Ma(r)king the Text

The Presentation of Meaning on the Literary Page

Joe Bray, Miriam Handley, Anne C. Henry

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429778582
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

First published in 2000, this volume is a unique collection of essays which draws our attention to the importance of those textual elements traditionally ignored in literary criticism. These include punctuation, footnotes, epigraphs, typography, cover design, white space and marginalia; features which significantly affect the meaning of a literary text.

The first section of the book opens with a proposal for a new theory of punctuation. The essays which follow are devoted to detailed interpretations of particular marks in the work of individual writers, including Spenser, Richardson and George Eliot.

The consequences of this approach to the literary text are examined in the second section of the book, which begins with a debate on editorial practice and responsibility, and features insights from editors. Attention is drawn in particular to the special issues thrown up by dramatic texts, translations and electronic editions.

The relationship of marks to the main text is far from subordinate, and we cannot appreciate the full interpretative potential of a text without considering this. The essays here compel us to assess the interaction of textual and literary meaning. To mark a text is to make it.

1
Mark, space, axis, function: towards a (new) theory of punctuation on historical principles

John Lennard

SINCE publishing, in 1991, a 300-page monograph on the English exploitation of poetic parentheses, I have had many conversations with colleagues and students about why one might care to think about punctuation. In doing so I have been obliged to continue thinking about it myself, and my dissatisfaction with the received understanding of punctuation has become increasingly acute, both in theory and didactically. As the commonest grammatical error of student writing is paratactic syntax caused by the restriction of punctuation marks to capitals, full stops and commas, one might expect a didactic concern about punctuation to be widespread: yet even in Teaching English as a Second Language, where grammar and syntax are usually better taught than elsewhere, there is no manual of punctuation which is either adequate or intellectually coherent.

The causes of this failure to be interested in punctuation are worth some consideration. One origin lies in the grammatical tradition, which for more than a millennium has been largely content to analyse marks of punctuation by function, as elocutionary, a rhetorical guide to pauses; syntactic, a grammatical guide to syntax; or deictic, merely for emphasis. For about two centuries, since that flurry of debate coincident with Romanticism which Park Honan identified forty years ago,¹ most grammarians have been happy to agree that the most basic function is the syntactic, and critics have largely taken their cue from grammarians. Yet it is patent to any literate that many marks function both elocutionarily and syntactically, depending on whether one is reading silently or aloud; and equally patent that many forms of deictic punctuation – indentation, underlining and distinguishing founts, for example – are neither usually regarded nor widely understood as being punctuation at all. One would expect the intensive recent work on semiotics and all manner of signification to have noticed the lacuna, and filled it (punctuation, after all, depending on how you define it, accounts for between 30 and 75 per cent of the top layer of every QWERTY keyboard); but the debt of modern literary and linguistic theory to Saussurian linguistics leaves it peculiarly blind to punctuation. Compare de Saussure's explicit limitation of his interest to langue, his formal exclusion of parole, with Malcolm Parkes's superb rule-of-thumb definition of punctuation as 'the pragmatics of the written text', and one begins to see why linguistic and structuralist theorists have had little to say: Derrida has made some experiments with layout, but to the best of my knowledge no major theorist has explicitly addressed the issue at all.

Another suggestive anomaly is to be found in these Oxford English Dictionary definitions:

punctuation [(ad, med.L.punctuāatiōon-em ...]

†1. The pointing of the psalms; the pause at the mediation. Obs. rare.

2. The insertion of the vowel (and other) points in writing Hebrew and other Semitic languages (or those using a Semitic alphabet); the system of such points: = POINTING vbl. sb.¹ 2b.

3. a. The practice, art, method, or system of inserting points or 'stops' to aid the sense, in writing or printing; division of written or printed matter into sentences, clauses, etc. by means of points or stops. The ordinary sense.

b. transf. Observance, in reading or speaking, of the pauses, as indicated by the points or stops.

c.fig. The repeated occurrence or distribution (of something); something_that makes repeated or regular interruptions_or divisions.

Ȃ4. The action (or result) of marking by pricking or puncturing, Obs. rare.

5. Nat. Hist. = PUNCTATION 2.

6. attrib., as (sense 3) punctuation mark.

Hence punctuationist, one who practises, studies, or treats of punctuation (sense 3).

punctuate, v. [f. med.L. punctu𐅍are (Du Cange) to prick, point, appoint, etc., whence It, puntuare, F. ponctuer (c 1500), f. L. punctu-s (u-stem) pointing, point.]

†1. trans. (?) To point out, note. Obs. rare.

2. Nat. Hist. To mark with points or dots, esp. with small depressions resembling punctures. (?Usually in pa. pple. [...]) rare.

3. a. To insert the stops or punctuation-marks in (a sentence, etc.); to mark or divide with points or stops. Formerly to point (point v.¹ 3). Also absol.

b. .fig. †(a) To put a 'period' or stop to; to interrupt so as to bring to a close (obs.). (6) To interrupt_at intervals (as a speech) by exclamations, etc.; to intersperse or 'dot' with.

4. To give point to; to emphasize, accentuate. The single underlining, in 'punctuation', senses 2, 3a, 3b, and 4, and in 'punctuate', senses 2, 3a, and 3b(b), indicate places where the OED tries to limit the meaning of punctuation to punctuation marks: points, it insists, or dots, or stops; something done by pricking or puncturing. The double underlining in 'punctuate', sense 4, is where deictic punctuation is accommodated, and 'point' slides into a figurative use – 'To give point to; to emphasize, accentuate.'; but the broken underlining in 'punctuation', sense 3c, and 'punctuate', sense 3b(b), both senses fiercely guarded by 'fig.', are where the game is given away: 'something that makes_repeated interruptions_or divisions'; an etcetera that is able to 'interruptat intervals'. We, and the OED, would not say punctuation marks, marks of punctuation, unless there were some other form of punctuation to be excluded, and, selfevidently, what most frequently interrupts written language is space.

