Mark My Words

Profiles of Punctuation in Modern Literature

Lee Clark Mitchell

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781501360749
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Biografías literarias

Why are Emily Dickinson and Henry James drawn habitually to dashes? What makes James Baldwin such a fan of commas, which William Carlos Williams tends to ignore? And why do that odd couple, the novelist Virginia Woolf and the short story specialist Andre Dubus II, both embrace semicolons, while E. E. Cummings and Nikki Giovanni forego punctuation entirely? More generally, what effect do such nonverbal marks (or their absence) have on an author's encompassing vision?
The first book on modern literature to compare writers' punctuation, and to show how fully typographical marks alter our sense of authorial style, Mark My Words offers new ways of reading some of our most important and beloved writers as well as suggesting a fresh perspective on literary style itself.

1

Silence: Hemingway’s Periods

Start with Hemingway, always an easy punctuational target with his presumptively flat presentation. What is it about all those arbitrary periods and equally arbitrary paragraphs that so often consist of little more than a few simple sentences, each unfurling in the indicative mood? Clauses are avoided, with full stops regularly inserted in preference to more modest comma-laden pauses, establishing a signature style that flaunts its stalwart paratactic detachments, notoriously so. Midway in his career, he would admit to struggling with a style adequate to his unconventional vision, as if learning how to strip punctuation down.¹ Here is the vignette that introduces the third story in his first collection, In Our Time (1925), consisting of eight sentences, ballooning from seven to sixteen words and then diminished to six:

We were in a garden in Mons. Young Buckley came in with his patrol from across the river. The first German I saw climbed up over the garden wall. We waited till he got one leg over and then potted him. He had so much equipment on and looked awfully surprised and fell down into the garden. Then three more came over further down the wall. We shot them. They all came just like that. (Hemingway, In 29)

The whole makes sense as a series of actions, but the casually dispassionate rendition has its own distinctive effect, as Thomas Strychacz observes: “we infer slaughters so frequent that either the narrator has become dehumanized or else uses a dehumanized language as a buttress against the inhuman” (Strychacz 58). The sentences move discordantly, with a newly clear-cut perspective approximated after each period, veering from “Young Buckley” to “The first German” to “We waited” to “He had so much equipment.” It is as if the focus on periods to the exclusion of any other punctuation (including paragraphing) enhanced the disconnection that lies at the heart of a soldier’s mid-traumatic stress syndrome. The polysyndeton of the longest sentence, moreover, offers “a mere illusion of coherence; ‘and’ becomes a last desperate attempt to hold together a chaos of impressions” (Strychacz 59).

Even in far less violent accounts, punctuation generates a persistent sense of fragmentation and barely suppressed anxiety. Take “Hills Like White Elephants” (1927), perhaps Hemingway’s most famous story, which offers in five pages a dialogue that alternates between periods and question marks (if also an occasional comma) in flat declarative sentences that build to a powerful if elusive emotional climax. The psychological takeaway is based on two people conversing, each establishing a separate center of consciousness, offering in the conflict between assertions, questions, and denials an uneasy impasse in understanding.

“What did you say?”

“I said we could have everything.”

“We can have everything.”

“No, we can’t.”

“We can have the whole world.”

“No, we can’t.”

“We can go everywhere.”

“No, we can’t. It isn’t ours any more.”

“It’s ours.”

“No, it isn’t. And once they take it away, you never get it back.”

“But they haven’t taken it away.”

“We’ll wait and see.”

(Hemingway, “Hills” 357)

Indeed, the marked exchange itself offers something of a forced march around an unidentified dilemma, interrupted by abrupt halts, with abbreviated expressions pausing at every tenth step, as if experience were assumed to be relatively cut and dried. Punctuation here might be said to serve as a red herring, disguising the emotional depths it nonetheless evokes.

