Mark My Words

For Cameron, again

A woman: without her . . .
 Mark My Words
Profiles of Punctuation in Modern Literature

Lee Clark Mitchell

What a hazard an Accent is! When I think of the Hearts it has scuttled or sunk,
I almost fear to lift my Hand to so much as a punctuation.
Penciled draft (summer 1885) found among Emily Dickinson’s papers
(Dickinson, Letters 3: 887)

The writer is in a permanent predicament when it comes to punctuation marks;

if one were fully aware while writing, one would sense the impossibility of
ever using a mark of punctuation correctly and would give up writing.
Theodor Adorno (1956) (Adorno 305)

The pace at which this world unfolds is supervised by punctuation.

Fredric Jameson (1961) (Jameson, Sartre 41)

The ear does it. The ear is the only true writer and the only true reader. I have
known people who could read without hearing the sentence sounds and they
were the fastest readers. Eye readers we call them. They can get the meaning
by glances. But they are bad readers because they miss the best part of what a
good writer puts into his work.
Remember that the sentence sound often says more than the words. It may even
as in irony convey a meaning opposite to the words.
Robert Frost, letter to John Bartlett, February 22, 1914 (Frost 176)

A woman without her man is nothing.

A woman: without her, man is nothing.
 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
 Acknowledgments

This book started as a slightly whimsical paper for a Santa Fe conference on

“Sights and Sites: Vision and Place in American Literature,” where I opened
with a hypothetical:
What if one stepped back from the echoing homonyms of this conference—
physical sites and ocular sights (or rather, geographical places and symbolic
visions)—to consider a map more familiar to most of us: the authorial
landscape itself? And rather than gaze outward at cliffs, creeks, and crossroads,
why not turn an eye instead to the topographies of punctuation that signal a
writer’s signature style?
The paper went well enough, but once I had returned home the questions it
raised continued to grip me and wouldn’t let go. And I in turn badgered various
friends, only to be met by an outpouring of sprightly ripostes and
recommendations, surprising me with the enthusiasm shared for a subject that
generally flies under the radar. After all, who would suppose that punctuation
could be a conversation stopper?
As it happened, many others have been fascinated by the squiggly marks
shaping the words we read. And in the course of writing this monograph, I have
benefited greatly from their acumen. Dan Fischer alerted me to W. G. Sebald’s
silencing dashes as well as José Saramago’s uncorseted syntax; Maria DiBattista
recommended Gertrude Stein (as Mona Zhang had, memorably, years before);
Brian Gingrich reminded me of Laurence Sterne and Gustave Flaubert; Jim
Longenbach rightly turned me back to poetry; and Garrett Stewart plumped for
Cormac McCarthy, Max Beerbohm, Toni Morrison, and even more James. Each
of these four also graciously, generously, put aside their own work to read an
earlier version of the manuscript, offering unwanted advice (always useful),
irritating corrections (ever accepted), and wonderfully suggestive ideas for
shaping the whole (on which I’ve readily drawn). At Bloomsbury, Haaris Naqvi
proved again a supportive editor whose enthusiasm and better sense for what a
book should be forced me back to revisions. Most of all Cameron Platt was there
at the beginning with challenging readings, better phrasings, even suasive
punctuation. This book, as the dedication declares, was written first and above
all for her, in playful celebration of an intellectual partnership that inspires, and a
love that astonishes. The only way to describe the feeling is as a sequence of
ever-sustaining semicolons and tumbling exclamation points . . . though you’ll
have to read on to see what I mean.
 Permissions

Adorno, Theodor W. “Punctuation Marks” (1956). Notes to Literature, vol. 1,

edited by Rolf Tiedemann; translated by Shierry Weber Nicholsen. New York:
Columbia University Press, 1991. 91-97. Permission granted by Shierry Weber
Nicholsen.

Cummings, E. E. [Edward Estlin]. Complete Poems: 1904-1962, edited by

George J. Firmage. “since feeling is first”. Copyright 1926, 1954, (c) 1991 by
the Trustees for the E. E. Cummings Trust. Copyright (c) 1985 by George James
Firmage, “Tumbling-hair/ picker of buttercups/ violets”. Copyright 1925, 1953,
(c) 1991 by the Trustees for the E. E. Cummings Trust. Copyright (c) 1976 by
George James Firmage, “r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r”. Copyright 1935, (c) 1963, 1991
by the Trustees for the E. E. Cummings Trust. Copyright (c) 1978 by George
James Firmage. Used by permission of Liveright Publishing Corporation.

Dickinson, Emily. THE LETTERS OF EMILY DICKINSON, edited by Thomas

H. Johnson, Associate Editor, Theodora Ward, Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap
Press of Harvard University Press, Copyright © 1958 by the President and
Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright © renewed 1986 by the President and
Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright © 1914, 1924, 1932, 1942 by Martha
Dickinson Bianchi. Copyright © 1952 by Alfred Leete Hampson. Copyright ©
1960 by Mary L. Hampson.

Dickinson, Emily. THE POEMS OF EMILY DICKINSON, edited by Thomas H.

Johnson, Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press,
Copyright © 1951, 1955 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.
Copyright © renewed 1979, 1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard
College. Copyright © 1914, 1918, 1919, 1924, 1929, 1930, 1932, 1935, 1937,
1942, by Martha Dickinson Bianchi. Copyright © 1952, 1957, 1958, 1963, 1965,
by Mary L. Hampson.

Frost, Robert. The Letters of Robert Frost. Volume 1, 1886-1921, edited by

Donald Sheehy, Mark Richardson, Robert Faggen. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2014. Permission granted by Robert Frost Estate and Copyright
Trusts.

Giovanni, Nikki. “Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day” and an excerpt from “Habits”
from The Collected Poetry of Nikki Giovanni by Nikki Giovanni. Copyright
compilation © 2003 by Nikki Giovanni. Used by permission of HarperCollins
Publishers.

Jameson, Fredric. Sartre: The Origins of a Style. New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1961. Permission granted by Yale University Press.

Williams, William Carlos. William Carlos Williams: Selected Poems, edited by

Charles Tomlinson. New York: New Directions, 1985.
 Prologue: What Can Punctuation Do?

