The long sentence has, over the past decade or so, returned to contemporary literary fiction in English with a confidence that the dominant minimalisms of the late twentieth century did not predict. Marlon James's A Brief History of Seven Killings, Lucy Ellmann's Ducks, Newburyport, the work of Mathias Énard and László Krasznahorkai in translation, the late-period sentences of writers as different as Hilary Mantel and Eimear McBride — the contemporary long sentence is, on closer attention, not a single phenomenon but a set of distinct experiments with what extended syntactic structures can do in contemporary prose. The phenomena differ from the modernist long sentences they sometimes reference, and the differences are worth thinking about because they tell us what the long sentence is for, in the contemporary moment, and why the form has reappeared after a period of considerable suppression.
This piece attempts a comparative reading of several contemporary long sentences against their modernist predecessors, with the aim of identifying what the contemporary form is and is not doing. The reading is selective; the contemporary long sentence is now a substantial enough phenomenon that a comprehensive treatment would require more than a single essay. The selections are intended to be representative of the principal modes the contemporary long sentence appears to be working in.
The Jamesian long sentence and what it accomplishes
The starting point, since the comparison is unavoidable, is the late Jamesian long sentence — the kind of sentence that The Wings of the Dove and The Ambassadors deploy in their most concentrated registers. The Jamesian long sentence is built around a particular structural ambition: it holds, across its length, a single moment of perceptual or moral registration, with the subordinated clauses dilating the moment in ways that give the reader access to the consciousness as the consciousness operates.
The dilation is not simply length. The Jamesian sentence has a specific shape, with the subordinated clauses arranged so that the consciousness's movement through the registered material becomes available to the reader. The reader follows the consciousness as it considers, qualifies, reconsiders, refines, and arrives at whatever provisional position the sentence will reach by its end. The ending is often itself qualified, and the reader is left in a state of considered awareness that the sentence has produced through its specific architectural choices.
The Jamesian sentence, in this sense, has a precise function — the production of a particular kind of phenomenological registration that shorter syntactic structures could not produce. The function is what justifies the form's difficulty; the difficulty is the precondition for the achievement. Readers who object to the Jamesian sentence on grounds of its difficulty are, in effect, objecting to the kind of consciousness the sentence is registering, and the objection is intelligible but does not defeat the form's purpose.
The Faulknerian long sentence and what it accomplishes
The Faulknerian long sentence operates differently. Absalom, Absalom!, in particular, deploys long sentences with a different architectural logic — sentences that are less structurally precise than the Jamesian sentence but that achieve a different kind of effect. The Faulknerian sentence builds through accumulation, with clauses piled onto clauses in ways that produce a kind of cumulative pressure that the reader is asked to bear.
The function is different from the Jamesian function. The Faulknerian long sentence is not registering a single consciousness's movement through a single perceptual moment; it is producing a kind of historical and emotional density that no shorter structure could produce. The sentence accumulates as the historical material accumulates, and the reader's experience of being held inside the long sentence is structurally similar to the consciousness of the narrators trying to hold the historical material together. The sentence does the work that the historical reconstruction requires.
The Faulknerian sentence is, importantly, not always grammatically clean in the way the Jamesian sentence is. The accumulation produces structures that strain at the limits of what English syntax can support, and the strain is part of the effect. The reader is meant to feel the pressure that the sentence is bearing, and the pressure is what produces the historical density the prose is reaching for.
The Bernhardian long sentence and what it accomplishes
The third major modernist long sentence, the Thomas Bernhard sentence in its most concentrated forms, operates on yet a different logic. The Bernhardian sentence builds through repetition and slight variation — the same phrases recurring with small modifications, the rhythm produced by the recurrence rather than by structural development. The function is something like obsession or fixation; the sentence enacts the consciousness's inability to leave a particular subject, and the reader is asked to inhabit the inability.
The Bernhardian effect is, in important ways, comic. The fixation that the sentence enacts is often absurd in its specifics, and the reader's inhabiting of it produces a particular comic register that the shorter forms could not produce. The long sentence is, in Bernhard's use, a structurally comic form, and the comedy is the principal achievement of the prose.
The Bernhardian sentence is also, importantly, less structurally various than the Jamesian or Faulknerian sentences. The repetitions and variations are limited; the sentence does not develop in the way the Jamesian sentence develops or accumulate in the way the Faulknerian sentence accumulates. The constraint is part of the effect; the consciousness inhabiting the obsession cannot, by definition, develop or accumulate beyond the limits of the obsession, and the sentence registers the constraint structurally.
The contemporary long sentences and what they accomplish
The contemporary long sentence inherits from these three modernist examples but, on close attention, generally does something different from any of them. Take the long sentence of A Brief History of Seven Killings, particularly in the sections narrated by the Kingston ghetto voices. The sentences are long and accumulate clause on clause, but the function is different from the Faulknerian function. The accumulation registers the speech rhythms and the cognitive patterns of specific voices in specific cultural contexts. The long sentence is doing voice work, and the voice work is what the sentence is for.
