A normal run-on sentence is pedestrian. The forceful, marauding use of polysyndeton to drag out a sentence into a multiple page narrative is badass. The comma, the semi colon, the parentheses, and the em dash all feature. Carlos Fuentes wrote in Spanish, as his native language. In translation, his grammar and punctuation was preserved as much as possible. It leaves me to wonder if this one sentence was even longer and more ungainly in the original.
"I could breathe with the place and see what each one was doing in his own bedroom, in his bathroom, in the dining room, there as nothing either secret or public for me the little witness, Harriett, I who saw them all, heard them all, imagined and smelled them all by simply breathing with the rhythm they didn't posses because they didn't' need it, they took it all for granted, I had to breathe in the hacienda, fill my lungs with its smallest flake of paint, and be the absent witness to every single copulation, hurried or languorous, imaginative or boring, whining or proud, tender or cold, to every single defecation, thick or watery, green or red, smooth or caked with undigested corn, I heard every fart, do you hear, every belch, every spit fall, every pee run, and I saw the scrawny turkeys having their necks twisted, the oxen emasculated, the goats eviscerated, and put on the spit, I saw bottles being corked full of uneasy wine of the Coahuila Valleys, so near to the desert that they taste like cactus wine, then the medicine bottles being uncorked for the castor oil purges, and the fevers running high in death and childbirth and children's diseases, I could touch the red velvets and creamy organdies and green taffetas of the hoopskirts and bonnets of the ladies, the long lace nightgowns with the Sacred Heart of Jesus embroidered in front of their cunts: the quivering, humble devotion to the votive lamps quietly sweating away their orange-colored wax as if caught up in a holy orgasm; contrasting, gringa, with the chandeliers of the vast mansion of stylish, expensive wooden floors and heavy draperies and golden tassels and grandfather clocks and wingtip chairs and rickety dining room chairs bathed in golden paint-I saw it all, and then one day my old friend, the most ancient man in the hacienda, a man maybe as old as the hacienda itself, a man who had never worn shoes and did not make noise (Graciano his name was, now I recall it), dressed in white peasant shirt and pants, a piece of rawhide that man, wearing clothes patched over and over again will it was impossible to distinguish between the patches on his clothes and the wrinkles on his skin, as if the body had also been patched over a thousand times: Graciano with his white stubble on his head and chin was the old man charged with winding the clocks every evening, and one night he took me with him."
Try to top that.
Jorge Luis Borges describes the meeting of deserter martin Fierro and Tadeo Isidoro Cruz. None of us may ever write a sentence this powerful in our lives.
A normal run-on sentence is pedestrian. The forceful, marauding use of polysyndeton to drag out a sentence into a multiple page narrative is badass. The comma, the semi colon, the parentheses, and the em dash all feature. Carlos Fuentes wrote in Spanish, as his native language. In translation, his grammar and punctuation was preserved as much as possible. It leaves me to wonder if this one sentence was even longer and more ungainly in the original.
