164 THE SENTENCE
For Practice
> In a brief paragraph of about 100 words describe a football game or a party. Use a segregating style to analyze the scene or action.
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forgets the dull routine of army life by fantasizing a romantic adventure with the heroine:
Maybe she would pretend that I was her boy that was killed and we would go in the front door [of a small hotel] and the porter would take off his cap and I would stop at the concierge's desk and ask for the key and she would stand by the elevator and then we would get in the elevator and it would go up very slowly clicking at all the floors and then our floor and the boy would open the door and stand there and she would step out and I would step out and we would walk down the hall and I would put the key in the door and open it and go in and then take down the telephone and ask them to send a bottle of capri bianca in a silver bucket full of ice and you would hear the ice against the pail coming down the corridor and the boy would knock and I would say leave it outside the door please.
Both Grahame and Hemingway use the freight-train sen- tence to describe an experience taking place within the mind.
The style suggests the continuous flow of dreaming, for we fantasize in a stream of loosely connected feelings and ideas and images, not in neatly packaged sentences of intricately related clauses and phrases tied together by if, but, yet, therefore, consequently, on the other hand. Indeed, we some- times fantasize not in words at all but in imagined percep- tions, as Hemingway implies ("and you would hear the ice against the pail"). Hemingway also goes further than Gra- hame in imitating the mental state of fantasy: his one sentence is much longer and its flow unimpeded by punctuation. This technique is a variety of what is called "stream of conscious- ness," a way of writing that suggests a mind feeling, dreaming, thinking in a loose associational manner.
Multiple Coordination and Parataxis
The Grahame, Hemingway, and biblical examples all use mul- tiple coordination, linking clauses by coordinating conjunc- tions—in these cases, as in most, by using the word And.
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Instead of being coordinated, however, independent clauses can be butted together without conjunctions, in which case they are conventionally punctuated by semicolons, though sometimes commas are clear enough. This is called parataxis.
Although either multiple coordination or parataxis is pos- sible in a freight-train sentence, they are not exact equivalents.
Broadly speaking, the first is called for when the ideas or feelings or perceptions are changing—and when the writer desires a quick and fluid movement from clause to clause.
These conditions are true of the three examples we have just seen, as they are of the following relatively short sentence by Hemingway:
It was a hot day and the sky was bright and the road was white and dusty.
There is movement here, involving both the scene and the sense by which we perceive it: we feel the heat, see the sky, lower our eyes to gaze down the road. The sentence style directs our senses much as a camera directs them in a film, guiding us from one perception to another, yet creating a con- tinuous experience. The freight-train style, then, can analyze experience much like a series of segregating sentences. But it brings the parts more closely together, and when it uses mul- tiple coordination, it achieves a high degree of fluidity.
On the other hand, fluidity is not always desirable. Ideas or perceptions may be repetitive, with little change and noth- ing to flow together. Then parataxis is preferable to multiple coordination. In the following example Virginia Woolf, sum- marizing a diary of an eighteenth-century Englishman visiting France, uses a freight-train style to mock his insularity:
This is what he writes about, and, of course, about the habits of the natives. The habits of the natives are disgusting; the women hawk on the floor, the forks are dirty; the trees are poor; the Pont Neuf is not a patch on London Bridge; the cows are skinny; morals are licentious; polish is good; cabbages cost so much; bread is made of coarse flour.
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Each detail is another instance of the same underlying insen- sitivity. By hooking her clauses with semicolons (in one case with a comma) Woolf stresses the dull, unyielding vision of the diarist.
Along with its advantages, the freight-train sentence has limitations. Like the segregating style, it does not handle ideas very subtly. The freight-train sentence implies that the thoughts it links together with grammatical equality are equally significant. But usually ideas are not of the same order of importance; some are major, others secondary. Moreover, this type of construction cannot show very precise logical relationships of cause and effect, condition, concession, and so on. It joins ideas only with such general conjunctions as and, but, or, nor or even less exactly with semicolons and commas.
The Triadic Sentence
A second deficiency of the freight-train sentence is that it lacks a clear shape. Being open-ended, it has no necessary stopping place; one could go on and on adding clauses. As a way of providing it with a clearer structural principle, the freight-train sentence is sometimes composed in three units and is called a triad:2
Her showmanship was superb; her timing sensational; her dramatic instinct uncanny. Robert Coughlan Business executives, economists, and the public alike knew little of the industrial system they were operating; they were unable to di- agnose the malady; they were unaware of the great forces operating beneath the Surface. Thurman Arnold
Often, as in these examples, the three clauses are paratactic rather than coordinated because the triadic sentence tends to
2. These sentences are also called tricolons. Loosely, colon designated in an- cient Greek rhetoric an independent clause that was part of a longer sentence.
A tricolor! is a sentence of three such clauses.
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be repetitive. But it can use conjunctions when shifts in sub- ject occur:
Then the first star came out and the great day was over and in the vestibule I saw my grandmother saluted by her sons who wished her a happy holiday. Ludwig Lewisohn
In Lewisohn's sentence the final clause is substantially longer than the two that precede it. Movement to a longer, more complicated final construction is a refinement of the triadic sentence:
The canisters were almost out of reach; I made a motion to aid her;
she turned upon me as a miser might turn if anyone attempted to assist him in counting his money. Emily Bronte
Occasionally the shift may work in the opposite direction, from long to short:
Calvin Coolidge believed that the least government was the best government; he aspired to become the least President the country ever had; he attained his desire. Irving stone