Why Did We Kill the Subclause?

The MFA Machine, Literary Minimalism, and the Erasure of Style

Every writer wants to be Hemingway.

Sure—I get it. The mystical pull towards subtext and the legendary Iceberg Theory. The perfection inherent in the act of making every single word count. The charm of expatriation, of never quite fitting in. The allure of the jazz age, sipping absinthe-spiked cocktails in the afternoon, taking off towards a bull fight with your fellow lost generation compatriots. Everyone wants to be Lady Brett Ashley from The Sun Also Rises—a femme fatale with loose morals and no remorse.

The problem is that every single writer of literary fiction today sounds like Hemingway rather than like themselves.

There’s a lot of buzz about this idea of voice. Approach any literary agent, and you'll be asked to submit a work with a distinct voice. The problem is that no one has a distinct voice in the literary fiction world anymore because the vast majority of literary fiction authors graduate from the same breed of MFA programs and are all taught to write the same way—that is, in surgically-doctored sentences that leave no room for embellishment or flare, with a vocabulary that a fifth grader could easily understand. It is, indeed, the classic Hemingway model, but the problem is that most of these writers aren’t Hemingway and would likely develop their own, more original literary voices if they were not holed into this routine exercise of literary minimalism. Literary fiction today is not original—it is simply derivative of the works of Hemingway, and, as such, the vast majority of literary fiction works sound like they were written by the same author.

I shall henceforth use the term “MFA prose” to denote the style of literary fiction in which most writers are taught to write today—one that is easily recognizable and has a few characteristic “secrets” that are likely being touted as tenets of “good prose” by jaded MFA professors. The most salient of these offenders is the lack of the subclause.

Take any contemporary writer who thinks they have perfected the art of the literary form, and they will tell you to avoid long sentences. These writers are typically Hemingway jerk-offs who detest the likes of Thomas Mann, William Faulkner, and Henry James for their egregiously long sentences. And listen—I absolutely adore Hemingway and consider him to be one of the best writers of all time. But there are other styles of writing that are equally as valid: the long, flowery, and, at times, convoluted sentences developed by his contemporaries, for one. For whatever reason, the 21st century literary milieu has collectively decided to nix the sub-clause and to almost exclusively produce sentences in Subject + Verb + Predicate order with no dependent or subordinating clauses. Let’s take a look at a few examples of literary fiction published within the last 10 years, and you’ll see what I mean.

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The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid

Reid’s sentences are pithy and simple to a fault. She starts almost every sentence in this paragraph with the word “I” or “and” and seems to have developed a fetish for repetition (another hackneyed element of style that I presume is being packaged and sold to the mediocre writer in these characteristic MFA programs). In the span of an entire paragraph, Reid uses two commas and barely touches the subclause. She has absolutely no variation in sentence style and creates a paragraph that reads like a sixth grader—and who has not yet discovered the creative potential of the English language at that—entering a short story contest. I suspect that she has been taught to write this way on purpose at Emerson College, one of the nation’s premier institutes for creative writing pedagogy, because the creative writing world has collectively decided that all writers should sound like middle schoolers in order to be considered “good.” Either way, if this paragraph is meant to capture an internal monologue, it fails miserably. No one actually thinks in such choppy sentences.

Let’s take another example.

Trespasses by Louise Kennedy

In a predictable turn of events, Kennedy’s writing sounds exactly like the MFA prose I describe above. In fact, almost every single sentence is constructed in the Subject + Verb + Predicate order with no subordinating or dependent clauses. While Kennedy’s writing is more mature than Reid’s, introducing variation in the opening word of each sentence and effectively capturing the ambience of the scene, it suffers from the MFA minimalism that has plagued literary fiction. Despite the paragraph’s overly simplistic construction, its final sentence is clunky and unreadable.

We’re definitely onto something. Here’s another such example:

Open Water by Caleb Azumah Nelson

The repetition fetish is real with these authors. Does no one in MFA programs teach authors how to start sentences with different words? Are there no more words in the English language other than “you,” “it,” “I,” and “and”? What is going on with literary fiction?

And, in a predictable turn of events, Nelson creates a paragraph that contains just a single comma and single subclause.

One last example so I can drive my point home.

