Appendix Q

A FEED Magazine Dialog on the state of the American sentence.

Question One: What makes an American sentence?

Question Two: How does it work?

Question Three: What's in store for it?

STARTING WITH two (rather arbitrary) assumptions—that the sentence is both building block and microcosm of our nation's literature, and that talking about how writing works (and doesn't) may be more interesting than talking about what it means— FEED invited four writers and an editor to participate in what we described as "an electronic symposium on the state of the American sentence." We hope you find the resulting Dialog to be of interest.

A NOTE ON THE PARTICIPANTS:

Ben Marcus was born in 1967 in Chicago. The author of The Age of Wire And String, he teaches at Brown. Born the same year in Melbourne and raised in America, Samantha Gillison published her first novel, The Undiscovered Country last summer. It is set in Papua New Guinea.

Jenny Offill is the author of Last Things. Born in 1968 in Greenfield, MA, she was educated at UNC and Stanford (where she studied with Gilbert Sorrentino). She lives and works (at a bookstore) in Brooklyn.

Ethan Nosowsky, 32, was born and raised in San Francisco, and educated in New York and Berkeley. An editor at Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, he has worked on books by Elias Canetti, Daniel Duane, Geoff Dyer, Lucy Ellmann, and Jenny Offill, among others.

Alex Abramovich, moderator.

QUESTION ONE

When you consider the influence writers like Mather, Jefferson, Dickinson, Toomer, Melville, and so forth have had on our idea of what America is, calling any of them a Great American Writer seems a bit circular. The American idiom is so lush, so varied—what definition could do it justice? Still, you can't help but feel that a sentence like the following (to pick an easy example, from Absalom, Absalom!) is recognizably American:

You get born and you try this and you don't know why only you keep on trying it and you are born at the same time with a lot of other people, all mixed up with them, like trying to, having to, move your arms and legs with strings only the same strings are hitched to all the other arms and legs and the others all trying and they dont know why either except that the strings are all in one another's way like five or six people trying to make a rug on the same loom only each one wants to weave his own pattern into the rug; and it can't matter, you know that, or the Ones that set up the loom would have arranged things a little better, yet it must matter because you keep on trying or having to keep on trying and then all of a sudden it's all over and all you have left is a block of stone with scratches on it provided there was someone to remember to have the marble scratched and set up or had time to, and it rains on it and the sun shines on it and after a while they don't even remember the name and what the scratches were trying to tell, and it doesn't matter.

Why? We could talk forever about our American literature; its themes and fixations, but is there a threshold at which these things begin to manifest themselves?

REPLIES TO QUESTION ONE

JENNY OFFILL: First, a confession. I'm no great fan of the American sentence. Not in its current incarnation, at least. Although there are some excellent American writers working today, there is still, to my mind, something deeply dull about most contemporary fiction. Often, this dullness seems to be located in a tiresome insistence on being straightforward, on immediately orienting the reader in a recognizable "realistic" world. Unlike much European and Latin American fiction, which often requires a leap of faith to enter into (a conscious quieting of the whos, whats, whys, wheres, etc.), the typical American sentence seems to want to ingratiate itself, to explain, to reassure—at best, to entertain. Turn off the TV, it beckons. I promise this won't be too hard. It makes me think of a radio station that used to play in the kitchen where I worked in New Orleans. It played classic rock and its tag line (repeated on the hour with feverish intensity) was "WKRC: Nothing new, nothing unfamilar!" The theory seemed to be: Your life is hard enough. We're not going to scare you and make you feel like an old fuck by playing some song by a band you've never even heard of. I listened to this slogan every day for months and after awhile it began to seem like a manifesto of sorts. I imagined people all over that strange ruined city being reassured by their radios that the world was still the way they remembered it, that their youth was not quite out of reach.

It seems to me that there is a similar triumph of the nothing new, nothing unfamiliar school in contemporary American fiction. This is baffling to me simply because it is exactly the opposite of what I want as a reader (mystery, beauty, surprise). For me, the best sentences (American or otherwise) are inherently disorienting because they allow passage into secret worlds; often these landscapes are dark and bewildering, places to wander through rather than feel at home in. For the most part, it seems American writers don't trust their readers to wander for long without signposts.

ETHAN REPLIES: I don't know. Aren't you really just pointing to "bad"American writers/writing? I'm playing devil's advocate here and can be as pessimistic about the current dearth of original work as the next reader, but the lack of surprise is the fundamental characteristic of "all" bad art, American or not. Was it Pound who wrote that the only immoral art is bad art? Well, that's true, but hardly unique to the ugly American. I mean come on, Milan Kundera? Middlebrow metafiction for jocks and those under 22.

JENNY RESPONDS: Maybe, but all the examples I pulled were from well-respected and critically acclaimed writers, all of whom are frequently anthologized and who pop up in Best American Short Stories, the New Yorker etc. year after year. So I do think it's fair to say that what I see as their lack of adventurousness doesn't seem to bother the critics much.

BEN REPLIES: I'd be curious to hear who these writers are for you, since I love that later on you name Dahlberg, Paul Bowles and Dr. Seuss. To me, contemporary writers such as Judy Budnitz and Dawn Raffel seem extraordinarily concerned with a kind of composition that takes little for granted in how the language works. Elsewhere I've mentioned Gary Lutz, and I could add Anne Carson, C.D. Wright and George Saunders to that list as well, among others.

JENNY RESPONDS: A few of the contemporary American writers I admire are Donald Antrim, Lydia Davis, Gil Sorrentino, George Saunders, Evelin Sullivan, Joy Williams, John Hawkes, the cartoonist Chris Ware and (sometimes) David Foster Wallace. (Also a bunch of poets.) The little I've read of Dawn Raffel (back in her Quarterly days) and Judy Bunditz (Flying Leap right?) struck me as interesting and inventive.

JENNY RESUMES: Perhaps a few examples are in order. Here are a few opening sentences I pulled at random from a recent anthology of fiction:

1)"Leroy Moffit's wife, Norma Jean, is working on her pectorals." (Signpost: trashy name + fitness equipment = lower class striver. Expect the buzz of television in the background, a denoument involving shoplifting, a self-help seminar or unsatisfactory sex.)

2) "Jasmine came to Detroit from Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, by way of Canada." (Signpost: Poetically named foreigner arrives in America's least glamorous city. Expect disastrous encounter with charming stranger; epiphany of the "We are all immigrants of the heart" variety.)

3)"Climbing up with a handful of star decals to paste on the bathroom ceiling, Claire sees a suspect shampoo bottle on the cluttered top shelf." (Signpost: stars + bathroom = cosmic conquered by the mundane. Expect gentle middle-class irony, exaltation of motherhood as the last great mystery.)

And so on and so on. Of course, there is nothing inherently wrong with starting a story in such a flat-footed way. Sometimes such a literal-minded beginning can be used to good effect in a narrative that later turns darker or stranger, a way of luring the reader on to a smooth surface, then revealing it to be thin ice.

Still, if I go back to the first American sentences I marveled at, the first ones I remember reading over and over again, I'm struck by how unliteral they are. I was five and had just learned to read and what I liked to read was Dr. Seuss.From "What Was I Afraid Of?" (in which a small bear is chased by a pair of pants):

"I had to do an errand,
Had to pick a peck of Snide
In a dark gloomy Snide-field
That was almost nine miles wide.

I said, 'I do not fear those pants
With nobody inside them.'
I said, and said, and said those words.
I said them. But I lied them."

And this from "The Lorax:"

"You won't see the Once-ler.
Don't knock at his door.
He stays in his Lerkim on top of his store.
He lurks in his Lerkim, cold under the roof,
where he makes his own clothes out of miff-muffered moof."