Maneuvering through unsettled landscapes of literary expression demands the

occasional guard rails and blinking lights of punctuation: the jersey dividers and
cautioning signs that serve as typographical tools for modifying syntax.
Creativity needs constraints—and flourishes within them—requiring that unruly
strings of words be policed into governable shape, transforming potential
conflicts into the plausible constructions we intend (hence the crucial comma in
“let’s eat, grandma”).1 The fear that syntax alone may not be enough led Theodor
Adorno to revere punctuation, even to the extent of lionizing the “definitive
physiognomic status” of every separate mark, each colorfully displayed: “All of
them are traffic signals . . . Exclamation points are red, colons green, dashes call
a halt” (Adorno 300).2 Mary Oliver has further speculated in a parsimonious
spirit that writers are each granted only “a finite amount of it for our use, and we
should use it judiciously—lest we hear a voice, suddenly, when we need, saying,
‘No more semicolons! You’re finished with your dashes!’—and, also, that
passive-aggressive comma, with which we so carefully set off what is nice, so it
won’t be missed” (Oliver). For Oliver, punctuation clamors to be invoked
circumspectly, though her proof at last was to offer a poem shorn of any
punctuation at all. And Adorno would have agreed, having already observed of
his own acute “ascetic use”: “In every punctuation mark thoughtfully avoided,
writing pays homage to the sound it suppresses” (Adorno 305).
Still, poet and critic remain at odds over whether punctuation clarifies meaning
or merely reaffirms what syntax already enacts, with clauses in proper order,
depending on marks solely for stress. In either case, it might be better to think of
punctuation less as regulation (like Adorno’s imagined traffic stop, where
speeding and prohibited turns are rigidly patrolled) than as a choice among
distinct rhetorical effects, say commas rather than periods, or even more
intriguingly rather than dashes. Keep in mind that punctuation is exclusive to
written texts, first appearing only after writing had been well-established. As
John Lennard observes, “The earliest unit of punctuation in the West was the
paragraph, which dates from the second century BC; but for nearly a millennium
the paragraph had no internal punctuation other than that supplied by readers”
(Lennard 2). If punctuation is not essential to sorting out verbal meaning, then,
the question that remains is how it does or (more interestingly) does not imitate
the effect of spoken stresses and pauses. What happens when we no longer
consider it simply a marker for rhythms of speech?
That way of regarding the issue has enjoyed a centuries-long history, ever since
the Roman Catholic Church introduced forms of punctuation (those, at least,
more fine-tuned than paragraphing) to assist clerics in scriptural readings aloud.
By the time Maggie Tulliver scolds her brother Tom in George Eliot’s The Mill
on the Floss (1860), the role of idiosyncratic marks as guide for public speaking
had long been firmly entrenched, if only as an assist to breath control: “you don’t
mind your stops. You ought to stop twice as long at a semicolon as you do at a
comma, and you make the longest stops where there ought to be no stops at all”
(Eliot 140). Yet early on, the Church had realized the problem was not simply a
matter of catching one’s breath but of reinforcing liturgical control, in the
escalating need to affirm orthodox meanings and otherwise rein in dissident
ecclesiastical possibilities.3 That bifurcated history helps explain modern
linguists’ own division, in the clash between a history of punctuation as largely
oral development and more contemporary understandings of it as semantic
discrimination.4
Intriguingly, this divergence launches striking questions for writers of both
poetry and prose, especially given the incompatible pressures of different
mediums: Why are Emily Dickinson and Henry James drawn habitually to the
abrupt, protracted stretch of a dash? Why does James Baldwin relish Oliver’s
“passive-aggressive” commas while William Carlos Williams so assiduously
avoids them? And why do both the novelist Virginia Woolf and the short-story
specialist Andre Dubus II—surely an odd transatlantic pairing—eagerly embrace
the ever-hesitant semicolon? More importantly, what suasive effect do such
marks have on any characteristic perspective, certainly one that appears
distinctively authored in all its swerves and delays?The following discussion
promises nothing like an exhaustive analysis, though it surveys familiar writers
to inquire into their shapings of syntax, teasing out in the contrast among them
the larger implications of what seem like arbitrary preferences for differing
forms of punctuation. How, I ask, do nonverbal marks of celebrated writers’
prose reveal at once characteristic styles and encompassing visions? More
particularly, how do distinctions between punctuation and syntax help clarify
what so often goes unnoticed, with some writers acceding to word order
(embracing punctuation that seems nearly invisible) and others requiring sharp
deflections (making us wonder at weird verbal rhythms). What, in short, is the
difference between Willa Cather, whose s yntax ordains her punctuation, and
William Faulkner, who flagrantly ignores grammar with punctuation that works
only rhetorically?
First, however, consider those who tend to ask such questions. With a few
salient exceptions, punctuation has been a subject left to buttoned-down
grammarians and middle-school teachers, who regularly censure us for breaking
presumptive rules.5 Eric Partridge was hardly the first in 1953 to officiously set
up shop parceling out advice on ways typographical marks ease verbal
expression (in the process deftly surveying three centuries of such conventional
wisdom). Yet he acknowledged the shifting give-and-take involved in any such
rules, conceding that “One could write a monograph upon the psychological
principles of punctuation,” though he himself demurred from taking up the
challenge (Partridge 7). Three decades later, Charles F. Meyer opined (with a
more fervent logic) that separation and enclosure formed the basic premises of
punctuation (Meyer). And standard grade-school primers ever since have
confirmed a vision of prose as words herded into subordinate clauses, then
clauses diverted in turn.
The following discussion parts ways with conventional understanding by
favoring writers who flagrantly break the rules. They punctuate less as prod to
drive preconceived meanings into syntactical chutes, or otherwise as gentle
nudge to avoid unsought impropriety, than as something of an alternative
narrative universe that displaces the primacy of meaning by presenting the
reader with either disquieting disorder or unexpected ease. Instead of a highway
along which traffic signals facilitate well-routed significance, we are presented
with a theme-park ride of careens, lurches, and glides. And rather than sense
preceding punctuation, with syntax dictating understanding, prose semantics
emerge as the decided effects of what might seem like diacritical marks (marks
that commonly have to do with a letter, not a word). The work of punctuation
can indeed encroach on meaning as if from within, with a dash or parenthesis, for
instance, becoming almost a diacritical inflection of what it anticipates. No
longer are prior, purely verbal depictions parsed by the apparatus of
typographical marks well after the fact; instead, marks dictate the message,
making words seem momentarily secondary, teetering us initially on the edge of
an Oxford comma, hesitating at a shy semicolon, reversing course with a swung
dash, or unexpectedly sliding down slippery inclines without our having been
exhorted to pause before the diction we traverse.6
In this roller-coaster domain, the demands of interruption, of swift swerves and
abrupt full stops, become more important than whatever literal significance is
demanded as the focus of our attention. Local rhetorical rhythms come to matter
more than blanketing paraphrase; syncopation trumps sense as a series of
sideslipping, lurching clauses waylay us from their ostensible claims of
reference. Often as not, disruptions in reading become the essential meaning
itself, even as those disruptions (involving deliberately missed punctuation, or
alternatively an apparently unneeded mark) offer a vanishing point in which we
are forced to pause. As John Lennard alleges of any punctuation, gathering it all
under the rubric of “parenthesis”: “The relationship between a parenthesis and
its context is exactly a contrast between an absolute meaning, typographically
isolated, and a relative meaning, typographically interposed. It is that double
quality of the parenthetical” that lies at the heart of any and all interpretive
gestures (Lennard 212).7 And that “double quality” can surprise us as we see
how a hiatus here, a dovetailed transition there, a lapidary gap or emotive lapse
in a further text, can be systemized in something like a signature pattern that
vividly distinguishes among writers, poets, and novelists alike.
Take Edgar Allen Poe’s story “The Tell-Tale Heart” (1843), which has the
uncanny effect of inducing an unreliable narrator’s frenzy in the reader, with the
repeated “louder” of the beating heart confusing us about whose heart it actually
is. Crucially, that confusion is accentuated by punctuation even more than by
syntax, as if superceding the words themselves. The dismaying indefiniteness of
plot and motive, even of the narrator’s gender or conceivable relationship to the
victim, focuses attention on the folkloric resonances of an “evil eye,” lacking
rationale or explanation. Yet punctuation not only reinforces that singular
absence but entombs us in the narrator’s deranged mental dungeon, confronted
by the analytical figures of law enforcement:
I gasped for breath—and yet the officers heard it not. I talked more quickly—
more vehemently; but the noise steadily increased. I arose and argued about
trifles, in a high key and with violent gesticulations; but the noise steadily
increased. Why would they not be gone? I paced the floor to and fro with
heavy strides, as if excited to fury by the observations of the men—but the
 noise steadily increased. Oh God! what could I do? I foamed—I raved—I
swore! I swung the chair upon which I had been sitting, and grated it upon the
boards, but the noise arose over all and continually increased. It grew louder—
louder—louder! And still the men chatted pleasantly, and smiled. Was it
possible they heard not? Almighty God!—no, no! They heard!—they
suspected!—they knew!—they were making a mockery of my horror!—this, I
thought, and this I think. (Poe 233)
The strange, strained commas of “this, I thought, and this I think” seems a futile
effort to reassert logical control in the midst of coming unglued—utterly unequal
to the battering rhythm of delirium. The pulsating anaphora of the speaker’s
sentences confirms how fully the scene upends our interpretive capacities, with
his panicked thoughts unsettling us through broken syntax and eerie repetitions.
It is as if the dash es themselves (along with agitating exclamation points, abrupt
question marks, even inflamed italics) generated the emotional panic we find
ourselves feeling as we read. Clearly, one means of assessing the ratcheting up of
hysteria is simply to imagine the punctuation removed, leaving syntax as is,
confirming how much the text’s intensity is thereby diminished.
Moreover, the invoking of punctuation as a series of regulatory policing signals
has curiously merged in Poe’s story with the presence of urban police
themselves. It is as if the narrator were forcing the reader out of a world of
conventionally trafficked meaning into the bizarre “alternative narrative
universe” of punctuation described above. That effect occurs in the rising
hysteria of his reaction to the policing force of the law, itself reinforced for the
reader by the narrator’s defiance of syntactical self-policing. Punctuation, most
saliently, erupts with a proliferation of erratic em dashes, beginning by reversing
possibilities, then acting as incendiary propellants. What is it about the simple
line of a dash, significantly lacking an arrowhead on each end, that implies its
potential to point either forward or backward? As clauses mount upon one
another, the dashes appear to divide conflicting bursts of observation that reduce
the prose to isolated ejaculations. The vertiginous mix of questions,
exclamations, and delirious screeching is intensified inordinately by punctuation
that keeps reversing and abruptly advancing, serving all by itself to confirm the
horror as well as the frenzied, anxious emotional frisson we experience as
readers.
In short, the intrigue bred by this passage lies in Poe’s deliberate conjuring of a
maniacal voice through little more than punctuation. And that intentional design
is confirmed by contrast with his sober ratiocinative tales of detection, in their
casual, otherwise sparse wielding of dashes and exclamation points. The
contrast, moreover, typifies many accomplished authors, all of whom have an
array of syntactical arrows in their quivers. Yet as suggested above, others
sometimes come to be known for a discernable, “signature” style that persists
more or less the same across a career of varied narrative efforts. By the same
token, individual works can often be differentiated simply through a predilection
for distinct punctuational choices. The Princeton neuroecologist Adam Calhoun
has configured a series of “heat maps” of novels by stripping out words and
granting a separate color for each punctuation mark (in an effort of synesthesia
that serendipitously recalls Adorno’s color coding: “Exclamation points are red,
colons green, dashes call a halt”). Calhoun’s fanciful exercise transforms Mark
Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), Virginia Woolf’s To the
Lighthouse (1927), and Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian (1985), among
nearly a dozen other novels, into colorfully abstract compositions. As well, in
calculating the percentage of unique marks preferred by each author, Calhoun
registers statistically Faulkner’s and Austen’s obsession with commas in contrast
to Hemingway’s or McCarthy’s reluctance to use subordinate or stacked clauses
at all (relying instead on single-clause sentences). Striking as are the visual
distinctions, however, Calhoun (like Partridge) forgoes any inclination to address
the effect of such differences on readers, preferring instead merely to point them
out as differences, perhaps arbitrary at that.8
The following study takes a different turn, psychologizing Calhoun’s heat
maps by assessing the effect on our reading of unadulterated (though as well,
thoroughly adulterating) punctuation, asking what it is that writers gain in
different narrative realms from different syntactic curbs. In an era of thematic
surface readings, how might a look at formal infrastructure (including ligatures,
disjunctures, and caesurae, if by other names) alter our understanding? What is
achieved in the preference for full-stop periods instead of hypotactic clauses, for
parentheses and dashes rather than lingering commas? One might even extend
the category of strictly technical punctuation to include typographical choices
that achieve a similar effect: What is enacted at moments transposed into italic
font or bold face that cannot be expressed by syntax alone or by conventional
marks of punctuation, affectively or performatively? And why should a recent
postmodernist fondness for footnotes serve narrative rhetorically, semantically,
better than earlier punctuational vehicles, posing a breach in the text that finally
does not derail the whole?9 It is worth keeping in mind that when novelists
aspire in their most far-flung efforts to the release of poetry, they often reveal
that aspiration through the process of punctuation. What then is its aura? And
why do we frequently fail to recognize its shaping power?
The question of what is gained, what lost, in the roiling possibilities of
typographical marks rather than words (or rather, in conjunction with words)
links the analyses that follow. But the rolling stakes might well be introduced by
mulling over the title of John Chu’s recent film, Crazy Rich Asians (2017).
Obviously, it depends on the polysemous adjective “crazy,” which could have
been offered either with a hyphen (“crazy-rich,” as in “impossibly rich”) or with
a comma (“crazy, rich,” as in “whacky upper-class”). Both erase an animating
ambiguity at the heart of the descriptive adjectives, with the possibility of
teetering between the poles of such equivocation enlivening our reading,
confirming in turn the aptness of the chosen title. Hesitating before the unsettling
absence of punctuation, we skip mentally among alternate possibilities, first with
comma, then hyphen—which happily, in the order it happens, clarifies the
ordering of chapters below.
After all, as John Lennard has established historically, the initial punctuation to
emerge after paragraphing was the period, followed by commas, helping confirm
their priority. And that evolution nicely corresponds to Jennifer DeVere Brody’s
strategic effort “to encourage readers to be attuned to punctuation’s contradictory
performances” (Brody 4). Analytically, Brody evaluates standard uses of
punctuation marks on an arbitrary scale patterned to general usage, with the
period valued as a ten against parentheses at a one, and arrayed between:
commas (two); dashes (three to five); semicolons (six); and colons (eight)
(Brody 136). Another way to configure the scale is to acknowledge the period as
the simplest (most minimal) punctuation mark, with parentheses among the more
complicated of digressions, indicating why the following chapters move from
Hemingway to Faulkner.
Even so, it soon becomes clear that chapter titles are mildly misleading,
dramatizing effects hardly meant as exclusive to each punctuation mark.
Granted, I identify certain authors with specific marks, though those marks can
and do produce different effects in the work of others. And while my discussion
begins with distinctive effects, it quickly broadens scope in each case to reveal
how skittish punctuation can be, depending on an author’s preferences and skill.
Commas act one way with Baldwin, another with Cather, and a third with
Nathaniel Hawthorne: a transmutation that, far from confusing matters, only
underlines punctuation’s mutability. As well, the focus on largely modern
American authors has more to do with my own professional interests than any
theoretical claim, though I willingly wander adrift to the British Virginia Woolf
and the German transplant W. G. Sebald, to the Portuguese José Saramago and
even Jane Austen. These divagations along the way are meant as adventures in
attention rather than exhaustive analyses, floating on occasion between prose
and poetry as punctuational choices lead me astray. After all, the strategy
pursued in the following chapters is at the very least to address the question
posed by this prologue: “What Can Punctuation Do?” The test of any success in
answering it will be the kind of additional examples you as reader can provide,
proving how more varied are the effects of punctuation than I have been able to
show.

