in music himself, he often felt that, in his head, “something like my own music was swirling around in a rich, strong surge. I wondered if it might be possible for me to transfer that music into writing. That was how my style got started.”
He found writing and jazz similar endeavors, in that both need “a good, natural, steady rhythm,” a melody, “which, in literature, means the appropriate arrangement of the words to match the rhythm,” harmony, “the internal mental sounds that support the words,” and free improvisation, wherein, “through some special channel, the story comes welling out freely from inside. All I have to do is get into the flow.”
With Peter Cat long gone, fans have nowhere to go to get into the flow of Murakami’s personal jazz selections. Still, at the top of the post, you can listen to a playlist assembled by YouTube user Ronny Po of songs mentioned in Portrait in Jazz, featuring Chet Baker, Charlie Parker, Stan Getz, Bill Evans, and Miles Davis. (You can find another extended playlist of 56 songs here.) Should you make the trip out to Tokyo, you can also pay a visit to Cafe Rokujigen, profiled in the short video just above, where Murakami readers congregate to read their favorite author’s books while listening to the music that, in his words, taught him everything he needed to know to write them. And elsewhere on the very same subway line, you can also visit the old site of Peter Cat: just follow in the footsteps taken by A Geek in Japan author Héctor García, who set out to find it after reading Murakami’s reminiscences in What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. And what plays in the great eminence-outsider of Japanese letters’ earbuds while he runs? “I love listening to the Lovin’ Spoonful,” he writes. Hey, you can’t spin to Thelonious Monk all the time.
An exclamation point looks like an index finger raised in warning; a question mark looks like a flashing light or the blink of an eye. A colon, says Karl Kraus, opens its mouth wide: woe to the writer who does not fill it with something nourishing. Visually, the semicolon looks like a drooping moustache; I am even more aware of its gamey taste. With self-satisfied peasant cunning, German quotation marks («> >) lick their lips.
The skillful deployment of aphorism seems typical; the playfulness not so much. But Adorno’s short essay, “punctuation marks,” takes a sober turn shortly thereafter, and for good reason. Punctuation is serious business. Sounding much more like the Adorno I know, the dour Marxist writes, “History has left its residue in punctuation marks, and it is history, far more than meaning or grammatical function, that looks out at us, rigidified and trembling slightly, from every mark of punctuation.” Okay.
Well, Adorno would just hate what I’m about to do, but—hey—this is the internet; who has the time and concentration to traverse the rocky course of thought he carves out in his work? Maybe you? Good, read the full essay. Not you? See below for some bite-sized highlights.
Punctuation as music: “punctuation marks,” Adorno writes, “are marks of oral delivery.” As such, they function like musical notation. “The comma and the period correspond to the half-cadence and the authentic cadence.” Exclamation points are “like silent cymbal clashes, question marks like musical upbeats.” Colons are like “dominant seventh chords.” Adorno, a musicologist and composer himself, heard things in these symbols most of us probably don’t.
The semicolon: There is no mark of punctuation that Adorno rejects outright. All have their place and purpose. He does decry the modernist tendency to mostly leave them out, since “then they simply hide.” But Adorno reserves a special pride of place for the semicolon. He claims that “only a person who can perceive the different weights of strong and weak phrasings in musical form” can understand the difference between semicolon and comma. He differentiates between the Greek and German semicolon. And he expresses alarm “that the semicolon is dying out.” This, he claims, is due to a fear of “page-long paragraphs”—the kind he often writes. It is “a fear created by the marketplace—by the consumer who does not want to tax himself.” Right, I told you, he would hate the internet, though he seems to thrive—posthumously—on Twitter.
Quotation marks: While Adorno accepts every punctuation mark as meaningful, he does not accept all uses of them. In the case of the quotation mark, his advice is precisely what I have received, and have passed on to overly glib and thoughtless students. Quotation marks, he writes, should only be used for direct quotes, “and if need be when the text wants to distance itself from a word it is referring to.” This can include writing words as words (the word “word” is a word…). Adorno rejects quotation marks as an “ironic device.” This usage presents “a predetermined judgment on the subject”; it offers a “blind verdict.”
The ellipsis: On this mark, Adorno becomes very prickly, particular, and, well… elliptical. Three dots “suggests an infinitude of thoughts and associations.” Two is the mark of a hack. I leave it to you to parse his reasoning.
