1. SPENSER

In a very interesting chapter of his book The Poetry of the Faerie Queene (Princeton, 1966), Paul Alpers argues that one perhaps should read Spenser with less “consciousness of sentence structure” than other poets such as Marlowe, or, put the other way round, that Spenser does not expect or engage the reader’s capacity for resisting the seductions of line structure and deciding between possible readings. The line, Alpers argues, is more a unit of perception and structure than in the work of certain other poets, the sentence less so. If a line appears functionally complete, take the line boundary as a clause or phrase boundary and you will rarely be significantly misled. This he calls the path of least resistance. There is enjambment in Spenser, but it is typically obligatory (i.e., between Subject and verb, or clearly transitive verb and Object), so that the reader cannot take the initial line to be complete. In cases where there is double syntax, the hovering element can generally be adequately read without enjambment—that is, it can be taken to be in construction with other words in the line containing it, though it may also go forward or back across line boundaries. Line ends are rarely the source of 'premature closure' of the type that requires reanalysis when we arrive at the next line. Hence, at the very least, the reader can rely on line boundaries as a clue to phrase and clause boundaries more in Spenser than in other poets. Among these other poets is certainly Milton, who enjambs endlessly and 'trickily', forcing an acute attention to syntactic structure and a distrust of line boundaries. For one quick illustration, consider these lines from Sonnet 23 ("Methought I saw...") (mine = my wife)

(1) Mine as whom washt from spot of child-bed taint,
Purification in the old Law did save,
And such, as yet once more I trust to have
Full sight of her in Heaven without restraint,
Came vested all in white, pure as her mind:

[Milton, Sonnet 23, 5-9]

Have at the end of the third line cited appears to complete the clause—he trusts to have his wife again, but the next line corrects the erroneous closure—there is no giving or taking in marriage in Heaven. Thus, as Stanley Fish demonstrates over and over in Surprised by Sin, the garden paths in Milton’s writing lead again and again to error, some misapprehension which the reader must cast off.

Alpers goes farther, however, and claims that the line may give the right perceptual unit even though it is wrong or incomplete grammatically. Thus he points out that in the following lines:

(2) Their frowning forheads with rough homes yclad,
And rusticke horror all a side doe lay

[Spenser, FQ, I.vi. 11]

it serves the reader well to forget that the forheads of the first line are coordinate with rusticke horror (they lay their forheads aside?this is what it says, grammatically), and this 'misperception' is facilitated by the line division. Compare these lines from Donne, where perceiving the coordination is critical:

(3) Oh make thyself with holy mourning black,
And red with blushing, as thou art with sin.

[Donne, “Holy Sonnet II,” 11-12]

(4)   Oh! of thine only worthy blood,
And my tears, make a heavenly lethean flood,

[Donne, “Holy Sonnet V,” 10-11]

Similarly in Spenser a line boundary may cut an element free to hover over various equally good possibilities:

(5) She dolefull Lady, like a dreary Spright,
Cald by strong charmes out of eternall night,
Had deathes owne image figurd in her face,

[Spenser, FQ, III.xii. 19]

(6) Wherewith he grypt her gorge with so great paine,
That soone to loose her wicked bands did her constraine.

[Spenser, FQ, I.i. 19]

In (5), the participial in the middle line may be attached equally to she dolefull Lady or dreary Spright—the difference is slight and the effect is to fuse the two possible alternatives; in (6), the last line is either a result clause or a relative clause (that = so great paine). Neither analysis is a misperception. The syntax is permissive, Alpers says: “the independence of the lines means their separation from each other, and . . . Spenser’s verse keeps us from inspecting the connection between the lines in a way that would make us treat structural possibilities as alternative choices" (p. 86). For a final example, consider

(7) And that new creature borne without her dew,
Full of the makers guile, with vsage sly
He taught to imitate that Lady trew,
Whose semblance she did carrie vnder feigned hew.

[Spenser, FQ, I.i. 46]

With vsage sly can be grouped with full of the makers guile as a modifier of that new creature, or with taught, or with imitate—but of course Spenser is insisting on the new creature as a product of her maker, so all possibilities work.

If Alpers is right about how Spenser should be read, we must further modify our perceptual model, for these cases go beyond raising the weight we give to line division. The change would have to be made at the point where alternative readings are compared: what we need to do is soften the injunction: “choose the best” and tolerate multiple parsings. One could of course try to rank the alternatives, but Alpers suggests that this is not the proper spirit in which to read Spenser. Rather, one should simply take them all (provided they are congruent). This is more or less the attitude Empson advocates for 'hovering' clauses and phrases which he describes as giving “an interpenetrating and, as it were, fluid unity, in which phrases will go either with the sentence before or after and there is no break in the movement of the thought” (Ambiguity, p. 50), and again, in words cited by Alpers, “the renewal of energy gained from starting a new sentence is continually obtained here without the effect of repose given by letting a sentence stop” (p. 52). Such a mental process, where more than one propositional structure is entertained and accepted, has never been contemplated by psycholinguists, but there is nothing unthinkable about it.