What I like about these sentences (besides the excellent smut of "miff-muffered moof") is the giddy sense of possibility they contain. When I first learned to read, I remember thinking words were very strange things. They seemed to have textures and temperaments; some were prickly, some smooth, some stayed in place and meant what they were supposed to, others changed character depending on what was around them. To me, words seemed less to represent the world than to reveal it. Even now, it is this revelatory quality that I look for in a sentence. Below are some American sentences I admire for this reason:

The balloon, beginning at a point on Fourteenth Street, the exact location of which I cannot reveal, expanded northward all night, while people were sleeping, until it reached the Park."
Donald Barthelme, "The Balloon"

"Many times my mother was in the room and I neither saw nor heard her, and so she grew fainter."
Edward Dahlberg, Because I was Flesh

"I think it is the year 1909."
Delmore Schwartz, "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities"

"The brace shop was a small concrete warehouse lined and stocked with the equipment of affliction."
Flannery O'Connor, "The Lame Shall Enter First’

None of them knew the color of the sky."
Stephen Crane, "The Open Boat"

"The Miss Lonelyhearts of the New York Post-Dispatch (Are you in trouble? - Do - you - need - advice? - Write - to - Miss - Lonelyhearts - and - she - will - help - you) sat at his desk and stared at a piece of white cardboard."
Nathaniel West, Miss Lonelyhearts

"In peopleless open places, there were lakes of dust, smudge fires burning at their hearts."
Eudora Welty "No Place For You, My Love"

"The room was malignant."
Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky

What I admire in each of these sentences is the clarity of the voice, the careful attention paid to the peculiarities of perception. Are they particularly American sentences? I'm not sure. What they seem to have in common is an ability to induce a sense of vertigo in the reader, as well as a reliance on the logic of dreams rather than psychology. Also, none of them are ornamental or even particularly clever. Even Barthleme's wears its erudition lightly, as if he's being careful not to startle the natives. There are, I think, no signposts here. Instead this is sentence as compass, trembling out a direction to follow. This way, it says. Trust me.

SAMANATHA REPLIES: It is, of course, impossible to look at American writing in a vacuum or to consider it without looking to its European forebears. Like American culture itself, American literature has absorbed influences from the rest of the world and it is respectable to argue that in the case of many writers, the American 20th century sentence has continued the project that the "post-Flaubert" Europeans set in motion. The Moderns' great experiment—blowing up traditional ways of viewing culture, like Picasso's coigns of vantage and Joyce's stream of consciousness,—is, to me, the great intellectual advance of arts and letters in this century (and as the historians would point out, inextricably linked with similar contemporaneous advances in science, math theory and psychology.) But what makes European and American writing, both content and sentence-wise (especially that writing which is outside of "the accepted tradition of prose design" [Ben Marcus' phrase]) so radically different from each other (or at the very least, different,) is explained by how dissimilar the daily reality of the European and American artists was and is. While the European Modernists were enmeshed in societies with rigid class-structure and for the most part racially homogenous populations, the American writer was confronting a wildly heterogeneous culture. America was and is a place beset with intense skin-color racism, the legacy of slavery and the dispossession of the Native Americans, with a wild West and its vast tracts of "undiscovered" land, a continuos influx of immigrants from all over the globe, and the East Coast, a place that was and is self-consciously imitative of Anglo tradition. The

European artist was contemplating a way of life that had been unchanged for the millennia, the American a place were anything could (and did) go.

     Isn't this why the great European disciples of Flaubert were writing stories about the impossibility of existence in bourgeois life? Molly Bloom, Anna Karenin and Lady Chatterly are all Emma Bovary's step-daughters, still fighting the construct of their very European lives. How different the American obsession with class looks. The Great Gatsby, a work roughly contemporaneous with Lawrence and Joyce's novels, and a work which many, many people claim is THE Great American novel, is all about the possibilities and limitations of transformation in America. You can, and many do, go from being a working class gangster to Long Island gentry here. Even Henry James' explorations of the unhappily caged female psyche read so much differently than those of his European colleagues. (I know he changed his citizenship to British before he died but he's an American writer.)

     But back to the sentences. I can't point to a handy "cheat sheet" to identify American "characteristics" as the American sentence is, in fact way too wide a category to make a facile list of its qualities. At the risk of being tautological it is what is, and it is identifiably different from other literature's sentences.

Although this paradigm sentence might well be considered "American," it is possible only because of the inventions and innovations of European Modernism. (By which I mean Modern literature post-Flaubert.) It has, just to take one example, many of the same cadences of the prose to be found in Beckett's Watt, published in 1953, but written earlier, during the war. It lacks Beckett's uncanny sense of timing, in which the string is pulled on his sentences at just the right time, and it adds, so to speak, the sort of extended analogy that Beckett avoided or exploited for his own comic and sardonic ends. On the other hand, look at this, from The Marble Faun: "The life of the flitting moment, existing in the antique shell of an age gone by, has a fascination which we do not find in either the past or present, taken by themselves." That's Hawthorne writing in 1860, and sounds very much like the prose of Carlyle or Arnold, even though Hawthorne's sensibility is thoroughly American and he is one of the premier models for American fiction—most especially the short story. And Poe, an arguably "more" American writer, in that his strange, skewed sense of the American psyche invented weird, "unreal" architectures to contain its darkness, writes sentences that are even more "foreign" in flavor and syntax. So where does that leave us? What is an American sentence? How about "In the fall the war was always there, but we did not go to it anymore"? Is it the lack of a contraction to replace "did not" that makes it American? Or is that simply Hemingway using speech rhythms for his own elegant ends? Fitzgerald thought it incredibly beautiful, but did not characterize it as "American." If we are given a sentence that contains idiomatic American expressions, slang, and references, that say "You're a rat bastard" rather than "By Jove!," O.K., then that's American. But what of sentences that eschew such superficialities? And then there is the overwhelming plainness of the prose of William Carlos Williams or Selby, each one of which functions like a brick—unexceptional—to build the whole. Finally, I think we must say that the American sentence is a creature of its time, its author's aims, and whether or not its author is concerned with what Barthes terms "combining predicates," or, to put it reductively, with showing off how well he has learned his "craft." But as Kerouac has succinctly noted: "Craft is craft." Of course, in the back of my mind, even as I try to make a case for the difficulty of discovering an American sentence, I am thinking of the ghastly sentences committed by British writers when they put words into their American characters' mouths, displaying thereby ears of sterling tin. Finally, one of the most perfect American sentences I know was one uttered by a cab driver in Brooklyn, way back in about 1949. Giving directions to a friend who was maneuvering his way out of a tight parking space, he said, "Go fuckin' back, Ant'ny!" Now that's as American as you can get.

ETHAN REPLIES: Hey, wait—I'd agree, but isn't that idiom, slang, etc.? I love the way "fuckin'" get's wedged in there. Anyway, that *is* the kind of thing I was trying to get at in my essay. It's just that you don't find "talk" everywhere—hardly a lowest common denominator for all great American sentences. Nevertheless, a tendency. Also, none of us addressed humor. Ah well...

BEN MARCUS: I feel poorly inclined to hazard ideas of Americanness because I don't really feel any conscious sense of nationality, and it is this that is maybe a distinctly American disorder: to not feel American, to have no idea what America is, and probably not to care, or at least to be irritated by the request to explain it. Maybe only in America does one have the luxury, or capacity, to be ignorant of one's origins and assume that life and language occur outside of any discussible context. Awareness of context is, after all, a disturbance of ambiguity, a harming of mystery, and thus becomes a baggage of facts that is easily regarded as a burden. But this might be a conveniently sub-literate excuse to avoid thought, which for me is often an evasive instinct while working, at least to avoid the kind of thoughts (secondary ones) that won't directly inhabit the sentences I'm attempting.

Discerning literary nationality seems distinctly to be the problem, or indulgence, of the anthologist or field-worker required to corral widely disparate utterances and expressions within a category so big it is essentially meaningless. It is extremely safe to define something that won't in any way be affected by our definition of it. More disconcerting is that this thing of the American sentence cannot be considered adequately, excellently, defined by itself, its own examples. Whatever happened to: "The definition of the world is the world; The map is the territory"? The thing is in front of us in abundance and we shouldn't require a cheat sheet to understand or recognize it.

