How Syntax Changes Meaning — The Context Of Adjacent Words

The third page of Amit Chaudhuri’s wafer-thin 2022 novel Sojourn finds the protagonist—an Anglo-Indian writer, like Chaudhuri himself—having breakfast: “The next morning I had a dark bread I’d never had before with coffee.” He is in Berlin, a stranger in a strange land, hence the unfamiliar bread. Had the author wanted clarity, though, the sentence should have read, “The next morning I had with coffee a dark bread I’d never had before”—unless he meant to suggest that the writer had indeed eaten this sort of bread before, but never, until now, with coffee. Alternatively, he might have told us, “The next morning, with coffee, I had a dark bread I’d never had before.” Substitute a word or two—say, “over coffee,” instead of “with coffee”—and the possibilities ramify still further. The whole tone might shift.

If a change of style is a change of subject, as Wallace Stevens averred, then a change of syntax is a change of meaning. Word order is, if not all, then nine tenths. I exaggerate, but I do so advisedly, as a corrective to the overemphasis on word choice, the unjust rule of the mot juste (recall here the old saying about the difference between lightning and a lightning bug) that dominates, to the detriment of other concerns, contemporary literature and creative writing. At times, this passion for the right—or the unusual—word reaps dividends; at others, it merely produces an uncalled-for flood of verbed nouns, portmanteaus, adjectives wrenched out of joint.

So in verse or prose you might find a sentence like “The jackdaw raises its head from the feeder, slipstreams away”—where that unusual verb, divorced from its usual meaning, is used in novel fashion to suggest fluidity of movement, speed. Or take the opening of “Pulse,” a short story recently published in The New Yorker: “He footed off his shoes, the logs balanced on an arm, and tugged the door shut.” Novelty is fine (so long as it’s not mistaken for originality), but it is hardly the only way to catch the reader’s eye, or, hold her attention. Word order all by itself can make a sentence new.

Novels today are rich in solecisms like Chaudhuri’s. Essays, news articles, and other journalistic products are worse. Often, their authors are all too clearly estranged from the full resources of the English language: What should be putty in their hands is tough, fibrous, unworkable. Or they just can’t be bothered. They plunk down words one after the other like inopportune Tetris blocks, mismatched, ill fitting, and in the wrong order. We listen for the chord of a powerful harmony, and hear only dissonance—unwitting dissonance, awkwardness without the saving intention of art. By contrast, when Dostoevsky’s underground man stumbles over his words, trails off in ellipses, you can be sure it is intentional, if not on his part, then on Dostoevsky’s; the syntax reflects the unhappy man’s admissions, evasions, and counterevasions.

One of the most common syntactical cock-ups is the misplaced or dangling modifier. “Having been accused of taking bribes to steer research, Harvard University has suspended Professor Jane Doe.” See the problem? It is, presumably, the professor who has been taking bribes, not the university, yet the word order suggests otherwise. This sort of mistake crops up everywhere; the preceding sentence is my own invention, but I could easily have pulled similar examples from mass-circulation magazines, online media, wire services, or newspapers of record. This is how a New York Times writer recently described the 1998 film Dark City: “Set in a noirish metropolis, where the sun never sets and its citizens cannot recall their pasts, humankind is ruled by mysterious telekinetic beings.”

Such outlets, after all, are staffed with the college graduates of today—and no less than the late David Foster Wallace, teaching English lit in the early 2000s, clued us in to the sorry state of English education in the most populous English-speaking country in the world. Finding invariably each semester, with the first set of papers, that his students were totally ignorant of “what a clause is or why a misplaced only can make a sentence confusing or why you don’t just automatically stick in a comma after a long noun phrase,” Wallace, angrily, would veer from the syllabus and spend the next three weeks not teaching literature, but providing remedial usage and grammar instruction, “during which my demeanor,” he wrote, “is basically that of somebody teaching HIV prevention to intravenous-drug users.… I all but pound my head on the blackboard… I tell them they should sue their hometown schoolboards, and mean it.”

But enough. To parade before you one example after another of syntactical sin, letting you choose the most egregious (or most delicious, if you’re a wicked sort), would be to play Mrs. Malaprop as a madam—what could be more dismal? (Perhaps to suggest that the officiant at a wedding should thus entreat the assembly: “Speak now, or hold your peace forever”; or that a mother should read to her child a folktale from those famous connoisseurs the Grimm Brothers.) More agreeable would be to examine two or three shining examples of excellent syntax to see what we can learn.

We might look profitably, first, at the famous opening of Ulysses: “Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.” Joyce’s unerring eye and ear give this sentence a feeling of inevitability such as few others possess, so much so that (though I checked my work to be sure) I was able to copy it out from memory, verbatim. Is it the word choice? Partly. But even without altering a single word or committing a gross offense against grammar, we can easily muck things up. For example:

Buck Mulligan, stately, plump, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed, came from the stairhead.

Bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed, stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead.

Or, confusingly (is the stairhead plump and stately?):

Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, stately, plump, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.

Or, worse, we might end the sentence with its preposition, as many writers today habitually do:

Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather that a mirror and a razor lay crossed on.

The sentence lands with a thud; its grandiloquence deflates; the plaintive “womp-womp” of a tuba seems to attend the lackluster finish. And if we add or change a few words while disrupting the word order, what was once immortal becomes instantly forgettable, if not grating:

Bearing a bowl of lather that a mirror and a razor lay crossed on, Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, looking plump and stately.

Bearing a bowl of lather with a mirror and razor on it, Buck Mulligan, plump and stately, came from the stairhead.

