The Power of the Sentence (1971).

One of the cardinal goals of The Scriblerus Club is the ability to shine a light on the efforts and creative achievements of forgotten names.  These are the artists (writers, for the most part, though there have been a handful of filmmakers in this particular group) who have fallen through the cracks of history, and are often in danger of disappearing altogether if someone doesn't draw attention to their efforts.  That's very much the case with David M. Locke.  He's someone who I know more or less nothing about.  All I've been able to discover about him is what is revealed in his author bio, and that goes as follows.  "David M. Locke is primarily a science - not a science fiction - writer.  He earned a Ph.D. and spent a year as a Fulbright fellow and five years as a research chemist before taking up writing.  So far as I can determine, this is his first story.  Surprisingly, despite his background, this is not filled with heavy science.  The only evidence of a highly trained mind comes from the meticulous care with which this tale is developed (56)".  Those words were written all the way back in 1972 by Sci Fi author and editor Lester Del Rey, as part of his editorial notes.  They were part of an anthology that he was editing way back when.  It was called Best Science Fiction Stories of the Year.  Those words also count as just about all I've been able to discover about David M. Locke.

Del Rey doesn't seem to have kept any close contact with this particular artist.  He was one of the most prolific storytellers and anthologists back during the Silver and New Wave eras in the history of Science Fiction.  His role as an editor made it essential that he keep in close contact with a long list of who's who in the field of Speculative Writing.  For whatever reason, David Locke is the one name that no one ever seems to have bothered to keep track of.  It's possible to know more about guys like Del Rey than it is this one obscure byline on a title page.  Even the scant piece of information that Locke was once (still is?) a Fulbright scholar doesn't tell us much, as its an international program attached to numerous academic institutions.  So any information about where Locke came from, what schools he went to, where he graduated from, or whether he maintained or continues in these academic settings would be so much guess work I might as well be creating a fictional character.  The only true statement I can make about him is that he is a name that has all but vanished off the literary map.  All that's left is his story about a very peculiar classroom lecture, and so I thought it might be interesting to look into it.

The Story.

"Quite by chance I happened to be taping Professor Gareth's English comp class the day it happened, and I picked up everything he said.  Because of what occurred, I've listened to the tape a dozen times since, and it's all perfectly clear to me now; but at the time, none of us were sure what was going on.

"The following transcript is taken directly from the tape.  Nothing has been added or omitted.  The only thing I've done is put some of Professor Gareth's words in italics.  During the lecture I was aware that part of the time the professor didn't sound like himself.  It was as though another person, or persons, was speaking with his vocal cords.  At the beginning of the lecture it wasn't too apparent, probably because I wasn't expecting it.  But as time went on it became more obvious.  Now that I've listened to the tape so many times, I can tell exactly when the other voice, or voices, comes in.  Unlike the professor's orotund tones, these voices are harsh, stiff, and mechanical, pitched all on a single note.  The transcript follows (56-57)".

Conclusion: A Mostly Clever and Effective Rumination on Writing.

There are two ways to describe a story like this.  The first is in terms of the plot.  The second is terms of what the story means on a thematic level.  So far as a mere surface look at the narrative goes, what we've got on our hands is nothing more than an otherwise ordinary academic college classroom lecture interrupted by a very extraordinary event.  In other words, this is a story about the unnatural intruding upon the normal.  It's become such a commonplace trope in modern fiction to the point where I almost want to say that what we're dealing here is nothing less than the current de facto mode of modern storytelling.  Like it says in the description above, we're dropped into the narrative pretty much in media res, or very close to it.  It all starts as one of the students in the class hits the record button on a tape player he brought to class.  That way he can make notes off the professor's lecture later on.  It might take us a minute or two for the reader to figure out that Locke's use of the transcript from an old fashioned tape recorder reel means that what we're reading isn't much else except a Found Footage tale told in the traditional ink and page literary format.  It starts out normal enough, at least to begin with.