ETHAN REPLIES: Still the best way to go (that old saw of Frost's being asked after a reading "what does that poem mean" and his reading it over again), but I think it's useful, and, interesting, to swap ideas about this stuff, even as they inevitably over-simplify. None of us needs, or is asking for, a cheat sheet, but I think our best critics help clarify where we've been and where we might go next. I kind of feel we're in an odd moment for literature, where there's no agreed upon or discernible style or school that's heading in the "right" direction. A lot of people are sifting through what's behind us or forgotten, digging through the trash for lost jewels. I think these kinds of—and the generalizations they require—can highlight where the good stuff is.

BEN RESPONDS: I completely agree. By questioning the question I'm mistakenly suggesting that discussion itself is futile, a pretty glaring cop-out that I'm glad Ethan has called me on, because now at least my guilt can be out in the open (diluted), yet the question did bother me and I wanted to disclose my sense, however wrong, or at least merely personal, that information and appellation become a technique of concealment: we discuss things in order to make them disappear, definition is eulogy. Probably this surliness is disguising my own lack of information or bafflement. I also tried to admit to some unsupportable superstitions I hold that sometimes seem to help (or fail to hurt) my own writing.

SAMANTHA REPLIES: And why should we care, anyway? Ben Marcus wonders. Is worrying about the provenance of sentences an essentially silly undertaking, something best left to anthologizers pitching reluctant editors? Is it constructing artificial categories to imagine American fictional sentences as distinct from Asian or African or British sentences? This is troubling for me because I find the entire exercise fascinating, especially since I spend so much of my own time perusing the work of other writers. If you admire really great sentences, love the way they can string together to form poetic, energetic, moving prose, this is probably an exercise you've done, too.

     But back to the question, what does it matter to the non-anthologizer if a magnificent sentence is American or for that matter written by a woman or a native Polish speaker or a British civil servant? I wonder if this particular desire to know and sort is related to the impulse that drives the cult of personality. What I mean is, if you read an amazing book, hear a song that transforms you or look at a painting or a movie that brings you to tears, most often your response will include—who made that? And if you yourself are trying to make art another response could be "how'd she do it? what was she reading? where had she traveled? gone to school? did she have a job when she wrote that? a lover? a child? a mentor? a political view?" This drive to know the artist behind the transcendent work of art is an intense one, as popular among the masses (ever check out the marathon showing on VH1 of rock biographies?) as it is among consumers of rarefied culture. And why not? It's fascinating stuff. In visual art, we recognize certain themes, certain styles of brushwork as belonging to the Impressionists. And we know more or less what the Impressionists were trying to do, what unified and divided them. So to me, "categorizing sentences," e.g. calling them American, Post-Modern, Southern Gothic, mid-Century, is a vital exercise in understanding the way fiction works.

     "I hate traveling and explorers," the short, declarative opening sentence of Tristes Tropiques accomplishes much: it evokes the opening of the great proto-existentialist Notes From Underground, sets us up for Levi-Straus' style in this highly personalized series of recollections of his work in the Amazon, and snubs every other adventure book ever written in its first breath. Does it matter that we call this a French sentence? Would it do anything for us to understand that Levis-Straus was a European Jew writing about traveling the world at a time when the holocaust was getting going? I think so, but then the more pleasure I get from the a sentence the more I want to know about it, ugly categories and all.

BEN RESUMES: As to the act of writing itself, probably best not to "think" of sentences, for me anyway, but to enact them, execute them, just as a baseball player probably doesn't want to think of swinging while swinging, but would rather hit the ball. Thought is then an obstacle to striking the object. Here might be an American, Gumpy idea: Thought ruins execution, is only a system of intimidation (authority equals menace and menace conceals ignorance) not required for successful "action" in the world. Gump is a genius because he knows not to think things through. He just does it. Perhaps it's American to be superstitious against explanation, definition, reduction, though the cult of explanation might also be an American phenomenon. Maybe it's American to be a thing and its opposite, to contain Whitman's opposing multitudes. On the other hand, what if this does not feel true, but is only an idea that sentences allow me to have, to claim as my own? I could not have had the idea without sentences, yet I had not thought of it before. (Sentences allow us to lie believably. Can we lie without words? Sentences occasion and encourage the most believable falsities.)

JENNY REPLIES: I think this is a lovely way of addressing the sometimes tricky question of whether fiction must have at its core some kind of truth. Many American readers (and reviewers) seem to be wedded to the idea that a work of fiction must spring from some recognizable place. Where did the story come from, interviewers ask and a writer is expected to trot out a well-crafted anecdote about his childhood, or his first marriage or his recent trip to Timbuktu. It seems to me that often the truth is much stranger, that a sentence sometimes floats in from the ether and a story forms around it, slowly and mysteriously, the way in a smattering of stars a bear might appear or a god or a plough.

BEN CONTINUES: The sports metaphor is a way to avoid over-describing a process one might be prone to regard superstitiously, and for me there's never been a sense that knowing anything about sentences has helped in the making of them. (Rationalization of ignorance could again be considered an American trait: recognition of a problem is not recovery, as Freud would have it; it only hurts more to know things. Knowledge sucks, does nothing but name, and thus taunt, our suffering.) Yet the body knows how to do many things it can't describe: make music, hit a ball, do math, write sentences. The repertoire of tools and techniques I fall back on when writing amounts to a collection of ticks, hunches, instincts, limitations, and blind spots that I hope won't shame me (or that will shame me in a way that also doubles as entertainment for others—a coincidence of wants—an aesthetics of self-laceration), but this is a catalog of instincts that ultimately I don't feel I control or can even describe. There's a fingerprint element to all of this: you can't really change or scrape away your deep code, your sentence style, the stubbornly permanent warp and woof of your brain. Emerson's rhetorical style seems just as identifiable as his DNA. As writers, we possibly enact a syntax that mirrors something irrevocable in the structures of our brains. This could be what is preciously referred to as our "voice." Our sentences cannot not reveal us, they automatically serve as evidence. But what exactly they evidence, what our syntactical habits ultimately say about us, is thankfully entirely beyond my grasp.

JENNY REPLIES: For me, this element goes by the old-fashioned tag of sensibility and what depresses me most in a book is when a writer seems to have borrowed his warp and woof from someone else. What I love best as a reader is stumbling upon a writer whose sensibility strikes me as so charming or strange that I want to read everything he has ever written, even the failures and one-offs because there too are their fingerprints. Edward Dahlberg is that way for me, as is the crazy Swiss writer Robert Walser.

ETHAN NOSOWSKY: When I think about a distinctly American sentence I generally start with the writers who were born a bit after the srart of the 19th century. I'd identify Jonathan Edwards, Hawthorne, and especially Benjamin Franklin as having reflected and defined an emerging American sensibility, but I don't see any American style per se for a few more decades. I'm stewing over this a bit, and might answer differently on a different day, but I'd start somewhat arbitrarily with the twin towers of Whitman and Dickinson. (I'm already feeling bad, not having pinned the ribbon on Melville, Twain, Thoreau.) Well, anyway, our maximalist and minimalist lines can usefully be traced down through them. The hard part, needless to say, is putting my finger on the thing that makes these two very differently American writers so unquestionably American. While Americans have no exclusive claim to this quality, and while many American writers don't rely on it (sorry for the throat clearing), I like to think it has to do with the way talk gets embedded in their writing. Whitman takes this literally; he's vatic, declamatory, broadening—his sentences and lines seem actually to reach out—and evokes the noisy sounds of a new people. There's a directness to Whitman's address, a simplicity that I identify as contra-European. "You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through / the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books,/ You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me, / You shall listen to all sides and filter them from yourself." In Whitman's and Dickinson's sentences, you start from the particular and build outward and upward. This is what William Carlos Williams would advocate openly decades later. If American-ness often has to do with self-creation, then the self we present to the world is the one constructed simply through what we say it is, which may or may not be a false representation (this is the preoccupation of Melville's wildly underrated The Confidence Man).

