Chapter 19: Omission of Connectives
… What is spoken falls out and, as it were, pours itself forth, nearly anticipating the speaker himself. “Locking their shields together,” says Xenophon, “they thrust, fight, kill, die.” And these lines of Eurylochus:
We went up past the hedge as we were directed, Odysseus;
We saw there in glens the abodes that were finely erected.
The lines, you see, chopped apart from each other and—none the worse for it—hurried along, carry a clear suggestion of action and of simultaneously tripping the reader and of hurrying him along in the chase. Such is what the poet has achieved by the lack of connectives.
Commentary
…What: the lacuna between this chap ter and the last seems to have contained the transition from figures of thought to figures of speech. Figures of speech involve changes made to a word, e.g., change of case, omission, change of position, change of person and number, etc. This chapter deals with asyndeton, that is, the omission of connecting words like “and” or “but.” Here follow some examples in English:
- Crafty men condemn them, simple men admire them, wise men use them. Bacon Of Studies (1597 ed.)
- I have told you candidly my senti ments. I think they are not likely to alter yours. I do not know that they ought. Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (last page)
- I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. I do not think that they sing to me. T. S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock 124-25
This device should not be confused with the aphoristic style, e.g.:
There are no fixtures in nature. The universe is fluid and volatile. Permanence is but a word of degrees. Emerson, Circles (paragraph 3)
anticipating the speaker himself: Ei narson has detected a submerged allu sion to a Homeric passage here (Iliad 21.262), in which Homer speaks of an irrigation-rivulet as “getting ahead, anti cipating” the man who guides it.
thrust, fight, kill, die: by leaving out the connectives, Xenophon produces a sense of quick, choppily dense move ment; the quotation is from the Hellen ica (4.3. I9), which Xenophon appar ently liked enough to repeat in Agesilaus (2.12). Compare Lincoln’s favorite folk song The Blue-Tailed Fly: “the pony run, she jump, she pitch.”
Eurylochus: the passage is from Odys sey 10.251-52. The Greek verses are very dactyllic and probably enhance the break in syntax caused by the lack of a connective. Connectives in Greek are far more common than in English; hence their omission is proportionately more striking.
suggestion: a technical term in rhetoric. Grube deals with its history at some length (A Greek Critic, pp. 137-38). Aristotle, who seems to have been the first to use the word, makes it signify an image or reflection, as in a mirror, in water, or in a dream. It is then extended to mean “reflection” in the sense of “indication”; and from this to mean “suggestiveness”-the sort of thing we do by tonal emphasis, as when we pro nounce a word differently in order to show that we mean more by it than is usually understood. In print, the device is to put the word in italics. It also con sists of using a word which suggests more than it says as a way of enhancing a point. For example, a farmer might tell a neighbor, “One of my yearlings got loose last night and it took me all night to corral it.” Here the use of the verb “corral” suggests that the calf was large and wild.