It seems like all we're dealing with is just a regular class session.  In fact, it's just possible that Locke deserves a fair bit of praise here for the almost unobservable skill in how he lays out his initial setup.  This is something that's conveyed through the style of the piece.  The opening paragraphs are all composed in the kind of dry academics cadences you tend to expect from an unremarkable college lecture.  It's all there, right from the start in opening sentence.  "As I promised last week (or threatened, as some of you think, I'm sure), today we're going to have a little chat about the sentence.  The sentence - ah, the sentence!  As I've indicated to you before, the sentence is one of man's most powerful inventions - ranking, I dare say, right up there with fire and the wheel.  Blessed be the man who discovered the sentence (57)"!  You'd be surprised at how the way a writer handles the style of their own sentence can sometimes tell you a lot about them in terms of both personality and background.  It probably doesn't happen often, yet when it does, a close reader might be able to spot a lot of unintended give away details that go on reveal a great deal of why certain authors write the way they do, or why so many of them tend to gravitate towards particular types of story modes and genres.

In Locke's case, for instance, if you pay attention, you can begin to realize that we're dealing with the type of personality who has allowed a great deal of his time to be spent in and around academic settings.  His tone is different from that of the homespun qualities of the writings of Mark Twain, for instance.  Much like Twain, Locke's prose sounds very much like it was based off of the speaking styles of the social circles that he was most familiar with.  In his case, it was the ivy league discourse of the classroom and the quad.  It's this familiarity with the cadences and rhythms of college, especially as it is experienced by the teachers which allows Locke to lay out his sentences in the kind dry tones that almost border on sounding like an instruction manual.  This is a very deliberate choice on the writer's part, and the good news is he's smart enough to realize that adding in a bit of true-to-life qualities to the ingredients of your story is no excuse to make it boring.  Even in the midst of giving us some pretty good writing advice, Locke is always able to keep in mind that the story has got to be interesting if you want to keep your audience.  A good example of how he juggles these two qualities can be seen here.

"For the sentence...is the chief unit of thought.  As you know, thought deals with relationships - with identities, similarities, differences, comparisons.  Thought takes note of cause and effect, of action and reaction, stimulus and response.  Thought observes the properties in things...And the principle tool that we employ in all of these thought-full endeavors is the sentence - simply that, the sentence.

"Yes, I know, you learn other basic principles in your psychology and philosophy courses.  You learn about deductive and inductive logic, about syllogisms, and the scientific method, about symbolic logic, and all the rest.  But these are merely elaborations of the sentence.  Even the equations of the mathematician are representations of sentences.  Our basic thinking is done with sentences.  And the sentence is far more subtle and flexible than is the product of the logician or the mathematician.  And every bit as true.  Truer, if you want my opinion.  Furthermore, just as the sentence is the chief unit of thought, so it is our principle mode of communication.  When you wish to convey a thought to someone else, you do it via a sentence.  A word, a name, a phrase might serve to attract his attention, to answer his question, or refer him to some particular object that you are thinking about; but only with sentences will you really be able to tell the person what you are thinking about.  Only with sentences can you convey to that mind what is in yours.

"The sentence, then, is the mechanism by which we think, and also it is the medium by which we transfer out thoughts to others.  The sentence quite literally liberates our thoughts from the prisons of our minds and re-creates them in the minds of others, where they live anew.  Through the power of the sentence, my thoughts can become your thoughts...Which brings us at last to our subject.  You are here, ladies and gentlemen, to learn how to write.  Some of you, I hope, will become competent writers.  But all of you, I shall insist, must learn, if nothing else, at least how to write a simple sentence.  Ladies and gentlemen, do not underestimate the power of the English sentence.  It can be a thing of sublime beauty, enormous strength, or delicate charm.  If you learn to master the sentence, you will find that it will serve you faithfully and well; more than that, it will furnish you with riches of expression beyond your every dream (57-58)".

What makes these parts of the story work as well as they is the fact Locke appears to have found a way to tell us a lot about the art of writing without selling his story for a plotful of message.  Instead, by introducing a series of well-crafted grace notes here and there like the right of kind of flavoring in a soup, the writer is able to draw the reader into his subject with a slow yet sure hand.  It's a clever bit stylistic sleight-of-hand that ropes us in like even the most rudimentary card trick can manage if it's done well enough.  In this case, Locke is able to shuffle the opening setup to his story with all the skills necessary to keep us wondering what happens next under the pretext of telling us about the craft of writing.  This is something I'll have to come back to, as these instruction manual aspects of the story play into a great deal of its ultimate meaning.  For now, let's just focus on the moment when things get interesting.  The real action of the plot starts with a demonstration of the declarative sentence.

