I have read critics who referred to Henry James’s syntax as involute and to William Faulkner’s as convolute. I do not know that there is any real distinction to be made between the two descriptions; both styles are arabesque; and just such arabesque language, it seems to me, is best adapted as a subtle net to draw a reader into a story, as in James’s great novels of his mature years or Faulkner’s Absalom! Absalom! and Intruder in the Dust or Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire or John Barth’s The End of the Road. One could also adduce the syntax of Herman Melville in Benito Cereno and The Encantadas and of Katherine Anne Porter in a story like Pale Horse, Pale Rider. Or of any arabesque prose whatever.
What I mean by such language being a net to draw one into the story is that it engages all one’s faculties, the intellect as well as the emotions and imagination, and thus lays in wait for all the reader’s resources, obvious and latent. Such nets may not catch the wind, but they catch the reader’s deeper responses, I believe. Or perhaps it takes a particular kind of reader to respond to writing of this stamp. But isn’t Shakespeare of this stamp? “If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well it were done quickly.” This is language made circular that it might be made hortatory and fall on the ear with a triple dun (“done”) on our consciousness.
I have posited James as a signal instance of the arabesque in prose syntax. Here is the sort of thing I mean, from The Ambassadors: “It was still history for Strether that the Comte de Vionnet—it being also history that the lady in question was a Countess—should now, under Miss Gostrey’s sharp touch, rise before him as a high distinguished polished impertinent reprobate, the product of a mysterious order; it was history, further, that the charming girl so freely sketched by his companion should have been married out of hand by a mother, another figure of striking outline, full of dark personal motive . . .” Such sentences, for me, are a litmus test of James’s command over the intellects and imaginations of his readers, the proof of a master magician at work. History is what the fiction writer strives to produce, and here is history caught in the net of high rhetoric.
Or here is Herman Melville in Benito Cereno: “The morning was one peculiar to that coast. Everything was mute and calm; everything gray. The sea, though undulated into long roods of swells, seemed fixed, and was sleeked at the surface like waved lead that has cooled and set in the smelter’s mold. The sky seemed a gray surtout. Flights of troubled gray fowls, kith and kin with flights of troubled gray vapors among which they were mixed, skimmed low and fitfully over the waters, as swallows over meadows before storms. Shadows present, foreshadowing deeper shadows to come.” This is an arabesque of arabesques, shadowing forth the ghost of coming trials of the human spirit. Need I say that I love writing of this kind? The syntax is perfectly matched with the scene described, long, rolling sentences to match long roods of swells.
Faulkner’s Intruder in the Dust is arabesque of another kind, a stream-of-consciousness art filled with logical paradoxes, as “because thinking it into words was like the struck match which doesn’t dispel the dark but only exposes its terror,” or “Yesterday won’t be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago.” Or take Absalom! Absalom! We have this: “Because there is something in the touch of flesh with flesh which abrogates, cuts sharp and straight across the devious intricate channels of decorous ordering, which enemies as well as lovers know because it makes them both:—touch and touch of that which is the citadel of the central I-Am’s private own: not spirit, soul; the liquorish and ungirdled mind is anyone’s to take in any darkened hallway of this earthly tenement. But let flesh touch flesh and watch the fall of all the eggshell shibboleth of caste and color too.” This is a whirlwind of words to say what could perhaps be compassed in fifteen—but would the fifteen concise words draw us into the narrative as Faulkner’s passage does? I submit that they most probably would not.
Here is Barth in The End of the Road: “Articulation! There, by Joe, was MY absolute, if I could be said to have one. At any rate, it is the only thing I can think of about which I ever had, with any frequency at all, the feelings one usually has for one’s absolutes. To turn experience into speech—that is, to classify, to categorize, to conceptualize, to grammarize, to syntactify it—is always a betrayal of experience, a falsification of it; but only so betrayed can it be dealt with at all, and only in so dealing with it did I ever feel a man, alive and kicking.” This is the celebration of syntax as such, a rhetorical flight in praise of rhetoric. Barth was another oracle of the arabesque, although he has fallen somewhat into disrepute of late as a mountebank of literary gamesmanship.
There is in Nabokov’s Pale Fire one of the finest tributes to the written word that I have seen. It is this: “We are absurdly accustomed to the miracle of a few written signs being able to contain immortal imagery, involutions of thought, new worlds with live people, speaking, weeping, laughing. We take it for granted so simply that in a sense, by the very act of brutish routine acceptance, we undo the work of the ages, the history of the gradual elaboration of poetical description and construction, from the tree man to Browning, from the caveman to Keats. What if we awake one day, all of us, and find ourselves utterly unable to read? I wish you to gasp not only at what you read but at the miracle of its being readable.” This is the keen awareness, for the literary artisan, of the uncanny in orthography. There is something truly otherworldly about the conduit from page to mind. It is this otherworldly conduit that makes possible the arabesque worlds which Poe, Melville, James, Porter, Faulkner, Nabokov, Conrad, and others spin into a fabric of words.
One last tribute to this conduit, this one indirect, is in order. It is from Porter’s Pale Horse, Pale Rider: “‘Don’t you love being alive?’ asked Miranda. ‘Don’t you love weather and the colors at different times of the day, and all the sounds and noises like children screaming in the next lot, and automobile horns and little bands playing in the street and the smell of food cooking?’” That is a subtle tribute to the power of words to convey these things on paper, a rhapsody on the sensible world that the poet and the storyteller try to invoke from the magic bottle of vocabulary. Porter, too, in stories like this one and Old Mortality and “Flowering Judas,” was a weaver of arabesques. And it is just such a love affair with words that most entrances me and draws me into the story being told.
David Massey has a Master’s Degree in English Literature After 1660 from The University of South Carolina and while there studied creative writing under George Garrett and James Dickey. He turned belatedly to fiction writing as a serious occupation but has made progress of late, publishing several short stories in the last three years.