The dash: First, we have “the serious dash,” in which “thought becomes aware of its fragmentary character.” Dashes may signal “mute lines into the past, wrinkles on the brow” of the text, ”uneasy silence.” Dashes need not connect thoughts. The “desire to connect everything,” Adorno writes, is the mark of “literary dilettantes.” Thus the “modern dash” is debased, a symptom of “the progressive degeneration of language.” It prepares us “in a foolish way for surprises that by that very token are no longer surprising.” Adorno also prefers another use of dashes—more below.
Parentheses: Parenthetical phrases (like this) create “enclaves” and admit the “superfluousness” of their contents, which is why many stylebooks frown upon them. Their use in this way “capitulate[s] to pedantic philistinism.” The “cautious writer”—writes punctiliously cautious Adorno—will place parentheticals between dashes, “which block off parenthetical material from the flow of the sentence without shutting it up in a prison.” The parentheses do have their place, as do all marks of punctuation in Adorno’s lexical theory. But probably only if you are Proust.
Reading Adorno—on punctuation and anything else—can be intimidating. His erudition, his disdain for carelessness, middlebrow expediency, and the crude forms of expression given birth by commerce of all kinds: these are attitudes that can seem at times like overbearing elitism. And yet, Adorno understands the burdensome nature of writing prescriptions. “The writer,” he admits, “is in a permanent predicament when it comes to punctuation marks: if one were fully aware while writing, one would sense the impossibility of ever using a mark of punctuation correctly and would give up writing altogether.” Far too many have done so. We “cannot trust in the rules,” nor can we ignore them. What to do? Err on the side of the abstemious says our poker-faced German Strunk; to avoid sloppiness or rote misuse, follow an Epicurean mean: “better too few than too many.”
Despite its occasional use in spoken monologue, the Very Long Literary Sentence properly exists in the mind (hence “stream-of-consciousness”), since the most wordy of literary exhalations would exhaust the lungs’ capacity. Molly Bloom’s 36-page, two-sentence run-on soliloquy at the close of Joyce’s Ulysses takes place entirely in her thoughts. Faulkner’s longest sentence—smack in the middle of Absalom, Absalom! —unspools in Quentin Compson’s tortured, silent ruminations. According to a 1983 Guinness Book of Records, this monster once qualified as literature’s longest at 1,288 words, but that record has long been surpassed, in English at least, by Jonathan Coe’s The Rotter’s Club, which ends with a 33-page-long, 13,955 word sentence. Czech and Polish novelists have written book-length sentences since the sixties, and French writer Mathias Énard puts them all to shame with a one-sentence novel 517 pages long, though its status is “compromised by 23 chapter breaks that alleviate eye strain,” writes Ed Park in the New York Times. Like Faulkner’s glorious run-ons, Jacob Silverman describes Énard’s one-sentence Zone as transmuting “the horrific into something sublime.”
Are these literary stunts kin to Philippe Petit’s highwire challenges—undertaken for the thrill and just to show they can be done? Park sees the “The Very Long Sentence” in more philosophical terms, as “a futile hedge against separation, an unwillingness to part from loved ones, the world, life itself.” Perhaps this is why the very long sentence seems most expressive of life at its fullest and most expansive. Below, we bring you five long literary sentences culled from various sources on the subject. These are, of course, not the “5 longest,” nor the “5 best,” nor any other superlative. They are simply five fine examples of The Very Long Sentence in literature. Enjoy reading and re-reading them, and please leave your favorite Very Long Sentence in the comments.
At The New Yorker’s “Book Club,” Jon Michaud points us toward this long sentence, from Samuel Beckett’s Watt. We find the title character, “an obsessively rational servant,” attempting to “see a pattern in how his master, Mr. Knott, rearranges the furniture.”
Thus it was not rare to find, on the Sunday, the tallboy on its feet by the fire, and the dressing table on its head by the bed, and the night-stool on its face by the door, and the washand-stand on its back by the window; and, on the Monday, the tallboy on its back by the bed, and the dressing table on its face by the door, and the night-stool on its back by the window and the washand-stand on its feet by the fire; and on the Tuesday…
Here, writes Michaud, the long sentence conveys “a desperate attempt to nail down all the possibilities in a given situation, to keep the world under control by enumerating it.”
