The long sentence ‘doesn’t bear thinking about’: facts, attention, and Ducks, Newburyport

Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport has been widely acknowledged as a significant formal experiment, yet its 1000-page sentence has never been the subject of critical inquiry. Presenting itself as a series of over twenty-thousand subjective and objective ‘facts’ cascading through the mind of its nameless narrator, the single-sentence form of Ellmann’s novel mirrors a cultural and political moment in which the distinctions between fact and fiction are in the process of collapsing. Amid the novel’s moments of personal recollection and political and environmental anxiety, are a ream of click-bait headlines, alarmist news items, and decontextualised statistics which highlight persistent questions of informational overwhelm, attention, and distraction. Ellmann’s non-hierarchal sentence is shown to function as an appeal to embodied conversation and the reciprocal production of meaning. Focusing on the long sentence, my reading of Ellmann’s novel is framed by Neil Vallelly’s Futilitarianism, Alice Bennett’s Contemporary Fictions of Attention, and Caroline Levine’s Forms. Assessing the novel’s mimesis of ‘futilitarianism’ as a paradoxically democratic affect, the long sentence is shown to be a vital literary form which is uniquely capable of interrogating the formal overlaps and clashing hierarchal systems that unsettle the contemporary neoliberal citizen.