JENNY REPLIES: I think you're on to something here but it seems tricky to apply this idea of the neccessity of self-creation to writing. I mean isn't that the fundamental logic of any fictional world (whether it be conjured up by an American or some other nationality) that a thing is what it is only because the writer says so?

ETHAN RESUMES: To me, then, to write an American sentence is to be seeking out the new and unknown through dialogue, to address some thing, some person, some self, even when it is hidden, and trace its shape.

JENNY REPLIES: In my essay, I claimed that most contemporary American writers seem to have a fear of the new. I was thinking mostly of an apparent lack of experimentation when it comes to structure and form, a sense that "telling a story" is always the most important thing. But maybe you're right that most of the real innovation in American writing these days is taking place at the level of dialogue. If so, that's the same emphasis on speech that you were talking about before as a common thread among American writers you admire.

ETHAN CONCLUDES: Flannery O'Connor pointed out that "the best American fiction has always been regional," and I'd say that dialect and dialogue (literal or figurative) are the ways that we have come to express that regionalism. This self-declaration/definition occurs in a kind of conversation. (O'Connor again: "Unless the novelist has gone utterly out of his mind, his aim is still communication, and communication suggests talking inside a community.") All those dashes in Dickinson seem to me the hesitations of speech, the move toward definition, and if she is the inward monologue to Whitman's multi-voiced yawp, there's still a firmness in her approach. It's this shapeless self in front of us that gets spoken and that gets reflected in their sentences. The blind leap forward binds them (Dickinson: "With Blue—uncertain stumbling Buzz—/ Between the light—and me—/ And then the Windows failed—and then/ I could not see to see." Whitman: "Now I will you to be a bold swimmer, / To jump off in the midst of the sea."). In Lydia Davis's brilliant story "Foucault and Pencil," the connection becomes rather explicit: "Sat in subway car, took out Foucault and pencil but did not read, thought instead about situation fraught with conflict, red flag, recent argument concerning travel: argument itself became form of travel, each sentence carrying arguers on to next sentence, next sentence on to next, and in the end, arguers were not where they had started, were also tired from traveling and spending so long face-to-face in each other's company."

SAMANTHA GILLISON: From Walt Whitman's ecstatic elegies to Kerouac's road odysseys to Joan Didion's minimalist roaming on the Los Angeles freeways, the American sentence has always been infused with its landscape, both physical and emotional. The prototypical American story, the wanderer discovering (some or all) of this huge, unpredictable continent echoes through the literature of the past two and half centuries right up until its most recent appearance in Charles Frazier's super block-buster, Cold Mountain. And the sentences that the American writer has created to navigate the New World are as distinctive as they are, ultimately, undefinable. The Romance of America, the dream of freedom and an endless horizon, has had a powerful pull on the American fiction writer's psyche since Hawthorne and Mellville. But it wasn't until the 20th century that prose writers, influenced by Gertrude Stein and Mark Twain (the latter, many literary scholars deem "the first American writer,") began producing what I would call distinguishably "American Sentences." American Writing began adopting its regional rhythms of speech and the patterns of its various immigrant traditions. And while the cultural historians tell us that the only "true American art form" is Jazz, I would venture that only America could have produced Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor, the Beats and Zora Neale Hurston. The literary descendants of Gertrude Stein, those American writers who were enormously influenced by her experiments with blowing up the sentence developed a distinctively, perhaps "typically," American body of prose fiction. Hemingway, Carver, Coover, Didion, William Gass and Stephen Wright all wrote fiction which seems to me fascinated by Stein's explorations of sound and meaning and rhyme and grammar and syntax; they stripped their sentences bare, inverted them and made literary worlds where repetition created unexpected, often profoundly experiencable, meaning.

     And how can I maintain that such work is "American"? What are the features, for instance, that distinguish the sentences of Lawrence Durrell as English and Grace Paley's as American? Clearly there is no decoder ring that I can whip out at this point. American writers are not a homogenous group and there are often cases where a particular American writer will have more in common, thematically and stylistically, with say a West Indian or French writer than with a compatriot. However, I will crawl out on a limb and say that to me, by and large, American sentences seem more intent on creating a direct link to the emotional content of a story than those of other cultures. (Nor do I mean this to be a GO, USA! statement: most of my favorite writers are British or Indian—but that's another essay.) Yet whether a writer feels contempt for it, betrayed or seduced by it, the promise of the United States haunts almost everyone's work. Even the most adamant expatriates, Gore Vidal and Paul Bowles for example, write sentences which somehow feel American. And why should this be a surprise? If Joyce's sentences couldn't shake their Irishness no matter how long he stayed in France, how could we imagine an American writer would produce work that wouldn't somehow be identifiably American? And moreover, why would we want her to?

QUESTION TWO

This is a question on craft. How do you, in your writing, editing, and teaching, think of sentences? What makes the kindling catch?

REPLIES

SAMANTHA GILLISON: Writing fiction is by far the most difficult thing I've ever done. I'm always stunned to hear writers talk about perfectly formed sentences spouting from their pens, like Mozart hearing his symphonies. I have never written a fictional sentence that I haven't rewritten at least three or four times. I read other writers like guidebooks for all aspects of story and especially sentence construction. Embarassingly, I have read Lawrence's England, My England and Hemingway's "Big Two Hearted River" so many times that I am running the risk of memorizing them. But these are the type of sentences that thrill me. Poetic, expansive, never coy, they reveal brutality so beautifully that the pages reveal realness. When you are deep into your work and it's going well and you're crafting sentences that have a rhythym, that follow one another as if they were meant to and not awkwardly put together by a nervous grasping writer, it feels like you've just figured out the hardest crossword puzzle in the world. For me, writing sentences is the real fun of a story. Plotting it, worrying about the characters, the setting, and the emotional resonance is merely hard work

ETHAN NOSOWSKY: An easier one for me, as I get to react to sentences rather than suffer through their creation. I like to say that editing is a species of acting, insofar as I have to get inside the style of each writer to work effectively. So I just try to inhabit the voice, rhythms, etc.—try to suss out the writer's direction. First I have to believe that something's going on—and this has nothing to do with "Americanness"—to make me want to grapple with those sentences. When, for example, I first read Jenny's novel I kept thinking of Gertrude Stein's saying that she knew something was good if the bell rang. I always imagine Gertrude's bell as more of a ting-a-ling thing, but in Jenny's case the clapper was going rather madly. I need to know that the structure of sentence and story are sufficiently in sync. Well, the writers will have more interesting things to say about this.

BEN MARCUS: Sentences are the execution or failure of a promise, a seduction that always fails.

ETHAN REPLIES: Almost all the writers I've worked with go through this phase after they've finished a book (they'd thought) where they get horrified by the fact that they have to stop re-writing it. Language, of course, is (as Ben writes) insufficient to describe the picture or idea in your head, but our best writers find the closest approximations. This is Valéry (I think) saying that great works of art are never finished, only abandoned. What I try to do in my job is help the writer make her book the best possible version of what it wants to be. And I think good readers generally can see what a book—or a sentence—"wants to be." However, I don't know that I'd go so far as to say what Ben does below: that "nothing exists outside of the range of grammar, or if it does, it cannot be reported upon and thus deservedly discriminated against with silence." The best experimental writers are the explorers, who try to find new ways to get at previously inaccessible—this is what the Surrealists were trying, what Burroughs was doing with his cut-ups, etc. Actually, I imagine Ben would agree with this, would say that these writers were still using grammar, while expanding its possibilities. Well?