The next example, from Poynter, achieves a very different effect. Instead of listing concrete objects, the sentence below from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby opens up into a series of abstract phrases.
Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.
Chosen by The American Scholar editors as one of the “ten best sentences,” the passage, writes Roy Peter Clark, achieves quite a feat: “Long sentences don’t usually hold together under the weight of abstractions, but this one sets a clear path to the most important phrase, planted firmly at the end, ‘his capacity for wonder.’”
Jane Wong at Tin House’s blog “The Open Bar” quotes the hypnotic sentence below from Jamaica Kincaid’s “The Letter from Home.”
I milked the cows, I churned the butter, I stored the cheese, I baked the bread, I brewed the tea, I washed the clothes, I dressed the children; the cat meowed, the dog barked, the horse neighed, the mouse squeaked, the fly buzzed, the goldfish living in a bowl stretched its jaws; the door banged shut, the stairs creaked, the fridge hummed, the curtains billowed up, the pot boiled, the gas hissed through the stove, the tree branches heavy with snow crashed against the roof; my heart beat loudly thud! thud!, tiny beads of water grew folds, I shed my skin…
Kincaid’s sentences, Wong writes, “have the ability to simultaneously suspend and propel the reader. We trust her semi-colons and follow until we are surprised to find the period. We stand on that rock of a period—with water all around us, and ask: how did we get here?”
The blog Paperback Writer brings us the “puzzle” below from notorious long-sentence-writer Virginia Woolf’s essay “On Being Ill”:
Considering how common illness is, how tremendous the spiritual change that it brings, how astonishing, when the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed, what wastes and deserts of the soul a slight attack of influenza brings to view, what precipices and lawns sprinkled with bright flowers a little rise of temperature reveals, what ancient and obdurate oaks are uprooted in us by the act of sickness, how we go down into the pit of death and feel the water of annihilation close above our heads and wake thinking to find ourselves in the presence of the angels and harpers when we have a tooth out and come to the surface in the dentist’s arm-chair and confuse his “Rinse the Mouth —- rinse the mouth” with the greeting of the Deity stooping from the floor of Heaven to welcome us – when we think of this, as we are frequently forced to think of it, it becomes strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love and battle and jealousy among the prime themes of literature.
Blogger Rebecca quotes Woolf as a challenge to her readers to become better writers. “This sentence is not something to be feared,” she writes, “it is something to be embraced.”
But then they were married (she felt awful about being pregnant before but Harry had been talking about marriage for a while and anyway laughed when she told him in early February about missing her period and said Great she was terribly frightened and he said Great and lifted her put his arms around under her bottom and lifted her like you would a child he could be so wonderful when you didn’t expect it in a way it seemed important that you didn’t expect it there was so much nice in him she couldn’t explain to anybody she had been so frightened about being pregnant and he made her be proud) they were married after her missing her second period in March and she was still little clumsy dark-complected Janice Springer and her husband was a conceited lunk who wasn’t good for anything in the world Daddy said and the feeling of being alone would melt a little with a little drink.
Sentences like these, writes Barnes & Noble blogger Hanna McGrath, “demand something from the reader: patience.” That may be so, but they reward that patience with delight for those who love language too rich for the pinched limitations of workaday grammar and syntax.
Along with topplingdemocratically elected governments, funneling money illegally to dubious political groups and producing pornographic movies about heads of state, the Central Intelligence Agency has also been fiendishly good at manipulating language. After all, this is the organization that made “waterboarding” seem much more acceptable, at least to the Washington elite, by rebranding it as “enhanced interrogation techniques.” Another CIA turn of phrase, “extraordinary rendition,” sounds so much better to the ear than “illegal kidnapping and torture.”
Not too long ago, the CIA’s style guide, called the Style Manual and Writers Guide for Intelligence Publications, was posted online. “Good intelligence depends in large measure on clear, concise writing,” writes Fran Moore, Director of Intelligence in the foreword. And considering the agency’s deftness with the written word, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that it’s remarkably good. Some highlights:
The guide likes the Oxford or serial comma. “Most authorities on English usage recommend [the serial comma], and it is the rule for CIA publications.”