The couple’s encounter speaks for itself, if reduced to a minimal style, with simple sentences attesting to all that supposedly can be expressed, though in their clipped terseness testifying to psychological abysses lurking beneath the bland tenor of the exchange. And as if confirming this state, only a few lines following the passage above, the woman pleads inexplicably, in vain: “Would you please please please please please please please stop talking?” The lexical repetitions here match a series of other re-statements of full sentences, emphasizing a certain persistence matched by the woman’s reluctance to feel as the man directs. And the punctuation of this late sentence likewise matches the predominance of questions traded back and forth over the whole story (with the balance tilted heavily in her favor, at seventeen versus only four for him).² By the end, despite mostly calm tones of voice, we sense their relationship’s ultimate dissolution—that “the weaker party might be left with ‘nothing,’ but she has the certainty that there is ‘nothing’ wrong with her, and that what is wrong is, precisely, that ‘nothing’” (Link 74).

Yet that sense of things is confirmed not so much by anything said or unsaid as by the stilted syntax of the final descriptive paragraph (followed by two lines of dialogue):

He picked up the two heavy bags and carried them around the st ation to the other tracks. He looked up the tracks but could not see the train. Coming back, he walked through the barroom, where people waiting for the train were drinking. He drank an Anis at the bar and looked at the people. They were all waiting reasonably for the train. He went out through the bead curtain. She was sitting at the table and smiled at him. (Hemingway, “Hills” 358)

Once again, the paratactic sequence of simple and compound sentences seems to fragment the scene rather than integrate it. And the absence of obvious linguistic seams and graduated transitions among the sentences helps create the descriptive mood that contextualizes the couple’s emotional disintegration.

One further example should confirm how fully Hemingway polished a relentlessly abbreviated mode of expression, averse to pauses and self-interruption. Writing it after the initial publication of In Our Time, he included “On the Quai at Smyrna” as the prologue to his 1930 edition, opening with: “The strange thing was, he said, how they screamed every night at midnight. I do not know why they screamed at that time. We were in the harbor and they were all on the pier and at midnight they started screaming. We used to turn the searchlight on them to quiet them. That always did the trick” (Hemingway, In 11). No semicolons or colons, no dashes, just two commas (inserting a not quite needed “he said” as if parenthetically) spread over four simple sentences. Again, Hemingway’s abridged syntax rarely lapses or hesitates, enforcing the familiar tight-lipped sense that more is occurring than we can see. And for that reason, we often paradoxically feel it takes longer to move through his stories than through Faulkner’s, if only because an ease of entry cloaks so much of what lies in wait on the edges of expression.

Where other authors wield punctuation to alert us to strategies of disguise, of hidden psychological depths, Hemingway realizes the genuine disguise lies in the obvious: like Poe’s purloined letter hidden in the supposedly simple, the apparently transparent. And in that assumption he balances us over fragile if suggestive possibilities, forced to guess at what lies within an uninflected presentation. The precipitousness of his laconic sentences, so visibly shorn of digression and amendment, stripped of hesitations (at least expressed via parentheses, dashes, or semicolons), renders the scene ineluctably there. It is as if Hemingway anticipated Isaac Babel’s notorious pronouncement: “No iron can stab the heart with such force as a period put just at the right place” (Babel 331–32). Untroubled by adverbs and adjectives as well as clauses, his narratives doggedly refuse step by careful step to modify a reader’s initial impressions or otherwise adjudicate among warring inferences.

Yet the very absence of punctuation in sentences as they unfold (periods, of course, excepted) dictates an unwavering rhythm paradoxically belied by vivid details. The apparently unflappable consciousness Hemingway invokes to register a scene has the effect of instilling not calm confidence but heightened anxiety. As Jeff Scheible expansively claims of periods, offering a special insight into Hemingway’s style:

In every writer’s inscription of a period there is a loaded paradox: one is relieved to have completed a sentence, but in this moment of relief one confronts an anxiety that threatens to overwhelm any sense of relief its inscription might have achieved. (Does something come next or have I finished? If something comes next, what is it? Is it someone else’s turn to speak? Or must I come up with something else to say?) Every period, in other words, seems to disguise at least four question marks. In this sense the period inscribes many of the same anxieties over finality that the idea of periodization does for many historians and humanists. (Scheible 50)

The “four question marks” occluded by any given period serve to underscore how finally indefinite a full stop can be. And the period-loaded conclusion to the brief “On the Quai at Smyrna” confirms what we sense in its opening lines: “You remember the harbor. There were plenty of nice things floating around in it. That was the only time in my life I got so I dreamed about things. You didn’t mind the women who were having babies as you did those with the dead ones. They had them all right” (Hemingway, In 12).