BEN RESPONDS: You're right to point this out and, later in my response, I do remark that some poets possibly eschew grammar to look for alternative forms of knowing (is there such a thing? maybe uncommon is a better word). I'm sorry to have here suggested these excursions into the language had to be rule based. Yet isn't Burroughs' cut-up technique a grammatical strategy of its own, a generative and structural device to tweak the language into new forms of thought? He took units of meaning and attempted, through chance operations, startling configurations. Sort of similar to trying to invent a grammar

BEN RESUMES: Whatever a sentence becomes does damage to what prompted it, effaces or betrays it. The broken promise is whatever life, or lack of life, the sentence starts off with, occasions, brings to mind, and then fails to truly evoke. We make sentences because it is impossible to cry all day. All sentences are betrayals of what preceded them in the ether: an itch, an urge, a fuzzy hunch. The sentence doesn't come close. Sentences never do, they fall short and remind us of the insufficiency of language to create perfect emblems for the problem of being alive, or rather, our own insufficiency to put the right words in the right order to actually penetrate what was once unsayable. Sometimes sentences are the chance to launch some new or formerly unfathomable object into the language, and thus to seed this object into bodies and brains, to inject readers with experience or whatever else we care to transmit. The sentence is medicine or poison, it kills or helps us, and sometimes there's no difference. Unfathomable: too far away, too deep to access, too obscure to know. Language and grammar offer the promise of ultimate navigability, a radar for the infinite. We sense something out there and the sentence reaches for it. You can get there. In this sense, grammar is a beacon for the unknown, the unheard of, the impossible. Nothing exists outside of the range of grammar, or if it does, it cannot be reported upon and is thus deservedly discriminated against with silence. (Although James Schuyler said, "Not knowing the name for something proves nothing.") But grammar doesn't even discriminate against the impossible, the way people do. Grammar allows what physics does not, and to me grammar is a physics of the mind, an endorsement of the impossible. It is disappointing to encounter prejudice against certain territories of grammar just because they have no "real world" corollary. Which field of life is the valid and real one? How could anything within language be dismissed as "unreal?" This is exactly what interests me about grammar.

     The sentence is a tool to bring a world to life, kill one, render thought or the absence of it, create or obliterate a spectacle, imitate or deny action, massage the brain. With sentences we can also complain about the insufficiency of sentences, like using your own hand to beat yourself up. But it's a mistake here for me to separate things called sentences from what the sentences contain, stand for, kill, enable, speak of, or whatever sentences do, rather than merely what sentences are (flags that belong to no one), because a sentence, to me, functions as a primary muscle to lever the fictional world into place. Here the metaphor of what a sentence is or does can extend to container, skin, shield, helmet. It holds information, but it also shields the reader from it, creates a rhythm for the delivery of the message, a timing system, like an explosion legend, to occasion or suppress meaning. This is the thrill of sentences. A writer controls the trigger to various explosives of language, allows things to occur in the order he or she decides.

JENNY OFFILL: Perhaps foolishly, I tend to follow sound more than sense when it comes to writing my own sentences. I always suspect that if I can just get the rhythm right the meaning of the words will fall into place too. Often this doesn't happen, but when it does it's like spinning the numbers on a lock.

BEN REPLIES: This is a superb metaphor and I very much feel that I attempt, however failingly, a similar thing. I wonder, though, how separate sound is from sense, if it's not just a deeper, more intuitive way to explore sense, logic, clarity and form. The word "sense" here seems so earthbound and dull. Sorrentino suggests it's the last thing he'd encourage his students to accomplish. But, for me, there is an "accuracy" or rightness that I recognize in a sentence once it's achieved (the lock opens), and it can seem entirely based on sound. Since you say "perhaps foolishly," do you regard sound as a secondary way to know what your sentence should be?

JENNY RESPONDS: To tell the truth, I'm not sure why I hedged by saying "perhaps foolishly" in my first answer. Maybe I've been squinted at one too many times when someone has asked me to describe "how I write" and I've mentioned the whole sense following sound thing. In fact, the sentences that seem most right to me (in that they click into place and never need to be fiddled with again) are almost always found through playing with sound not sense. (By "sense" here, I mean my literal idea of what I'm trying to say at any given point.) I've always thought Breton's suggestion to "put your trust in the inexhaustable character of the murmur" was excellent advice for writers.

JENNY CONCLUDES: Mystery, beauty, surprise, click, and if you're lucky the sentence opens up in unexpected ways. For me, the best sentences always seem to come out of nowhere and often can't be traced back to an idea or even an image.

GILDBERT SORRENTINO: The trick, if that's what it is, is to make the sentence somehow "sing." It has been my experience, over some 50 years of writing, that when one is writing well, there is nothing easier than writing, and that conversely, when the work is going badly, nothing, absolutely nothing that one does is right. Oh yes, the grammar may be impeccable, the syntax crafted and polished, the punctuation honed beautifully—but the sentences pile up, each one more correctly leaden that the last. Craft will not help here, for it is craft that is there on display, right on the grim and lusterless page. The sentence has to have some moxie to it, even as it is set down.

ETHAN REPLIES: This couldn't be truer. I have nothing against writing programs per se, but I read lots of manuscripts that come out of them and the one thing no M.F.A. prof can teach is moxie. What they *can* teach is craft. Respectability. So you sit there and read a few pages and you think, hey this isn't half bad—there's a whiff of style here, and yes, there's one, an interesting character, oh, here comes some nicely ratcheted tension. And yet—utterly forgettable because many of us have nothing, really, to say, and despite the pretty sentences no need to foist them on the public.

GIL CONTINUES: I've discovered, over many years of teaching, that the hardest thing for a beginning writer to learn is that writing is not, absolutely, the act of transferring one's "ideas" from the mind to the page, but that the very act of writing is where writing happens. That's why, as every writer knows, the scene in which Bill jumps into the river often ends up with Bill buying a bottle of wine and renting a movie instead. It's not, surely, that the characters "do what they want" that changes things; it's that the sentence that began, say, "And then Bill, gazing into the river" feels better, looks better, and is better, if it ends with Bill walking back to town and not removing his shoes. It is the form and shape of the beginning words that urge the sentence to a completion thzt the movement of the words, and not the "drama" of the scene, intends.This is a roundabout way of saying that form, despised by so many of our readers (and writers!) as superficial, effete, mere razzle-dazzle, makes the content quite literally appear.

BEN REPLIES: Are you referring to an acoustical element that asserts its own terms outside of any referents of the sentence itself—what the sentence is describing, etc? Or is this "movement of the words" the syntactical promise that is created by the opening structure? Not that these are the only choices, but I'm interested to hear if you make a distinction between them.

GIL RESPONDS: I'd go with the second possibility as paramount, that is, I'm more convinced by the—as you put it—"syntactical promise that is created by the opening structure." This is not to say that the acoustic may not play a part, e.g., "Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed." Joyce has got a three-ring circus performing in this knockout opening sentence: rhymes, off-rhymes, alliteration, assonance, and three—count 'em—three verbs, all of which are doing work. Not a goddamn copula in the bunch. It's somehow, and I don't know how, of course, the decision made by Joyce to use the verb "came" that sets the sentence on its course. What's so marvelous about this sort of a sentence is that it not only works beautifully as a descriptive opening, but underneath the simply referential, we have a blasphemous parody of the mass. So I make a distinction, but it's not a rigid one. What I wanted to make clear is that the sentence changes or can change according to the systems given one by grammar and syntax more than by the "need" to dramatize. "Show don't tell" may well be the most insidiously destructive advice given to beginning writers, and leads to what Jenny speaks of in her remarks on the prose fiction that is most valorized by readers and in writing workshops. Jenny is right when she remarks that young writers tend to read their contemporaries, but she may be too kind to say that they read contemporaries who write stories (almost always stories, for they are the quickest way to publication) that are the sort toward which they strive. "Safe as houses," as they used to say. And poetry? It is simply not part of the young fiction-writing student's life, and is thought of as difficult and irrelevant. I was once explaining to a class the difference between metaphor and metonymy by using an example from Yeats's "Sailing to Byzantium." It was as if I had proffered to them the ancient mysteries of the Pyramids; they were interested, some even fascinated, but it was clear that this was thought of as "extraneous" information, much like some dope given them on what freeway is best to take on a rainy day. It had, that is, nothing to do with writing their stories. That metonymy is the very bones of prose—as I "suggested" to them—was of little concern. Go figure.