Spenser’s language differs from Milton’s (among others) in a second way that appears to bear on Alpers' arguments: his sentences are strange and ungrammatical quite a bit more often, forcing the reader to choose the lesser of bad alternatives, as it were. The process by which we select a best parsing is deprived of one of its primary grounds—choose the alternative that gives a grammatical parsing. There is first of all the vocabulary, strange even to Spenser’s contemporaries: one cannot be sure whether a verb is transitive or not, for example, or whether it requires an animate Subject or Object, if one is not certain whether he has seen it before or whether it might have been differently used in Spenser’s time. Many of the examples from Spenser cited in previous chapters are still slightly odd or 'off' sounding even when they have been correctly parsed (e.g., To seeke her strayed Champion if she might attayne) or require a rather special understanding of a key term (e.g., That weaker sence it might haue rauisht quight). Further, Spenser omits Subjects of subordinate clauses, so that the best parsing is ungrammatical:

(8) but he againe
Shooke him so hard, that forced him to speake.

[Spenser, FQ, I.i. 42]

(9) The Geaunt strooke so maynly mercilesse,
That could haue ouerthrowne a stony towre,

[Spenser, FQ, I.vii. 12]

(10) [the battle of Red Cross Knight and the dragon; whom = RCK]
Whom so dismayd when that his foe beheld,
He cast to suffer him no more respire,
But gan his sturdie sterne about to weld,
And him so strongly stroke, that to the ground him feld.

[Spenser, FQ, I.xi. 28]

In each of these, the italicized that could be either a relative pronoun or a marker of a result clause. The missing Subject in the subordinate clause makes us consider the relative pronoun interpretation, but one must in that case make up a cognate object as antecedent (shooke a shake, strooke a stroke, etc.); the presence of so, on the other hand, suggests that we have a result clause with a missing Subject. There is no right (grammatical) parsing. The problem is even worse when the so is not around to point to a result clause reading (Sugden notes that Spenser does use that as a result clause marker without so¹):

(11) So as they trauelled, the drouping night....
Vpon them fell, before her timely howre;
That forced them to seeke some couert bowre....

[Spenser, FQ, IV.v. 32]

(12) With wrathfull hand I slew her innocent;
That after soone I dearely did lament.

[Spenser, FQ, II.iv. 29]

Sugden (p. 58) reads these thats as relative pronouns with sentential antecedents ("the unusually early night-fall"; “my wrathful slaying of her”), but if a result reading is possible earlier, it is so here, though (11) would still be ungrammatical. Subjects are missing from coordinate clauses in the next examples, but the Subject of the first clause is not the missing Subject of the later ones (as it would have to be to be grammatical even, I believe, in Early Modern English). I note the reading I prefer:

(13)           Her humblenesse low,
In so ritch weedes and seeming glorious show,
Did so much enmove(his) stout heroicke heart,
Andsaid, 'Deare dame, your suddein ouerthrow....

[Spenser, FQ, I.ii. 21]

(14) Much did his words the gentle Ladie) quell,
And turn'd aside for shame to heare, what he did tell.

[Spenser, FQ, V.iii. 16]

(15) [it = women’s faire aspect]
Yet could it not sterne Artegall retaine,
Nor hold from suite of his avowed quest,
Which he)had vndertane to Gloriane;
But left his loue, albe her strong request,
Faire Britomart, in languor and vnrest,
And he rode him selfe uppon his first intent:

[Spenser, FQ, V.viii. 3]

These examples are not difficult as the previous set because there is no alternative parsing to be weighed—we interpret them essentially as we would if there were pronouns present, looking back for the likeliest individual to function as Subject when the Subject of the first clause proves to be inappropriate (humbleness said is bad; his words turm'd (her) aside is bad, (turn'd, if coordinate to did quell, would be turn); it left... and rode him selfe is definitely bad). Nonetheless, the better reading is ungrammatical. Finally, in the next two examples, Objects have been ungrammatically deleted (again I indicate my preference along with the obvious function):

(16) (Hen [= Ate] false Duessa who full well did know
To be most fit to trouble noble knights,
Which hunt for honor, raised from below,
Out of the dwellings of the damned sprights....

[Spenser, FQ, IV.i. 19]

(17) The patron of true Holinesse,
     Foule Errour doth defeate;
Hypocrisie him to entrappe,
     Doth lo his home entreate.

[Spenser, FQ, Argument to I.i]

In these, again, one eventually works out what they have to mean, but one’s confidence that the best reading is grammatical is shaken, and one is less ready to prefer sentence structure to line division. The general procedure of reading by parsing is further challenged by the various irregular and highly unusual placement of phrases outside of subordinate clauses discussed in Chapter II and again exemplified in (10). When reading (10), we again work out what the lines have to mean, but without any confidence that the inferred parsing is supported by grammaticality.