Notes
1 For a wry example of the dire semantic effects of punctuation, compare two versions of this heartfelt
“Dear John” letter:
Dear John,
I want a man who knows what love is all about. You are generous, kind, thoughtful. People who are not
like you admit to being useless and inferior. You have ruined me for other men. I yearn for you. I have
no feelings whatsoever when we’re apart. I can be forever happy—will you let me be yours?
Jane
Dear John,
I want a man who knows what love is. All about you are generous, kind, thoughtful people, who are
not like you. Admit to being useless and inferior. You have ruined me. For other men, I yearn. For you,
I have no feelings whatsoever. When we’re apart, I can be forever happy. Will you let me be?
Yours,
Jane (https://www.vappingo.com/word-blog/the-importance-of-punctuation/)
2 Interestingly, the German word here is Verkehrssignale, and Verkehr means both traffic and
communication. Moreover, as Adorno opened his celebrated 1956 essay: “The less punctuation marks,
taken in isolation, convey meaning or expression and the more they constitute the opposite pole in
language to names, the more each of them acquires a definitive physiognomic status of its own, an
expression of its own, which cannot be separated from its syntactic function but is by no means
exhausted by it.” He then with a whimsical turn observed: “An exclamation point looks like an index
finger raised in warning; a question mark looks like a flashing light or the blink of an eye. A colon,
says Karl Kraus, opens its mouth wide: woe to the writer who does not fill it with something
nourishing. Visually, the semicolon looks like a drooping moustache; I am even more aware of its
gamey taste. With self-satisfied peasant cunning, German quotation marks (<< >>) lick their lips”
(Adorno 300).
3 On “the desire of the Catholic Church to prevent heterodoxy and heresy,” see Lennard (2). As Jonathan
Rée adds: “One plausible theory about punctuation marks is that they are originally and essentially
guides to reading aloud; and people reading from a script may be accused of outright mistakes if they
fail to obey the instructions supposedly implied by its punctuation” (Rée 1041).
4 Among more important scholars of the early shift from orality to literacy was Walter Ong, who
declared of “punctuation marks which the early grammarians mention, the clarification of the syntax is
 coincidental. The grammarians are interested primarily in the exigencies of breathing. It is convenient
to place the breath pauses, and consequently the punctuation marks, where they will not interfere with
the sense. But interest in both breathing and sense is quite independent of formal attention to
grammatical structure” (Ong 351). See as well M. B. Parkes (esp. 11, 41) and Jeff Scheible (10).
5 Two standard recent examples are Mignon Fogarty and M. B. Parkes. For an earlier instance, see F.
Horace Teall, as well as Gertrude Stein’s famously idiosyncratic personal essay. Lynn Truss offers a
recent playful effort, but see Louis Menand’s critique.
6 Dramatic proof that punctuation has crucial legal implications is the 2014 suit brought by three Maine
truck drivers against Oakhurst Dairy for what they said was four years’ worth of denied overtime pay.
The case, which hung on a missing serial (or Oxford) comma, was settled for five million dollars. See
Daniel Victor.
7 For Lennard, views of punctuation split along party lines, with “the grammarians’ insistence that
parentheses are additional, irrelevant, extraneous, subordinate, or damaging to the clarity of argument:
whereas in practice they are often original, relevant, central, emphatic, or indicative of the crux of
argument. The fact is that a lunula marks a boundary between two textual states, one as it were the
tonic, the other parenthetical to the tonic” (Lennard 242).
8 As Calhoun explains his color scheme: “Periods and question marks and exclamation marks are red.
Commas and quotation marks are green. Semicolons and colons are blue” (Calhoun). My own
preference would have been to distinguish these groupings of marks by adding more colors, and to
include parentheses and em dashes. As well, question marks operate differently as a condition of
dialogue between characters from a narrative pattern of punctuational emphasis.
9 Though footnotes, here self-consciously acknowledged in a footnote, are more palimpsists (following
Gérard Genette’s distinction) than actual punctuation. One need look little further than Junot Díaz,
Dave Eggers, or David Foster Wallace to register how fictional footnotes seem to extend Faulkner’s
more abrupt interruptions of reading time and authorial presence, serving as diversion from a distinct
narrative trajectory.
 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 weather was coming over the
mountains from the sea.
The flags in the square hung wet from the white poles and the banners were
wet and hung damp against the front of the houses, and in between the steady
drizzle the rain came down and drove every one under the arcades and made
pools of water in the square, and the streets wet and dark and deserted; yet the
fiesta kept up without any pause. It was only driven under cover. (Hemingway,
Sun 170)
Hemingway’s prose sequencing is exemplary, with sentences summing up the
weather in a way that evokes the listlessness Brett admittedly feels, now shared
by the narrator Jake Barnes. Again, the diction throughout is elementary (“fog
had come,” “flags in the square,” “steady drizzle”), the repetitions self-
consciously iterative (“come over the mountains,” “coming over the mountains”;
“drove every one under,” “driven under cover”).
Yet what energizes the whole is the shift in internal punctuation between the
paragraphs, almost as a self-conscious switch between two contrasting styles.
The first paragraph relies on short, passively constructed, indicative sentences,
all punctuated by periods with the exception of a single comma to set off a
clause (again, unnecessarily). The effect of this paratactic syntax compounded
by its abrupt punctuation is to evoke an experience fundamentally disconnected,
unassimilated, emotionally null. The one active, narrative sentence (“I walked
out . . .”) confirms by contrast the tenebrous mood hanging over the passage
until we transition into the second paragraph, where repetitions are compounded
(“wet” reiterated three times; “hung” twice). Yet everything takes place with
only two periods in a syntax otherwise all but unpunctuated, as the unscrolling
polysyndeton (“and . . . and . . . and”) alters the first paragraph’s “dull and
gloom” into a mood that, despite the weather, proves emotionally uplifting. It is
as if the paragraphs were meant to exemplify exactly what punctuation might do,
anticipating other writers below in their varied styles. Even Hemingway’s
solitary semicolon here, otherwise notably rare in his prose, anticipates Woolf’s
usage by moving the reader from the swelling accumulations of water (as “rain,”
“sea,” “wet,” “damp,” “drizzle,” “pools of water”) across the sentence to the
safely dry emotional harbor of the fiesta once again. In this, Hemingway might
be seen as anticipating part of the trajectory of the following chapters.
In fact, his influence can be measured by a quick glance at (and leap forward
to) Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006), which opens in prose that appears
desolate, bluntly truncated, inflected by periods (not commas), splintered into
separate impressions that are the effects of a signature style: “When he woke in
the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he’d reach out to touch the child
sleeping beside him. Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each
one than what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming
away the world” (McCarthy 3).5 That unconventional means of honing his
appalling narrative may best be grasped by normalizing the syntax of this
apocalyptic landscape, in registering how fully the topographic and
punctuational character of description have been borrowed from
Hemingway.Consider the alternative, which might be construed as undulant,
even uplifting: “When he woke in the woods, in the dark and cold of the night,
he’d reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him. Nights were dark beyond
darkness, and the days more gray each one than what had gone before, like the
onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world.” We realize that
McCarthy’s stripping away of even the most modest of pauses, relying instead
on abrupt full stops, effectively divests the landscape of continuity itself. The
punctuated diurnal rhythms of the latter, restructured passage have been erased.
Swept into the final, unyielding “onset” of an ophthalmological simile, the
passage suggests how much the scene’s resistance to flux depends entirely on
grammatical inducement itself. That glimpse of alternative expressive
possibilities confirms how far the Hemingway style can go, in giving us one of
its most dramatic instances. He lays the foundations for McCarthy’s own
experimental triumphs, in gesturing beyond Hemingway’s repudiation of falsely
comforting syntax, denying the logic of sequence or integrating flow, extending
literature’s further embrace of a modern world as finally disconnected, arbitrary
and disjointed.6

Notes
1 As Hemingway admitted less than a decade after his earliest stories: “I was trying to write then, and I
found the greatest difficulty, aside from knowing truly what you really felt, rather than what you were
supposed to feel and had been taught to feel, was to put down what really happened in actions; what
the actual things were which produced the emotion that you experienced. In writing for a newspaper
you told what happened, and with one trick and another, you communicated the feeling of something
that has happened on that day; but the real thing, the sequence of motion and fact which made the
feeling and which would be as valid in a year or in ten years or, with luck and if you stated it purely
enough, always, was beyond me and I was working very hard to get it” (Death 2).
2 As Alex Link claims, in his analysis of the story’s lexical patterns and punctuational choices: “The
movement of the text from a prominence of ‘want’ and ‘know’ to one of ‘realize’ and ‘feel’ suggests
that the man is not seeking a compromise, but instead a means of getting what he wants by
manipulating how Jig feels and thinks” (Link 69).
3 Later, Jameson explicitly addressed Hemingway’s stylistic preference in terms that anticipate my claim
for the priority of punctuation over preconceived meaning: “one is wrong to say that Hemingway
began by wishing to express or convey certain basic experiences; rather, he began by wishing to write
a certain type of sentence, a kind of neutral compte rendu of external displacements, and very quickly
he found that such a sentence could do two kinds of things well: register movement in the external
world, and suggest the tension and fitful resentment between people which is intermittently expressed
in their spoken comment” (Jameson, Marxism 411). While punctuation is not mentioned here, it is
implied in Jameson’s emphasis on the sentence.
4 As he adds of the comma, it “has the seeds of perpetual motion within it: it connects co mplete
sentences, lets them pile up one after another, and suggests no superior structure which would cause a
period to happen at any given point, which would of itself set an end to the fissioning development”
(Jameson, Sartre 58). By contrast, in Jameson’s logic: “The colon was bounded, centripetal, moving in
upon itself to vanish at a given moment; the comma has no natural term; the form which governs it is
open, full of loose ends” (Jameson, Sartre 59).
5 Ashley Kunza cites McCarthy dismissively referring to punctuation (in an interview with Oprah
Winfrey) as “weird little marks” (Kunza 146).
6 A century after Hemingway, digital communication has seen a conspicuous shunning of periods,
interpreted as sign of either sarcasm or anger. Anna Davies notes: “The finality of a full stop can be
construed as over-assertive or even aggressive. As a result, it is becoming more common to leave the
end of a communiqué with no punctuation or with an ellipsis” (Davies 10; see also Scheible 44).
Gretchen McCulloch observes that “the passive-aggressive potential of the single period” began in
2013, and describes the decorum of internet communication so: “if you’re writing informally and you
don’t want to bother deciding whether your string of words is a full sentence or merely a clausal
fragment, one way to split the difference is to punctuate ambiguously—to use an ellipsis or dash”
(McCulloch 113, 112; see as well Ben Crair).
 2
Hesitation: Baldwin’s Commas