The Marlon James long sentence is, in this sense, more like a transcription than a construction. The reader is asked to inhabit the voice as the voice operates, with the long sentence preserving the voice's natural contours rather than imposing a structural design. The function is recognisable from earlier traditions of dialect and voice fiction — Joyce, Hurston, the various oral-tradition transcriptions — but the application of the long sentence as the carrier of voice is, in James's use, distinctive enough to constitute its own contemporary form.
The Lucy Ellmann long sentence, in Ducks, Newburyport, operates on a different logic again. The novel is composed almost entirely of a single long sentence, with the contents being the running thoughts of an Ohio housewife across several months. The function is associative — the long sentence registers the movement of consciousness through the materials it encounters, with the associative leaps being the principal structural feature. The reader is asked to follow the associations as the consciousness produces them, with the long sentence preserving the natural flow of the cognitive movement rather than imposing the discrete units that paragraph and sentence breaks would produce.
The Krasznahorkai long sentence, as I discussed in another piece on this site, operates on yet a different logic — the long sentence as the carrier of metaphysical density, with the structural commitment to non-termination producing a specific philosophical and emotional effect that shorter forms cannot produce. The Krasznahorkai sentence is closer to the Faulknerian than to the Jamesian — it accumulates rather than developing — but the accumulation has a metaphysical rather than historical function, and the differences are real.
What the contemporary long sentence is for
The contemporary long sentences I have mentioned are, on this reading, doing different work from each other and from their modernist predecessors. The form is not a single phenomenon. The contemporary long sentence is a tool that contemporary writers have taken up for several different purposes — voice work, associative consciousness, metaphysical density, the registration of cultural and political situations that shorter forms cannot register adequately. The form has become available again, after a period of suppression by the dominant minimalisms, because writers have found it useful for tasks that the shorter forms could not perform.
The return of the long sentence is, in this sense, not a stylistic revival but a functional development. Writers have realised, or rediscovered, that certain kinds of literary work require the long sentence, and that the contemporary publishing apparatus, despite its preferences for the readable and the marketable, can be made to accommodate the form when the form is doing real work. The accommodation has been uneven; not every long sentence in contemporary fiction is doing real work, and some of the contemporary long sentences are stylistic affectations rather than functional necessities. But the form is, for several writers working seriously with it, doing real work, and the work is producing some of the more accomplished prose of the contemporary period.
How to read the contemporary long sentence
Reading the contemporary long sentence well requires attention to what each particular long sentence is doing. The forms differ, and the responses required of the reader differ accordingly. The Marlon James long sentence asks the reader to inhabit the voice; the Ellmann sentence asks the reader to follow the associations; the Krasznahorkai sentence asks the reader to inhabit the metaphysical density. The reader who applies a single reading strategy to all contemporary long sentences will read some of them poorly and may miss what each is specifically doing.
The reading also requires patience that the contemporary reading culture does not generally support. Long sentences require, at minimum, the willingness to remain inside the sentence as it operates, without the periodic relief that shorter forms provide. The willingness has to be cultivated; readers who have been trained on shorter forms often resist the long sentence on first encounter, and the resistance can be a real impediment to the reading. The cultivation is part of what serious engagement with contemporary fiction now requires.
The reward, when the cultivation has been done, is access to kinds of literary experience that the shorter forms cannot produce. The contemporary long sentence, when it is doing real work, produces effects that no other contemporary literary form is capable of. The voices, the associative consciousnesses, the metaphysical densities, the historical accumulations that the long sentence carries are not available elsewhere in contemporary writing. The form's return is, in this sense, an enrichment of what contemporary fiction can do, and the readers who have learned to read it have access to a more substantial range of literary experience than the readers who have not.
An ending
The long sentence is not, despite the modernist genealogy, an obsolete or recovered form. It is a contemporary form, with contemporary uses, and the writers who have been developing it over the past decade or two are doing work that contemporary literature has not been able to do without it. The engagement of the criticism with the form has been, on the whole, less developed than the form's actual achievements warrant. The criticism has tended to treat the contemporary long sentence as a stylistic flourish rather than as a functional development, and the resulting accounts of the form have been correspondingly less informative than they could be.
The criticism that the contemporary long sentence deserves would attend, in detail, to what each particular long sentence is doing — would compare contemporary uses to each other and to the modernist precedents, would identify the specific functions the form is being put to, would describe the kinds of literary experience the form is producing. The criticism would, in short, do for the contemporary long sentence what serious criticism does for any other significant contemporary form — describe it accurately, situate it, evaluate it on terms that match what it is actually trying to do. The work is harder than the casual treatment, but the form is substantial enough to warrant the work, and the literary culture would be better informed if the work were done. The long sentence is back. The criticism that can read it well, on the whole, is not yet back at the same scale. The catching-up is part of what the next decade of literary criticism will, with luck, undertake.