Such are some of the consequences of writing—in Jonson’s somewhat severe words—"no language," but there are others which can be seen by considering Milton. We have seen numerous examples of Milton’s fondness for multiply coordinate structures (S V O, V O, V O, etc.). These are as rare in Spenser as they are common in Milton, and the reason would seem to lie partly in their running across several lines and partly in the 'contract' between poet and reader that they will parse if the reader is sufficiently conscious of syntactic structure. Milton can lead his reader through more complex syntactic thickets than Spenser because he rarely leaves him with only a choice between garden paths.

2. WORDSWORTH

Alpers suggests that the Romantics loved Spenser because he does allow one to follow the path of least resistance: instead of an active, decisive speaking voice sustaining sentence structure against the blandishments of line and rhyme, we have a “peculiarly passive sensibility,” which is mirrored in the reader’s diminished consciousness of sentence structure (p. 75). It is interesting to apply these notions to a Romantic poet, and I will do so to Wordsworth, who, as much as any Romantic, affected 'the Miltonic'. Even when he is most obviously echoing Milton, however, as in the beginning of The Prelude, there is a decidedly un-Miltonic looseness of syntactic structure. For one thing, the sentences often trail appositives or other phrases which are quite long, leaving the reader uncertain whether they initiate a new clause or not:

(18) Sometimes it suits me better to invent
A tale from my own heart, more near akin
To my own passions and habitual thoughts;
Some variegated story, in the main
Lofty, but the unsubstantial structure melts
Before the very sun that brightens it,
Mist into air dissolving! Then a wish,
My last and favourite aspiration, mounts
With yearning toward some philosophic song
Of Truth that cherishes our daily life;
With meditations passionate from deep
Recesses in man’s heart, immortal verse
Thoughtfully fitted to the Orphean lyre;

[Wordsworth, Prel I. 221-33]

The punctuation adds to the difficulty—one would expect the semicolon after Lofty rather than after thoughts (the 1805 version has only a comma after thoughts). The parallelism of with yearning and with meditations passionate suggests that they are appositive, though they are semantically alike only on one point (passion) and not on another (articulation). Alternatively, meditations passionate could, on semantic grounds, be appositive to philosophic song (they are both articulated), but this violates the definition of apposition, which applies only to like structures: here with meditations passionate is a prepositional phrase and cannot be appositive to the noun phrase philosophic song. Also, the relation of immortal verse to the preceding is a little uncertain: plainly it is coreferential to philosophic song, but is it in addition appositive to meditations passionate, or is there an ellipsed second toward ("mounts with meditations passionate toward immortal verse")? The syntax here is not so much permissive as it is indeterminate, and deciding all the questions just raised does not make the sense of the passage much clearer. In Wordsworth we may stop working out complete syntactic structures, not because it cannot be done, as sometimes in Spenser, but because it is distracting and irrelevant to do so—there are more direct ways to get the import of the passage. We realize the extent to which we have been able to relax syntactic analysis and hypothesis testing when we encounter a passage that does require attention to syntax:

(19) But from this awful burthen I full soon

235 Take refuge and beguile myself with trust
That mellower years will bring a riper mind
And clearer insight. Thus my days are past
In contradiction; with no skill to part
Vague longing, haply bred by want of power,

240 From paramount impulse not to be withstood,
A timorous capacity from prudence,
From circumspection, infinite delay.

[Wordsworth, Prel. I. 234-12]

It is certainly not easy to “part” the contradiction here. The double enjambment contributes to the problem: line 240 must not be taken as a modifier of want of power or of vague longing in the previous line ("a vague longing which is from paramount impulse...") but must be related to part at the end of the preceding line ("part longing from impulse..."). Even when Wordsworth warns us with contradiction, we take him to mean something vague like “self-deception” or “confusion” and are unprepared to work out the tight syntax of 'part a from b, c from d, from e, f'. The whole passage is really quite clever—we have been so lured into his frame of mind that we share his inability.

One of Wordsworth’s characteristic practices that most undermines reliance on parsing is his ellipsis of semantically rather empty main verbs. Consider the following two cases:

(20)       [I] listen to the grave reports
Of dire enchantments faced and overcome
By the strong mind, and tales of warlike feats,
Where spear encountered spear, and sword with sword
Fought, as if conscious of the blazonry
That the shield bore, so glorious was the strife;
Whence inspiration for a song that winds
Through everchanging scenes of votive quest
Wrongs to redress, harmonious tribute paid
To patient courage and unblemished truth,
To firm devotion, zeal unquenchable,
And Christian meekness hallowing faithful loves.