It favors using adjectives and adverbs sparingly. “Let nouns and verbs show their power.”
In all cases, it favors American over British spellings, even proper names. Thus, “Labor Party” not “Labour Party.” And for that matter, the guide isn’t terribly keen on using phrases like “apropos” and “faux pas.” “Foreign expressions should be avoided because they sound hackneyed.”
It wisely discourages writers, or anyone really, from ever using the word “enthused.”
And they caution against using exclamation points. “Because intelligence reports are expected to be dispassionate, this punctuation mark should rarely, if ever, be used.”
And then there are some rules that will remind you this guide is the product of a particularly shadowy arm of the U.S. Government.
The guide makes a point of defining “disinformation” as opposed to “misinformation.” “Disinformation refers to the deliberate planting of false reports. Misinformation equates in meaning but does not carry the same devious connotation.” Now you know.
Undeclared wars, like Vietnam, should be spelled with an uncapitalized “w.” Same goes for the “Korean war” and the “Falklands war.” It goes on to argue that the writer should “avoid ‘Yom Kippur war’ which is slangy.” Presumably, the CIA prefers the term “The 1973 Arab-Israeli war.”
The confusing split between China and Taiwan – each refuses to recognize the other — is represented confusingly here too. “For what was once called Nationalist China or the Republic of China, use only Taiwan, both as noun and as adjective. … Avoid Taiwanese as an adjective referring to the island’s administration or its officials (and do not use the term Taiwanese government.)”
It’s unclear whether or not the guide is being used for the CIA’s queasily flip, profoundly unfunny Twitter account.
Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow.
Sci-fi author B.C. Kowalski recently posted a short essay on why the advice to write every day is, for lack of a suitable euphemism, “bullshit.” Not that there’s anything wrong with it, Kowalski maintains. Only that it’s not the only way. It’s said Thackeray wrote every morning at dawn. Jack Kerouac wrote (and drank) in binges. Every writer finds some method in-between. The point is to “do what works for you” and to “experiment.” Kowalski might have added a third term: diversify. It’s worked for so many famous writers after all. James Joyce had his music, Sylvia Plath her art, Hemingway his machismo. Faulkner drew cartoons, as did his fellow Southern writer Flannery O’Connor, his equal, I’d say, in the art of the American grotesque. Through both writers ran a deep vein of pessimistic humor, oblique, but detectable, even in scenes of highest pathos.
O’Connor’s visual work, writes Kelly Gerald in The Paris Review, was a “way of seeing she described as part of the ‘habit of art’”—a way to train her fiction writer’s eye. Her cartoons hew closely to her authorial voice: a lone sardonic observer, supremely confident in her assessments of human weakness. Perhaps a better comparison than Faulkner is with British poet and doodler Stevie Smith, whose bleak vision and razor-sharp wit similarly cut through mountains of… shall we say, bullshit. In both pen & ink and linoleum cuts, O’Connor set deadpan one-liners against images of pretension, conformity, and the banality of college life. In the cartoon at the top, she seems to mock the pursuit of credentials as a refuge for the socially disaffected. Above, a campaigner for a low-level office deploys bombastic pseudo-Leninist rhetoric, and in the cartoon below, a cranky character escapes a horde of identical WAVES.
O’Connor was an intensely visual writer with, Gerald writes, a “natural proclivity for capturing the humorous character of real people and concrete situations,” fully credible even at their most extreme (as in the increasingly horrific self-lacerations of Wise Blood’s Hazel Motes). She began drawing at five and produced small books and sketches as a child, eventually publishing cartoons in almost every issue of her high-school and college’s newspapers and yearbooks. Her alma mater Georgia College, then known as Georgia State College for Women, has published a book featuring her cartoons from her undergraduate years, 1942–45.
More recently, Gerald edited a collection called Flannery O’Connor: The Cartoons for Fantagraphics. In his introduction, artist Barry Moser describes in detail the technique of her linoleum cuts, calling them “coarse in technical terms.” And yet, “her rudimentary handling of the medium notwithstanding, O’Connor’s prints offer glimpses into the work of the writer she would become” with their “little O’Connor petards aimed at the walls of pretentiousness, academics, student politics, and student committees.” Had O’Connor continued making cartoons into her publishing years, she might have, like B.C. Kowalski, aimed one of those petards at those who dispense dogmatic, cookie-cutter writing advice as well.