The casual success at maintaining a terse expressive control in the face of such a scene; the paratactic resistance to any inclination to link simple sentences together; the slippage between memory and nightmarish vision coupled with a grotesque contrast of newborns and dead babies: all is conveyed through a painstaking, even systematized adherence to full stops. As Fredric Jameson provocatively declared in his doctoral dissertation, distinguishing Sartre’s use of periods from other punctuation that establishes a mental pause: “The period comes as a deep silence, a consequential gap; it has something of the force of the past definite tense: after each one areas are uncovered or new things happen” (Jameson, Sartre 42).³

But Jameson then goes on to elaborate this almost rigidly unfolding “force of the past definite tense” in a way that Hemingway’s early stories disclose with dramatic clarity. The sweeping consciousness of his characters seems somehow shattered into broken segments through a fragmenting punctuation:

This silence latent in the period is by no means intrinsic to it through some kind of “nature” that it might possess: its meaning is a function of its use, and the shock, the sudden break it causes, becomes easier to sense when we realize that the normal connection in this special world between straightforward sentences describing concrete actions is not the period at all but the comma. (Jameson, Sartre 42)⁴

Syntactical partitioning seems enforced by periods, as if they represented the divide between opposed typewriter keyboard possibilities (as Jeff Scheible has speculated): between “the uncertainty of the question mark and on its other side . . . the overpowering certainty of the exclamation mark” (Scheible 46). The surprise is that neither of those alternative marks makes an appearance in Hemingway’s narrative depictions, though more than occasionally they emerge in dialogue between characters.

Even so, Hemingway resisted crossing over, suggesting that his early avoidance of commas as mere concession to connection and coherence forms in fact a deliberate strategy, with punctuation not simply reinforcing a larger thematic agenda but actively creating it. That pattern of relying upon “the shock, the sudden break” of periods would fade with his novels, even most of his later stories, perhaps in recognition of the insight Jameson observes of full stops: “It is as if the period were so strong it had to be used with care, reserved for the most significant moments, so as not to wear it out and for fear it prove too powerful for the structure it is supposed to hold together” (Jameson, Sartre 43–44). Just as frequent handling of unstable gelignite leads to lost fingers, so too with periods, and perhaps predictably the explosive quality of Hemingway’s early prose would necessarily settle into more temperate patterns.

As well, Hemingway discovered fruitful opportunities in learning to take a more measured, somewhat lingering perspective on syntax as well as punctuation. The very expansiveness of the novel form revealed advantages unanticipated in his initial reliance on periods. Not that his syntax needed to adjust, but he came to realize the effect of alternative ways to express both descriptive details and the emotional connotations they evoked. A relatively inconsequential moment occurs late in The Sun Also Rises (1926), illustrating the contrast between Hemingway’s predominant styles, early and increasingly late. The fiesta at Pamplona has already lasted four days, with Pedro Romero’s emotionally exhausting performance in the bullring having left Lady Brett Ashley “limp as a rag.” Then a passage occurs that announces through its punctuated division into two paragraphs how differently other marks of punctuation can evoke a mood:

In the morning it was raining. A fog had come over the mountains from the sea. You could not see the tops of the mountains. The plateau was dull and gloom, and the shapes of the trees and the houses were changed. I walked out beyond the town to look at the weather. The bad weath...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Permissions
• Prologue: What Can Punctuation Do?
• 1 Silence: Hemingway’s Periods
• 2 Hesitation: Baldwin’s Commas
• 3 Interruption: James’s Dashes
• 4 Rupture: Dickinson’s Dashes
• 5 Expansion: Woolf’s Semicolons
• 6 Hemorrhage: Joyce, Morrison, Saramago, Sebald
• 7 Enjambment: Cummings, Williams, Giovanni
• 8 Incarceration: Nabokov’s Parentheses
• 9 Plenitude: Faulkner’s Array
• Epilogue: Punctuation as Style
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright