Blogger’s note: What follows is some 1,200 words on writing and reading. Nothing to do with politics at all, nor snark, alas. So get off here if you’re not of a mind for some of what we would have called in the dead-tree era of magazines a “back-of-the-book” piece. If, on the other hand, y’all …
Great Sentences: Daniel Deronda editionPost + Comments (129)
So what first caught my eye/ear there? That would be the way Eliot managed to construct a physical space out of words — and then impose both design and motion upon it. Gwendolen Harleth (to whom we’ve not yet been properly introduced), is “bending”…and then, in an instant returns both to her roulette game and to erect posture, “the full height of a graceful figure.” That’s a delineation of three-dimensional space written by someone who’s looked at a lot of painting. It presents a tableau (Gwendolen bending and speaking to a sitting player beside her…
…and then it animates that set piece in a way that completes the visual description through motion: Gwendolen returns to the game, and through that gesture reveals her carriage, her figure and her complicated beauty. In writing classes we talk all the time about that old (true) cliché, the need to show rather than tell. This is what it looks like, accomplished by one of the greats.
Next, I noticed all the character-work this little string of words manages to do. We know on meeting Gwendolen that she’s a gamester (as Jane Austen might have put it) — not just a watcher of the game, but someone enmeshed in the social web of the play, talking to her anonymous tribal kin within the temporary and artificial village about the tables. Then we get that last piece of not-quite description: a face that we are compelled to imagine, knowing only that it could be lovely — and that it is marked by some quality that arrests attention, and perhaps desire.
That is: Eliot here invites the reader to enter into the space of her novel. We must, constrained by only the merest touch of the author’s authority, construct Gwendolyn’s image. Eliot does not restrict what we may imagine. All she tells us is that as we read, the woman in our head must hold both our attention and an ambivalence of judgment. We know from the start that she is flawed, and likely a danger — to herself, probably, as well as others. She may earn sympathy as well as curiosity; but we will have to read on to find out.
One damn sentence!
Maybe I’m overdoing it here. Certainly, I’ve read the novel before (though, as noted, very long ago), and I know something of what to expect from and for Miss Harleth. But as I opened up the book again just a few days ago, I tell you, this line stopped me in my tracks. The use of just the suggestion of visual representation to orient us to scene, character and plot is the work of a virtuosos. Add to that the marvelously tricky way Eliot co-opts the reader into participating in the moment, and you have a writer’s master class in just fifty-two words.
It’s at moments like these that I truly love my craft, not to mention the company it lets me keep — even if all I can do, as here, is hold that master’s coat.
(Oh, and I suppose if you’ve labored this far, you’ve earned an open thread. Have at it.)
*Properly, “The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” But I’ve always known it in the other way, so there it is.
**I picked up Daniel Deronda, after a lapse of decades since last I read it stimulated by Ta-Nehisi Coates’ blogging on perhaps my favorite novel of all time, Eliot’s Middlemarch. TNC is doing much the same thing I am here, only in greater depth, and engaged with more of the book and Eliot’s technique.
Images: Annibale Caracci, Two Children Teasing a Cat, c. 1590
Caravaggio, The Card Sharps, 1594