Given the finality of periods, one might well presume that commas (pace
Hemingway and McCarthy) offer a less abrupt, more even-tempered breathing
space, allowing a thought or event to be extended, developed, shaped via a series
of modulations and nuanced additions. And clauses set off by commas often do
have the effect of integrating prose, setting up appositions and implicit
connections that hone a point made less effectively in a brief simple sentence.
But a profusion of commas can also lend a more precipitate, less judicious cast
to prose, paradoxically registering an antithetical effect. They can alternatively
weave together moods or unsettle ideas; they have the potential to generate
harmonious rhythms—or to disrupt them. As well, an intermediate effect can be
achieved, as Nicholson Baker observes of Samuel Beckett, who “spliced the
phrases of Malone Dies and Molloy together with one-size-fits-all commas, as
commonplace as stones on a beach, to achieve that dejected sort of murmured
ecphonesis so characteristic of his narrative voice” (Baker 71). Beckett was far
too inventive and experimental in his use (and abandonment) of punctuation for
this description to be exclusively true, but it does indicate the divergent
possibilities of such marks (particularly commas) for modern writers.1 Earlier
authors were not always so self-conscious, with Charles Dickens accused of
being excessively prone to “thudding commas” while Herman Melville “flung
commas like darts while riding a swell at sea, and they went wide of the mark”
(Norris 96, 99). As we shall see, James Baldwin inherited this propensity a full
century later.
But a contemporary far more attentive than Dickens and Melville to the effect
of such pauses was Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose equivocal style built on an
accumulation of clauses that regularly extend yet modify, even contradict, what
his sentences initially seem to proclaim. In the hesitancy of his judgments, he
remains ever averse to simple declarative statements: stating something, then
done with it. Indeed, his fiction reveals a constitutional inability to rest easy in
ready judgments or to settle for unmodified assessments, as if ever inclined to
revise his tentative angle of vision. And such nuanced responsiveness establishes
characters multidimensionally, each more than the sum of separate parts,
conflicted in their own way as if at war with themselves. That style is
Hawthornian, evident in nearly all he wrote, though perfected in The Scarlet
Letter (1850), in which theme, style, and overall structure converge. Each of the
novel’s main figures needs to disguise a private from a public self, doing so
through prose resistant to stating matters unilaterally. A fundamental
ambivalence characterizes Hawthorne’s vision, expressed via an equivocal,
oblique, comma-strewn expressive style that renders any observation uncertain,
finally enigmatic. And the narrative’s own self-division (with the second half
repeating and inverting the first) matches the characters’ own disunion, reflected
in sentences that seem to back up on themselves.
The novel’s opening sentence itself offers a syntactic alternative to the social
consciousness ascribed to the Puritans—of their grim self-certainty, their solid
conviction, their firmly black-and-white construction of social reality: “A throng
of bearded men, in sad-coloured garments and grey steeple-crowned hats, inter-
mixed with women, some wearing hoods, and others bareheaded, was assembled
in front of a wooden edifice, the door of which was heavily timbered with oak,
and studded with iron spikes” (Hawthorne 45). For those attuned to punctuation,
the stuttering introduction to this community reveals in its very pauses and self-
corrections an alternative to the group solidarity it strives to describe. The
second chapter then opens descriptively in a style that confirms what we already
know:
The grass-plot before the jail, in Prison Lane, on a certain summer morning,
not less than two centuries ago, was occupied by a pretty large number of the
inhabitants of Boston; all with their eyes intently fastened on the iron-clamped
oaken door. Amongst any other population, or at a later period in the history of
New England, the grim rigidity that petrified the bearded physiognomies of
these good people would have augured some awful business in hand.
(Hawthorne 47)
In the controlled pauses, the clauses that accumulate sentence by sentence, the
unwinding discriminations that at once augment and entangle the whole:
Hawthorne at once depends on commas and somehow defies them, continuing in
a distinctive brand of stylistic divertissement to the end.Notably, midway
through, he tentatively, teeteringly marvels at Hester’s remaining in New
England:
It might be, too,—doubtless it was so, although she hid the secret from herself,
and grew pale whenever it struggled out of her heart, like a serpent from its
hole,—it might be that another feeling kept her within the scene and pathway
that had been so fatal. There dwelt, there trode the feet of one with whom she
deemed herself connected in a union, that, unrecognized on earth, would bring
them together before the bar of final judgment, and make that their marriage-
altar, for a joint futurity of endless retribution. Over and over again, the tempter
of souls had thrust this idea upon Hester’s contemplation, and laughed at the
passionate and desperate joy with which she seized, and then strove to cast it
from her. She barely looked the idea in the face, and hastened to bar it in its
dungeon. What she compelled herself to believe—what, finally, she reasoned
upon, as her motive for continuing a resident of New England—was half a
truth, and half a self-delusion. (Hawthorne 72–73)
The paragraph wonderfully captures in its hesitations and apparent lapses
Hester’s divided feelings, her mixed reasons for having stayed and for
continuing to stay, “half a truth, and half a self-delusion.”
As she compels herself to fight natural impulses and discordant feelings, the
narrator confirms an ambivalence that is also highly ambiguous, not fully
knowable. The shady, gray self-presentation in sentences structured so
thoroughly by commas confirms the tentative view of Hester that offers such
multiple possibilities. Little will chan ge between this intermediate transitional
moment and the conclusion, when: “On the threshold she paused,—turned partly
round,—for, perchance, the idea of entering all alone, and all so changed, the
home of so intense a former life, was more dreary and desolate than even she
could bear” (Hawthorne 228). Hawthorne’s almost obsessively frequent commas
confirm the narrator’s tentativeness as he recounts events that seem to drift back
and forth. Sentences open by implying positive experiences that then end
confirming the contrary, denying the reader a confident interpretation. And as
sentences go, so goes the novel, with characters each appearing at last at odds
with their initial appearance. Commas that tend to parse sentences in conflicting
ways match the persistent evocation of both characters and depictions.
Any other study than one focused on punctuation would be unlikely to pair
Hawthorne with James Baldwin, though a hunch might be ventured that their
shared preoccupation with outcasts and outliers drew them to the enforced
hesitation of commas. Indeed, their signature styles both depend on liberal
insertions of commas in prose that initially seems not to demand them. Like
Hawthorne, moreover, Baldwin realizes the antipodal logic of commas, capable
of both enhancing and unsettling ideas, often at the same time. He had learned
the power of these rhetorical turns from his own teen-age years as a gifted
Pentecostal preacher, and his earliest essays already reveal a formidable
command of English prose marked by frequent pauses. His notorious 1949
polemic against Harriet Beecher Stowe’s popularity a century earlier exemplifies
the tendency:
Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a very bad novel, having, in its self-righteous, virtuous
sentimentality, much in common with Little Women. Sentimentality, the
ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of
dishonesty, the inability to feel; the wet eyes of the sentimentalist betray his
aversion to experience, his fear of life, his arid heart; and it is always,
therefore, the signal of secret and violent inhumanity, the mask of cruelty.
(Baldwin, Notes 10)
And the rest of the fiery essay, still compelling today, matches punctuation with
its ideological assault on all smoothly honeyed bromides, all mawkish recitals,
all trite tributes. In flat-out contravention of Stowe’s reductive binaries, he
earnestly advocates that “only within this web of ambiguity, paradox, this
hunger, danger, darkness, can we find at once ourselves and the power that will
free us from ourselves” (Baldwin, Notes 11).
Baldwin’s bold defiance of conventional assumptions—about literary
performance as well as racial attitudes—came at the time as a surprise, in
spurning any accommodation to Stowe’s racist if nonetheless politically liberal,
abolitionist stance. But consider this account from the eminent critic F. W.
Dupee of later essays in The Fire Next Time (1963), admiring Baldwin’s prose
expression as inimitably his own, independent of subject matter, worthy of full
citation:
He is in love, for example, with syntax, with sentences that mount through
clearly articulated stages to a resounding and clarifying climax and then
gracefully subside. For instance this one, from The Fire Next Time:
Girls, only slightly older than I was, who sang in the choir or taught Sunday
school, the children of holy parents, underwent, before my eyes, their
 incredible metamorphosis, of which the most bewildering aspect was not
their budding breasts or their rounding behinds but something deeper and
more subtle, in their eyes, their heat, their odor, and the inflection of their
voices.
Nobody else in democratic America writes sentences like this anymore. It
suggests the ideal prose of an ideal literary community, some aristocratic
France of one’s dreams. (Dupee, “Baldwin”)
That was a welcome accolade, as Baldwin surely felt at the time, though it leads
to the playful speculation that a supposedly democratic style might be more
leveling and paratactic in contrast to the aristocratic tone Dupee admires. Much
as the quoted excerpt deserves “ideal” praise, however, Dupee pointedly fails to
address the question of syntactical shaping itself, the hypotactic nature of the
sentence he quotes, with its vivid reliance on commas for effect. Why not more
of a glance at the prose rather than simply a courteous covering gesture?
Grant that Baldwin fell into this habit as a self-confessed effect of his Bible-
loving youth, coupled of course with a later devotion to Henry James. And grant
as well that this comma-laden habit characterizes all his writing, early and late,
fictional and nonfictional, occasional essays and fire-breathing exhortations.2
Still, he realized the antithetical possibilities contained in his punctuational
preference, the paradoxical counterarguments implicit in his syntactical choice,
and displayed them to powerful effect at the heart of his second novel,
Giovanni’s Room (1956). The way the novel presents the anguished experience
of David, a gay American white male divorced from his own body; alienated
from Hella, his long-time American girlfriend; and tormented by his feelings for
the young Italian, Giovanni, who falls in love with him in Paris: all this results
from Baldwin’s signature use of commas. Indeed, the novel’s pow er builds from
David’s dismay at what seems beyond his control, unfolding through a series of
flashbacks that begins with a childhood memory of having had boyhood sex with
his friend Joey. Fleeing to Europe, he proposes in sexual panic to the first
American woman he meets, and then feels adrift when she retreats to Spain in
order to consider that proposal. In her absence, David cannot resist a passionate
affair with Giovanni, though he abandons him on Hella’s return. And Giovanni’s
murderous anguish forces a crisis in which Hella finally forsakes David on the
eve of Giovanni’s public execution.
The novel’s vivid thematic resonances emerge from issues related to David’s
sexuality, which have largely focused critical efforts. But few have observed the
way his narrative voice emerges in a highly punctuated style. And no one
engages the alternations between his self-conscious uncertainties (evoked by
comma-laden prose) and his otherwise clear-minded declarations (stated in
period-pointed sentences). This becomes apparent immediately in David’s first
flashback to meeting Hella, filled with the self-loathing he has felt over his brief
encounter with Joey: “I can see her, very elegant, tense, and glittering,
surrounded by the light which fills the salon of the ocean liner, drinking rather
too fast, and laughing, and watching the men. That was how I met her”
(Baldwin, Early 222). The simple words and brief clauses cluster together, as if
in pointillist representation of the past, pulling together a series of images.
Yet the staccato delivery at the same time vigorously denies such a weave,
seeming ever uncertain, pausing too often, hiccuping unrestrainedly—as much in
resistance to the memory as in solicitation. And on the next page, likewise,
David continues to draw on associations that pull up in their own turn a flood of
untoward memories:
I was thinking, when I told Hella that I had loved her, of those days before
anything awful, irrevocable, had happened to me, when an affair was nothing
more than an affair. Now, from this night, this coming morning, no matter how
many beds I find myself in between now and my final bed, I shall never be able
to have any more of those boyish, zestful affairs—which are, really, when one
thinks of it, a kind of higher, or, anyway, more pretentious masturbation.
(Baldwin, Early 222)
“Pretentious” indeed, as the self-involved, onanistic musings confirm, though
punctuation again shapes recollection into a series of mixed moments, of
clashing feelings, present and past, with mere masturbatory release shackled
syntactically together with a profound and redeeming affection. We are hard-
pressed to separate out the diverse moments, in the alignment of “boyish, zestful
affairs” somehow with “an affair,” simple and heteronormative. Unlike any other
writer, Baldwin evokes through commas a deeply contradictory state of mind
that perfectly embodies David’s consciousness, torn between what he thinks he
wants and what his body actually desires and says to him. In this regard,
Baldwin’s perspective aligns with Hawthorne’s.
Even in more self-contained, self-satisfied moments, David’s syntax doubles
back, appearing to reverse itself, though the commas (rather than dashes, say)
suggest the reversals are only meant to be momentary, without any deeper
reconsideration or a fuller plan of revision:
 Then I, alone, and relieved to be alone, perhaps went to a movie, or walked, or
returned home and read, or sat in a park and read, or sat on a café terrace, or
talked to people, or wrote letters. I wrote to Hella, telling her nothing, or I
wrote to my father asking for money. And no matter what I was doing, another
me sat in my belly, absolutely cold with terror over the question of my life.
(Baldwin, Early 287)
The recurrent “or”s pepper a prose that seems in the first two sentences to lack
direction before the third reveals a self-loathing that regularly nullifies any
activity, unravels any coherent state of mind, invalidates any feeling of
integrated selfhood.
Even in less taut situations, David’s thoughts rarely cohere, as if his emotional
register were—in good times or bad, wrought moments or calm—invariably
perturbed, unfocused, lacking concentration:
The bus came and the policeman and I, the only people waiting, got on—he
stood on the platform, far from me. The policeman was not young, either, but
he had a gusto which I admired. I looked out of the window and the streets
rolled by. Ages ago, in another city, on another bus, I sat so at the windows,
looking outward, inventing for each flying face which trapped my brief
attention some life, some destiny, in which I played a part. I was looking for
some whisper, or promise, of my possible salvation. (Baldwin, Early 340–41)
Here, simply boarding a bus, casting his eyes about, David lapses into a
fractured mental syntax, unable to string together observations into the
polysyndeton of a calmly tranquil stream of consciousness. Instead, commas
mandate a wild looking before and after, as if not simply allowing us to be swept
along unwaveringly but imploring us to pause at the same time to look further
ahead, then behind, before continuing with the sentence.
Moreover, confirming that this is not simply an unthinking signature style,
unvaried in any and all situations, Baldwin invokes a very different expressive
mode for Hella when she finally can no longer endure David’s inexplicable
behavior: “Please. I want to go home. I want to get married. I want to start
having kids. I want us to live someplace, I want you. Please David. What are we
marking time over here for?” (Baldwin, Early 353). The short anaphoric
sentences, isolated by abrupt, seemingly stalwart periods that articulate her
coldly angry, anguished state, reinforce a difference from David, contrasting her
knowledge of what it is she actually does want with the kind of relationship she
still desires, if irredeemably.
 By contrast, David continues as if unassuaged, even in the midst of her
faltering final kiss: “It seemed that my body, next to her warmth, her insistence,
under her hands, would never awaken. But when it awakened, I had moved out
of it. From a great height, where the air all around me was colder than ice, I
watched my body in a stranger’s arms” (Baldwin, Early 353). Again, the
customary weight of commas is light, continuing an idea, enhancing a
formulation; but Baldwin’s intense rhetorical practice tends to have the opposite
effect—making us self-conscious as readers about what is not being protracted
and conjoined but instead paused, even reversed. And as we shall see,
punctuational reversals are more often the domain of dashes than commas,
though it may not come as surprise th at writers drawn to one have frequently
been inclined toward the other. And even when not—when a preference for
dashes conspicuously outweighs other punctuational choices, as in the case of
Emily Dickinson or Henry James—editors have more than occasionally
intervened to replace the dashes with commas.
That species of intervention makes it appropriate here to pause over Jane
Austen, especially since she represents a quandary for editors eager to correct
her punctuational style—one that teeters, as we do at the moment, between
commas and dashes. Clearly, Austen offers a glaring contrast to Baldwin: not
only for obvious thematic differences; nor because early nineteenth-century
standards for punctuation were not yet prescribed; nor even because of our
uneasiness about her punctuational intentions (possibly altered, possibly
confirmed by editors, leaving us uncertain in the absence of original
manuscripts); but because of her eccentric writing style itself. “Her style is much
more intimate and relaxed, more conversational,” Kathryn Sutherland argues;
“Her punctuation is much more sloppy, more like the kind of thing our students
do and we tell them not to. She uses capital letters and underlining to emphasise
the words she thinks important, in a manner that takes us closer to the speaking
voice than the printed page. In taking them away, it becomes more grammatical
and sophisticated—but something has been lost” (cited by Maev Kennedy). As
another critic observes, “Austen hardly punctuates at all, so what you get is a
much more urgent form of language which becomes more restrained when it is
edited. There tends to be an awful lot of clauses and sub-clauses. There is the
odd comma, but they aren’t always in the most rational places. There are no
paragraphs” (Malvern).
The controversy over Austen’s punctuation has recently aroused scholars and
critics unsettled by Sutherland’s claims, though one of the examples she offers
nicely suggests the stakes involved. The only surviving manuscript fragment
available for Austen is a revised section of her late novel Persuasion (1817),
preserved simply because it was canceled and replaced. Yet it gives a vivid sense
of her typical offhand style, evident in private letters that rely on frequent
capitalizations and clearly tilt toward dashes3 :
“When I yeilded [sic], I thought it was to Duty.—But no Duty could be called
in aid here.—In marrying a Man indifferent to me, all Risk would have been
incurred, & all Duty violated.”—“Perhaps I ought to have reasoned thus, he
replied, but I could not.—I could not derive benefit from the later knowledge of
your Character which I had acquired, I could not bring it into play, it was
overwhelmed, buried, lost in those earlier feelings, which I had been smarting
under Year after Year.—” (Sutherland, “Austen’s”)
This is the way Austen penned the manuscript, with neither line breaks nor
paragraph indentations, presumably in order to economize on expensive writing
paper.4 And here is the printed version, where changes that seem small prove
cumulatively significant:
“When I yielded, I thought it was to duty; but no duty could be called in aid
here. In marrying a man indifferent to me, all risk would have been incurred,
and all duty violated.”
“Perhaps I ought to have reasoned thus,” he replied, “but I could not. I could
not derive benefit from the late knowledge I had acquired of your character. I
could not bring it into play: it was overwhelmed, buried, lost in those earlier
feelings which I had been smarting under year after year.” (Sutherland,
“Austen’s”)
That is, Austen’s printed use of commas or dashes (as much as quotation marks,
capitalization, and paragraphing) would seem to have been as much a copy
editor’s determination as her own, always assuming that she approved of the
amendments.
Another way to describe the finished effect is that an “intention” in the text
seems to fly free of the author, or at least is not entirely circumscribed by her
original inclination. Austen’s handwritten sentences, Jenny Davidson observes,
“are spikier, more idiosyncratic than anything we see in her novels as they have
been printed,” even though she admits, “It is an illusion of sorts, as the sequence
of words is identical” (Davidson 36). That domesticating impulse (of generally
removing dashes from prose) became more apparent through the course of the
century, though our sense of the “polite” rhythm of Austen’s printed novels is
dramatically enhanced by realizing how fully her own voice sounds so dynamic,
even bristling; expressively, in terms of punctuational conventions, it might be
said that she “looks backward rather than forward” (Davidson 37).
Still, Sutherland poses an interesting question for the intersection of
punctuational choice and mediated expression in Austen’s later work:
What these occasions for mistaken editorial conjecture hold in common is a
quality characteristic of Austen’s mature narrative style which can be described
as vocal encroachment. It is most famously present in those passages in which
a central fictional consciousness (usually female, often the heroine’s) is
absorbed into the omniscient narrator’s voice, a fusion of first- and third-person
narrative, usually designated “free indirect discourse.” The skill of such a
method lies in its compre ssion, and in particular in the overlaying of one voice
by another. It is at just such moments, when the text is most richly and at the
same time least precisely voiced, that it betrays the logic of the reading eye and
denies its visual confinement. (Sutherland, Textual 300)
Compounding the issue is that we have no available evidence for Austen’s
influence on her novels’ repunctuation. Sutherland sides against authorial
revision in favor of its being a decision made by others on behalf of the printing
house, though Rachel Brownstein offers a perfectly reasonable retort that
nothing precludes Austen’s having made her own corrections to manuscripts sent
to the printer.
Perhaps less important than why dashes may have been expunged is the fact
that those remaining have so decided an effect, sometimes merely standing in for
commas or semicolons, at others suggesting a character’s heightened emotional
turmoil, at still others a helter-skelter mental chaos. In each case, the momentary
conversational breach in an em dash registers an intensifying disruption of
thought. Among the more notorious splashes of such punctuation in Emma
occurs in the outing to Mr. Knightley’s estate at Donwell Abbey, where Emma
takes in the “becoming characteristic situation,” observing to herself: “—It was
just what it ought to be, and it looked what it was—and Emma felt an increasing
respect for it” (Austen 335, 336). Gradually, swept up by dashes into the scene
of strawberry picking, Emma’s inner thoughts merge with dialogue both spoken
and heard:
and Mrs. Elton, in all her apparatus of happiness, her large bonnet and her
 basket, was very ready to lead the way in gathering, accepting, or talking—
strawberries, and only strawberries, could now be thought or spoken of.—“The
best fruit in England—every body’s favourite—always wholesome.—These the
finest beds and finest sorts.—Delightful to gather for one’s self—the only way
of really enjoying them.—Morning decidedly the best time—never tired—
every sort good—hautboy infinitely superior—no comparison—the others
hardly eatable—hautboys very scarce—Chili preferred—white wood finest
flavour of all—price of strawberries in London—abundance about Bristol—
Maple Grove—cultivation—beds when to be renewed—gardeners thinking
exactly different—no general rule—gardeners never to be put out of their way
—delicious fruit—only too rich to be eaten much of—inferior to cherries—
currants more refreshing—only objection to gathering strawberries the
stooping—glaring sun—tired to death—could bear it no longer—must go and
sit in the shade.” (Austen 335)
Initially, the passage seems to become a monologue by the pretentious Mrs.
Elton, though in the very next line the narrator affirms, “Such, for half an hour,
was the conversation” (Austen 335).
In fact the dash-laden “conversation,” we now realize, may be not only Mrs.
Elton droning on but others breaking in, offering interjections (signaled by silent
dashes) to which she responds, or perhaps even sneaking in on Emma’s own
private thoughts. Voice itself becomes confused (is it Mrs. Elton? others in the
party? even the narrator?), with the reader offered snatches at once shaped by
Emma’s introductory thoughts, perhaps even her sly mimicry, thus offording a
more nuanced view of the heroine’s shifting response than we had at first
surmised. Here as elsewhere, Austen’s proclivity for dashes allows a heightened
response to a scene that plays out dramatically, but also emotionally, with
dialogue internalized. The question left standing, certainly following the
example of Hawthorne and Baldwin, is whether these dashes (as so many others
in Austen’s manuscripts) might readily have been replaced by the commas that
copy editor William Gifford desired. Perhaps so, though it is worth keeping in
mind how conventional formal attitudes toward the em dash would change.

