tone

Sentence and prose. by Gerardo Muñoz

After more than ten years, I have recently reread several works of contemporary novelist Alan Pauls, and only now I have come to understand the precision of his language; a perfect combination of the rhythmic movement of a swimmer combined with a dry stroke of a brush on a canvas. This precision is not holistic, but found in every sentence of his prose. Aside from the content of his intuitions about literature or the almost microscopic development of frozen time of his characters, what Pauls ultimately teaches is that the unit of prose is the sentence, both its cadence and its ability to be severed and be brought to an end. This is precisely the meaning of the “period” (periodos) as the internal unit of the sentence: periodos is afterall, the circular moment of something that has a beginning and an end. The achievement of a good prose is the articulation of periods that can launch and make a sentence retire. 

For a novelist who is also a self-reflective essayist, it is puzzling that Pauls has not implicitly thematized the unity of the sentence in the craftsmanship of prose (although he has considered accentuation in an essay) [1]. But it is wholly absent in El factor Borges (2004), and his most recent collection of musings and glosses on reading and writing in a volume titled Trance (2014). It is perhaps too easy to overstate the fact that there cannot ever be a general theory of the sentence, because both tone and periodos are expressions of style. The construction zone of a well crafted prose can only be analyzed in the movement of the sentence. In a fabulous moment of his Arcadian Rhetorike (1588), the sixteenth century grammarian and poet Abrabham Fraunce writes the following regarding the sentence: 

“The beginning and the end of a poemt must not be the beginning or ending of prose. For the beginning, a little consideration will suffice, for the middle, less; but in the end the chief care is to be had, for it is most examine, and the longest in memory. It must therefore be sweetly contruied, that it seem not hasty and abrupt: it must also be varied and changed often time…if the same foot should in the end be continualed repeated.” [1]. 

In his treatise of rhetoric, Fraunce connects the end of the sentence, the coming to the periodos to the work of memory and sweetness. Perhaps because the cadence embedded in the sentence is the instance that allows us to connect past and present without hesitation or interruption; not the moment of suspension and surprise, but of landing in language, so that something, once again, can commence. This is also why a novelist in Spanish like Alan Pauls has not ceased to be fascinated by the idea of the past, especially in El pasado (2003), but also in his historical trilogy about his coming of age in the seventies. In other words, it is not enough to write the past in mere prose; the most important solicitation is to lodge its memory in the nest of the sentence. It is only here where memory arrives at a region called “home”.

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Notes

1. Alan Pauls. “Elogio del acento”, in Temas lentos (Random House, 2022), 52.

2. Abraham Fraunce. The Arcadian Rhetorike (Oxford University Press, 1950), 34.

On American language. by Gerardo Muñoz

Towards the fourth part of “A language of New York” included in This in Which (1965), George Oppen registers something like the ultimate struggle of the poet with its nemesis: language itself. Fully aware of the erosion of language of his time, Oppen writes in these verses both a warning and a strategy: “Possible to use / Words provided one treats them / As enemies. Not enemies – Ghosts Which have run mad / In the subways / And of course the institutions and the banks. If one captures them / one by one proceeding / Carefully they will restore / I hope to meaning / And to sense” [1]. The polemic against the darkening automation of language, the public consolidation of kallopismata orphne, is resolved through a possibility of use that is redirected elsewhere, at least away from the nihilism of vicarious denomination and exchange. 

This “possible use” is perhaps nothing else than the treatment that language receives in the voice, which becomes its ultimate speaking experience. If language is always outside and beyond itself, always exceeding its meaning and place, it is because its trembling tonality cuts through both meaning and sense. The construction of the concluding verse cannot be dismissed: “Carefully they will restore / I hope to meaning / And to sense”. Oppen fails to place hope as action towards a higher entity (meaning and sense); rather he sends the poetic voice to meaning and sense. The redemptive quality of language is to be found in this fall and trembling of the voice that, because it has interrupted both meaning and sense, it can inhabit a state of bliss or perpetual hope. In other words, hope is not just an affective state of human being, but a possible turn, a necessary one, in which language is appropriated in all of its impropriety. If words had to be treated as enemies it is precisely to be redirected to the swirling vocative current that divides meaning and sense as the ultimate region of the poetic being where there is no longer a struggle. 

The catastrophe of Americanism is not just a political or economic reality, one that runs through being in language insofar it is understood as the vision of the use of the voice. Oppen was fully aware of this calamity when writing to William Carlos Williams that “there will be no poetry in America only insofar as that lesson is learned. People who are afraid to talk will not produce much poetry” [2]. It goes without saying that Oppen was not thinking of a new renaissance of poetry and literary producers, but just of the poetic being as one that subsists in the chiasmatic relation of language and voice. 

And if American subjectivity today has given up entirely on the use of its language – a use that is increasingly delegated to machines and telematic automation  – it is precisely, because already historically they ceased moving into “hoping to meaning and sense”. This does not mean that we Americanism strives in absolute muteness; on the contrary, running away from sense means the plugging of meaning into sense and of sense into meaning, which is the definition of the construction of argumentation. And argumentation is the delivery of force in the interiority of language. When Adorno & Horkheimer once defined the United States as “the country of argument” they touched something profound [3]. It is only when language is ripped from argumentation that poetic possibilities are restored, and perhaps also redeemed.

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Notes 

1. George Oppen. This in Which (New Directions, 1965), 25.

2. George Oppen. The Selected Letters of George Oppen (Duke University Press, 1990), 39.

3. Theodor Adorno & Max Horkheimer. Towards a New Manifesto (Verso, 2011), 51.