I found this sentence in a reading material from a GRE (Graduate Record Examination) test. And I found it incredibly difficult for my to understand.
A desire to throw over reality a light that never was might give way
abruptly to the desire on the part of what we might consider a
novelist-scientist to record exactly and concretely the structure and
texture of a flower.
Any help is appreciated. It would be better if you could disassemble the sentence into parts. (e.g. main structure: A desire … to the desire)
Edit:
It is from the paragraph below: (Don't blame me. It is one paragraph as it is.)
In Hardy‘s novels, various impulses were sacrificed to each other
inevitably and often. Inevitably, because Hardy did not care in the
way that novelists such as Line Flaubert or James cared, and therefore
took paths of least resistance. Thus, one impulse often surrendered to
a fresher one and, unfortunately, instead of exacting a compromise,
simply disappeared. A desire to throw over reality a light that never
was might give way abruptly to the desire on the part of what we might
consider a novelist-scientist to record exactly and concretely the
structure and texture of a flower. In this instance, the new impulse
was at least an energetic one, and thus its indulgence did not result
in a relaxed style. But on other occasions Hardy abandoned a perilous,
risky, and highly energizing impulse in favor of what was for him the
fatally relaxing impulse to classify and schematize abstractly. When a
relaxing impulse was indulged, the style—that sure index of an
author‘s literary worth—was certain to become verbose.
Best Answer
One way to get at the structure of a tortured sentence like this is by temporarily ignoring the content of noun phrases and verb phrases and treating them like generic content blocks, so "connective tissue" like conjunctions and prepositions are easier to spot. I'll try to describe my thought process in real time, so to speak, so you can see what I'm doing.
A stretch of text like "reality a light that never was might" comes close to being pure word salad on the first read-through, so I just stroll along without even trying to interpret it until I get to "might give way abruptly." This appears to be a good candidate for our predicate, so let's start parsing here. Abstracting away some of the more complex material that precedes the verb gives us:
Reading a little further, we come across the word "desire" again. Excellent! One desire might give way to another desire. Okay. We can do this. Unfortunately, instead of getting a "to" after the second desire, we get this weird parenthetical crap. We know there will almost surely be a "to" eventually, so let's skip ahead until we find it... ah, there it is: it's a desire to record something. After a couple more adverbs, we find out what that "something" is: the structure and texture of a flower. This gives us:
So now we know basically what's happening here: the subject of our analysis (Thomas Hardy, apparently) is prone to start doing one thing, only to suddenly shift gears and start talking about flowers. Now we just fill in the blanks:
So now we know: Hardy, who was both a novelist and a scientist, tends to be impulsive in his writing, and is prone to shifting abruptly from poetic descriptions of reality to prosaic, technical examinations of minutiae.