Spunk & Bite Page 15

  [T]he Korean barfleberries, the fifty most obviously worthless plastic flowerpots, the assortment of sand-dollar fragments, and the sheaf of silver-dollar plants whose dollars had all fallen off. . . . The wreath of spray-painted pinecones that someone had ripped apart. . . . the brandy-pumpkin “spread” that had turned a snottish gray-green. . . . the Neolithic cans of hearts of palm and baby shrimps and miniature Chinese corncobs, the turbid black liter of Romanian wine whose cork had rotted . . . the collection of Paul Masson Chablis carafes with spider parts and moth wings at the bottom, the profoundly corroded bracket for some long-lost wind chimes.

  SOUNDS AND TEXTURE

  Some inventories win the day by sheer quality of word and phrase. When poets list particulars, they usually treat them as, well, poetry. They choose terms with stimulating qualities in addition to their contextual relevance. Not to obsess on garbage, but from a long poem of that name by A. R. Ammons (American Poetry Review), I extract a few such terms that appear in various small lists throughout the work:

  [B]roken-up cold clams . . . crippled-plastic chair . . . beach goo . . . gobbet . . . eroded roads . . . flits of steel . . . shivers of bottle . . . busted slats . . . spinningly idle wheels.

  Writers can bring the same poetic qualities to enumerations in prose. When a list by comedic writer Mark Leyner (Et Tu, Babe) is set as poetry, one sees that his seemingly out-of-control particulars are well under the control of a word artist. Here, I’ve broken up his prose thumbnail of a Jack LaLanne Health Spa into lines of verse:

  Yelping aerobics classes,

  the echo of raquetballs,

  sweaty florid-faced hausfraus in garish leotards

  lumped at juice machines,

  men with hairy jiggling breasts and

  gelatinous rolls of stretch-marked belly fat

  grimly tramping on treadmills and Stairmasters.

  This, by the way, is a list containing some ten particulars (counting those found in modifying clauses), a number that feels just about right for achieving the desired effect. Fewer items, and the list would lose its manic thrust; more and it would seem gratuitously mean.

  Often you’ll find that the old “rule of three” applies to lists of particulars. To indicate a house furnished “usuriously,” for example, Andrea Lee (in her New Yorker short story “The Birthday Present”) has her doted-upon protagonist glance at a “Piedmontese Baroque cabinet in the dining room, a watchful congregation of Barbie’s in the girls’ playroom, a chubby Athena in a Mantuan painting in the upstairs hall.” Three items, and we get the picture.

  * * *

  PARTICULARS ON A PLATTER

  As lists of particulars go, nothing seems to inspire writers and stimulate readers more than edibles. The best such inventories gather words so sensual you can chew them. In The Middleman and Other Stories, for example, Bharati Mukherjee offers up “platters of mutton croquettes, fish chops, onion pakoras, ghugni with puris, samosas, chutneys.”

  Once writers open the food locker, however, they have a hard time closing it. Sometimes a long list is justified by the significance of the event—say, a wedding feast amidst the bleakness of ranch life:

  [P]ork barbecue, a baron of beef pit-roasted, spitted lamb, prairie oysters, sweet corn, giant shrimp in Tyler’s ketchup sauce, oven rolls, a keg of sour pickles, melons, ripe Oregon peaches made into deep-dish pies, and a three-tier wedding cake with pale-blue frosting topped by a tiny plastic bull and cow. (—Annie Proulx, “The Bunchgrass Edge of the World”)

  I’m not sure we needed the whole shopping basket, however, when Bill Bryson’s hiking companion, Katz, stocked up for the Appalachian trail in A Walk in the Woods:

  [F]our large pepperoni sausages, five pounds of rice, assorted bags of cookies, oatmeal, raisins, M&Ms, Spam, more Snickers, sunflower seeds, graham crackers, instant mashed potatoes, several sticks of beef jerky, a couple of bricks of cheese, a canned ham, and the full range of gooey and evidently imperishable cakes and doughnuts produced under the Little Debbie label.

  Well—on second burp, maybe we did need the lot. The more the funnier, it seems, when the gag is about excess. And, in massively large part, a character is what he eats.

  * * *

  NUTS, BOLTS, SCREWS, STAPLES

  Here are some mechanics of composing lists: Note that in the short story excerpt above, Lee omits the word and before the last item in her series. This is the standard way to indicate that a list is not definitive— that the items are just samples pulled from a greater inventory. Use and if a list represents the author’s essential “take,” as it does in Jon Lee Anderson’s snapshot of a Taliban mullah’s compound in “After the Revolution,” a piece that appeared in the New Yorker: “The bedroom, which is small and dank, has a ceiling fan, a double bed, and two white-and-faux-gilt mini-chandeliers.”

  For better variety and force, try to avoid the static to be and to have verbs in your lists. Instead of, there were three lemurs, four parrots, and one python in the room, try something like, the room sheltered three lemurs . . . , or a python eyed four parrots and a trio of lemurs across the room.