Notes
1 As James Williams asserts: “Beckett saw the problem of literature as ‘trying to find a form for . . .
silence’—and the particular relationship of Beckett’s work to the problems and possibilities of silence
helps us to see why Beckett’s punctuation is a subject which is beginning to attract sustained critical
attention. Beckett’s prose is marked throughout by attention to starting, stopping, and pausing; marked
 too by an imaginative identification with those problems of integration and disintegration which
punctuation, being connective, enacts” (Williams 251). Or as he adds: “The evolution of Beckett’s
prose style reads like a series of experiments with the possibilities of punctuation” (Williams 254).
2 While Laura Fisher likewise observes this stuttering effect, she does not focus on the syntax of
multiple clauses that produces it: “Another Country vacillates, as interlocking affiliations prove
alternately reparative and profoundly destructive; the vision of urban sociality it offers hovers between
promise and peril. We might say, then, that the novel’s governing mood is one of uncertain potentiality,
a feeling of possibility that somehow exceeds the content of the storyline” (Fisher 138). And just a
glance at the opening sentences of If Beale Street Could Talk (1974) reveals the pattern continues
throughout Baldwin’s career: “I look at myself in the mirror. I know that I was christened Clementine,
and so it would make sense if people called me Clem, or even, come to think of it, Clementine, since
that’s my name: but they don’t” (Baldwin, Later 369). Likewise, consider the opening of his last novel,
Just Above My Head (1979): “The damn’d blood burst, first through his nostrils, then pounded through
the veins in his neck, the scarlet torrent exploded through his mouth, it reached his eyes and blinded
him, and brought Arthur down, down, down, down, down” (Baldwin, Later 515).
3 Sutherland identifies one prominent editor as the “notoriously pedantic” William Gifford (Sutherland,
Textual 303). Of alterations in the second edition of Mansfield Park, she adds that “the majority of
changes do not suggest authorial polish; rather, they indicate the routine readying of manuscript for
publication by an external hand” (Textual 159). Five years later, under attack for this interpretation,
Sutherland quoted from Gifford’s letters to reveal how vexed he was by Austen’s punctuation (see
Sutherland, “Austen’s”).
4 As Sutherland reminds us, the exchanges between characters can appear in her published novels as an
“exaggeratedly staccato performance,” back and forth: “It is tempting to invoke at this point the
evidence of the extant manuscripts, where paragraphing is far more fluid than print conventions
normally allow. But the manuscripts are not reliable as an indicator of Austen’s print intentions since,
as in the cancelled fragment of Persuasion, for example, there is no paragraphing of any kind
throughout a whole chapter” (Sutherland, Textual 309).
 3
Interruption: James’s Dashes