GIL CONCLUDES: Poets know this, know that the rhyme scheme of the simplest and most common sonnet or villanelle "makes" the poem say what it wants to say. In Isaac Babel's famous story "Guy de Maupassant," he writes, "A phrase is born into the world both good and bad at the same time. The secret lies in a slight, an almost invisible twist. Turn your hand, getting warm, and you can only turn it once, not twice." It is that turn, that one and only turn, that I try to effect in my sentences. When the turn is just right, the sentence "works," and when it's not, the sentence is but a conveyor of information. The kicker in Babel's sentence, of course, is the remark "not twice," by which I take him to mean that the second turn is the application of craft and "professionalism" to rescue what is essentially dead. Better to strike the whole sentence and, as Fitzgerald said, "rewrite from mood." It's a tough business.

QUESTION THREE

Assuming there is such a thing as the American sentence, how has it changed over the years, the centuries? Will it, must it change in years to come? What threats lurk in the margins? And what new arms do we have against them? In a conversation leading up this dialogue, Ethan confessed the following: "I guess I'm one of those people who believe surprise is just about everything in art... and grammar is always where surprise has to be embedded first." That struck me. I wonder—does our grammar still have the power to shock and surprise?

REPLIES

BEN MARCUS: The threat to good sentences: bad ones, easy ones, false ones, ones that create simple and dull expectations, or ruin expectations, or lull and lower standards until the sentence is just a mouthsong meant to stroke the head and affirm what we already know. The real question here is what elaborations or extensions of grammar are people able to understand and why is there such a low threshold for excursions into the possibilities of grammar? Can this problem be discussed without referring to the lure of the Visual? What will people tolerate, what will invade the brain and expand our notions of utterability and sense without being too difficult or unusual to follow? Or:How come most readers are not prepared to read writing that leaves the territory of familiar grammar?

ETHAN REPLIES: Not everyone's interested in art. People read for different reasons: to be entertained, to look for stories that remind them of—and explain to them—their own lives, to be shocked, educated, etc. It seems unreasonable, to me, to expect that the general public will engage in rather technical issues. What is sad is that the sort of person who used to be a reader of the new often isn't anymore. Or, if they are, we publishers are having a harder time finding them.

BEN RESPONDS: This is an important clarification. Maybe what I was attempting to say is more of the latter: definitions of "the new" have changed to "current and young," and what masquerades as an appetite for innovation, even flawed and preening failures, is quickly sold off to the "forbidden content cult" or the little lyrical intro in a book that gives way to obedient narrative, a palatable disruption because we know it will end. I think the larger issue I was trying to get at is how incredible a tool grammar is, how amazingly full of potential, but it's as though we're making the world with three colors instead of how many other ones there are, just because those three colors are familiar and comfortable. Part of the palatte is forbidden, or at least vastly underappreciated. Yet those other colors actually exist, even if they're blinding or awful or dull or terrible or foreign.

BEN RESUMES: The problem is that grammar allows infinite, beautiful, strange and startling sentences, but the writer isn't freely allowed to use or explore them if the so-called audience is kept in mind. The grammatical palette, if communication is to be achieved, must be kept limited to what narrative and commercial tradition has ratified. Grammar is a muscle not exercised very well or widely in most forums. A writer is often regarded as "difficult" if he or she employs unfamiliar, or subverted, grammar. We can't follow the work, engage it, understand it. It is like a foreign language, even if we might understand all of the words in sequence. It is the arrangement of words that is troubling and undecipherable (it actually is decipherable, but reading is not happily equated with decoding. Having to stop and think, or to go back and read a sentence again, is viewed as a liability, at least editorially). There are not too many people prepared to let grammar expand and present information, emotion, subtlety, ambiguity, in unusual ways. Complexity, in grammar, is often a sin, or not even as glamorous as a sin, it is just dull and boring. Cliché, in this respect, is then a deeply recognized grammatical style that is so comfortable to some that there seems to be no grammar at work at all, an absence that just comes as a relief. And then there is what occurs or does not occur between sentences, the links or lack of links, the leaps, the strange transitions, the omissions and failures and assumptions that create a sub-language chaos. Donald Barthelme was a genius at transitions, and his work briefly dilated the appetite for unexpected jumps between sentences, though his imitators often lack his intuitive grace. Yet a writer like David Markson, who cannot exactly be considered funny—his Reader's Block is one of the most upsetting books of the decade—provides an exhilarating strategy of transition and goes mostly unknown and underread.

     Of course, this resistance to different work is sometimes because the writer is also careless and not so attuned to clarity or precision—some so-called experimental writing takes refuge in this difficulty and smugly conceals an absence of technique or rhetorical intention—but there are other examples of extraordinary writers not content to participate in the accepted tradition of prose design, of rhetorical or grammatical familiarity (Gary Lutz comes to mind: incredible grammatical precision and invention, yet highly unfamiliar arrangements), and this is where we find a surfeit of persons interested in engaging a possible future of grammar, or at least a way that grammar might be used to do what it once did, namely to allow us to know ourselves, teach us to think. But is it at all appropriate or interesting to discuss language in terms of progress? In literature, attempts at progress can easily be regarded as pretentious. This is firstly because they often are. It becomes difficult to sort through all of the crap. But all uses of language are a pretense, a construction, a fabulation. Work that proffers a new utilization of grammar, and thus a new fiction of experience, is going to be strange and thus a threat.

     Because grammar is a primary form of knowing, we require language artists (which not all novelists or poets are) even if it might be their lot to be mostly ignored and unappreciated, simply because they bend and bruise and break up the language and its grammar in order to attempt a new kind of sense, or lack of it, to produce symbols and reports of experience not yet seen, to enable the body to know or forget itself and its world in sudden or startling ways

JENNY REPLIES: This interested me because it almost makes grammar sound like a sense, as if it is as much of a tool to apprehend the world by as sight or smell or touch. It made me think of those stories about children raised by wolves who even after they're taught to speak can't say what happened because when they were in the woods they had no language to record their experiences and so it all just slipped away.

BEN CONTINUES: They expand the story, remind us that not everything has been said or felt, or they remove falsely achieved feeling or sense, stories imposed upon us and the culture by other language tyrannists (every official form of language reinforces some conception of grammar and sense, and thus our styles for thinking about ourselves). In this sense, writers like David Foster Wallace and Mark Leyner are all the more valuable, because they can extend the parameters of familiar grammar, syntax and sense, and make it entertaining, they dilate the apparatus without succumbing to ponderous navel gazing or abstract head games. Yet, to be fair to the other side, a writer like Richard Yates worked entirely within narrative, and thus grammatical, tradition and produced some of the most crushing fiction of the century.

     There is another writer I'd like to cite, not least because he did a kind of violence to the sentence that produced an outrage of new experiences: Thomas Bernhard. Why are we exhausted if the sentence doesn't end? The sentence parcels and apportions narrative, sometimes simulates breath, but it also creates an expectation (where's the period?), which is a lack of patience, a distraction with its own terms, so that as the sentence goes on, refuses to end, we refuse to follow it, or no longer can, and we're relieved when the period arrives because we can stop thinking for a moment. While the sentence teaches us to think, it also restricts our thinking, sometimes necessarily (we can't think of everything all the time—narrative is a set of focus strategies, well-designed blinders). Thus, I would guess, the urge of some poets to produce an experience of language outside the confines of sentences or grammar. The impulse to remove created (fictional) rules of language and its arrangements and see what else the language might be capable of, increases the possibilities of what can be said and felt.

