Parataxis and Hypotaxis

Style, again. This time, rhetorical devices, including Hemingway's simple style:

Parataxis is the natural way of speaking English. It’s the way English wants to be spoken. English is a basically uninflected language. Everything depends on the word order. It’s all subject verb object. The man kicked the dog. The cat sat on the mat. The angels have the phone box. In Latin and German it’s different. Words can be moved around, but you still understand the sentence because of the endings. “Nauta amat puellam” and “Puellam nauta amat” both mean “The sailor loves the girl.” English isn’t like that. It’s paratactic. It’s linear. It’s one sentence. Then it’s another. 

The alternative, should you, or any writer of English, choose to employ it (and who is to stop you?) is, by use of subordinate clause upon subordinate clause, which itself may be subordinated to those clauses that have gone before or after, to construct a sentence of such labyrinthine grammatical complexity that, like Theseus before you when he searched the dark Minoan mazes for that monstrous monster, half bull and half man, or rather half woman for it had been conceived from, or in, Pasiphae, herself within a Daedalian contraption of perverted intention, you must unravel a ball of grammatical yarn lest you wander forever, amazed in the maze, searching through dark eternity for a full stop. 

That’s hypotaxis, and it used to be everywhere. 

Forsyth, Mark. The Elements of Eloquence: Secrets of the Perfect Turn of Phrase (pp. 60-62). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. 

Forsyth blames the Romantics for turning away from hypotaxis, with their search for all things natural in speech.

Hypotaxis is unnatural in English; nobody would ever say a sentence like the one above. You have to think calmly for a long time to come up with a good hypotactic sentence, and so a good hypotactic sentence tells the reader that you have been thinking calmly for long time. 

Forsyth, Mark. The Elements of Eloquence: Secrets of the Perfect Turn of Phrase (p. 64). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. 

Those looking for an alternative to Hemingway's style might consider the layers of subordinate clauses found in hypotaxis. But beware, it will be a hard sell for such writing to pass the ear test.

UPDATE: Out on social media, Neal gives a useful application of how to use both parataxis and hypotaxis:

Formula for a great speech to an audience of all educational levels. Parataxis with Anglo-Saxon (PAS) words. Restatement and addition of new information in hypotactic structure with introduction of latinate words. Restatement of new information in PAS. Iterate, finishing in parataxis.

Also, parataxis and hypotaxis are not rhetorical devices, such as, say anaphora, aposiopesis, chiasmus, or homeoteleuton are. The are syntactical forms, the use of which (along with assorted devices) can be used to characterize a style.

I believe the shorthand way of referring to ensembles of rhetorical style, back when people had more classical educations, where Ciceronian (hypotactic) and Senecan (paratactic).

 Note how he connects English's dual vocabulary to rhetorical effects--and famous public speakers.

The Double Vocabulary of English

Style, again.

As mentioned earlier, English has parallel vocabularies, based on the origin of the root words, such as the Germanic "drink" and the "Norman beverage".  In gross terms, the Germanic version is more forceful and everyday, the French more sophisticated, and the Latin and Greek more scholarly. (There are exceptions. This is English we're talking about. There's always an exception.)

Here's a video explaining more about these parallel tracks.

Anglish

Yep, back to style.

Little things make a mighty stir in little towns, which is why that Kingsford folk talked all that spring and summer about the three unacknowworth bodies, frightful cut as with many seaswords, and frightful twisted as by the tread off many ruthloose bootheels, which the tide washed in. And some folk even spoke off things paltry as the forsaken roadwain found in Ship Road, or true unmennish screams, most likely off a lost wight or northfaring bird, heard in the night by wakeful burgars. But off this idle town gossip the Fearful Old Man took no heed at all. He was by lund withdrawn, and when one is old and weak, one’s withholding is twice as strong. Beside, so eldern a seaheadman must have witted scores off things much more stirring in the faroff days off his unbethought youth.

--H. P Lovecraft, "The Fearful Old Man" 

Meet Anglish, the deliberate pruning from English of all those pesky loan words our magpie language has hoarded away over the centuries. Like the competing trend among grammarians to force Latin grammar on a Germanic language, Anglish is an attempt to shift English into an aesthetically "purer" form, conveniently ignoring the language as it is spoken.

But, for the writer, it provides an interesting exercise in style and word choice. English might be Germanic in origin, but it is also a blend of French, Latin, and Greek, owing to a mix of English peasants, Norman French nobles, and Latin-speaking clergy. This has built up parallel vocabularies, based on the origin of the root words, such as the Germanic "drink" and the "Norman beverage".  In gross terms, the Germanic version is more forceful and everyday, the French more sophisticated, and the Latin and Greek more scholarly. (There are exceptions. This is English we're talking about. There's always an exception.)

Anglish allows a writer to better understand connotation and the interplay of how language of origin affects word choice. In most cases, this is a mere writing exercise, but attempts are underway to convert such works as Shakespeare's plays, Lovecraft's Mythos, and famous orations into this more Germanic form.

Perhaps the prized example of Anglish comes from science fiction. Appendix N alumnus Poul Anderson explained atomic theory in his "Uncleftish Beholding" in one of the occasional thought exercises that sneak into science fiction. Here's how an Anglish speaker might explain the ways of worldken:

For most of its being, mankind did not know what things are made of, but could only guess. With the growth of worldken, we began to learn, and today we have a beholding of stuff and work that watching bears out, both in the workstead and in daily life. 

 The underlying kinds of stuff are the *firststuffs*, which link together in sundry ways to give rise to the rest. Formerly we knew of ninety-two firststuffs, from waterstuff, the lightest and barest, to ymirstuff, the heaviest. Now we have made more, such as aegirstuff and helstuff.

That said, Anglish has survived as a concept for over 300 years, but has never truly caught on beyond scholarly and writing exercises.

The Clave: A Contrast

Fourth in a series on style:

As mentioned earlier, language has an effect on music and thus poetry. In the previous post, we listened to the shuffle, the expression of syncopation in English popularized by Afro-American musicians.

Below is a video on the clave, the Afro-Cuban expression of syncopation in Spanish. It is a five-beat rhythm that does not match the two-syllable heartbeat of the English iamb. Instead, the pattern lends itself to the more lyrical Romance languages. This disparity between an odd-numbered rhythm and English's even-numbered heartbeat also explains why English language haiku is lacking when it attempts to follow the 5-7-5 syllable pattern of the Japanese form.

The lesson here for the stylist is to match the rhythm to the native pulse of the language.

The Shuffle

More groundwork for the musicality of style.

It comes as no surprise that the language that built its lyrical poetry on the da dum heartbeat rhythm of the iamb would popularize the same rhythm in the swings and shuffles of blues and jazz.

Listen to the bass in the video below for the same heartbeat rhythm in Shakespeare's Sonnet 18:

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date:

It takes a little work, but you can sing the sonnet at tempo to the accompaniment of Freddie King and have it retain the life of spoken language without sounding like a robot--or an elementary school language arts teacher. The challenge is to keep the recitation from sounding rote.

Missing Letters: Thorn

Here is a second video laying groundwork for a discussion of style.

Another example of stylistic shift over time affecting pronunciation and thus meter.

Of particular interest here, is the letter "thorn", a strange letter that looks like a lowercase "b" mashed with a "P" (check the video for an example). This letter did not survive the onset of printing, as, much as English printers tended to replace German umlauts with uncontracted vowels "ae", "oe", and "ue", Continental printers replaced the thorn with y. So "thee" and "thou" turned into "ye" and "you" on the page, obscuring the last remnants of the informal "you" grammar inherited from Anglo-Saxon. (It wouldn't surprise me to learn that it sped up the elimination of the informal tense as thee and thou became ye and you, and eventually just you.)

