JCB's Ruminations on the Craft of Fiction #32
December 24, 2020
Today is Christmas Eve, and perhaps you’ll read "A Visit from Saint Nicholas" by Clement Clarke Moore, which begins, "'Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house / Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse." Eventually, you’ll reach these lines:
As leaves that before the wild hurricane fly,
When they meet with an obstacle, mount to the sky;
So up to the housetop the coursers they flew
With the sleigh full of toys, and St. Nicholas too--
And perhaps you’ll hesitate, as I do every time I read them to my daughters, trying to untangle the syntax.
There are two salient observations I make about this sentence when I read it. The first is that it does not begin with the activity under description, but spends appreciable time first establishing an image. I notice that authors will often take a narrative breath, a hesitation before some action, or immediately following an important decision, where they step back and take a wider view of the scene or story. Think about the last stanza of "Casey at the Bat" by Ernest Lawrence Thayer: immediately after "the air is shattered by the force of Casey’s blow," the swing of the bat that the entire poem has been building toward, Thayer takes a step away from that moment at the beginning of the immediately following stanza: "Oh, somewhere in this favoured land the sun is shining bright" before, eventually, three lines later, at the end of the poem, resolving the interrupted action: "mighty Casey has struck out." It’s a way of letting the moment breathe, of giving it air and a sense of doom, of fate--these are the axes on which the world revolves, these momentous decisions, the actions our characters take that determine their future, their stories.
Now, Saint Nicholas’s sleigh mounting to the rooftop may not seem like such a moment, but the poem does create a brief hesitation by stepping back and developing the image of the hurricane blowing leaves, granting additional power to the image by drawing it out with this narrative delay.
My second observation about this sentence is that syntax is a versatile thing, and we as writers have immense power over how we ravel the images and actions of a narrative through the way we structure our sentences. We can twist a sentence and bring about the depiction of a character action or choice at precisely the moment we need it to occur, when it has the most impact, when the reader is best primed to see it happen. English is an analytic language, relying upon position within a phrase rather than morphological markers to indicate case and syntactic-semantic role, and there is an immense versatility in the way in which our sentences can be structured. Reading the Little Golden Books story of the Three Bears to my daughters, I often hesitate over this line, thinking about its syntax: "Then home through the forest and back to their house came the three bears." English’s ordinary word order is SVO (subject-verb-object), but here we have a perfectly comprehensible sentence in OVS order. Imagine if it had been written as "Then the three bears came home through the forest and back to their house." This arrangement would have provided a different weight, a different focus for the role of the forest in the bears’ return to their house. The author seems to have wanted to give focus to the forest and so restructured the sentence so that it could be mentioned sooner--this was, after all, where we had last seen the three bears heading earlier in the story.
I think about these issues most times I read the lines highlighted here from "A Visit from Saint Nicholas." Now maybe you will too. Sorry about that. At the very least, maybe think about syntax and narrative delay as you write your next story. And I hope you enjoy whatever subset of the many holidays comprising this holiday season that you choose to observe.
Next: On the Purpose of Story