I n t e r p r e t a t i o n1 2 5twists and turns of the syntax in a struggle to unpack the author’s
meaning. James feels the need to spin his syntax into a spider’s web
in order to catch every nuance of experience and every flicker of
consciousness.
This super- subtlety is one of several reasons why modernist
works of art can be obscure, and thus hard to interpret. Marcel
Proust, whose prose is rarely less than lucid, can nevertheless
produce sentences which stretch for half a page, full of labyrinthine
alleys and syntactical byways, propelling the meaning of a passage
around any number of tight grammatical corners and hairpin
bends. Ulysses ends with an unpunctuated sentence which goes on
not for half a page but for sixty or so pages, liberally spattered with
obscenities. It is as though the opaqueness and complexity of
modern existence are beginning to infiltrate the very form of
literary works, not just their content.
The contrast with realist fiction is clear. In a lot of realist writing,
language is made to seem as transparent as possible, yielding up its
meaning without much resistance. It thus creates the effect of
presenting reality in the raw. We may compare the James extract
in this respect with a typical passage from Daniel Defoe’s Moll
Flanders:
It was near five weeks that I kept my bed, and tho’ the violence of
my feaver abated in three weeks, yet it several times return’d; and
the physicians said two or three times, they could do no more for
me, but that they must leave Nature and the distemper to fight it
out; only strengthening the first with cordials to maintain the
struggle: After the end of five weeks I grew better, but was so
weak, so alter’d, so melancholly, and recover’d so slowly, that the
physicians apprehended I should go into a consumption...