Stanley Fish - How to Write a Sentence (And How to Read One)

authors

Fish, Stanley

Fabulous, fabulous book.

[..] (the English are particularly good at this), affords no such easy handles. It is, if you will pardon a very bad pun, all too swift: Last week I saw a woman flayed, and you will hardly believe how much it altered her person for the worse.

This famous sentence from the ninth section of A Tale of a Tub (1704) follows Swift’s observation that “in most corporeal beings, which have fallen under my cognizance, the Outside hath been infinitely preferable to the In.” Our sentence is offered as proof of this pronouncement. The power of the sentence comes from the disparity between its surface tone—calm, detached—and the horror beneath it. The sentence is itself an emblem of the lesson it teaches. “Last week I saw a woman” is perfectly conversational. We’ve all seen a woman, haven’t we? That is the question the sentence proceeds to answer, first with the bombshell word “flayed,” which would seem to disturb, if not destroy, the flat-footedness of “Last week I saw.” But the disturbance is not registered by the speaker, who strolls right past it to express an incredulity he assumes the reader will share. By saying “you will hardly believe,” the speaker puts his arm around the reader’s shoulder and claims him as someone who sees things as he does. What they are both said to see and hardly believe is a woman whose “person” has been altered by having had her skin removed. The effect of this deadpan, clinical response to a surgical dissection depends on the ambiguity of “person,” which can refer either to someone’s outside (he hid it on his person) or to someone’s interior qualities (what kind of person is she?). For the speaker, there is no disjunction between the two; the person is his or her surface, and if this is so, the removing of one surface should reveal another equally pleasing, and then another, until there remain no layers to peel off. He is surprised, and expects us to be too, when the removal of the surface—of the appearances of things—reveals something disagreeable beneath. The moral of the incident for him is the one he began with. Stay on the surface, don’t look into things too closely, be content with “the Superficies,” and you will be rewarded with “the sublime and refined point of felicity, called the Possession of being well deceived; the serene peaceful state of being a fool among knaves.” This is the state into which we are invited by the sentence, and the measure of our resistance—the extent to which we recoil from the speaker’s awful equanimity and refuse to become fools or knaves—is the measure of Swift’s satiric success. The form Swift deploys is fairly simple. Put together two mildly affirmed assertions, the second of which reacts to the first in a way that is absurdly inadequate: “This morning I awoke after twenty minutes of sleep and it is amazing how tired I was.” “Last night I ate six whole pizzas and you would hardly believe how sick I was.” “Yesterday I saw a man electrocuted and it really was surprising how quiet he became.” Why are these imitations so lame, aside from the fact that I, not Swift, wrote them? It is because nothing is at stake; their subject matter is trivial; there is nothing behind them; they are little more than a trick. Swift’s sentence is certainly a trick, but it is dead serious; and behind it is a constellation of concerns about the Church, sectarian disputes, politics, education, literature, the ancients and the moderns, and much more. I know I said at the beginning of this book that it is not the thought that counts; but of course it is, ultimately. The forms on which I have placed so much ( justifiable) emphasis are there for a reason they do not themselves point to; they are there for the elaboration, illumination, and powerful expression of content.