  But sometimes a list wants to be a true list—an unabashed inventory of particulars with collective impact. In Composition 101, such lists usually follow an introductory statement and a colon. The items are separated by commas, or by semicolons if complicated in structure. Some contemporary authors (or their editors), however, disdain the semis. Novelist William Kennedy’s inventory of a prostitute’s parlor (Roscoe) sets up with the colon, proceeds with commas only, and breaks—as lists often do—with a dash to introduce a summary clause. Kennedy writes of

  the plush decor established by her decorators: George III armchairs, pink linen drapes on the windows, marble horse figurines on the marble coffee table, a baby-grand piano given to Mame by an ardent customer, a portrait of Mame as a young beauty—in sum the escalation of Mame’s sense of herself.

  In literature, the list itself might be thought of as a kind of parlor—not necessarily of ill-repute, but a showroom of particulars chosen for the occasion. Visitors ought not to be besieged by quantity, but rather engaged by the choicest items or the ones they least expect. Even for paying customers, more is not always best.

  TWENTY-TWO

  THE ART OF THE SEMICOLON

  Even outside the world of punctuation, the year 1644 was not without its moments: Sweden declared war on Denmark; the Manchu Dynasty replaced the Ming in China; philosopher René Descartes declared, “I think, ergo, I am.” But for lovers of semicolons— and no few roam the planet—the year leapt into history when British schoolmaster Richard Hodges offered these words in The English Primrose, his notable pronunciation and spelling guide: “At a comma, stop a little. . . . At a semi-colon somewhat more.”

  Our modern semicolon had settled into the English language.

  Until then, it appears, no authority had nailed down a role for the mark in English, though its use in Latin had been somewhat standardized (see sidebar, “The Saga of the Semicolon,” below).And once put to work in the English sentence, the semicolon showed Copperfield-like ambition, becoming what some now call our most sophisticated punctuation mark.

  But in its very sophistication, the semicolon has caused unease among both beginning and practiced writers. “I exist, ergo, figure me out,” it seems to say. This unease may be part of a renewed self-consciousness about punctuation, reflected in the immense popularity of Lynne Truss’s 2003 best-seller Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation.

  As it turns out, Truss’s intolerance applies more to humorless prigs than to adventurous semicolons—about which she left several trenchant things unsaid. For leaving them to be said here, and for reminding the multitudes that punctuation can be a beautiful thing, we thank her, moving on now to our own look at the art of the semicolon.

  ARTFUL OPTIONS

  Why do we refer to the “art” of the semicolon? Because nuance and personal style, not grammatical convention, guide many
uses of this mark today. Many of the old conventions or “rules” for semicolons, perpetuated by such esteemed writers of their times as Henry James, have faded. The few standard models remaining apply mostly to specific cases, such as semicolon use with a series of whereas clauses. The rest is art—a matter of optional choices.

  When does the semicolon option arise? Mainly when closely related statements yearn to be united, rather than exist as a sequence of jerky sentences. Consider these two statements: She dated five men that year and by December she was still alone. To join them you could use the conjunction but, preceded by a comma:She dated five men that year, but by December she was still alone. Or you could apply the art of the semicolon, creating just enough suspension for the reader to feel the poignancy of the connection: She dated five men that year; by December she was still alone. Each choice, in the appropriate context, yields a different feeling: usually subtle, but sometimes as different as major and minor keys.

  * * *

  THE SAGA OF THE SEMICOLON

  Near the close of the fifteenth century, Venetian printer Aldus Manutius took a thousand-year-old punctuation mark and, in his Latin texts, standardized it more or less as the modern semicolon. Within decades, English writers were using it to pieces. Hamlet might have acted sooner without the 574 semicolons Shakespeare strewed in his path.

  Weaving in and out of favored English grammar, the semicolon became the darling of nineteenth-century rhetoric. But individual writers have gone their own ways in using the mark. Dickens loved the semicolon and fussed over it. Shaw wrapped it in his own ironbound rules. In America, Mark Twain made ample use of it to pace his sentences. President Lincoln called it “a useful little chap.”

  Most newspaper editors feel that semicolons slow a story, but that they are tailor-made for headlines: WRITER SELLS POEM; QUITS DAY JOB. William Zinsser (On Writing Well) finds the semicolon a bit musty, as does a fictional editor in John Irving’s A Widow for One Year: “No one knows what they are anymore. . . . If you’re not in the habit of reading nineteenth-century novels, you think that the author has killed a fruit fly directly above a comma.”

  But the majority of modern writers turn to the semicolon for clause-heavy lists and for joining related statements in a lyrical, sometimes soulful way. And of course some writers use it for almost everything. Ms. Truss (among others) warns against the mark’s addictive pull; but she asks: “How much notice should we take of those pompous sillies who denounce the semicolon? I say, none at all.”

  * * *

  ASK WHAT SEMICOLONS CAN DO FOR YOU

  To link statements, one has several options besides the semicolon or the conjunction. Even when the statements issue from world leaders, punctuation can be up for grabs. During his 1961 inaugural address, President John F. Kennedy uttered these famous two clauses, pausing briefly between them: “And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you [pause] ask what you can do for your country.”