[Wordsworth, Prel. I. 174-85]

The easiest way to get the material following whence into a clause is to suppose an ellipsed main verb comes or came, which is largely redundant, given whence, but grammatically unusual to omit. One can force the material into a clause without assuming ellipsis if one takes paid as the main verb ("whence inspiration ... paid harmonious tribute to patient courage. . ."), but the tenses jar somewhat: why is the relative clause (a song that winds . . .) present tense if the “main verb” is past tense? The reading so derived is also irrelevant—a high price to pay for its grammaticality. The next case involves an ellipsed be:

(21)               Thanks to both,
And their congenial powers, that, while they join
In breaking up a long-continued frost,
Bring with them vernal promises, the hope
Of active days urged on by flying hours,—
Days of sweet leisure, taxed with patient thought
Abstruse, nor wanting punctual service high,
Matins and vespers of harmonious verse!

[Wordsworth, Prel. I.38-15]

One may continue to expect the main clause right up until the exclamation mark, and then one realizes the first line should be read “Thanks be to both....” Again, the ellipsis is a bit unusual, but it is better to lower one’s expectation that the text will be a succession of clauses than to exhaust oneself waiting for a verb that never actually comes. Another problem in this passage is whether days of sweet leisure is appositive to the promised active days. At first, the contrast of active׀leisure suggests that they are not coreferential, but as the modifiers taxed and punctual service accumulate, we begin to think the leisure could be pretty active. No quick decision is possible here: the situation is like that described by Stanley Fish with fiend׀spot. In this case, we do construct two entities and ponder the question of their possible identity.

Wordsworth’s use of appositives exemplified here does not quite fall under any of the categories delineated in the preceding chapter. As these appositives unfold, they seem to transform the initial formulation so that a possible underlying unity is discovered, which is equivalent to the realization that the two phrases are appositive after all. The effect is to redefine our understanding of the initial term, as here active is transformed so that it is compatible with leisure and then the opposition is recast in terms of ritual service, which is neither work nor play but something transcending both. This particular clash and resolution is absent in the 1805 version, which reads:

[11. 41—45]

There is a similar effect in the following lines from The Prelude where the initial clash of domineering instinct and fluent receptacle is so great that one at first resists seeing them as appositives but then begins to think that they may be appositive after all as the overtones of passivity in fluent receptacle become even more overt in the next that clause (which may be appositive to the preceding clause, there being a link via the notion of self-sufficiency):

(22) Nor did the inexperience of my youth
Preclude conviction, that a spirit strong
In hope, and trained to noble aspirations,
A spirit thoroughly faithful to itself,
Is for Society’s unreasoning herd
A domineering instinct, serves at once
For way and guide, a fluent receptacle
That gathers up each petty straggling rill
And vein of water, glad to be rolled on
In safe obedience; that a mind, whose rest
Is where it ought to be, in self-restraint,
In circumspection and simplicity,
Falls rarely in entire discomfiture
Below its aim, or meets with, from without,
A treachery that foils it or defeats;

[Wordsworth, Prel X. 164-78]

The passage is remarkable in the way it modulates insensibly from flirtation with the “Great Man” into stoicism (and, in the lines following, into a kind of Kantian moral consciousness). The changing philosophic stance is paralleled by shifts in the way that the first stance is viewed through the succession of appositives and equivalences: instinct—way and guide—fluent receptacle, the way and guide forming a kind of bridge from the activity of domineering instinct to the passivity of receptacle (which may be qualified in obscure ways by fluent). I am not sure whether Wordsworth considers the moral philosophies to be exactly the same or not: the direction of the thought away from political involvement is important, not distinctions of moral philosophies. Our initial understanding of domineering instinct is so modified by its identification with fluent receptacle that we are prepared for a further redefinition in the direction of even greater (political) passivity. The intent of the passages seems to be just the opposite of distinction, namely, to find a common ground underlying these stances without wrestling them into strict identity. It is interesting that the way and guide and fluent receptacle are not in the 1805 version—it is as if Wordsworth tried to assist the reader in the imaginative progression from one stance to the other. The 1805 version reads:

[11. 148-54]

These passages suggest a possibility we have not yet considered, namely, that the reader may stop parsing into well-formed sentences or propositions and stop specifying the reference of nouns and pronouns exactly. What then would the units of perception be? Wordsworth provides three kinds of structural clues. First, 'positive' things go together and 'negative' things go together in opposition to the positive things (notice how in the 1850 edition Wordsworth helps the reader to identify each petty straggling rill as the mob by adding Society’s unreasoning herd). Hence, when the good things and bad things are mixed, it is hard to part them, as in example (19)—the alertness to syntactic distinction and opposition has been lulled to sleep. Second, parallel phrases (e.g., the that-clauses and the with phrases of [18]) go together. With both of these clues, 'going together' may not be exactly apposition nor coordination, just association. Third, there is usually a strong rhetorical pointing to the initiation of a significantly new train of thought which to a considerable degree substitutes for sharp clause boundaries. One must attend to the beginnings of sentences which sustain a pattern (sometimes... sometimes....; then... now. . .), mark a reversal (nor...) or other shift (therefore, thus.. .), or break off with an interjection (Oh!...) or other emphatic construction (How oft...!). Finally, structural clues aside, the reader who is interpreting successfully will become attuned not only to the sorts of distinctions and points Wordsworth wants to make, but the sorts that he does not want to make and will not expect the reader to make.