Shakespeare: Original Pronunciation

Rather than get swept up in the recent personality clashes in the PulpRev, I'd rather focus on an idea somewhat tangential to that discussion: how to learn style, or what to do when Hemingway's prose just doesn't carry the rhetorical weight needed in a passage.

But before I can get to those thoughts (And because I haven't mastered how to get multiple videoes on Blogger), I am going to lay a little groundwork prior.

In English, Shakespeare towers above all, in lyrical meter, rhetorical grammar, and characterization. But 400 years of linguistic shift obscures some of the puns and the meters used in his poetry. Thus many scholars have attempted to discover the original pronunciation of the plays from period sources.

Original pronunciation (OP) changes the meter of Shakespeare--or rather restores it from years of pronunciation drift. Any attempt to study Shakespeare for style needs to consider this, as to best understand drama and poetry is to hear it performed instead of reading it on the page.

For instance, the vowel shift on the word sleep, from sla-ep with an unstressed long A to slEEP with an accented long E, affects the stress on the word and the rhythm of the sentence.

For more on OP, including snippets of performances, check out the video below.

Audiobook Wednesday: Rappaccini's Daughter

"Rappaccini's Daughter", by Nathaniel Hawthorne, represents one of the earliest science fiction stories. Adapting an explorer's tale from India, it gave birth to a number of "Poisoned Garden" stories, where literary naturalists would use the poisoned garden as a vehicle to investigate the scientific progress of the age. Fans of weird fiction and science fiction will also see the influence of "Rappaccini's Daughter" in C. L. Moore's Northwest Smith stories. As foundational to science fiction as Frankenstein and The Castle of Otranto are, Hawthorne's novelette is a key to understanding not only weird fiction, but the American tradition of the short story.

The complete text can be found here, hosted by Columbia University.

Warning: Lupin The Third Will Steal Again...

Anthony's recent Castle of Cagliostro review at Castalia House sparked an idea. (By the way, I need to go back and explain why it is A Big Deal that Lupin III squared off with the Cagliostro family. His ancestor Arsene Lupin would be proud...) With the 50th anniversary of Lupin III coming up--and "Blue Jacket" Lupin hitting American TV--there's time to do a bit of an in-depth look at Japan's gentleman thief.

I'm thinking:

Lupin III TV series 4 (2015)
Daigen Jigen's Gravestone (2014)
Green vs. Red (2008)
Dead or Alive (1996)
Fuma Conspiracy (1987)
Lupin III TV series 2 (1977)
Lupin III manga (1967)

So, working backwards from the present day to the beginning of the MAD Magazine-inspired gentleman thief's adventure. I might substitute Castle of Cagliostro for the second TV series. Anthony's review was from the perspective of a Miyazaki fan and not really Lupin-centric.

While I have an eye for putting a fair bit of this on the Castalia House blog (my regular posting day falls right on Lupin III's 50th anniversary), the thief will appear here.as well. I've got far more Lupin III than appears on this list, and I also want to take a closer look at his grandpa, the French gentleman burglar Arsene Lupin. Without him, there would no Shadow, Batman, or Lupin II.

In the meantime, I hope you have a chance to catch Lupin III's return to American TV on Saturday on Cartoon Network

Appendix M: "Haita the Shepherd" by Ambrose Bierce

Ambrose Bierce wrote horror short stories that were later mined by Clark Ashton Smith and H. P. Lovecraft for their own stories. In this one, a shepherd prays to Hastur.

The Lost Musketeer

In compiling the list of pulp-influencing works I've taken to calling Appendix M, one observation leaped off the page.  French writers influenced English language fiction, and vice versa.  A Great Conversation of popular fiction was underway in the 1800s and early 1900s between America, Britian and her Dominions, and France.  This should have been obvious as, even today, the stories of Jules Verne, Alexandre Dumas, and The Phantom of the Opera still are celebrated and remade.  The French influence in detective pulps in unmistakable, as American hardboiled detective stories drew greedily from the well of noir.   But upon reading Appendix N, the list of fantasy works that influenced Dungeons and Dragons, French contributions are absent.  Nor can French writers be found in the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series.  With minor exceptions such as The Planet of the Apes and the Metal Hurlant comics, the French post-pulp contribution to English language science fiction has been minimal.