The importance of space was recognised by Eric Partridge, whose You Have a Point There: A New and Complete Guide to Punctuation (1953) devotes nearly half its length to what it calls 'Allies and Accessories', from capitals and italics to indentation and paragraphing; but, unlike Partridge's famous Usage and Abusage, You Have a Point There was not issued in Penguin, and is long out of print. There is no sign whatever of Partridge's insights in any handbook I can find in print, and it is easy to demonstrate that students' understanding of what constitutes punctuation is widely varied. For some years now I have given students a short poem and instructed them to prepare, without consulting any other student, or any reference work, a 'wholly depunctuated' version. Here, for example, is Browning's 'Memorabilia' as a student might receive it:

Memorabilia
1
Ah, did you once see Shelley plain,
And did he stop and speak to you
And did you speak to him again?
How strange it seems and new!
2
But you were living before that,
And also you are living after;
And the memory I started at – My
starting moves your laughter.
3
I crossed a moor, with a name of its own
And a certain use in the world no doubt,
Yet a hand's-breadth of it shines alone
'Mid the blank miles round about:
4
For there I picked up on the heather
And there I put inside my breast
A moulted feather, an eagle-feather!
Well, I forget the rest.

The eighty or so answers received to date fall broadly into four categories: (i) from a minority, including the laziest students, a version which appears substantially unchanged, with only the marks of punctuation removed:

Memorabilia
1
Ah did you once see Shelley plain
And did he stop and speak to you
And did you speak to him again
How strange it seems and new
2
But you were living before that
And also you are living after
And the memory I started at
My starting moves your laughter
3
I crossed a moor with a name of its own
And a certain use in the world no doubt
Yet a handsbreadth of it shines alone
Mid the blank miles round about
4
For there I picked up on the heather
And there I put inside my breast
A moulted feather an eaglefeather
Well I forget the rest

(ii) from the majority, a version with marks, numbers, eisthesis, and distinguishing cases and faces removed, but interword spaces and lineation retained:

memorabilia
ah did you once see shelley plain
and did he stop and speak to you
and did you speak to him again
how strange it seems and new
but you were living before that
and also you are living after
and the memory i started at
my starting moves your laughter
i crossed a moor with a name of its own
and a certain use in the world no doubt
yet a handsbreadth of it shines alone
mid the blank miles round about
for there i picked up on the heather
and there i put inside my breast
a moulted feather an eaglefeather
well i forget the rest

(iii) from a substantial minority, a version in scriptio continua:

memorabiliaahdidyouonceseeshelleyplainanddidhestopandspeaktoyouanddi dyouspeaktohimagainhowstrangeitseemsandnewbutyouwerelivingbeforet hatandalsoyouarelivingafterandthememoryistartedatmystartingmovesyour laughtericrossedamoorwithanameofitsownandacertainuseintheworldnodou btyetahandsbreadthofitshinesalonemidtheblankmilesroundaboutfortherei pickedupontheheatherandthereiputinsidemybreastamoultedfeatheraneagl efeatherwelliforgettherest

(iv) and from one student, once, a version in which even the letter-forms had been collapsed into an ink-blot:

As that student agreed, however, the ink-blot is de facto a large fall stop, and implies a fifth stage, the ink distributed about the whole page to produce an even grey surface, in which any and all distinction is lost.

In one aspect, clearly, OED's 'fighas the right of it: to extend the concept of punctuation to the way in which letters punctuate the whiteness of the page is to redefine punctuation. But to restrict one's understanding to what the language acknowledges as a subset, marks of punctuation, has not proven, in two millennia of practice, very productive. My concern, therefore, has been to devise an axis of analysis for punctuation which can accommodate these variant understandings, and supplement the received analysis by function. Spurred on in 1997 by the opportunity to write a new entry on punctuation for the revised edition of J.A. Cuddon's Dictionary of Literary Terms (Blackwell 1998; Penguin 1999), I have formulated an axis on eight levels:

1. letter-forms, punctuating the blank page; scriptio continua, wordswithout spacesormarksbetweenthem;
2. interword spaces, which I take to include three special varieties of interword space: the paragraph-, verse line- and stanza-break;
3. the marks of punctuation (including the stops, tonal indicators, inverted commas, rules, the family of brackets and slashes, signes de renvoi, mathematical punctuation and special sorts) with their associated spaces (one space after a comma, two after a full stop, none around a hyphen, one each side of a dash, and so on; conventions which vary in different media and cultures);
4. words or other units distinguished by fount, face, case, colour, siglum or position; thus, capitalisation, italics, small caps, underlining and so on; the detail of the mise-en-page, decisions which in cold-metal setting come under composition;
5. the organisation of the page and opening; decisions about basic fount and face, margins; the principles of the mise-en-page, decisions which in coldmetal setting come under imposition, or precede composition;
6. pagination or foliation; the use of the page or opening as units as, for example, volumes of poetry giving each new poem a new page, or graphic novels using the full opening for a single image; and by extension, that regular turning of the page which punctuates the reading of all codices and printed books;
7. the structure of grouped pages; sections, chapters, prolegomena and appendices, and apparatus; and
8. the book itself, as a complete object punctuating space or as a constituent volume.

Now obviously there are some oddities here, and one could argue about this or that – I would be more than happy for the axis to be constructively modified or revised – but it does offer a substantial starting place. The history of punctuation is largely a late t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Preface
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction
• Redefining marks
• Editing marks
• Endnote: what is text?
• Index