ShoutGrace
05-01-2007, 04:08 PM
This thread can be about Hemingway’s writing in general (I titled it thusly out of a lack of ingenuity), or about ablative absolutes and terse prose :D. The principle reason why I started this thread was to see what people thought about Hemingway’s grammatically impeccable 171 word sentence (which follows below).
Jamesian’s sentence in another thread reminded me of this gem I uncovered in a little book entitled, “The Practical Stylist,” an English prose grammar and style manual.
It [an ablative absolute] is certainly a construction you should use with caution. It can sound exactly like a bad translation. But able writers come to it sooner or later, whether knowingly or through discovering for themselves the horsepower in a subordinate clause milled down to its absolute minimum of noun and participle, or noun and adjective, or even noun and noun. Hemingway uses it frequently. Here is one of the noun-noun variety at the end of a sentence about pistols in To Have and Have Not: “ . . . their only drawback the mess they leave for relatives to clean up.” And here are two noun participle ones (he playing and the death administered), in a passage that will serve as a closing illustration of how a complex sentence can subordinate as many as 164 words to the 7 of its one main clause (“they will put up with mediocre work”):
If the spectators know the matador is capable of executing a complete, consecutive series of passes with the muleta in which there will be valor, art, understanding, and, above all, beauty and great emotion, THEY WILL PUT UP WITH MEDIOCRE WORK, cowardly work, disastrous work because they have the hope sooner or later of seeing the complete faena; the faena that takes a man out of himself and makes him feel immortal while it is proceeding, that gives him an ecstasy; moving all the people in the ring together and increasing in emotional intensity as it proceeds, carrying the bullfighter with it, he playing the crowd through the bull and being moved as it responds in a growing ecstasy of ordered, formal, passionate, increasing disregard for death that leaves you, when it is over, and the death administered to the animal that has made it possible, as changed, and as sad as any major emotion will leave you.
Jamesian’s sentence in another thread reminded me of this gem I uncovered in a little book entitled, “The Practical Stylist,” an English prose grammar and style manual.
It [an ablative absolute] is certainly a construction you should use with caution. It can sound exactly like a bad translation. But able writers come to it sooner or later, whether knowingly or through discovering for themselves the horsepower in a subordinate clause milled down to its absolute minimum of noun and participle, or noun and adjective, or even noun and noun. Hemingway uses it frequently. Here is one of the noun-noun variety at the end of a sentence about pistols in To Have and Have Not: “ . . . their only drawback the mess they leave for relatives to clean up.” And here are two noun participle ones (he playing and the death administered), in a passage that will serve as a closing illustration of how a complex sentence can subordinate as many as 164 words to the 7 of its one main clause (“they will put up with mediocre work”):
If the spectators know the matador is capable of executing a complete, consecutive series of passes with the muleta in which there will be valor, art, understanding, and, above all, beauty and great emotion, THEY WILL PUT UP WITH MEDIOCRE WORK, cowardly work, disastrous work because they have the hope sooner or later of seeing the complete faena; the faena that takes a man out of himself and makes him feel immortal while it is proceeding, that gives him an ecstasy; moving all the people in the ring together and increasing in emotional intensity as it proceeds, carrying the bullfighter with it, he playing the crowd through the bull and being moved as it responds in a growing ecstasy of ordered, formal, passionate, increasing disregard for death that leaves you, when it is over, and the death administered to the animal that has made it possible, as changed, and as sad as any major emotion will leave you.