At the height of the Harry Potter novels’ popularity, I asked a number of people why those books in particular enjoyed such a devoted readership. Everyone gave almost the same answer: that author J.K. Rowling “tells a good story.” The response at once clarified everything and nothing; of course a “good story” can draw a large, enthusiastic (and, at that time, impatient) readership, but what does it take to actually tell a good story? People have probably made more money attempting, questionably, to pin down, define, and teach the best practices of storytelling, but at the top of this post, we have a revealing scrap of Rowling’s own process. And I do, almost literally, mean a scrap: this piece of lined paper contains part of the handwritten plot spreadsheet she used to write the fifth Harry Potter novel, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.
This particular page (click to view it in a larger format) covers chapters 13 through 24, during which even more happens than you may now remember. It may have amounted to more than Rowling, too, could remember, hence the spreadsheet itself. Endpaper explains some of her story notes as follows:
“Prophecy”: A subplot about the prophecy Harry finds himself concerned about all through the book
“Cho/Ginny”: The book’s romantic subplot
“D.A.”: What’s happening with the resistance army, or “Dumbledore’s Army”
“O of P”: What’s happening with the “Order of the Phoenix” group
“Snape/Harry”: What’s happening with Snape and Harry
“Hagrid and Grawp”: What’s happening with Hagrid and Grawp
“If you think about Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, that’s it,” writes /Film’s Germain Lussier. “Those columns pretty much encompass the whole story.” Rowling, of course, hardly counts as the only novelist to write with such techniques, and based on this example, hers don’t get nearly as elaborate as some. (I recall once reading that Vikram Chandra had to bust out Microsoft Project to keep track of the complications of Sacred Games, his 900-page novel about the Mumbai underworld.) But Rowling must certainly rank as the most famous novelist to, quite literally, draw up spreadsheets like this. I suppose it does leave her books even more exposed to accusations of overplotting than before, but something tells me it won’t bother her.
“When forced to leave my house for an extended period of time, I take my typewriter with me,” once wrote essayist-humorist David Sedaris. “Together we endure the wretchedness of passing through the X‑ray scanner. The laptops roll merrily down the belt, while I’m instructed to stand aside and open my bag. To me it seems like a normal enough thing to be carrying, but the typewriter’s declining popularity arouses suspicion and I wind up eliciting the sort of reaction one might expect when traveling with a cannon. ‘It’s a typewriter,’ I say. ‘You use it to write angry letters to airport security.’ ” But Sedaris, one of the last high-profile hold-outs against electronic word processing, wrote those words almost fifteen years ago — even before airport security really cracked down in our post‑9/11 reality. Surely he has since picked up and presumably learned to use a computer. We now find ourselves in an age when typewriter usage has transcended the status of an act of nostalgia and attained the status of an act of rebellion; if you insist on using a classic old Underwood Remington, or an Invicta, or a Continental Standard, or Olympia Monika Deluxe, well, you must really have a statement to make.
Yet I daresay that for all their mechanical heft, freedom from internet-borne distraction, and thoroughly analog aesthetic appeal, typewriters bring with them a number of burdens. We have their difficulty in clearing TSA lines, yes, but also their thirst for physical ink and paper (“I can always look at my loaded wastepaper basket and tell myself that if I failed,” said Sedaris, “at least I took a few trees down with me”), and their noise — oh my, their noise. You can hear the varying sounds of 32 models belonging to many successive typewriter generations in the video at the top of the post. They don’t come as straight recordings, but as sounds reproduced by mouth to perfection by that one-in-a-million mimic Michael Winslow, best known from the Police Academy movies as Sergeant Larvell “Motor Mouth” Jones. “The History of the Typewriter Recited by Michael Winslow” originated in the mind of Spanish artist Ignacio Uriarte, who, according to Frieze, “has employed standard office supplies such as Biros, highlighters and jotters,” not to mention “the ubiquitous spreadsheet tool Microsoft Excel, perhaps soon facing its own obsolescence.” This production “tellingly culminates with the sounds of a machine from 1983, the year before the arrival of the first home computer with a graphical interface.” Which leads one to wonder: can Winslow do hard drive noises?
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