Obviously this sort of handling of syntax has its limitations and dangers. One limitation is that the ability to draw sharp, quick distinctions and oppositions syntactically is lost. On the whole, this is not a major loss for Wordsworth, for he does not court the critical, analytic involvement of the reader that Milton or Donne does, but rather an involvement sympathetic to the exploration of feelings nearly too deep for words. One danger is that the reader will simply lose track of more and more things until he finally bogs down. I will cite two passages from The Excursion which illustrate the mind-numbing possibilities of Wordsworth’s verse when the subject or the sense require alertness to sentence structure:

(23) Happy is he who lives to understand,
Not human nature only, but explores
All natures,—to the end that he may find
The law that governs each; and where begins
The union, the partition where, that makes
Kind and degree, among all visible Beings;
The constitutions, powers, and faculties,
Which they inherit,—cannot step beyond,—
And cannot fall beneath; that do assign
To every class its station and its office,
Through all the mighty commonwealth of things;
Up from the creeping plant to sovereign Man.

[Wordsworth, Excur. IV. 343-49]

One’s grip on syntax begins to loosen in the first two lines: where is the rest of the Object of understand? It is also hard to decide what the constitutions, powers, and faculties is appositive to (kind and degree? union and partition? law that governs?), or whether it is perhaps a further Object of find. It is hard to decide on a referent for that when we aren't sure how many candidates there are. The passage continues:

(24) Such converse, if directed by a meek,
Sincere, and humble spirit, teaches love:
For knowledge is delight; and such delight
Breeds love: yet, suited as it rather is
To thought and to the climbing intellect,
It teaches less to love, than to adore;
If that be not indeed the highest love!

[Wordsworth, Excur. IV. 343-49]

It is not too clear what such converse refers to (exploring all natures?), and the it of the last few lines might be either converse or delight. On this last point, the exact reference could be said not to matter, since delight and converse should be one, but in the earlier ones a system of knowledge is being articulated, and here the obscure reference is fatal. By the end of the passage the weary reader may have shifted from 'doesn't matter' to 'don't care'. The attempt at parallelism is made (such converse, such delight in [24]; that governs, that makes, that do assign in [23]—these modify different noun phrases, however), but it doesn't adequately organize the passage.

In the next example, the reader is suddenly called upon to resolve grammatical ambiguities when he is scarcely alert:

(25)       Strains of power
Were they, to seize and occupy the sense;
But to a higher mark than song can reach
Rose this pure eloquence. And, when the stream
Which overflowed the soul was passed away,

30 A consciousness remained that it had left,
Deposited upon the silent shore
Of memory, images and precious thoughts,
That shall not die, and cannot be destroyed.

[Wordsworth, Excur. VII. 25-33]

The trouble begins here with that it had left, which could be a relative clause ("a consciousness which it had left") or a noun phrase complement ("consciousness of its leaving"). The line end and enjambed next line containing the oddly dangled participial deposited. . . support closing off the clause at the end of line 30, and memory, images, and precious thoughts appear to belong together in the same line, but eventually one realizes that they do not belong together—rather, images and precious thoughts is the delayed Object of left, which is then conclusively identified as a complement clause. We thus reconstruct “a consciousness remained that the stream had left images and precious thoughts that shall not die and cannot be destroyed deposited upon the silent shore of memory.” To parse this correctly, we must enjamb across two line ends pursuing the sentence structure, and, while Milton trains us to do this, Wordsworth does not. And we must parse it correctly: it is just plain wrong to take that it had left as a complete clause either relative or complementing. As a complete clause, the relative interpretation is better; about the time one adopts that reading, one discovers the missing Object and must revert to the complement clause interpretation. I do not see how Wordsworth’s customary rhetorical speaking voice could guide us through these lines—he is simply writing verse the reader does not expect him to write. Consciousness of sentence structure and the habit of rejecting garden paths are not things you can turn on and off.

3. FAULKNER

With the exception of the last example and (19), the complexities we find in Wordsworth could be found in prose: the line is not the unit of perception that it is in Spenser. Indeed, some of the same looseness of sentence structure can be found in Faulkner, and when reading Faulkner, one has the same experience of losing the thread in certain passages. Robert Zoellner has discussed some of the looseness of the prose in Absalom, Absalom!—the difficulty of locating referents of noun phrases, of deciding whether they are trailing appositives to the preceding sentences or Subjects of a verb to come; the large and complex chunks of modifying and parenthetical material separating Subjects from their verbs; the fragments and incomplete clauses—and has put forth the claim that Alpers made for Spenser: it frequently doesn't matter which reading one takes.² Here is part of Zoellner’s first example:

(26) It was a summer of wistaria. The twilight was full of it and of the smell of his father’s cigar as they sat on the front gallery after supper until it would be time for Quentin to start, while in the deep shaggy lawn below the veranda the fireflies blew and drifted in soft random—the odor, the scent, which five months later Mr Compson’s letter would carry up from Mississippi and over the long iron New England snow and into Quentin’s sitting-room at Harvard.