Gliff by Ali Smith

If I hadn’t told you that each of these authors were distinct and had no relation to one another, you might assume, based on the style of their writing, that these sentences were all written by one person. Smith, similarly, employs just a single comma over the span of her large paragraph and writes these overly-simplistic sentences that sound like they were plucked out of a picture book: “I stood in the front room. Then I stood in the bedroom.”

Really? This is what we’re publishing today?

I have been informed by Wikipedia that Ali Smith is “Scotland's Nobel laureate-in-waiting.” Not sure about that one. Unless you want to give the Nobel Prize in literature to my local fifth grader, who can also write the sentences “I stood in the front room” and “Then I stood in the bedroom,” I suspect you might want to look elsewhere, Nobel Prize committee.

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All right, that’s enough. Let’s take a look at some good writing and discuss the joy of the subclause.

I mentioned Mann, Faulkner, and James earlier as writers that the MFA crowd typically detests. Therefore, I will present you with excerpts from their work as we examine how complex sentences create distinct style and bring prose to life. I have only read Mann in translation after giving up halfway through Death in Venice in the original German and switching to English—his language is so rich in sentence structure and vocabulary that, as a non-native German speaker, I was presented with a great challenge that I was not yet equipped to surmount (and I wanted to get through the Mann oeuvre as quickly as possible because he is truly an intellectual joy). So I present Mann here in translation, but I did do some digging, and the German sentences seem to be structured similarly. The passage is one of my favorites from Doctor Faustus, in which the composer Adrian sets Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” to music.

Doctor Faustus by Thomas Mann:

This was my excuse, of course, to slip some Keats into this essay, but after spending several hours reading through and dissecting the contemporary literary fiction works above, I cannot express how happy I was to see punctuation! Mann uses commas and dashes; he creates longer and more varied sentences that accurately capture the procession of human thought and richly endows the narrative with feeling! This is precisely what is missing from these surgically-doctored sentences produced by the MFA machine. Passion and feeling!

Here is the German for those who are interested:

The translator preserves Mann’s sentence structure quite well, so I am satisfied. I wish I had more patience to sit here slowly reading the German original because it is quite beautiful, but I digress.

Let’s turn back to our native English—to the literary greats Faulkner and James.

Faulkner is a bit of an odd case because many of his sentences are not “grammatically correct,” as it were, and do not follow strict English conventions. Nevertheless, I present a “simpler” and more straightforward Faulkner example to address the necessity of the subclause in literature.

As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner:

Please show me one author today who would write a clause similar to “the two torsos moving with infinitesimal and ludicrous care upon the surface,” and I will give you a prize. The portion of the sentence I just excerpted violates the minimalistic prescriptions of MFA prose to remove all extraneous adjectives and subclauses, but it’s just so damn good! The MFA would never teach you to write like this, but it’s Faulkner, and it’s unique! The dependent clause, furthermore, gives Darl, who narrates this chapter, a touch of idiosyncrasy and humanity. Through the seemingly unnecessary subclause, we learn how Darl sees Jewel and Vernon and get a glimpse into Darl’s inner life.

Let’s take a look at an example from Henry James, whom one might dub the king of the subclause in the English language.

Portrait of a Lady by Henry James:

This paragraph is a fantastic example of one that the MFA prose machine might never let through. My favorite sentence here is “So the next day, after breakfast, she sought her occasion” because it is a sentence that I know my editor would immediately rewrite as “After breakfast the next day, she sought her occasion” in an attempt to minimize the number of clauses and commas in the sentence. Yet that is what makes James’s writing so mesmerizing—the insertion of “after breakfast” as a nonessential rather than essential clause makes the thought almost more human, as if the narrator forgot to mention the fact that it was after breakfast and inserted it as an afterthought. Subclauses lend humanity to our writing.

What Mann, Faulkner, and James, then, have in common is not style at all—each writes in a style that is uniquely theirs, which, in itself, is of the utmost importance in the literary craft—but the way in which they use sentences to capture rapture, feeling, and emotion. And this is precisely what the modern literary novel lacks—humanity!

The subclause has always accurately captured human thought and emotion. We are not robots, after all. We do not think in clear, linear sentences, nor should we write in this way. In stripping the sentence of the subclause, the MFA has dehumanized the literary tradition and left us with a stale mode of writing that reflects the demise of humanistic thought in our society.

So embrace those long sentences, create that flowery prose, and resist surgically treating your sentences until no extraneous word remains. These imperfections, after all, make our writing human.

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