Before turning to Henry James’s altered mastery of dashes a century later, we

might recall the various uses to which they had already been put: according to
Ben Yagoda, a “mark that—unlike commas, periods, semicolons and all the
others—doesn’t seem to be subject to any rules” (Yagoda).1 Poe had drawn on
the em dash as a means of imparting a certain frenzy, but even earlier
Washington Irving had turned to dashes in “Rip Van Winkle” (1819), when the
titular figure awakens in the Catskills after a twenty-year slumber:
“Surely,” thought Rip, “I have not slept here all night.” He recalled the
occurrences before he fell asleep. The strange man with a keg of liquor—the
mountain ravine—the wild retreat among the rocks—the woe begone party at
ninepins—the flagon—“ah! that flagon! that wicked flagon!” thought Rip
—“what excuse shall I make to Dame Van Winkle?” (Irving 776)
His befuddlement as he remembers the moments immediately prior to falling
asleep is manifested via the same punctuation that in Poe marked the narrator’s
hysterical state, which in turn induces a similar sense of convulsive horror in the
reader.Later, when Rip at last returns home to find all utterly transformed, the
dashes crowd in once again to register his amazed emotional state:
The very village was altered—it was larger and more populous. There were
rows of houses which he had never seen before, and those which had been his
familiar haunts had disappeared. Strange names were over the doors—strange
faces at the windows—every thing was strange. His mind now misgave him . . .
There stood the Kaatskill mountains—there ran the silver Hudson at a distance
—there was every hill and dale precisely as it had always been—Rip was
sorely perplexed—“That flagon last night,” thought he,—“has addled my poor
 head sadly!” (Irving 778)
Where another author might have relied on commas or semicolons, the effect of
this alternative punctuation is to ratchet up consternation, to amplify Rip’s
disorientation, to more actively isolate disconnected impressions and
observations from each another as a means of simulating his befuddled state of
mind.
Henry James, more than any previous author, understood the diverse emotive
possibilities embodied in the em dash, building on his predecessors’ use of them
for emotional self-division, intellectual reconsideration, and digressive
heightening, but incorporating the horizontal mark to different ends in ways that
establish it as his dominant punctuational mode.2 Nor was this an understanding
acquired gradually, but apparently an insight intuited very early. Indeed, his first
interview in 1881 began with a reporter’s asking “if certain words just used
should be followed by a dash, and even boldly added: ‘Are you not famous, Mr.
James, for the use of dashes?’”3 Famous or not, James was clearly drawn to
dramas of psychological wavering, to a process of thinking that resists
straightforward unfolding and instead appears broken, as sedimented images and
ideas about one another, with psychological landscapes tilted awry by verbal
plate tectonics. And to see the imprint of punctuation over his sentences, we
realize the “dash man” is certainly that, if also much more. The dash, as it were,
comes to encapsulate James’s entire stylistic revolution, signaling a need to
make an abrupt stop, to pause in whiplash style, to consider the pull of possible
diversions in the very presentation of diversion itself. Few other writers have so
persistently represented consciousness as multiple, undecided, conflated,
interrupting deliberation with interjections—and realized that the only way to
represent this syntactically was through the em dash. As typographic lines that
point both forward and backward, dashes represent a breaking off, or a turning to
some prior moment or state of belief, or simply an effort to start anew, in
anticipation of fresh possibilities.4 James’s narratives embody in that regard a
Hamlet-like hesitation, frequently reviewing what has occurred and what might
have occurred in its stead, all to explore possibilities that exceed whatever his
narrative exposes as having in fact occurred (which can prove a more interesting
narrative).
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the em dash was not something James reserved for his
novels alone; indeed, it seems to have been a central intellectual lever for him—
part of the way in which he translated impressions into symbolic form. Mark
Boren has completed a thorough investigation of notes that James made to
himself, and nicely focuses upon sheer grammatical marks: “In James’s original
notebooks . . . horizontal lines abound: lines run between words; lines run
beneath them. The visual impact of his ubiquitous lines (in the original
notebooks) is inescapable. They delineate thoughts, break apart clauses,
underscore ideas, and give emphasis” (Boren 330). And that inescapable pattern
of lines scrawled across a page, forming an iconic representation of the mental
elisions and delays he himself experienced, defined in his early years the initial
patterns of thought that would in more elaborate configurations come to
characterize his later fictional triumphs.
Yet the editorial translations made of James’s notebooks are themselves
revelatory of the ways in which cultural dictates and conventional mores could
so easily transform meaning itself. As Boren goes on to explain, in describing
the nonverbal but importantly visual and iconic status of James’s dashes:
When his notebooks are eventually published, thirty-one years after his death,
the countless dashes make it into the published notes, but the copious
underlining is translated into italics. The bold editorial act of italicization
maintains the stress placed on select words, but it destroys an important facet
of James’s notes: the sheer number of horizontal lines traversing his text and
thus the significance he placed on the physical line itself. In viewing the
original notes, the impression one has, the visual image inscribed on one’s
retinas and in one’s brain, is of an almost illegible scrawl punctuated by a
plethora of horizontal lines. Obviously (in the original notebooks) the
horizontal flourish is essential to James’s thought processes. Emphases
certainly survive in the translation for publication—on those words that are
italicized—but what is lost is the significance attached to “the line.” In James’s
original notebooks, the horizontal line is unmistakable and therefore
significant. (Boren 330)
Intriguingly, James perceives narrative as fully a graphic as a symbolic form,
with meaning registered through the kind of icons that Faulkner would later
include directly in his novels (of pictorial eyes or coffins, or simply of empty
spaces—all meant as actual physical depictions rather than verbal
representations).5
As early as “Daisy Miller” (1879), James had embraced the dash’s oral
tonality, in the doubling back and leaping forward that reminds us of someone in
the midst of thinking while speaking. Of course, the move from iconic (visual,
graphic) punctuation to its oral effects suggests a twofold, rabbit-duck conflation
hard to experience at the same time, as lines across a page transform both
speaker and reader into stuttering uncertainty. The novella’s opening paragraph
delights in crisscrossed clauses divided by commas, with a slightly pretentious
narrator offering a tourist’s guide to Vevey. But then suddenly, the second
paragraph dives into dashes:
He had come from Geneva the day before by the little steamer, to see his aunt,
who was staying at the hotel—Geneva having been for a long time his place of
residence. But his aunt had a headache—his aunt had almost always a headache
—and now she was shut up in her room, smelling camphor, so that he was at
liberty to wander about. He was some seven-and-twenty years of age; when his
friends spoke of him, they usually said that he was at Geneva “studying.”
When his enemies spoke of him, they said—but, after all, he had no enemie s;
he was an extremely amiable fellow, and universally liked. What I should say
is, simply, that when certain persons spoke of him they affirmed that the reason
of his spending so much time at Geneva was that he was extremely devoted to
a lady who lived there—a foreign lady—a person older than himself. Very few
Americans—indeed, I think none—had ever seen this lady, about whom there
were some singular stories. But Winterbourne had an old attachment for the
little metropolis of Calvinism; he had been put to school there as a boy, and he
had afterward gone to college there—circumstances which had led to his
forming a great many youthful friendships. (James, Turn 269)
Clearly, the narrator has shifted from the cumulative tempo of the opening, in its
slyly patronizing if practiced patter of setting a scene, to this acquired portrait of
Winterbourne, whom we soon learn is as full of brusque conclusions as the
punctuated description anticipates. Instead of calm formulations, this dash-laden
sequence pivots nervously, adding details belatedly, self-correctively, seeming in
the process a bit distracted. It is as if Winterbourne himself were here displacing
the narrator’s cultured tentativeness, his largely conditional tone, as the narrative
quietly adopts Winterbourne’s less judicious reliance on binary thinking. And
curiously, this clotting of dashes largely disappears from the story as
Winterbourne’s own emergent first-person voice makes such narrative seesawing
unnecessary.6
Dashes would accompany James throughout his career, predictably and
sardonically appearing at the onset of In the Cage (1898), set in a telegraph
office where the Morse-coded communication of electrical pulses is slyly
inserted as dots and dashes into the novella. There, they provide a textual (and
punctuational) context for the mysterious narrative:
It had occurred to her early that in her position—that of a young person
spending, in framed and wired confinement, the life of a guinea-pig or a
magpie—she should know a great many persons without their recognising the
acquaintance. That made it an emotion the more lively—though singularly rare
and always, even then, with opportunity still very much smothered—to see any
one come in whom she knew outside, as she called it, any one who could add
anything to the meanness of her function. Her function was to sit there with
two young men—the other telegraphist and the counter-clerk. (James, Cage
174)
And dashes (as well as full-stopped dots) continue through nearly every
paragraph that ensues, as if to punctuate a theme that relies on enigmatic
communications duly tapped out yet tantalizingly incomprehensible to the
female telegraph operator who sends them.
By the time of The Ambassadors (1903) five years later, James had mastered
what earlier seemed mildly experimental, though his pattern of introducing
dashes is similar.7 The novel’s opening paragraph has three pointed interruptions
of the narrative voice itself, but this pattern only really gets going in the second
paragraph:
That note had been meanwhile—since the previous afternoon, thanks to this
happier device—such a consciousness of personal freedom as he hadn’t known
for years; such a deep taste of change and of having above all for the moment
nobody and nothing to consider, as promised already, if headlong hope were
not too foolish, to colour his adventure with cool success. There were people
on the ship with whom he had easily consorted—so far as ease could up to now
be imputed to him—and who for the most part plunged straight into . . .
(James, Ambassadors 22)
Here, Strether’s consciousness is represented via a combination of commas and
dashes, of sequences sutured together that gradually build, then abruptly
interrupt themselves, as thoughts are elaborated and subsequently corrected.
Indeed, one might well presume that James’s central theme has caught up to his
style, with the opening hesitations of “Daisy Miller” reflecting a savvy narrator
hedging his bets, now transformed into the basis of plot itself. The focus on
Strether is on a consciousness always teetering between certainty and
reformulation, ever ready to reconsider its own premises on the other side of a
dash. The “stiff” psychology informing the earlier narrative that skewers a
flirtatious Daisy Miller has now become the flexible, earnest, responsive
consciousness that wants to understand what has become of Chad Newsome.8
And while many of the novel’s dashes occur as acoustic gestures, endeavoring
to capture the quality of spoken conversation with its back and forth reversals,
just as many occur narratively in Strether’s self-conscious realization of how
little he actually knows, or can otherwise depend upon. Again, the potential
distinction between oral and visual makes the prose resonate, as pictorial and
symbolic representations vie with each other:
It was positively droll to him that he should already have Maria Gostrey,
whoever she was—of which he hadn’t really the least idea—in a place of safe
keeping. He had somehow an assurance that he should carefully preserve the
little token he had just tucked in. He gazed with unseeing lingering eyes as he
followed some of the implications of his act, asking himself if he really felt
admonished to qualify it as disloyal. It was prompt, it was possibly even
premature, and there was little doubt of the expression of face the sight of it
would have produced in a certain person. But if it was “wrong”—why then he
had better not have come out at all. At this, poor man, had he already—and
even before meeting Waymarsh—arrived. (James, Ambassadors 26)
Regularly, the narrative voice is broken up by dashes that establish how little
Strether can confidently assume or assert. Stymied, halting, uncertain how to
continue, he characteristically interrupts himself in almost any verbal gesture. Or
as he queries Maria Gostrey, “Well, is Chad—what shall I say?—monstrous?”
almost as if the words “what shall I say?” do little more than duplicate the
meaning of the dashes themselves (James, Ambassadors 116).
Moreover, at moments like this, we sometimes pause to consider the difference
between the parenthetical dash in mid-sentence (as here, which actually
constitutes two sets of dashes) and other varieties: the multiple dashes in “The
Tell-Tale Heart,” say, which attest to a hysterical consciousness, or those single
dashes that otherwise end a sentence, signaling something yet unstated. Here,
Strether’s self-impeding flow turns from the merely querulous to something
more revelatory of his questing intelligence, as he realizes once again how little
his own bland assumptions cover the facts of the case he desperately wants to
understand.
Near the end of the novel, wandering outside Paris into the countryside,
Strether lets his imagination wander as well:
He really continued in the picture—that being for himself his situation—all the
rest of this rambling day; so that the charm was still, was indeed more than
ever upon him when, toward six o’clock, he found himself amicably engaged
with a stout white-capped deep-voiced woman at the door of the auberge of the
biggest village, a village that affected him as a thing of whiteness, blueness and
crookedness, set in coppery green, and that had the river flowing behind or
before it—one couldn’t say which. (James, Ambassadors 415)
Again, the syntax converges on the dash that finally covers the scene, providing
the fullest description only to end in quizzical uncertainty that suggests how little
optical clarity is ever clear. And as the scene unfolds in shocked surprise at what
has actually become of Chad, dashes erupt dramatically. The point is that
Strether’s signature style, the way in which his discernibly heightened
consciousness manifests itself, is through his punctuation.
A year later, “The Beast in the Jungle” (1903) presents John Marcher
persistently anticipating that his life will pass him by somehow unlived. Yet
ironically, it is he who drains that life away in obsessive anticipation, refusing
the patient love of his one close friend, ever holding out for something yet to
come rather than already here in the person of May Welland: devoted, faithful,
already happening as he awaits. By the end of the story, what remains is a
stymied sense of life blocked by punctuation, with dashes prominent but
compounded as well by semicolons, parentheses, periods: all representing the
psychological resistances he has suffered, from which he had never been able to
break free into sinuously self-possessed, unremitting, and integrated prose.
Again, the reader feels frustrated as much by halting exposition as with an
obstructed consciousness, contributing as fully to a desire for stylistic release as
for psychological deliverance:
The escape would have been to love her; then, then he would have lived. She
had lived—who could say now with what passion?—since she had loved him
for himself; whereas he had never thought of her (ah how it hugely glared at
him!) but in the chill of his egotism and the light of her use. Her spoken words
came back to him—the chain stretched and stretched. (James, Turn 481)
Apart from the parenthetical self-laceration of “(ah how it hugely glared at
him!),” itself intensified by that exclamation point, consider how the dashes in
this long sentence tend to break the pace, contributing to the emotional
devastation of Marcher’s regret. Looking back and then despairingly forward
along the “chain” of moments locking him into the present he now suffers, we
realize how much that condition has been elicited by dashes. Their effect is to
puncture a sustainable rhythm, to break off an associative progression, to
sideline a thought or reduce an experience into something else entirely.
In fact, much of the story prepares for this end, relying on dashes from the
opening sentence, as if to anticipate a life that will defy continuity or sequence.
Instead, Marcher remains inert, paralyzed, condemned to starting ever anew (or
rather, never able to actually start). His meeting with May Bartram at the country
house at Weatherend becomes at once a premonition and a perpetuation,
reflected in its punctuation: “They lingered together still, she neglecting her
office—for from the moment he was so clever she had no proper right to him—
and both neglecting the house, just waiting as to see if a memory or two more
wouldn’t again breathe on them” (James, Turn 328). Thereafter, their
relationship is marked by a regularly broken rhythm that captures his haunted
dread of being utterly isolated:
He had thought of himself so long as abominably alone, and lo he wasn’t alone
a bit. He hadn’t been, it appeared, for an hour—since those moments on the
Sorrento boat. It was she who had been, he seemed to see as he looked at her—
she who had been made so by the graceless fact of his lapse of fidelity. To tell
her what he had told her—what had it been but to ask something of her?
(James, Turn 331)
The dashes here all but implement Marcher’s narcissism, returning him ever
back to a moment that should supposedly confirm his presupposition, rather than
opening out to some newer, more reflective progression of linked, integrated
scenes.9
By the time he asks that question, midway through, the hoped-for solution
already seems helplessly belated. Anticipation itself has become simply a
reconsideration: “What did everything mean—what, that is, did she mean, she
and her vain waiting and her probable death and the soundless admonition of it
all—unless that, at this time of day, it was simply, it was overwhelmingly too
late?” (James, Turn 347). And May’s own reassuring confirmation that “It’s
never too late” (James, Turn 353) serves not to clarify but to confuse our
reading, injecting doubt into any assurance that Marcher has at last grasped the
futility of his life. We end (as does he, it seems) unsure of how to read his fate,
as either further condemnation of a life lived with consummate egotism or a
transformation of consciousness in which he at last sees what was wrong in his
stuttering, stifling choices all along. A large part of that closing confusion
emerges from James’s punctuational finesse, having transfigured through his
“use of dashes” (already notorious early on) the simple confusions of “Daisy
Miller” into the far more complex psychological troublings of a life held at a
stammering pause.10 The dash, in short, might well be thought of as emblem of
Marcher’s fate.

