"the perfect sentence"

A bundle of copies of the Times Literary Supplement arrived in the mail early on New Year's Eve, sent as replacements for my messed up subscription. Have been gradually reading them. [Now I note -- appropriately -- that Microsoft has underlined the previous statement in wriggly green with the admonition: Fragment (consider revising).] This message appears a lot when I'm making notes or drafting a piece of writing, when the standard subject/predicate relationship is not conventionally satisfied.

What I came across in the Nov. 7/08 issue of the TLS (p. 15) was a two-column account(by a TLS editor) about a French writer name of Frederic-Yves Jeannet griping (in Le Monde) about Jean-Marie Le Clezio having been awarded the Nobel Prize for literature.

One of Jeannet's several complaints is his conviction that Le Clezio's language is "banal", the cure for which would be "to give the author a lesson in how to construct a sentence." This provoked a response by a professor of modern literature in Lyon, who in turn "criticized Jeannet for an 'obsolete and overtechnical vision of literature', and suggested that writing fiction is about more than attempting to create perfect sentences."

Had it not been for my recent readings of Gertrude Stein's lectures on writing, as well as the odd piece I've been reading about contemporary poetics, I might have pooh-poohed the business about the "perfect sentence" as a fit of schoolboy pique but I was curious to find out what Google would toss up when prodded about GS and the notion of the "perfect sentence."

Somebody "out there" has already created a partial concordance of Gertrude's reference to sentences with this tidbit:

"This is a perfect sentence because it refers to regretting."

the only context being:

"Way-laid made it known as quince cake. This is a perfect sentence because it refers to regretting. They regret what they have given. So far there is no need for a paragraph. I cannot see him. This is a paragraph."

though alas without reference to the piece of writing it was found in. The becauseness (not, according to M'soft, a real word) relating to the feeling of regret being captured.

Hardly equivalent to gospel and for me yet another example of Gertrude at play stating that something is because she says it is and because it is something she has written so therefore it is.

Yet another writer on the internet takes GS more seriously:

"The most important elements of poetry to me are sound and syntax. Vowels carry emotion. The interplay of consonants can be quite sensual, kinetic, frenetic, awkward or erotic. A well-tuned sentence will be meaningful, and beautiful, regardless of what the words might mean. I am always striving to write a perfect sentence. Like Stein, I like to begin again and again. Building context tends towards futility, it stifles sound."

Or: a perfect sentence will as a whole be meaningful (and beautiful) no matter what the individual word might mean.

This is somewhat at odds with conventional grammatical definitions, viz:

"A sentence is an expression of a thought or feeling by means of a word or words used in such form and manner as to convey the meaning intended." (from a 1953 reprint of a 1947 reprint of a paperback Barnes & Noble English Grammar -- a relic.)

A Dictionary of Literary Devices by Bernard Dupriez considers that the reader's notion of "the sentence" is already understood and simply classifies them as "unary", "binary" and "ternary" according to their "organization of ideas" with this nugget:

"Absence of organization in the ideas expressed in some modern texts produces sentences christened in French 'invertebrate' or unarticulated. . . . The next logical step . . .is interior monologue." This latter illustrated by a quotation from James Joyce.

Hardly gospel, either of these, one a curio the other a devilish advocate.

Grammar hammered into grade-school lessons or categorized according to (translated) French rhetoric loses its power of glamour/magic. A word means. A sentence means. But it seems to be the poets or certain among them who are concerned with how we mean what we mean by what we say as Gertrude Stein stated she was herself busy trying to do through her writing.

Then and finally when I came across in a newly arrived book, American Women Poets of the 21st Century (Wesleyan 2002) Ann Lauterbach's "Poetic Statement" (363-367) with her writing about not sentences perfect or otherwise but the importance of fragments (though we are led to believe that fragments have no Meistersoft oops Microsoft meaning); reflecting back on Stein (and others) I am given pause: [here the line breaks indicate where text is in the original lined up on the right side of the page]

"For a while I have been interested in the notion of a whole fragment.
This fragment is not
one in which one laments a lost whole, as in Stein, Eliot, and Pound, but
of our unhandsome condition, where we suffer from having been being,
and in that
acknowledgment foreground what is: the abraded and indefinite
accumulation of an infinite dispersal of sums . . . ."

. . . which reminds me of GS writing that the "perfect sentence" is so "because it refers to regretting." Lauterbach's "lament [for] a lost whole."

This excerpt from Lauterbach doesn't at all do justice to the whole piece, in which Lauterbach carefully expresses the difficulty of constructing the "complexities in which we find ourselves" and the temptation to fall back into the "habit" of a stabilizing "logic of recognition."

Out of that moment of feeling twigged by what seemed a tantalizing notion of "the perfect sentence here I am now wading into deeper waters, not certain I really know how to swim without my grammatical life-preserver, that reliable stabilizer.