Suppose a Sentence by Brian Dillon
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

How To Become Holy

Brian Dillon has done for the secular what scholars of the sacred call ‘exegesis,’ that is, the meticulous investigation of single sentences (biblical people call them verses; theology students refer to gobbets). Who wrote? Why was it written? How has what was written been interpreted by others? Are there other versions of what was written? How does what was written compare with other writing before and after? Etc.

Exegetes, in other words, squeeze their literary objects by making as many interpretations and connections that they can imagine until the objects yield a meaning, a moral, a truth that was lying hidden in plain sight. They are never satisfied with the obvious, the surface meaning. They search for allusions and subtle uses of style, vocabulary and grammatical nuance.

This is what Dillon does in his analysis of twenty-seven more or less random sentences that appealed to him aesthetically at some time in his reading history. He contemplates them as intently as a biblical scholar. He makes them say things that haven’t been said before.

Dillon’s use of exegesis has an interesting effect which I don’t think even he anticipated. It turns the secular texts he has chosen into sacred objects. Their importance lies not in what they say literally but in what they connect or point to beyond the words used. They become a kind of poetry simply by being treated as independent linguistic objects, hieroglyphs perhaps, whose significance must be discovered not casually presumed.

It strikes me that this very well could be how all sentences considered sacred got that way - for one reason or another (perhaps their inherent beauty) they attracted, no demanded, attention and consideration. If so, all sentences are potentially sacred. The ones already so designated are merely conventional. Perhaps this is a general conclusion of my cursory exegesis of Suppose A Sentence, and a reason for the book itself.

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