The American Sentence

The nature, history and transformation of the American sentence in XX century American fiction is the focus of the current essay which examines the shift from the oracular to ordinary style. This is the contrast between Henry James and Ernest Hemingway, or Thomas Wolfe and Cormac McCarthy. It is a shift in tone and syntax from an elaborate rhetoric and rhythm to a pointed, direct style that wastes no words. It suggests an impatient style reflecting an age of intensity, speed, and thrust. The leisurely and intricate style of late XIX and early XX century American writers loses its energy, although individual authors experiment and, within the body of their work, shift from an initial, ornate method to one that is immediate and precise. A new, fragmented cogency takes over, although this is not a prescriptive formula. There is a stylistic pendulum at work alternating between, say, the elaborate writing of David Foster Wallace or Don DeLillo and that of Raymond Carver or Jennifer Egan. The dynamics of this shift is the center of this discussion. Examples of XX century writers include Gertrude Stein, William Faulkner, J.D. Salinger, Thomas Pynchon, Cormac McCarthy and Jennifer Egan. Overlooked, the sentence remains the core of literary expression but it is a problematic form associated with such cultural changes as the telegraph, World War II and crime writing, as much as the literary imagination. Its permutations may, in fact, represent the “moral history” of America, its shifts in style reflecting the conflict between traditionalism and innovation, conservatism and experimentation.