Notes
1 Prior to Austen, the most prominent virtuoso of dashes was Laurence Sterne in The Life and Opinions
of Tristram Shandy (1759–67). As John Lennard observes, however, they also function (like Austen’s)
idiosyncratically: “the sense of Tristram’s personality, character, and mental habits which his text
produces is mediated largely through the broken-dash’d and parenthetic appearance of the mise-en-
page. Digressions operate at all levels in Tristram Shandy, including those of the chapter and the
volume, but they are manifest in the dashes and lunulae which spatter each page of text” (Lennard
140). As he adds of Tristram, “The ruling characteristics of that mind it would be hard to pin down—
speculative, restless, impatient of restraint, passionately enamoured of words and devoted to the
pursuit of ideas, but apt to pursue them for their appeal to the imagination rather than for their claims
upon the intellect” (Lennard 141). Roger Moss had earlier observed, “Indeed, what we should see is
that digressions themselves are ‘things’ just as much as they are responses to feeling. No reader of
Sterne should fall into the trap of reading the book as a series of digressions, following each one with
the seriousness that the surface demands—that is, following them ‘straightforwardly’—and forgetting
that digression is an issue in the book as well as a technique. Digression is an object standing in the
way of narrative as much as it is an adjunct to narrative—it is ‘thing’ as much as ‘feeling,’ ‘body’ as
much as ‘mind’” (Moss 186).
2 It is worth noting the dubious status of the dash in modern writing, contrary to its standing with Austen
and her contemporaries. As W. S. Maugham observed: “There is in the dash something rough, ready
and haphazard that goes against my grain. I have seldom read a sentence in which it could not be well
replaced by the elegant semi-colon or the discreet bracket” (Carey 20). For an alternative view, see
Yagoda.
3 One should not be surprised to learn that James was justly self-conscious about his punctuational
reputation: “Dash my fame!” he impatiently replied. “And remember, please, that dogmatizing about
punctuation is exactly as foolish as dogmatizing about any other form of communication with the
reader. All such forms depend on the kind of thing one is doing and the kind of effect one intends to
produce. Dashes, it seems almost platitudinous to say, have their particular representative virtue, their
quickening force, and, to put it roughly, strike both the familiar and the emphatic note, when those are
the notes required, with a felicity beyond either the comma or the semicolon; though indeed a fine
sense for the semicolon, like any sort of sense at all for the pluperfect tense and the subjunctive mood,
on which the whole perspective in a sentence may depend, seems anything but common. Does nobody
ever notice the calculated use by French writers of a short series of suggestive points in the current of
their prose? I confess to a certain shame for my not employing frankly that shade of indication, a finer
shade still than the dash.” (Lockwood)
4 Theodor Adorno observed: “To the person who cannot truly conceive anything as a unit, anything that
suggests disintegration or discontinuity is unbearable; only a person who can grasp totality can
understand caesuras. But the dash provides instruction in them. In the dash, thought becomes aware of
 its fragmentary character. It is no accident that in the era of the progressive degeneration of language,
this mark of punctuation is neglected precisely insofar as it fulfills its function: when it separates
things that feign a connection. All the dash claims to do now is to prepare us in a foolish way for
surprises that by that very token are no longer surprising” (Adorno 302).
5 This concern with marks on a page not as signs but as something more like drawings is central to
current critical interpretation of Emily Dickinson, led by the intervention of Susan Howe’s The Birth-
Mark. Further discussion of this issue is pursued later in this chapter.
6 Robin Riehl has studied James’s editing of this story in 1909, focusing on the dropped commas
intended to disambiguate the whole: “James’s injunction suggests that his ‘no-commas’ and other
punctuation changes are indeed ‘essential’ to reading his revised text. Close examination of revised
passages shows that the pervasively altered punctuation serves much more than a stylistic purpose: it is
neither accidental nor irrelevant to readings of the revised text” (Riehl 69). Yet the dashes remain
largely intact.
7 In 1897, James began dictating his fiction and memoirs, with careful instructions for where and what
sort of punctuation he intended. As his typewriting amanuensis, Theodora Bosanquet, later described:
“The spelling out of the words, the indication of commas, were scarcely felt as a drag on the
movement of his thought. ‘It all seems,’ he once explained, ‘to be so much more effectively and
unceasingly pulled out of me in speech than in writing’” (Bosanquet 34).
8 According to Mark Boren: There are 2325 dashes in The Ambassadors. This multitude is not surprising
though, considering that the text itself revolves around the presence, or absence, of significance in life
and the “undecidability” of communication. In rendering the protagonist’s difficulty in negotiating the
world and his hesitancy to enter into it, and in highlighting the constant attempts at communication
between characters and the inevitable misunderstandings and misreadings that result, Henry James
wields the dash to amazing effect. (Boren 338)
9 It is worth noting how, in contrast to his reliance on dashes, James never uses an ellipsis. That may be
explained by Adorno’s claim that “The ellipsis, a favorite way of leaving sentences meaningfully open
during the period when Impressionism became a commercialized mood, suggests an infinitude of
thoughts and associations” (Adorno 303). That very “infinitude” is precisely what James would deny
as the interesting psychological strain in his characters. By contrast, Jennifer DeVere Brody more
tautly declares: “The ellipsis can stand for what need not be said, for what may be redundant to say as
well as for what cannot be said, for that which exceeds locution and is therefore impossible” (Brody
77).
10 As if to clarify James’s distinctive tone, consider Max Beerbohm’s notorious parody, which strangely
favors an unusually energetic comma over the more characteristic dash in a way that makes Jamesian
prose seem fussier and more ingrown, if also finally not quite familiar.
http://www.parodies.org.uk/james-beerbohm.htm
 4
Rupture: Dickinson’s Dashes