  But how is that pause to be represented in print? Check enough quotation books, and you’ll find five different marks competing for the job: comma, dash, period, colon, and semicolon. Which best suits the message? Obviously the call is a subjective one. My own judgment would be based on these considerations:

  • The comma seems too hurried, too trivializing, as if one were saying: “Ask not for the large pizza, ask for the small one.”

  • The dash is too abrupt. With a dash, one expects an indirection, like, “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask how you can get heartburn relief.”

  • A period (full stop) allows time to anticipate the locution and to think, “Yeah, yeah, I get it.”

  • And a colon warns of some tedious enumeration: “Ask not what your country can do for you: Ask what you can do about poverty; ask what you can do about the environment; ask what you can . . .”

  The semicolon seems just right as a bridge between the two echoing clauses. It calls for a brief rhetorical pause, as before a punch line. It announces that the two clauses will relate, but it doesn’t give away how. Will there be an elaboration? Question? Statement? Command? Any of these could follow a semicolon, but not necessarily. With the semicolon, there is a split-second tease. In music, certain effects raise expectations of related ones: Notes go up; we expect they’ll come down. One set of beats anticipates another: Shave-and-a-haircut; two bits. Semicolons inject expectation into sentences, and in literature expectancy is a good thing; it creates subliminal tension followed by release: the quiet “ah” of art.

  In his much quoted “Notes on Punctuation,” essayist Lewis Thomas likened the glimpse of a forthcoming semicolon to “climbing a steep path through woods and seeing a wooden bench just at a bend in the road ahead, a place where you can expect to sit for a moment, catching your breath.” A semicolon does indeed promise a mini-pause, a chance to gather oneself before moving forward. But it isn’t always refreshing. Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Beloved is awash in semicolons that weigh like sighs as the author writes of slavery’s horrors: “Two were lying open-eyed in sawdust; a third pumped blood down the dress of the . . . woman.”

  Sometimes, instead of a pause measured in time, the semicolon creates a mental space, enabling readers to take in image-loaded passages like this one by David Foster Wallace:

  I can make out in the stands stage-left, the white sun-umbrella of the Moms; her height raises the white umbrella above her neighbors; she sits in her small circle of shadow . . . a delicate fist upraised. (—Infinite Jest)

  An excess of such spaces, of course, can get spacey. In a noted critique, semicolon-hater Paul Robinson decried the “epidemic”use of the mark by students. He objected to the ambiguity of semicolons. What precise relation do they indicate? he demanded.

  But one curmudgeon’s ambiguity is another’s poetry. What semicolons can indicate are certain nuances felt by the writer, certain gestures and whispered messages. Perceived in a split second at the end of a clause or poetry line, semicolons say things like: “wait”; “brace yourself”; “take stock”; “here’s more”; “here’s a stronger way of putting it”; “here’s how”; “here’s why”; and “come along, I’m waiting for you.”

  * * *

  DEEPER SECRETS OF SEMICOLONS: SOME QS & AS

  What is “parataxis”?

  It sounds like a name for unlicensed cabs, but parataxis is the rhetorical term for the joining of sentences, phrases, or clauses without the use of conjunctive words such as and, but, or because. And here’s where the semicolon comes in: Often it substitutes for these conjunctions, giving a different feel to the locution. Which of the following two is more lyrical—or less dweeby?:

  Conjunctive: Run away with me, since I need you.

  Paratactic: Run away with me; I need you.

  Can semicolons be used within quoted dialogue?

  Yes, just as commas and dashes are used to approximate two kinds of spoken pauses. A semicolon might represent a pause somewhere between the two: “Folks come; folks go,” she answered. (Toni Morrison, Beloved)

  Semicolons are used to separate wordy items in a series. But what about a series of one-or two-word items?

  Use semicolons if the intent is to convey significant spoken pauses. For example, when a lawyer listed one-and two-word afflictions that his client allegedly suffered, he used semicolons to create a “sympathy” pause after each one:

  “[He suffered] . . . headaches; vertigo; nausea; hypertension; scalp tenderness; insomnia; mood dysphoria; photosensitivity; and phonophobia.” (—John Cassidy, “The Misery Broker,” The New Yorker)

  When semicolons are used to separate items in a series, can a comma be used before the last item?

  Yes. Use either a semicolon or a comma, but be consistent. Wilson Follett (Modern American Usage) prefers a semicolon before the last item, but later authorities cite a trend toward commas. Just be sure that clarity isn’t lost: She tried switching computers; she wrote by hand; she dictated to a recorder, her old one from wo
rk, and she prayed to her muse. Nothing helped.

  Can a semicolon be used between two sentences joined by a conjunction (and, but, etc.)?

  Yes. If Wordsworth (among thousands of others) can do it, why not you?:

  The Child is the Father of the Man;

  And I could wish my days to be

  Bound each to each by natural piety.

  This particular pattern is common in poetry: the semicolon indicates a pause between lines, where the second line launches a sentence with a conjunction. In prose the semicolon occurs after a long sentence or complicated one, offering readers a pause before a conjunction that picks up the flow: “All right, I’d yea, yea and oui, oui and si, si and see, see them too; and I’d walk around in their guts with hobnailed boots.” (Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man)

  What is the proper placement of the semicolon in relation to quotation marks and parentheses?