No Priests Required

By Jonathan Pattishall, Staff Writer

How To Write A Sentence by Stanley Fish Harper 176 pages; $19.99 Hardcover

The premise of Stanley Fish’s latest book is deceptively simple: a famous literary theorist picks through a catalogue of his favorite well-crafted sentences, explaining why he finds them so commendable and how a writer might imitate their forms with reasonable, if unoriginal success. Randomly flipping through Fish’s chosen sentences—by Shakespeare, Milton and Donne, among others—a reader might assume that the book’s tone were laudatory, and the book itself yet another homage to great men and women of letters. The first line of the epilogue does nothing to dispel this assumption: “Of course there are more sentences to celebrate and many more authors to praise.”

But this premise is a trick, albeit an illuminating one. Despite epilogue, Fish hasn’t just been wasting pages celebrating famous sentences, or praising canonical authors. Actually, he’s often doing something very different. By focusing on others’ sentences, Fish is self-consciously stripping the writing process of its mystique. His goal is for everyone to be “comfortable with the task of writing,” and his mortal enemy is “obscurity,” not in writing itself, but in the explanation of writing.” Artful prose isn’t just a matter of intuition, but can be rationally dissected, so we have no need for high priests of letters. In fact, as Fish demonstrates by rewriting some of his favorite sentences, everyone can do it. Imitation may be flattery, but sometimes it’s also the sincerest form of deconstruction. While Fish may praise great authors and their sentences, the ultimate effect of his literary project is leveling.

On of the mountains he seeks to level early on is the dual monarchy of William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White, whose writing manifesto, The Elements of Style, “long ago attained the status of a classic.” Fish’s dealings with this book are complex, sometimes even inconsistent, and lend his text its most interesting problématique. He is clear about what he calls the “nonutility” of The Elements of Style as a true learning tool. As he puts it, “Strunk and White’s advice assumes a level of knowledge and understanding only some of their readers will have obtained; the vocabulary they confidently offer is itself in need of an analysis and explanation they do not provide.” Granted, Fish is referring to their general and relatively accessible prescriptive advice, such as “Do not join independent clauses by a comma,” but his point still stands: Strunk and White want people to write in the most approachable style possible, but do not do so themselves.

Though this tension between the two books is very real, it seems insignificant compared to what should be a more powerful mutual attraction: the ideology of style, and specifically the Protestant style. For instance, while analyzing a sentence from George Eliot’s Middlemarch, Fish points out that “Eliot wrote in a Protestant tradition that privileges the interior action over the performance of great deeds.” Expanding on this idea in the following paragraph, Fish can’t help but write himself into the interpretation, so that Eliot’s “resolution always to be true to an internal code of values” echoes his own earlier claim that the only necessity in writing is to honor an internal “structure of logical relationships.” Whether for morals (Eliot) or meanings (Fish), no priests are required. And how could they be, in a book by a Milton scholar? In the end, the moral of Fish’s literary theory is essentially Miltonic: he can not praise a fugitive and cloistered sentence.

This Protestant penchange on Fish’s part makes me wonder why he has no kind of words for Strunk and White’s underlying ideology. After all, in forbidding the use of an unnecessary prefix in The Elements of Style, those two opine that “the sober writer will abstain from the use of this wild additive.” A few pages later, White claims that “the approach to style is by way of plainness, simplicity, orderliness, sincerity.” The first sentences is nothing but the Baptist response to a Catholic aesthetic; the second is a perfect Weberian summation of the Protestant writing ethic. But Fish, normally so attuned to ideology, lets these otherwise ameliorating similarities go unmentioned, and that’s a shame, because they deserve sentences of their own.