"The simple declarative sentence takes many forms.  At its briefest it consists of only two parts, a subject and a predicate.  The subject is a noun or pronoun, and the predicate is a verb.  Here is an example: I exist.  Notice the simplicity of this sentence, its firmness, its finality.  It is a complete thought, precise and well defined.  I exist too.  Here the predicate has been expanded to include an adverb as well as the verb.  The addition is necessary to convey a slightly more complex meaning, but inevitably the sense of sparseness has begun to slip away.  Language is a constant battle between the need to express complexity of thought and the desire to maintain simplicity of expression (58-59)".

For my own part, it's gratifying to see the author reminding his audience of a perennial truth.  To my knowledge, the one single author out there who managed to find the happy medium between these two competing claims of complexity and simplicity has got to be found in the work of Alexander Pope.  He's one of those poets who is more remembered as a wit, or master of epigrams, if anyone can bother remembered that he existed, even as an idea.  A good example of the kind of balance that Locke talks about in the passage can be found in an old saying of Pope's: "Fools rush in where angels fear to tread".  Go back and take a careful look at that sentence and you'll see the skill of the old poet in being able to combine ages of philosophy into just one line of verse.  You may have forgotten the poem of which the line was just a single part, yet the advice is likely to stick in your head, no matter how much you try to get rid of it.  That's a pretty good example of the power of a good sentence.  The next best example of the kind of literary balance that Locke is after can be found in a lot of the sayings of Mark Twain.  For instance, take this bit of wise counsel that America's first stand-up comic liked to pass along during his stage act.  "Always obey your parents; when they are present".  Much like Pope, Twain is able compress a lot of complex life experiences together within the confines of just one single sentence.  It's another witticism whose strength of expression will allow itself to hang around in your mind for a long time.

An even better idea would be to see if there's a way for the lines of both Pope and Twain to fuse together without fear of contradiction.  If so, then you'd have the beginnings of something like an actual philosophy, or outlook on life.  Such are the power and examples of the simple declarative statement.  If it can manage to prove anything beyond the fact that the mind can devise all kinds of clever tricks of rhetoric to amuse itself with, then perhaps the biggest strength of the sentence lies in the way it's able to prove how sometimes the ability to pull off the needed dramatic effect of any story rests on whether or not all the right words are there when you need them.  Then it's not just a matter of making sure the words are there, but also that they are all in as close a correct order as possible.  Note I said that all the words have to do is to be close, not accurate.  I don't think any writer is ever going to be able to compose the Perfect Story in which all the words are going to be there as needed.  Something tells me our minds just can't reach that level of artistic achievement.  The good news is the sentences don't have to be pitch-perfect in order for the story carry off its proper dramatic effect.  They just have to amount to as good a piece of sentence construction as you can make them.  The beauty of a work of unrealistic fiction such as the one Locke is composing here is that the Folkloric format offers the writer plenty of leeway in terms of methods of expression.  This is especially true for the story that Locke is writing.

The trick with a narrative like this is that sooner or later there comes a point at which the fantastical elements of the story have to be brought on stage in order to interact with the otherwise mundane elements of the plot.  It's the eternal clash between these competing elements in a story and the styles used to express them that accounts for a lot of the power to be found in works as simple as the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm, or the more complex narrative imaginings of fantasists like the novels of Jonathan Carroll.  Locke isn't writing the exact same type of story as The Land of Laughs, yet perhaps there's a sense in which this work and Carroll's might be considered as related to one another.  I'll explain what I mean by that in a minute.  Right now, it's enough to know that Locke is able to prove himself capable of living up to his own literary strictures by following the rules he sets down within the confines of his own narrative, and then using that same instruction manual quality of the sentences to give his readers a clever introduction to the fantastic elements of his story.  The author shows good sense in allowing the fantastical aspects of the tale to introduce themselves in a slow, deliberate pace.  