Unfortunately, the French abandoned science fiction after suffering the great civilization wound of World War One.  From a vantage point 100 years in the future, it is not always readily apparent the damage done to the cultures of Europe by the Great War.  World War Two is more recent, and is portrayed as the Great Crusade and the Last Good War.  Further, America was on the winning side of both wars and managed to be relatively untouched by the ravages of war, both in casualties and collateral damages.  But where World War Two invigorated America, World War One disillusioned and demoralized Europe as their best and brightest men died by the millions in a nightmare of technology, pride, and idealism.  This still haunts European cultures to this day, as writer Sarah Hoyt, a Portuguese immigrant, points out.  And, as French men died defending their country, so did hope and the desire to write science fiction.

Only in the 1950s did science fiction rekindle in France, using Campbelline and Golden Age ideas as a starting point.  But, instead of rejoining the Great Conversation of the Gilded Age with American and English writers, French writers took their science fiction in different directions, conversing instead with Germany, Italian, and Japanese writers.* (However, since French, Continental, and Japanese science fiction retain elements of the pulps expunged from the English speaking tradition, perhaps it is the English speaking tradition that is out of step with the times?)  While the reasons for the French abandonment of science fiction and fantasy are clear, the reasons for the divorce from the prior English speaking traditions are not yet clear. 
 
***

*A potential generalization about a European reception to Campbelline works might be made, as C. S. Lewis was bored by the Campbelline period, Michael Moorcock led New Wave in rebellion against it, and the French abandoned it wholesale.  However, this will require additional reading to properly prove.

Appendix M: A First Draft

The pulps, even driven by entertainment instead of literary accomplishment, were written in conversation with the existing corpus of popular and literary works.  Hero pulps such as Doc Savage and the Shadow drew from Tarzan, Sherlock Holmes, and even the anti-heros of A. J, Raffles, Fantomas, and Arsene Lupin (the first, not the grandson).  Science fiction drew from the works of Edgar Allan Poe, H. G. Wells, and Jules Verne.  Even Lovecraftian horror was built on the edifice of Ambrose Bierce and Guy de Maupassant.  And popular fiction throughout the world, from English penny dreadfuls, to Depression era American pulps to Japanese light novels, owes an unpayable debt  to Edgar Allan Poe.

In an attempt to piece together the century old roots of today's genre fiction, I have compiled a first pass at a list of works written prior to 1920 that inspired the Golden Age of the Pulps.  As this is an ongoing investigation, the list is incomplete and open to suggestions.  In the spirit of Dungeons & Dragons' Appendix N, let's call this Appendix M until a better name arises.

***

Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre - the Fantomas stories

Ambrose Bierce - "An Inhabitant in Carcosa"

Edgar Rice Burroughs - the Barsoom stories, the Tarzan stories, and the Pellucidar stories

Robert W. Chambers - The King in Yellow

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - the Sherlock Holmes stories, The Lost World

Alexandre Dumas - The Three Musketeers serials, The Count of Monte Cristo

Lord Dunsany - The Gods of Pegana, Tales of Wonder, The Book of Wonder, The King of Elfland's Daughter

E. W. Hornung - the A. J. Raffles stories

Maurice Leblanc - the Arsene Lupin stories

Gaston Leroux - The Phantom of the Opera

Guy de Maupassant - "Le Horla",  "The Necklace"

Edgar Allan Poe - "Mellonta Tauta", "The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall", "The Pit and the Pendulum", "The Tell-Tale Heart", "The Purloined Letter", "The Cask of Amontillado", The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket

Robert Louis Stevenson - Treasure Island, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Jules Verne - Journey to the Center of the Earth, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Around the World in Eighty Days, From the Earth to the Moon

H. G. Wells - The Time Machine, War of the Worlds, The Island of Dr. Moreau