The grad student teaching my major American authors class (groan) promised on Tuesday that we would be reading one of the most convoluted and oddly constructed sentences in American literature in reading today's assignment. He trumped it up to be barely a sentence, a sequence of phrases so twisted that it would make you stop and ask what just happened. I didn't find it. As I found out in today's lecture, I read over it without so much as batting an eye. If this is one of the craziest sentences American lit has to offer, consider me unimpressed. Judge for yourself. The following is a passage from Herman Melville's Benito Cereno. (This might spoil the plot, should you ever hope to read it. But if you're taking a lit class like mine, they'll probably spoil it for you anyway.)
He smote Babo's hand down, but his own heart smote him harder. With infinite pity he withdrew his hold from Don Benito. Not Captain Delano, but Don Benito, the black, in leaping into the boat, had intended to stab.
Babo is the black referenced in the "crazy" sentence. And it would make more sense if you knew the story up to that point, but it's not so weird, is it? Reading it the first time I didn't even notice the structure because it flowed so well in the story. Yet the grad student talked for five minutes on how it stops the reader and makes him stumble through it. Eh.
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2 comments:
I stumbled. Even after the fifth time I read it.
Hm. You should read the story (it's good) and report back on if it still seems awkward. I'm inclined to think it is more obvious in the short excerpt I typed, and it would flow much better in the story.
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