     In the Bible, the only real threat God feels is the use of language. He punishes a cresting language superiority with babble, when the tower gets too close. If there are no rules to how language is used, then anything might happen, authority might by overthrown. Wide-spread accord and a shared adventure into the depths of grammar might lead to a piercing of heaven. God would be dethroned by words.

SAMANTHA GILLISON: So much of what's been recently trumpeted as the "Future of American Fiction" is pretty underwhelming, sentence-wise especially. I suppose it's belaboring the obvious to lament the graduate school style that's so prevalent. The "workshopped" sentence, smooth, mellifluous and coated with a hyper-educated cyncism, is here to stay. The most interesting writing that's being done by youngish writers today I think is, sadly, not coming out of the US. Writers from India, China, and the Caribbean are doing amazing and original things with English prose. Their sentences turn "proper English" inside out and are filled with rhymes, puns, inverted syntax, pleasingly unexpected cadences and rhythms. Romesh Gunesekara, Ha Jin, and Arundhati Roy, to name only a few, are writing sentences with real passion that, ironically, owe much to American Southern fiction. It is as though these writers feel an irreverance toward English and room to play with language and tease out its possibilities with the liveliness of a Stanley Elkin or a William Gass. Glibness isn't exciting. The American sentence needs to be fertilized by the invigorated prose of the rest of the world if it's going to have a future as awesome as its past.

ETHAN NOSOWSKY: I do think the best American writers have this preoccupation with talk, have continued the conversation. Gaddis? Almost too obvious for me to mention. I think what I meant by saying that grammar is where surprise has to be embedded is that the sentence, the syntax, tells us how to read and react to the larger—it's the locus of your encounter with the work. And in Faulkner, his stories and themes are mirrored perfectly in those beautiful—they embody his idea of time and history, spooling forward endlessly, but irrevocably tied to some murky beginning. And it's not irrelevant that Absalom, Absalom!, where your sample sentence is from, is itself largely a told thing, a conversation between Quentin and his roommate. I still see this talk, this self-shaping sentence, everywhere in American literature. David Foster Wallace has mastered a kind of slangy exposition that looks rather casual but that perfectly outlines the recursion of the modern neurotic thought process: "'All right, I am, okay, yes, but hang on a second, okay?'" Wallace has a great ear for the way people talk to each other and finds beauty in it even when he's describing a rather nightmarish world.

     I'd say that, in this century, there has been more of a sense of what's behind us. William Carlos Williams again: "With this pressure upon us, we eventually do what all herded things do; we begin to hurry to escape it, then we break into a trot, finally into a mad run (watches in our hands), having no idea where we are going and having no time to find out." It's in the Faulkner sentence you quote, too. Faulkner's terrified of that headlong rush but knows it's the only way. Anyway, the preocupations are—art doesn't tell us much that is new, but artists keep finding new ways to offer answers to the same old questions about what it's like to be alive in this world. So long as the American writer stays attuned to that ongoing conversation, and finds a way to shape sentences to it, those sentences will give us that jolt of recognition.

JENNY OFFILL: I'm afraid my shoddy (but gratifyingly cheap) education prevents me from tracing anything at all through centuries of development so I guess I'll just end by saying I'm not so sure that there is such a thing as an American sentence. American cadences and fixations are recognizable, of course, but I suspect that in the end there are really only interesting and uninteresting sentences. I think I've already touched in my earlier answers on what makes a sentence interesting to me. As for what "threats" face the American sentence, the most obvious one seems to me to be inertia. In general, contemporary writers tend to divide into two camps: "experimental," say, or "traditional," and then rigidly hold their ground, refusing ever to cross the river and see what the other side is up to. I've talked a lot about what I think is wrong with the traditionalist camp, so now I'll tackle what bothers me about some of the more "experimental" (stupid word) writers working today. Basically, I think their idea of risk is too narrowly defined. Many writers who are incredibly innnovative when it comes to form and structure (I'm thinking here of Mark Leyner and David Foster Wallace's early work) seem to me to risk almost nothing when it comes to emotion. They always seem to be performing with a net and for the most part that net is irony and a kind of self-conscious cleverness. So much of contemporary writing seems dumb as dirt, so I understand the impulse to distance oneself from that by dumping out a bag of tricks right away (Theory! Interrupted narrative! Footnotes!), but I do think the best writers let themselves risk seeming like fools by not always letting on at the start everything they're up to. Also, by being willing to skirt sentimentality occasionally by tackling subjects that have intrinsic meaning to them (love, family, desire) but have too often been given cliched treatments. That's why I thought David Foster Wallace's much maligned new book was a breakthrough for him. The series of stories "brief interviews with hideous men" seemed to me to have moments of startling vulnerability and even some unfootnoted emotion (though I would argue that he's falling back on the irony net with his title, hedging his bets by deeming his narrators "hideous"). Still, I felt he was doing something new, relying less on his wit than his instinct and that's what made these stories seem truly innovative in the best sense of the term. My wish is that more American writers knew how to combine intellect and emotion this way. Too often I feel a lack in one direction or the other.

GILBERT SORRENTINO: I think I've more or less addressed the idea of the changing sentence being a product of its time, the Zeitgeist, the real spirit of a people that exists despite the official "spirit of the age" as proferred by those who want to own the age, etc., etc., etc. The writers are those who should guard the language and be fearless in doing so, but we live in a time in which the writer who does not wish to be this year's hip color is rarely read, and for that matter, barely published. The notion of the writer's "duty," the writer's responsibility to his audience, the writer's "task" (oh brother!) is everywhere ascendant, as if the writer should forever have in mind those unknown souls who might read him. It is hard enough to write without having to be a combination Sam Smiles, healer of the sick, and right-thinker-on-social-questions seer. I've said before, in public, that the one truly marvelous thing about being an artist is that in one's capacity as such one is beholden to no one, no thing, no idea, no sacred duty, no shibboleth, no anything: The artist is free. In his "Prologue" to Kora in Hell, Williams writes, apropos a chiding letter from H.D. anent what she took to be his lack of concern as to the sacred nature of beauty, "Oh well, this might be very disquieting were it not that 'sacred' has lately been discovered to apply to a point of arrest where stabilization has gone on past time. There is nothing sacred about literature, it is damned from one end to the other. There is nothing in literature but change and change is mockery. I'll write whatever I damn please, whenever I damn please and as I damn please and it'll be good if the authentic spirit of change is on it." The problem, of course, is that such work, with the "spirit of change" on it is given to editors who, conservative by nature (although one mustn't let on), have been made more conservative by the economic exigencies of publishing. The other threat, which works hand in glove with the stern demands made of writers to shape up for God's sake!, is the obvious and everywhere apparent homogenization of the sentence and, by extensions, all prose.

ETHAN REPLIES: This is such an enormous and true problem I don't know where to start.

GIL CONTINUES: It is disheartening, to say the least, to read story after story in fairly large-circulation magazines that all sound the same—witty yet somewhat disillusioned, cynical yet with a pang deep in the heart, wise to the ways of urban and suburban life yet looking beyond to what might be, etc., etc. All couched in a prose that is very like the prose that accompanies the picture spread on what's new in cuisine and life and love at Cannes. This is prose that is always aware of the figure it cuts, and it is seemingly measured against its similitudes.

ETHAN REPLIES: An uncannily accurate indictment of a withered sensibility that's quite prevalent. This style allows the author to avoid committing to any point of view or position. No blood in it. I recall some Kenneth Rexroth essay where he pointed out what was wonderful in the then-current, now-classic hard-boiled style of Chandler, Hammett etc.—something along the lines of "this is prose that isn't buying anything and isn't selling anything." I would ask, though, aren't there any writers around today (who have appeared in the last say 15 years) who you like? You note that "real writers are always on the margins anyway, so what the hell." That's Romantic and true enough, but wasn't Papa a best-seller? What about Cormac McCarthy (guess it took a few books though)? Is David Foster Wallace still on the margins? Grace Paley?