It starts out with just those two bits of italic declarative sentences.  There's nothing big and showy about the moment when the fantastic steps onto Locke's stage.  This is the type of story that doesn't need the grandiloquent bombast of someone like Stoker's Count Dracula.  It's to the writer's credit that he's able to realize just what sort of fantasy he's dealing with.  It's the kind of tale where the unreal doesn't need a bullhorn to announce its presence.  Instead, all that's required is the simple use of italics to convey to the reader the idea that a second set of speakers have entered the room.  It's a subtle and clever device of the writer's toolbox that Locke is able to use to clue us in that something not quite right has begun to happen.  The professor's lecture still sounds normal for all intents and purposes.  However, the use of italics gives the impression that the entire proceedings has begun to take on an off-putting slant.  It's at this point that the reader begins to suspect that things have become perhaps less than normal.  Like any halfway decent crafter of suspense, Locke is able to find a way to build on this initial note of unease by developing the dialogue between these two new "voices" in ways that serve to heighten the unreality of the situation.  Note how it seems like the "sentences" themselves are starting to take over the lecture.

"Next let us examine a sentence of a different type, one with a linking verb and a predicate noun.  I am Gar-Eth.  This is the identity sentence.  In a sense, it spawned the mathematical equation, a = b.  Note here, too, the laconic quality.  There are no qualifying words, like the adverb in the previous example, to modulate the meaning.  The last class of simple declarative sentence that we must consider today is one with a predicate consisting of a transitive verb and a noun or pronoun object.  A transitive verb is an action verb, and the action is passed from the subject to the object.  This is probably the most common class of English sentence.  I hate Gar-Eth.  Notice the concentrated intensity of that sentence, how the subject projects its feeling via the verb directly to the object.  And again, observe the...sentence is not veiled by modifiers.  These, then, are the basic forms of the declarative sentence.  But there are other classes of sentences as well.  Take the interrogative sentence.  The declarative sentence makes a statement; the interrogative asks a question.  Is that you, Eth-Gar?  This is a typical interrogation.  

"Please observe that in English we ask a question by altering the order of the subject and the predicate.  We don't say, it is I, but, is that you?  In English we also have the imperative sentence.  This kind of sentence issues a command.  Go away.  In the imperative sentence, the subject is eliminated, and the predicate alone carries the...command.  If we wish, however, we may add the understood subject to the end of the sentence like this: Go away, Eth-Gar (58)".  By this point, the reader should begin to a get a clearer picture of what's going on here.  Two new characters have made themselves known to the audience if not any of the others in the narrative.  At least, they haven't alerted anyone else to their presence just yet.  The main conceit to note is that these new characters appear to be disembodied and immaterial.  Yet they are able to make themselves known through a human vessel.  As the writer continues the dialogue between these interloping speaker's, we maybe begin to get a better sense of the kind of story Locke is telling here.  It sounds very much as if a pair of otherworldly beings, seeming antagonists to one another, have found themselves in an otherwise ordinary college English Writing Instruction class.  It sounds very much like the kind of thing Stephen King likes to write about.

An outline of the scenario that Locke has given us leads to a number of very important questions.  For instance, who are these unseen beings>  Where do they come from?  Are they anything like humans?  Are they ghosts?  Some kind of disembodied extra-terrestrial life form?  These are the sorts of explanations that I think most readers would be inclined to ask themselves when reading about a situation like this.  Given the fact that Locke's story was first published in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, the most logical inference people are going to make about a story like this is that we're dealing with non-human lifeforms from space.  The interesting thing is that an explanation is provided for us by the time the story closes, and whether or not you're willing to go along with it is the hinge on which your final judgement of the story's success rests.  The way things shake out is that Locke's writing implies that rather than specters, or invisible little green men, it is in fact a case of the sentences or thoughts themselves somehow finding a way to take on a life of their own.  The various declarative, interrogative, and imperative statements are all examples of a pair of living sentience becoming aware of themselves, and one of them expressing the desire for self-actualization.