[Faulkner, ABS, 31]

The odor, the scent... is, as Zoellner notes, a trailing appositive, and it presents the additional difficulty of determining the referent: is it cigar smoke only, or is wistaria there too? (Note that an inference is needed to get the wistaria: twilight full of wistaria → smell of wistaria.) Obviously even the attempt to choose between alternatives is misguided, since the odor evokes the whole atmosphere of the evening and the place. Unfortunately, Zoellner also confuses the question of consciousness of sentence structure by making virtually contradictory claims about the way the reader should read. At first, he says, “Faulkner demands that the reader maintain the maximum possible consciousness of the whole extended sentence—the sentence-continuum—from beginning to end. In this case, the syntactical ambiguity of 'the odor, the scent' jars the reader out of his habitual casualness and forces him, if he hopes to maintain a sense of logical continuity, to keep the entire wordpattern in the vivid forefront of consciousness" (pp. 487-88), but later he argues that Faulkner is out to break down conventional, logical categorization and to present primary experience as an unsorted whole: “Faulkner will have no hierarchy of sentences or sequences of impressions; he aims at the total impression and the total sentence” (p. 489). (How does one maintain logical continuity while abandoning logical categorization?) I must confess I find the notion of total sentence intriguing, but I do not see how we can avoid the fact that it is with perception as with love: “the will is infinite and the execution confined... . the desire is boundless and the act a slave to limit.” The possibility latent in Zoellner’s qualification “if he hopes to maintain his sense of logical continuity” is real, I think, for many readers—they surrender that hope (or desire). They must certainly surrender it in a ’sentence', also cited by Zoellner, which appears a few lines farther on:

(27) That Sunday morning in June with the bells ringing peaceful and peremptory and a little cacophonous—the denominations in concord though not in tune—and the ladies and children, and house negroes to carry the parasols and flywhisks, and even a few men (the ladies moving in hoops among the miniature broadcloth of little boys and the pantalettes of little girls, in the skirts of the time when ladies did not walk but floated) when the other men sitting with their feet on the railing of the Holston House gallery looked up, and there the stranger was.

[Faulkner, ABS, 31]

Read it as often as you like; you will not find a main verb before the when. Clearly Zoellner is right that one should surrender to the impression being evoked here. The incantatory and. . . and. . . and... is a reliable indication in Faulkner that such surrender is in order. The case is much more advanced in Faulkner than in Wordsworth, just as the grammatical irregularities are more numerous. The parallel with Wordsworth can be carried one step further: what replaces syntax and punctuation is a highly rhetorical voice making heavy use of parallelism and the good words/bad words opposition. One reason both writers are said to exhibit intensely moral consciousnesses is that they require the reader to make active use of moral categorizations in perception—which is to say, they activate the moral consciousness of the reader. Also, when both rhetorical and syntactic structures break down, passages dissolve into “things” and “events” loosely associated but indeterminately related. There is one fairly reliable clue that one is not reading for sentences: upon reaching a period, one asks himself “what did that sentence say?” and cannot exactly answer. Usually one can say a good bit specifying what the sentence is about—i.e., the feeling evoked by the things and the tone of the passage—one is simply not prepared to specify what is predicated of what. Readers who are dissatisfied until they can arrive at a well-formed propositional structure frequently find Faulkner somewhat vexing in the way Conrad Aiken describes: “It is annoying, at the end of a sentence, to find that one does not know in the least what was the subject of the verb that dangles in vacuo—it is distracting to have to go back and sort out the meaning, track down the structure from clause to clause, then only to find that after all it doesn't much matter, and that the obscurity was perhaps neither subtle nor important.”³ As Aiken sees it, consciousness of sentence structure is exactly the wrong thing to bring to Faulkner:

Aiken does not say very must about how one perceives in a state of hypnotized immersion, and he is plainly uncomfortable about an unqualified commitment to irrationalism, but other critics have developed this way of defending Faulkner, and we will return to this question in the next chapter.

One might suppose, and in fact I did at one time suppose, that the ultimate signal to abandon sentence structuring is the suppression of punctuation. In fact, however, the unpunctuated stretches of interior monologue (and remembered speech) in Faulkner are rarely harder to parse into sentences than the punctuated sections and sometimes easier. It is as if the author, having taken away the clues of punctuation, more strictly honors the other signals of structure and less often constructs elaborate structures (most commonly, Faulkner omits periods but leaves commas and colons in). Anthony Burgess pointed out that this is so in Joyce as well (Joysprick, Chapter Four), noting that one can punctuate the passages fairly confidently, and one can also do so with Faulkner. Consider this passage from The Sound and the Fury:

(28) Women are like that they dont acquire knowledge of people we are for that they are just born with a practical fertility of suspicion that makes a crop every so often and usually right they have an affinity for evil for supplying whatever the evil lacks in itself for drawing it about them instinctively as you do bedclothing in slumber fertilising the mind for it until the evil has served its purpose whether it ever existed or no....