GIL RESPONDS: To move to Ethan's remarks, or to at least approach them: Yes, these writings are, for the most part, "respectable." The problem, as I adumbrated above, is one of career-building, if I may use such a pompous phrase, and it works in the following way. (I make no moral or ethical judgments here, but present the situation as I see it.) The young writer is accepted into a program on the basis of his "talent." That is, he can present a couple of stories that show that he has read stories that are canonical or currently mainstream. O.K. Once in the program, he continues to "hone his craft" along with his colleagues, who are honing theirs. The ideal is to make stories that are very much like those that are regularly published in mainstream magazines. With luck, he'll publish in these same magazines, collect 10 or 12 stories, which will be contracted for as the first book of two (the second to be a novel) by a trade house, and this transaction will be the ticket to a job—teaching creative writing! Now, there's nothing inherently "wrong" with all this, but by the very nature of the situation, such an approach to writing militates against anything that might disturb that prose which is in the given "mode." So what we have, essentially, in this era, is prose fiction as a kind of cottage industry. It exalts craft and discourages risk. I once heard an instructor of creative writing speak with undisguised contempt of an applicant who seemed to think of herself as an artist. Such an admission was the equivalent of "Strike two!" Innovation, departure from the norms of narration, and, most depressingly, any interest in theoretical notions of how prose actually works, are relentlessly discouraged or held cheap. This climate does not make for the emergence of fiction as anything but market-ready. What I will never understand is why publishers are happy to publish books by young writers that fit the above bill, when the realities of the market are such that these '"accessible" (what a gruesome word) books will just about make back their advances, but averse to publishing books like, say, Ben Marcus's (the publication of which by Knopf was something of an aberration). Well, I can answer my own question, of course. The standard fare has a chance of being acquired by other media—film, TV, the theater—whereas the "strange" books live and die as books. No chance there of anything but the remainder tables, or purchase by a small house for reprint (at a small price). As far as young writers whom I like, sure: Curtis White, Mary Caponegro, Susan Daitch, Jay Cantor, Carole Maso, Ben Marcus, David Foster Wallace, and others who are just beginning to appear in little magazines. I don't pay as much attention as I should to the young—a concomitant of my age, I suppose—but I would be hard pressed to believe that any of these people will get off the margins, save Wallace, who is off already, but I suspect that the knives are being sharpened for him as I write this. The case of Wallace, though, is a standard one, I think. He is what Robert Duncan characterized to me many years ago—he was speaking of a poet—as a "sop to the avant-garde." That is, if one has the temerity to say, "Jesus Christ! The fucking New York Times is reviewing yet another novel about life, love, lust, and drugs and the emptiness of it all, and that's the 243rd so far this year!," said reviewing organ can proudly point to their full-page review, plus subsidiary features in the daily paper, etc., etc., re/ Wallace. "Whaddaya mean we don't pay attention to the 'experimental!'"

     As a last remark to Ethan, sure, Hemingway was a best-seller, but what about Djuna Barnes, Gertrude Stein, Emanuel Carnevale, William Carlos Williams, Nathaniel West, etc., etc., Fitzgerald, even as his star declined. And Faulkner's books were all O.P. and he was virtually unknown until Malcolm Cowley's Viking Portable was published. I'd go so far as to say, although I have no room to argue it here, that Hemingway was popular via misconception, which is why cement-head critics join in the idiot chorus of putting down everything he wrote after For Whom The Bell Tolls. It's all seen as Hemingway parodying himself, imitating himself, cheapening his talent, etc., etc. But somehow Time Regained is not a parody of Swann's Way. Hmm. Nor is late Bellow a parody of early Bellow. How come? One would have to be the supremest idiot not to see Hemingway at his purest in dozens and dozens of pages of a work that he had no hand in publishing, The Garden of Eden. Once again, what we are subjected to by these sluts of the popular media is the half-baked and middle-brow notion that Hemingway's "ideas" were always (oh, let's face it, Sally!) dumb, crude, and embarrassing, but his prose was so "fresh" that we could forgive him. Now the prose is "stale" and we can see the dumbness plain. All this is enough to make a cat laugh.

JENNY REPLIES: I liked what you said about Poe inventing "weird, unreal" architectures to contain the darkness of the American psyche. I wonder if this idea of "containing" darkness (or the need to do so) is particularly American? It seems to be part of the reason that many good books that do well in Europe get rejected here as too "depressing" or "disturbing" by either publishers or the reading public. I work in a bookstore and I can't tell you how often I hear those sort of complaints as if books were meant to be as soothing as a hot bath. Yet these same customers will happily trot off with The Brothers Karamazov or Lolita, perhaps because they are classics and therefore require less thought since they already have the stamp of critical approval on them. It does seem that H.D's complaint about Williams touches on some common misconceptions about what writers should be. Curators of beauty perhaps or worse! cheerleaders for the fainthearted. In any case, it all goes back to this idea of containing darkness, that despair must be transformed, bleakness leavened with hope etc. It seems to me that that's why so many really devastating writers like Williams are misread as "simple folk." It always amazes me to see him talked about in the same breath as dolts like Frost since Williams strikes me as an American writer where the darkness is barely contained at all but rather seeps into everything he describes. I'm thinking particularly of Paterson and of The Doctor Stories. What do you think made him such an innovative writer (at the sentence level) and in general? What American writers do you find are doing interesting work these days? I certainly agree with you about why so much of the currently hyped fiction is so tiresome. Your description of the soft focus ennui of the typical literary short story was dead on. A lot of people blame the proliferation of this sort of writing on MFA programs. That seems to be part of it (the blind leading the blind as it were), but still somehow too simple to me. I'd say the reason most new writing is so dull is that a lot of young fiction writers read only their contemporaries (Best American Stories, etc.) and often no poetry at all which makes their ideas about what a story can be mindbogglingly narrow. Or they read with a political agenda (one person in my workshop refused to read the work of white men, another—a white guy—wrote always in the voice of a Chippewa Indian). This is silliness and made for much ridiculous "critiquing." Those of us who were poetry hounds or read "old" writers (often no farther back than the Modernists) were seen as being willfully obscure and snobbish. None of this is interesting, of course, for those outside of the insular world of academics, but I did wonder when I was there if writing programs had always been this way or if this was a fairly recent development. I know you've taught at Stanford for years and I'm curious whether the students seem more or less the same as when you started or whether you've noticed some further homogenization of writing in recent years? Are people more interested in "story" less interested in form, etc.?

     Finally, I was interested in what you said about writing either going mysteriously well or not at all. Do you stop writing during those periods where you feel all your sentences have turned leaden or do you just keep going and wait for the lever in your hand to get warm again?

GIL RESPONDS: Let me address some words to Jenny and then I'll shut up. I think Williams was a remarkably innovative writer because he thought of prose the way he thought of poetry—that it really didn't matter what the sentence "said." This is not a vote for gibberish, but the realization that the shaped, or as WCW would have it, the "designed" sentence would speak out of its shape, if that's not too obscure. That is, if the sentence can be made right, what it says will matter. In A Novelette, he says, speaking of "conversation" in writing: "To be conversation, it must have only the effect of itself, not on him to whom it has a special meaning but as a dog or a store window." It has to be, I'd say, like the grotesquely beautiful shows and light bulbs and hooded figures in Guston's last paintings. There they are, dogs and store windows. Robert Frost was an old fraud, who couldn't hold a candle to minor poets like Edwin Arlington Robinson and Alfred Kreymborg.

     When things are not working for me, I keep going until something begins to happen, then cross out all the preliminary junk.

     And finally, a quote from one of my oldest friends, Robert Creeley, on writing: "Nothing will fit if we assume a place for it." Selah.

GIL CONCLUDES: But real writers are always on the margins anyway, so what the hell.