Here's the part where I'm going to have to rely on my own judgment from now on.  In the strictest sense, I don't have a clue how that kind of story reveal is going sound for other readers.  I just know I found the whole idea of sentences coming to life, and Locke's skill in exploring this hypothetical topic to be fascinating on both a plot oriented and thematic level.  Here's my reason for saying this.  A moment ago I said that the whole setup to Locke's story sounded like the kind of thing Stephen King might write about.  Well, it turns out I'm not just being facetious with that statement.  I'm dead serious, and I've got a lot of proof to back it up with.  The reason for being able to say that is because as I went through "The Power of the Sentence", it became clear to me that David Locke was writing the same type of story that King would go on to explore later in his own writings.  There's a particular subset of King's oeuvre where the focus is centered specifically on what I can only described as a series of literary explorations on and about the Art of Writing.  I suppose a better way to describe them is to claim that these are King's metafictional texts.  They're all concerned with writers in the act of artistic creation and composition.  These tales are the moments that King likes to set aside for whenever he is in a self-reflecting mood about his own day job.  He wants to examine what it means to be a book artist, and to try and find the answer to the question he's most often asks.  Where do the stories come from?

It's a topic he's returned to time and again.  The author's musings on art and where it comes from provided the inspiration for novels such as The Dark Half, and novelettes such as Secret Window, Secret Garden, and short stories like "Unmey's Last Case".  In each of those works, the writer is confronted with the familiar dilemma of what happens when the artist's work seems to be taking on a life of its own?  It's the kind of thing authors like to talk about all the time when discussing their writing practices.  The basic rule of thumb here is that if it is possible to say that the characters are starting to take their own initiative, it means you've got a potentially real story on your hands.  Peter Straub, for instance, was adamant that once and if that starts to happen, if the writer doesn't stand back and let the story tell itself, then all you can do from there on in is stifle any artistic potential the creative idea might have had.  The interesting part is how it's this very idea of the story struggling to get away from a reluctant author in order to tell itself which appears to go right to the very heart of Locke's narrative.

This is the story the writer is telling us here.  It's in the vein of King novels like Misery, or Rudyard Kipling's "Greatest Story in the World".  It's a narrative whose plot is concerned with what stories are, where they come from, and how they get made.  It functions as a piece of metafiction in which the author is allowed to comment both on the work that's being produced, as well as giving him a chance to put the writing profession in general, and his own efforts in particular under the microscope, in the hopes that he might be able to gain a better understanding of what he's doing.  Now if all this sounds like we've got one of those dry, academic, naval-gazing texts that can't be bothered to make time for the reader on our hands, the good news is that's not the case.  What David Locke has given us here is a metafictional fantasy written in a crisp and clear style that draws the audience in.  Like any good practitioner in this genre, Locke is able to understand that it is the ability to find the suspense latent in the concept that will make the story engine run.  This realization that he's a got suspense story in the garb of a supernatural fantasy is crucial for Locke's narrative.  It's what allows him to let the tale of Professor Gareth's lecture have all the qualities of a well told stalker yarn, if that makes any sense.

Like any good practitioner in this kind of setup, Locke seems to have an almost instinctive understanding that the best tales of suspense are those that don't rely on cheap jump scare tactics.  Instead, the real treasures in this literary hoard are the ones that let all the plot elements work toward a creeping sense of dread.  The entire narrative relies on the sense of unease that comes from being all by yourself in a room somewhere, and then hearing the faint traces of a noise just out of hearing.  A sound so miniscule that it's easy to dismiss as just a product of your own imagination.  At the same time, that brief interruption of quiet is enough to make the hairs stand up on your head, enough to make you wonder if you really are all by yourself, or if all of a sudden you've found yourself alone in a house with someone or something else?  It's one of the oldest narrative tricks in the book, the mechanism behind all the greatest campfire tales from the urban legend of the Hook to John Carpenter's Halloween.  It's also the approach that Locke goes for in letting his story tell itself.  I almost want to say this short work might just count as an example of a sub-genre known as Daylight Horror.  This is where the Gothic setup unfolds in the broad light of day, as opposed to the eerie shadows at night.  Steven Spielberg's Duel is a good example of this type of setup.  Locke's story is more compact, yet just as effective.