[Faulkner, SF, Vintage, 115]

It is interesting to notice how the structural signals take over: the nominative case pronouns mark the beginnings of new sentences; the appositive for phrases are marked by repetition of the for; fertilising obviously marks the beginning of a participial parallel to drawing, and so on. Clause boundaries are not always quite so evident, but they can always be made out (that is, we do not have overlapping syntax):

(29)    Country people poor things they never saw an auto before lots of them honk the horn Candace so She wouldn't look at me they'll get out of the way wouldn't look at me your father wouldn't like it if you were to injure one of them I'll declare your father will simply have to get an auto now....

[Faulkner, SF, Vintage, 113]

The italics, for once, are Faulkner’s and mark a train of thought interrupting the remembered speaking. One may perceive lots of them as the Subject of honk at first, but the they'll could not be coreferential to the Subject of honk—one eventually infers that Candace is present and addressed as you and is driving.

It is perhaps a bit misleading to refer to the clues we take advantage of here as wholly structural. The nominative forms zue and they in (28) are helpful, but they don't eliminate all uncertainties. The first lines of (28) might be divided:

Making the division here, however, obscures the opposition of we and they that plainly is part of the burden of the passage (cf.:

These passages become easier to read as we catch the voice of the speaker with its phrasing, diction and tone. I'll declare, for example, always initiates, never interrupts or terminates, a sentence, often introduces something hyperbolical, and so on. Faulkner makes us read more with our ears by taking away some of the clues of the eye, but he certainly does not force us to stop parsing the text into sentences.

4. JAMES

James is an interesting contrast to Faulkner because they have certainpoints of similarity, particularly the practice of interrupting sentences with lengthy complex modifiers and parentheticals which render the basic process of parsing difficult. again, critics have tried to specify the attitude toward syntax that the reader develops, rshould develop. Clearly the paramount difference between James and Faulkner is that James always writes grammatical sentences—one can rely on that, however difficult it may be in a given instance to put the sentence together. Jane Tompkins describes a sense of resolution one experiences as one wins through to a complete sentence in James. Citing the following sentence from “The Beast in the Jungle,”

(30) Then it was, just at the turn, as he afterwards made it out to himself, that, everything else failing, she herself decided to take up the case and, as it were, save the situation.

she says, “In James’s sentence, the effort of holding the mind in suspense while each of the intervening modifications is gathered in, intensifies the force of the outcome and produces, in the end, a sense that not only the ’situation,' but the sentence itself has been ’saved' ”⁴—a little bit later, she adds in an elegant imitation of the master’s syntax (though not his diction): “The hard-won syntactic resolutions, delayed by frustrating qualifications, share, by virtue of their intensity and the sense they afford of welcome relief, the orgasmic nature of the story’s conclusion” (p. 191). Plainly the sense of completion, not to say release, that she describes is available only to those who are conscious, even acutely conscious, of sentence structure. Further, as she implies, garden paths and other misperceptions are rarely fruitful—they are diversions from the main event—and in James it generally matters very much which is the best reading (e.g., whether the warning refers to Strether’s note or to Chad’s reply in [11] of Chapter III). Notice, however, that the element of choice between alternatives is not involved in reading James as much, say, as in reading Milton. There is no path of least resistance: one must struggle to put the sentence together at all. Further, one’s satisfaction in having assembled a sentence is sometimes diminished by an uneasiness about what qualifications have been made to the main thought. Indeed, I think Tompkins' account of the sense of syntactic resolution needs to be tempered with some remarks of Stephen Booth’s on “the lure of an unfinished syntactic unit” in Shakespeare’s Sonnets:

Problems of reference and coreference in James have also been said to heighten the reader’s consciousness of sentence structure. Seymour Chatman, for example, quotes and extends Vernon Lee’s early (1923) comment that James forces his readers to be “intellectuals” by constructing mazes of coreference: “[his reader] must remember what the pronoun stands for... the Reader will have to be, spontaneously, at full cock of attention, a person accustomed to bear things in mind, to carry on a meaning from sentence to sentence, to think in abbreviations; in other words he will have to be an intellectual, as distinguished from an impulsive or imageful person.”⁶ Chatman quite properly extends this observation to putting together coreferring definite noun phrases (pp. 85-86) and to supplying ellipsed material (pp. 100-101). The necessity of solving these problems, Chatman says, weeds out the lazy and inattentive reader: only those willing to adopt an “analytic stance” can survive. The solutions involved with reference and coreference differ in one important respect from those with phrase and clause structure, namely, one frequently attains only relative certainty, particularly in the case of ellipsed material. Uncertainties are perhaps never totally dispelled, and R. W. Short’s remarks are at least as faithful to my experience of the text as Tompkins' or Chatman’s: “The finality, the crystallization, that ordinary sentence order and signs defining relationship bestow upon the prose has been skilfully foregone in favor of other values. In these peculiar sentences, facts remain tentative, intentions fluid, and conclusions evanescent.”⁷ To be sure, the questions that Short says are unanswered are those of comprehension rather than sentence perception, but I think his comments are a salutary reminder that even the alert “intellectual” reader often experiences an incomplete grasp and qualified certainty.

