I’ve been thinking about warmth in sentences this week: warmth, direction and clarity. Many of my students struggle with finding their subject, even on the level of the sentence, especially on the level of the sentence. I think this has to do with being too far away from their materials because they believe the materials themselves – their texts -- aren’t good enough. That they need augmenting by some clever-speak; something imported, a foreign object, some special wrapping. So they push away the subject and weaken its relationship to process and purpose; to the perceiving and doing subject.
And so they write sentences like this:
‘The singular eye of the observing outsider situates the idea of the house as a construction that is haunted.’
Instead of something more like this:
An outsider is an immediate threat because in the gothic imagination a visitor might carry with them undesirable histories. By this logic — the logic of fear and suspicion, you might even say paranoia – any visitor crossing the threshold could bring harm.
In my sentence I’m trying to open up the voice to more discussion; to convert critical terms – to move them along - as I grant them more definition:
outsider
threat
visitor } the Gothic
threshold
undesirable histories
paranoia
I’m generating and developing a vocabulary that pushes my argument on. I first produce a simple sentence which pivots around ‘because’: because’ forces me to generate a cause-and-effect relationship between parts. And so the first part of my first sentence sets up the reality of the outsider as an immediate threat:
An outsider is an immediate threat because in the gothic imagination a visitor . . .
Here, I convert ‘outsider’ into ‘visitor’ because ‘visitor’ and ‘visiting’ is different way of thinking about an outsider; it is a more genteel or socially polite description of someone potentially unknown who enters the sanctity of the home. It fits sympathetically with the world of my texts where visitors come and go or are barred entry.
Then, in the second part of the sentence, I establish directly what this immediate threat might be: a visitor carrying undesirable histories. In the gothic imagination history is often a threat to the status quo of the present. New knowledge is not necessarily desirable.
My method is to generate potential characters or persons – an outsider, a visitor -- to draw my reader into a plot. Because we are, after all, discussing fiction, novels and stories, and so there is always a dramatic centre. In the case of gothic fiction it is the space of the threshold.