Our friend Dale Nelson is a fan of the long literary sentence–at least longer than is currently fashionable. He’ll appreciate this article from the LA Times, by way of Mirabilis: The Writing Life: The point of the long and winding sentence.
Enter (I hope) the long sentence: the collection of clauses that is so many-chambered and lavish and abundant in tones and suggestions, that has so much room for near-contradiction and ambiguity and those places in memory or imagination that can’t be simplified, or put into easy words, that it allows the reader to keep many things in her head and heart at the same time, and to descend, as by a spiral staircase, deeper into herself and those things that won’t be squeezed into an either/or. With each clause, we’re taken further and further from trite conclusions — or that at least is the hope — and away from reductionism, as if the writer were a dentist, saying “Open wider” so that he can probe the tender, neglected spaces in the reader (though in this case it’s not the mouth that he’s attending to but the mind).
Dale sent me this link, from the English Government Archives: J. R. R. Tolkien’s Army Commission Application.
There’s a great sentence in one of Dickens’s novels describing a tottering shack and the sentence itself is a tottering shack of a sentence!
Re. the Tolkien application–wow.
His handwriting is strangely poignant. There seems to be an odd contradiction between his handwriting, with its archaic elegance and decoration, and the racist and very bureaucratic form it fills out. Somehow, it seems to foreshadow war experiences that will lead him to declare that if the Lord of the Rings had been an allegory, hobbits would not survive even as slaves.
It’s no wonder that in his most popular works, he identifies with hobbits, small creatures who stand by their duty yet feel out of place in the world of warlike men, wishing only for simpler times and peace.