5. STEVENS

Stevens demands attention to sentence structure and logical form while at the same time pressing them, and the readers, beyond their limits. The reader must learn to read resolutely across line and even stanza boundaries in pursuit of the sentence. Stevens enjambs as heavily as Milton, and even splits auxiliaries and main verbs across a line boundary—which is most uncommon even in Milton. Notice, for example, how one misses the point in the following lines from “The Sense of the Sleight-of-Hand Man” (cited in full in Chapter III [5]) if one lets the as if. . . dangle loosely:

(31) So bluish clouds
Occurred above the empty house and the leaves
Of the rhododendrons rattled their gold,
As if someone lived there.

[Stevens, CP, 222]

That is, the appearances create a sense of “presence” which is false (the house is empty). Similarly, somewhat later in the poem there is a fairly obscure it which must be identified—it is wrong to read the phrase loosely as “so it goes”:

(32) To think of a dove with an eye of grenadine
And pines that are cornets, so it occurs,
And a little island full of geese and stars:

The referent for it is essentially (falsifying) poetizing—one’s grand flights, etc.—of the first line and the 'occurrences' of (32). The point is perhaps made in the sharpest way by the disagreement between Helen Vendler and Frank Doggett about the reference of the last word in “The Man on The Dump” (again note Stevens’s use of definite noun phrases). The last line is “Where was it one first heard of the truth? The the” (CP, 203). Vendler holds that the last the refers to the self (oneself), citing lines from another poem, while Doggett identifies the referent as “reality.” As we have seen, in some passages of Romantic poetry these alternatives need not be distinguished, but here much turns on what referent one identifies for the.⁸

However, as Helen Vendler, struggling against annoyance, shows in her introductory chapter of On Extended Wings, Stevens frequently aims at collapsing distinctions he has set up, and we have already seen many examples of this in the foregoing chapters. Stevens' method is essentially dialectical in that an excess of syntax and logic lead to their transcendence. At least, they do when they are successful—when they are not, they collapse into confusion, surfeiting in their own too much. To read Stevens, one must parse and parse, and when one loses the thread, return and pick it up. Even this may not save one, but it is the only way to get beyond the fairly vague sense of the poems that is the besetting vice of Stevens criticism.

We have thus considered four modifications of our model of reading. The first is really an adjustment within the model giving greater weight to line boundaries as a clue to perception: one still parses into well-formed propositional structures and selects the best reading on the basis of grammaticality. The second is a further adjustment for coping with ungrammatical texts: one continues to aim for the best propositional content, but without sentence structure as a guide. The third modification, taking two propositional structures for the same stretch of text, is a more radical modification or departure from 'ordinary' reading, and the fourth is so radical a departure one might want to call it something else, for in it well-formed propositional structures are not consistently constructed, though pieces of them may be assembled: one reads rather by associating things into clusters or aggregates held together by feeling and related to other clusters by a current of feeling. This last sort of perception is present, I think, even when one is reading for well-formed propositions—it merely comes to have greater prominence as a primary way of perceiving with texts that obscure or elude parsing into sentences. Alliteration and other figures of sound, for example, may lead us to associate words together in a way that facilitates parsing, as in Milton’s place... prison . .. portion (Chapter II [53]), or may take a quasi-independent role in organizing the perception of the passage, as Alpers argues they do in Spenser, and Booth in Shakespeare. Readers must adjust the degree of their reliance on parsing as a way of apprehending for each text, and it appears that the appropriate mode of reading may vary from writer to writer and even over particular stretches of the same writer’s work. And surely the value readers place on the experiences provided by one sort of text or another depends on the sorts of mental operations that give them pleasure: some readers find what I may loosely call romantic texts vague, unclear, decadent, and unsatisfying, preferring the cool, sharp edges of a writer who forces decisions and repays the effort of making them; others find those texts dry and cold. We need not, and should not, stop with a cursory de gustibus, however, for a number of critics have tried to specify the particular effects and values of these diverse styles, and their methods of finding and describing values in syntax deserve closer examination—this will be the subject of the final chapter. Before that, however, in the next chapter we will extend our model of reading into areas having to do not with the structure of individual sentences as much as with the integration of sentences into their contexts.