Today I would like to give a little tribute to one of my favorite rhetorical/poetic devices, parataxis. It is, says the OED:
parataxis (gram.) placing of propositions or clauses side by side without connecting words. XIX. — Gr. parātaxis, f. paratássein place side by side
I first really got obsessed with parataxis by reading Gertrude Stein. She has a lot of cryptic crypto-theories about words and citizenry–citizen word stands alone, forthright, apart, but adjacent.
Parataxis tends to privilege the world of the sentence, and movement within it. I have been working obsessively on chapter titles lately, so I have found this mini-genre of sentence or clause very intriguing. I think it’s such an interesting format because it is so simple, and places such emphasis on the relations of the respective units, which makes it different than just paradox or repetition.
A paratactic title may modify (“Girl, Interrupted”), or surprise with counter-intuition (“Hiroshima, Mon Amour”). It may sit elements in a curious relation to one another, in paradoxical (or is it metonymic?) opposition: the title of Edouard Glissant’s Faulkner, Mississippi. One more example, here in sentence form, which starts admitting action and characterization, is here in Chandlerian form:
“He stopped. His eyes rolled. His head jerked.” Farewell My Lovely.
And now in Roman imperial form: “I came; I saw; I conquered.” (Julius Caesar).
And in Roxy Musical form!!–”You came, you saw, you conquered me.”
Posted by thesecretingredientiswater 