And so on. What you might have noticed in reading all these maladroit variants is that Joyce chose for the opening line of his magnum opus ordinary words: “plump,” “bearing,” “bowl,” “lather,” “mirror,” “crossed.” Only the unusual word order alerts us to the fact that something extraordinary is about to begin.

To begin a sentence is to launch into the void—I wanted “launch voidward” here but was too chicken—and syntax plays a large role in determining whether, plummeting toward the sentence’s end like a parachutist, you come to rest violently or serenely, with a broken leg or with a smile on your face. And for that matter, syntax does a great deal to determine what the descent itself is like, whether the peregrine’s killing stoop or the autumn leaf’s timorous fall.

The half-literate wretches who write in a rush—professional bloggers and tabloid hacks, Substack heroes and Twitter gods, with their urgent deadlines and instant opinions (just add hot water…with someone else in it)—fall headlong. Or pratfall. Like people arriving home with overloaded arms, carrying too many parcels, they can spare no thought for decorum; they simply look for the nearest flat surface on which to set down their burdens, in whatever order, for the readiest means to get their point across, however inapt, good sense and domestic tranquility be damned.

Shirley Hazzard wouldn’t have hesitated to write “voidward.” How does she begin, in her celebrated 1980 novel The Transit of Venus, an important pair of sentences? In this scene, Caroline Bell is newly aware of Ted Tice’s desire for her, which she has rebuffed. Nevertheless: “In the night or in any pause she might now, if she chose, feel his consciousness of her. Through all the events and systems of her days it would persist, like the clock that is the only audible mechanism of a high-powered car.”

How would it be if Hazzard had written, “If she chose, she might feel now, in the night or in any pause, his consciousness of her.” Serviceable, if undeniably weaker, and a little hard to parse. Or worse, much worse: “She might now feel in the night or in any pause his consciousness of her, if she chose.” Hazzard, masterly, learned well the lesson that an editor of mine, a lifetime ago at CNN, refused to admit: that in most cases a sentence is strongest when it closes with the point you want to stick in a reader’s mind instead of dribbling off into inconsequence or supplemental detail. This, unfortunately, is what every newspaper story does when it leads with something like: “‘I’ve never seen scorpions this size,’ said Mr. Hamilton, a professor at the Folderol Institute of Arachnid Studies and an expert in scorpion morphology.” Like a warm bath, its familiarity both soothes and enervates.

Hazzard’s second quoted sentence, however, appears to violate this rule. Reverse the order of the prepositional phrase and the noun-verb portion, and you get this: “It would persist through all the events and systems of her days,” which, okay, is certainly weaker, but why not end with “her days”—“Like the clock that is the only audible mechanism of a high-powered car, it would persist through all the events and systems of her days”—rather than that simile about the clock in the automobile? In this case, because the comparison sets up a highly charged bit of dialogue:

She said that to him, about the clock, exorcising it with her laugh. And he replied, “It’s not a clock you’re describing, it’s a time-bomb.”

“So there’s a limit, then. Time-bombs must have a stop.”

“Not a limit. A climax.”

The author wants you to feel something inevitable ticking away, powered by but imprisoning her characters; hence the image of the clock in the car, a machine within a machine.

Another opening sentence, this one from Hugh Kenner’s The Pound Era. To read it, a masterpiece of pre-Internet scholarship, is to confront the chasm between erudition like Kenner’s (raised up in those halcyon days before social media turned everyone’s brains to mush) and the faux learning, the pseudoliteracy that today fills the books even of celebrated writers and public intellectuals. Anyway, here is the first sentence, which bears—or demands—re-reading: “Toward the evening of a gone world, the light of its last summer pouring into a Chelsea street found and suffused the red waistcoat of Henry James, lord of decorum, en promenade, exposing his Boston niece to the tone of things.”

To perfect this sentence, with its drama and surprises, its sense of unfolding discoveries, in which Henry James is neither subject (“light”) nor direct object (“red waistcoat”), cost Kenner weeks of work; the entire book took ten years. Returning to its magnificent opening, I think of what Kenner himself wrote about William Carlos Williams’s 1930 “Poem” (“As the cat / climbed over / the top of // the jamcloset…”): “It is one sinuous suspended sentence, feeling its way and never fumbling.” Without subjecting Kenner’s grand sentence, itself quite sinuous, to any ugly permutations, it should be immediately apparent that even without changing a single word it could be written a dozen different ways, all of which would be incomparably worse than the order Kenner gave it. And just see what happens if we strip-mine the raw information he provides and use it to construct the sort of beginning that is far more familiar, more pedestrian: “Henry James, wearing a red waistcoat, was walking in a Chelsea street with his niece from Boston, when…”

Quelle horreur—and for that matter, why the soupçon of French in Kenner’s sentence? By this he means to convey the atmosphere of European culture in which James moved, and he does this while also elegantly conveying the fact of the great writer out walking with his American and, we may presume, less sophisticated niece, whom he had taken under his wing.

Kenner understood the power of word choice as well as word order, in English as in French; the fascinating first chapter of his book is titled “Ghosts and Benedictions.” What he teaches—and for years he taught, like Wallace, illiterate students—is that a concern for putting the best words in the best order shouldn’t be the exclusive province of poets. Syntax is part of the art of saying. Command of it can make the highest prose, like poetry, in W.H. Auden’s famous formulation, “a way of happening, a mouth.”

And now, like a magician explaining his trick, I could say: We began with dark bread being eaten with coffee; we have returned, full circle, to a mouth. Structure is merely syntax writ large.

If, coiled in its mad didacticism, this essay carries a fond wish, it is this: that the next time you set out to compose something important, perhaps a passion project that you have been putting off for years, perhaps (cough, cough) a long-deferred essay, be sure—bearing syntax in mind—you don’t well write it, nor write well it, but rather write it well.