I’m going to continue my trend from last week of leading with a quote from Stein (and why not, she is so beautifully quotable). This particular sentence is from her essential essay “Poetry and Grammar,” in Lectures in America (1935), and is a thought that I always used to pause on, agreeing with it as one agrees with a phrase of music, but never quite feeling it fully.
But this week I had occasion to reflect further on this idea, of the sentence and the paragraph: I’ve just finished reading Mathias Enard’s Zone, translated from the French by Charlotte Mandell, and released this past winter by the always inspiring Open Letter. Zone takes place over the course of a train ride from Milan to Rome, in the perceptions and memory of Francis Servain Mirkovic, who is abandoning his work for the French Intelligence services and going to sell all he knows to the Vatican and begin, he tells us and we try to believe him, a new life. Mirkovic’s focus both as an agent and in his own obsessions was the “Zone,” the lands surrounding the Mediterranean: Northern Africa to Lebanon, Syria, Turkey, Italy, Greece, Spain… He is of Croatian descent and fought for the Croatians during the Balkan wars of the 1990s, memories that also haunt the novel, escalating in their brutality as the train approaches its destination. Zone incorporates a commanding, feverish breadth of history, intricate portraits of individuals–spies, war criminals, victims of atrocity, partisans–that in accumulation become panoramic, portrayals of myriad conflicts that become a portrait of conflict itself, its scope, its costs, its racialization, its ferocity.
Zone is also a 517-page novel narrated in a single sentence. There are occasional chapter breaks, but these only pause the sentence; throughout the comma takes on the role of the period, and bows out of much of its usual use clause by clause, and the period–the full stop, as the British would say–occurs only at the novel’s conclusion. The exceptions to this rule are a few passages “excerpted” from a novella Mirkovic reads on the train, about Palestinian fighters during the Lebanese civil war. The writing in these passages is weaker, unremarkable in comparison to Mirkovic’s heady narration (though that too relies often on practical, everyday phrases and descriptions), in a way that I thought might be purposeful–how we’re relieved to encounter this simple, brutal but fairly sentimental story, these flat, small, gulp-able sentences. I think perhaps this is not in fact entirely purposeful, but it’s interesting to consider what it is to read these two styles in contrast.
The theory behind this formal choice, the single sentence, seems persuasive: the lack of pauses, of stops, means that Merkovic’s memories and the contents of his suitcase of secrets bleed into one another, as do the places and histories and people they call up, until these histories of specific places and political events begin to lose their distinction and wash relentlessly over the reader. In this way the history told is of Merkovic and of the Zone more than it is of particular events, places, times. This is a powerful aesthetic achievement: to take conflicts for whom boundaries above all are at stake–the rights to land and resources, the boundaries between ethnic groups–and to unroot, to erase distinctions, at least to a degree. To show how these fiercely specific claims start to echo each other, until one hears the howl of conflict itself, not from where or whom it emanated. The lack of periods also makes the novel read extraordinarily quickly; I found that I was almost skimming a lot of the time, with nowhere to touch down would scramble on ferociously, get to the end of the page and realize I remembered nothing, had to go back. It also made the information a bit harder to sort, which could be, as noted, a strength, but is also of course possibly a weakness.
I found myself wishing that the novel had if not sentences, then paragraphs. And it was this thought that seemed suddenly to illuminate Stein’s claim: the sentence may be either too little or too big to be a full or contained emotion, but the paragraph provides a rhythm, a shape, a building up then pausing that is in itself emotional. With paragraphs, I thought as I read, I could breathe, I could read better, I could appreciate the gorgeous images that the text would toss up from time to time but then swallow again, privileging momentum overall. Faced with full page after full page of text, the reader starts to feel suffocated–this too suits the novel, suits Merkovic’s state of mind and the pervasive corruption of human motives he explores, but it also makes us fight him and fight the text a little.
Of periods, Stein says:
What had periods to do with it. Inevitably no matter how completely I had to have writing go on, physically one had to again and again stop sometime and if one had to again and again stop some time then periods had to exist. Beside I had always liked the look of periods and I liked what they did. Stopping sometime did not really keep one from going on, it was nothing that interfered, it was only something that happened, and as it was a perfectly natural happening, I did believe in periods and I used them. I really never stopped using them.
(Ending with her typical wit.) When considering these matters, I often think of Hitchcock’s claim that the length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder. I think of my own natural formal constraints as a writer: whatever I write is made up of fragments that each represent a single writing session, usually 500 to 1500 words. I revise these considerably, but their shape is always there, this is the essential unit of which anything longer is made. This is also, perhaps, a weakness.
Zone is an excellent novel, challenging, moving, and to be warmly recommended in its own right. I’m glad both to have read it, and to have had occasion to consider Stein’s claims: how perhaps it is pauses that define emotion. And because Zone is not only a novel, but a French novel, whose political lens does indeed seem particularly French to an American reader, perhaps I’ll end, as food for thought, with some of Stein’s thoughts on particularly American approaches to space and time, to the sentence and the paragraph. (Note that she wrote The Making of Americans while living in France.) Perhaps some of what she claims below as “definitely” American is, in the blurring of boundaries that has occurred between then and now, and attested to by novels such as Zone, no longer so definite:
When I wrote The Making of Americans I tried to break down this essential combination by making enormously long sentences that would be as long as the longest paragraph and so to see if there was really and truly this essential difference between paragraphs and sentences, if one went far enough with this thing with making the sentences long enough to be as long as any paragraph and so producing in them the balance of a paragraph not a balance of a sentence, because of course the balance of a paragraph is not the same balance as the balance of a sentence.
… I did in some sentences in The Making of Americans succeed in doing this thing in creating a balance that was neither the balance of a sentence nor the balance of a paragraph and in so doing I felt dimly that I had done something that was not leading to anything because after all you should not lose two things in order to have one thing because in doing so you make writing just that much less varied.
This is one thing about what I did. There is also another thing and that was a very important thing, in doing this in achieving something that had neither the balance of a sentence nor the balance of a paragraph but a balance a new balance that had to do with a sense of movement in time included in a given space which as I have already said is a definitely American thing.
An American can fill up a space in having his movement of time by adding unexpectedly anything and yet getting within the included space everything he had intended getting.