published in The Writer’s Chronicle (12/2015)
The term syntax makes us think of structures, static and abstract. But syntax gives shape to sentences, and sentences are language in motion. What if syntax affects us the way a dance does? Seeing a dancer suddenly defy gravity, we feel ourselves uplifted. Or someone simply drops his face into his hands, and something stirs deep inside us. It’s mysterious—we identify with the movement and are ourselves moved.
So it is with sentences—we find ourselves carried, physically and emotionally. Their progress becomes our progress, their tempo ours. Sentences move through us quite literally, grow out of the body; voiced, they rise through flesh and sinew, shaped by contraction and release. They are made of physical energy, life. The life is pressed into shape by specific patterns and syntactic forms, channeled and released in ways that are profoundly evocative. The outward flow—the ex-pression—becomes a dance. I don’t want to continue too much in this abstract vein. Let us instead experience the dance of syntax, the range of emotion it gives rise to, in the writings of Charlotte Gilman, Marilyn Robinson, Flannery O’Connor, Shelton Johnson, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce.
Perhaps the easiest way to see how sentences channel life’s energy is to notice when the flow is blocked. For this reason, I’ll start with Charlotte Gilman’s story The Yellow Wallpaper, whose theme, broadly speaking, is the suppression of life and whose syntactical forms dramatize this suppression. The story offers us a powerful experience of the patriarchal culture of Victorian times, largely because its sentences have been shaped—or misshapen rather, stunted—by the frustration of desire, and as we read along, making the sentences our own, we feel this frustration directly.