As we listen to the Professor ramble on about the Elements of Style it doesn't take long before the tenor of his sentence examples begins to change from that of mere illustration to conversation, to a very dangerous form of potential conflict.  You begin to get the sense that any minute now something bad could happen as the characterization behind the names Gar-Eth and Eth-Gar begin to take on more definitive forms.  It's very much like watching the creation of ghosts happen right before your eyes.  Whether others are able to go along with this sort of fictional conceit or not, I'll have to confess right here that this is the kind of story I sink my teeth into.  It's a nice little piece of modern day Magical Realism.  It's a surprising yet winning exercise in both conceptual thought, yet above all, entertainment.  It fits in neatly with that select category of Stories about Stories.  The whole thing remains yet another example of the author being fascinated with the art of making narratives in and of itself, then wanting know more, and using the craft of fiction to explore his own thoughts on the matter.  The fact that none of this ever comes off as dull is a testament to Locke's skills as a good writer.

If there's any room for criticism in all of this, then it might center on just one incidental and thankfully not vital piece of the story's denouement.  It is possible to come away with a reading in which the author tries to explain away the story's mystery with a lot of fake scientific jargon, leaving the reader with the impression that their might be some sort of material answer to the events of Prof. Gareth's last lecture.  Such a reading would result in a somehow anticlimactic denouement to what up till then was a solid piece of literary fantasy.  The good news about this is that such a narrative device is used much in the same way as it was later on by Stephen King in The Dark Half.  In that novel, it also suggested that the fantastical happenings might have their explanation in a material event in the main character's past.  In each case, however, both King and Locke seem to have an unconscious awareness that such an explanation would rob their respective stories of their essential narrative power.  So each of them makes the wise choice of leaving any concrete explanation up in the air.  The closest we ever get in Locke's story to a full explanation might be in the subtle clue that the two spectral personalities that manifest in the course of the Professor's lecture are each variations of the lecturer's own name, Gareth.  The implication being that this college teacher has tapped in a creative power he was unaware of.

In the end, though, such explanations aren't the real point of this story.  What matters most with any narrative is whether you can say to yourself "That was pretty darn fun" once you've reached the final line of prose.  In that regard, I'd have to say that "The Power of the Sentence" passes the test with high marks.  It's a fine little fantasy of a very particular type.  It was written sometime in the years between 1969 and 71, just a handful of years before Stephen King made his own literary debut.  I think this dating of the story is sort of important, because it marks it out as an early example of the kind of New Wave Fabulist tale that writer's like King, Peter Straub, Neil Gaiman, and Jonathan Carroll would later go on to pioneer throughout the 80s and 90s.  In contrast to each of those known brand names, however, there's very little information on David Locke to be found anywhere.  I might even have a Mandela Effect story to tell on this aspect of the review.  I will swear to you that I came across this one website that had a few trivia pieces of information about the author of this short story.  The funny thing is when I went back look for it again, the whole damn thing was gone.  An entire webpage full of information just seems to have vanished from the web.  I'm not making a word of this up, by the way.

I mean like I've tried putting in all the familiar search terms I know that could be relevant to just one obscure short story from an old issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and yet it's like...nothing.  It's just plain zilch all the way.  For a site such as this, where part of its ongoing goal is to help give forgotten names a day in the limelight, this is one of those intriguing cases where the historical record is more or less a complete blank.  So far as I can tell, David M. Locke wrote just this one small crap of narrative, and then never bothered with the world of fiction ever again.  It's one of those situations that are as fascinating as they are frustrating.  All it leaves us with are the words on the page, and the story they have to tell.  The good news in all this is that "The Power of the Sentence" is one of those narratives that is able to live up to its title.  Whoever he was or is, David Locke is to be congratulated for writing a fine and sophisticated work of Fantasy.  It's an entertaining story of the uncanny.  A pensive exploration of what it means to be able to write and let the voices of the story be heard.  Locke's accomplishment is to be praised all the more for being able to pull all of these themes off within the pages of the short narrative format.  The result is a winning combination of the outlandish and the bizarre, in the best sense of those words.  The is an effort and a name worth remembering.