The ever-present question of what sort of pause to invoke—whether the calm

interlude of a comma, the suspension of a parenthesis, the hitch of a semicolon,
or the caesura of a dash—is always at once consequence and cause of an
author’s signature vision. Achieving a certain prescribed pacing of expression is
dictated as much by the choice among such options as by larger syntactical
arrangements or thematic adjustments. Yet the choice is not always clear at first
to the reader, and rarely becomes a dilemma once a story or poem has been
published. This makes the notorious history of Emily Dickinson’s edited poems
a particularly revelatory one, of typography interrupted in the standoff between
supposedly presumptuous dashes replaced by acquiescent commas. Her nearly
1800 poems (with fewer than a dozen published in her lifetime), followed by a
popular, heavily edited posthumous 1890 collection, seem eerily to have set the
stage for contentious critical discussion in the following century, of poems first
normalized by commas into acceptable form.1 Not until Thomas H. Johnson’s
1955 scholarly edition were they at last restored into the restless, disturbing
dashes that exploded from her pen. Even then, the controversy did not subside;
on the contrary, critical divisions about Dickinson’s intentions and possibilities
have grown ever more tendentious.
It is worth pausing here in the shift away from prose fiction to consider how
the status of punctuation is altered by poetry’s configuration in lines. After all,
end-stopped lines confirm the weight of punctuational finality, while enjambed
lines slide sense along by refusing to culminate at the line break. Indeed,
enjambment allows line ends to serve as a form of silent punctuation unavailable
to prose: more moderate than typographical marks; encouraging a quicker pace
even as conflicting ideas are brought together. The particular poetic implications
of dashes over commas, or of semicolons over periods, may differ little from
their characteristic resonance in prose, though the additional weight of the line
compounds their effects. And Dickinson forms a dramatic example to consider
just such effects, even taking her poetic lines as lines more or less for granted.
Consider Kamilla Denman’s astute claim about her verse as at once musical and
rhythmical:
Dickinson’s punctuation is neither a transcendent, purely extra-semantic effect
nor a careless transgression of grammatical rules but an integral part of her
exploration of language, used deliberately to disrupt conventional grammatical
patterns and create new relationships between words; to resist stasis in
linguistic expression (whether in the conventions of printing or in her own
evolving writing); to create musical and rhythmical effects; and to affirm the
silent and the nonverbal, the spaces between words that lend resonance and
emphasis to poetry. (Denman 24)
That affirmation of the “spaces between words” reminds us how productively
dashes spark vibrant interpretive possibilities not only in our reading of
paragraphs and sentences (as James would later demonstrate for fiction) but also
in smaller units (as Dickinson had already anticipated), exfoliating brief clauses
and individual words into profoundly consequential segments of poetic meaning.
The dashes that proliferate throughout, often at the ends of lines, are lent an
additional, dramatic weight by virtue of their placement on the page.2
The link between punctuation and musical pauses has long configured poetical
assessments, given prominence in Adorno’s own strong interpretive gestures. Yet
Dickinson raises the stakes in jewel-like lyrics that at once defy and enhance
brief verbal gestures. Or as Denman adds, “Like songs set to music, Dickinson’s
poems are accompanied by a punctuation of varying pauses, tones, and rhythms
that extend, modify, and emancipate her words, while pointing to the silent
places from which language erupts” (Denman 24).3 The effect of Dickinson’s
preferences becomes clear in her singular objection to the newspaper alteration
of “The Snake.” An energetic editor had altered capitalization, stanzas, even
words themselves, though significantly Dickinson objected only to the repeated
obliteration of her dashes. As Strunk and White remind us in their prescriptive
standard guide, a dash is conventionally “stronger than a comma, less formal
than a colon, and more relaxed than parentheses” (Strunk and White 9).
However “relaxed,” the dash nonetheless seems abrupt and emphatic if
paradoxically informal, making it perfect for Dickinson’s own spectacularly
paradoxical purposes.
 This anxiety about editorial mangling reflects Dickinson’s refusal to have her
poems domesticated linguistically, their meanings transformed and subdued by
conventional habits of punctual (and punctuational) decorum. And the measure
of that increasing anxiety is the degree to which it is reflected in the evolution of
her stylistic choices: “from conventional punctuation in the earliest poems
through a prolific period where punctuation pulled apart every normal
relationship of the parts of speech, to a time of grim redefinition punctuated by
weighty periods, on to a final stage where language and punctuation are minimal
but intensely powerful” (Denman 30).4 As Denman further points out, even
Dickinson’s copying of earlier poems transformed punctuation to her later
preference, and with newer poems investing dashes with an “anarchic” force by
replacing “almost every other mark of punctuation and in its placement between
almost every one of the parts of speech” (Denman 32).5 The dash defies the
surprised closure proffered by exclamation marks, offering instead the apparent
continuity of a horizontal wrinkle; at times, it seems a line connecting what
would otherwise be the dots of ellipsis, transfiguring possible silence into dashed
fragments and broken thoughts.6 Indeed, dashes seem like an all but figurative
break from continuity, from syntax itself in its efforts to draw things quietly,
imperceptibly into grammatical coherence. “What is interesting,” Susan Howe
has observed of this effect, “is that she found sense in the chance meeting of
words. Forward progress disrupted reversed. Sense came after suggestion”
(Howe, My 24). And that occurs precisely because meaning is signaled by
punctuation.
The effect of Dickinson’s dashes is evident nearly everywhere in her oeuvre,
revealed in even such a less refractory effort as “Remorse—is Memory—awake”
(1863) (Dickinson, Poems 383). For here, they appear as the only and ubiquitous
form of punctuation, serving the reversal so central to the poem’s logic:
Remorse—is Memory—awake
Her parties all astir—
A Presence of Departed Acts—
At window—and at Door—
Its Past—set down before the Soul
And lighted with a Match—
Perusal—to facilitate—
And help Belief to stretch—
 Remorse is cureless—the Disease
Not even God—can heal—
For `tis His institution—and
The Adequate of Hell—
One might initially overlook the wall-to-wall dashes as ancillary and unneeded,
something like a punctuational spasm that seems irrelevant to the poem’s
meaning. Certainly, that appears true at first, with “Remorse—is Memory—
awake / Her parties all astir.” Yet we quickly realize that dashes effectively
isolate single words, sequestering them off, sapping them of buttressing support
or shored up meanings by their very posture of standing alone. As Sharon
Cameron observes of the paradox inherent in the opening line (and compounded
by its punctuation), it presents a definition that “exists for the purpose of
dismissing the situation with which it purports to deal” (Cameron, Lyric 35).7
Yet that does not clarify why the line is enjambed, flowing without a dash into
what seems like a new situation. For pausing here, one realizes that the
announced identity (“Remorse—is Memory”) enacts a more complicated
entanglement, with regret over the past somehow transformed into a more
spirited reconstruction of that past, and with the dash separating the nouns itself
offering a reversal that functions not just temporally (turning us backward) but
also emotionally forward (enlivening an otherwise quiescent and settled regret).8
Memory is not simply alive here, but because not partitioned off by punctuation
is thereby conceived as signally energized by all her inflamed parts.Still, the
restlessness of this feeling emerges in the next line via the transformation of
“parties all astir” into a series of already “Departed Acts,” conjoined sonically in
the repetition that aligns physical aspects with memorable moments. It is as if
the reversals endorsed (indeed enforced) by the punctuation lay at the poem’s
thematic center itself, in the about-face of feeling and remembrance, of
synecdochic part and whole, of “Acts” that though “Departed” remain
nonetheless an imperative “Presence.” And their imputed presence peers
presumably out through the “window” of memory even as it accompanies us
through the “Door” of the past.
Remorse deliberately invokes “Its Past—set down” in the second quatrain, in
wanting to examine what led to the present sense of contrition, pressing against
consciousness so as finally to be explained and somehow resolved. Again, the
dash dramatizes the temporal dissonance of a past refusing to stay passed, being
deliberately exposed to the flame of possible insight. But the pun of “a Match”
also doubles in the effort to match present remorse with past facts, bringing an
alignment between them across the bridge created by the dash. And the sequence
of three quick dashes to separate four words confirms the hesitancy, the possible
misgiving, the hemming and hawing involved in the Soul’s facing up to the
body’s history.
Only in the third quatrain, which erases the hesitancy of the poem’s opening
line with a simple un-dashed claim that “Remorse is cureless,” do we realize that
Belief cannot be stretched so far as to erase our guilt at the life we have actually
lived. It is a Disease that accompanies our fallen state, with even God’s saving
grace unable to heal, as the isolating dashes again reveal. Remorse becomes “His
institution,” the everyday reminder of our daily fall, our recurrent inadequacy to
separate past insufficiency from present aspiration, memory from regret. There is
no faultless state that renders us whole or feeling at one with ourselves, able to
move beyond contrition to some simpler, unified consciousness. And that
realization of our partial, self-divided state is configured no more effectively
than in the recurrent, ubiquitous dashes that structure the poem with their
disruptive, cleaving effect (visually, grammatically, sonically).
What begins as a seemingly simple set of individual words set apart,
apparently consisting of standalone lexical meanings—much like the regrettable
separate acts that often punctuate our lives—is transformed through the course
of the poem into an integrated if ever conflicting sequence of possibilities
pitched against one another.9 In that regard, “Remorse—is Memory—awake”
offers a perfect example of Dickinson’s signature consciousness, one that so
often begins by focusing on single words, only to unfold their linked resonances
and paradoxical conflicts in a larger epistemological, often theological frame of
reference. At this point, however, one can well appreciate how much was lost in
the altering by generations of editors of her punctuation, from breathtaking
dashes to workaday commas. It is also worth considering briefly (from another
perspective) the ways in which Dickinson’s intense devotion to the logic of
dashes distinguishes her vision from, say, Faulkner’s parenthetical constructions
and comma-loaded (even comma-spliced) sentences, which depend not on
reversals of logic so much as self-embedding connections.
Dickinson’s dashes, however, hardly work the same way in different poems,
any more than Faulkner’s parentheses or Baldwin’s commas or James’s dashes
do in different narratives (and sometimes even the same ones). Signature
punctuation marks may appear “signature” as part of a writer’s larger unified
style, but separate instances among that same writer’s stories, novels, and poems
put pressure on punctuation differently, producing effects that idiosyncratically
alter our readings anew. The deeply necessary conflict produced by the dashes
that structure “Remorse—is Memory—awake” (J744) becomes in a slightly later
effort a more calibrated, even fanciful gesture. “One and One—are One—”
(Dickinson, Poems J769) appears from its opening mathematical axiom to be
less a reflection on recondite emotional plangencies than a whimsical brain
teaser:
One and One—are One—
Two—be finished using—
Well enough for Schools—
But for Minor Choosing—
Life—just—or Death—
Or the Everlasting—
More—would be too vast
For the Soul’s Comprising—
As always, Dickinson challenges the reader to pursue elliptical declarations, with
the opening line recalling the Phaedo, in which Socrates explores why the unity
of body and soul should become the problem of how one independent body plus
one separate soul can still exist as “One.” That helps explain the plural copula
“are,” in a slight tilt away from conventional expression “is,” if only to affirm a
wondrous convergence rather than mere addition. Then following a second dash,
more period than pause, “One” is agreed to replace the conventional “Two,”
which becomes a simple-minded arithmetic solution to a sublunary problem
(“for Minor Choosing”). The reference of “Well enough for Schools”
suggestively invokes a scholasticism that strives for dialectical reasoning as a
means of resolving contradictions. But the opening challenge holds to a paradox
that cannot be so reasonably resolved.10
Not until the second quatrain (of a poem built on “One” and “Two”) does an
adequate explanation appear, though it sustains the initial paradox via a
hesitancy established through its half-dozen destabilizing dashes. The customary
division of life and death is defied by a third term (“Everlasting”), revealing that
binary systems cannot account for such overarching considerations, working
only as a matter of “Minor Choosing.” The collapse of “Life—just” with its own
contrary “Death” becomes a cause of revelation in which “the Everlasting— /
More—”) exceeds any common actuarial balancing we might achieve. The poem
finally depends on earthly mathematics it nonetheless rejects unhesitatingly
without a dash (“too vast / For the Soul’s Comprising”), having banked on a
binary equation inadequate to the realm revealed in the final “More—.” If the
earlier poem invoked dashes as a means of emotional pummeling at our ever-
divided state, this forgoes emotion altogether, relying on dashes to make us
pause over a logic that remains insufficient. In either case, however, Dickinson
turns the dash to her own structuring ends, creating a complex vision that
requires little other punctuation.11

Notes
1 As Robert Weisbuch explains of the effect of her dashes, “Dickinson suddenly, midpoem, has her
thought change, pulls in the reins on her faith, and introduces a realistic doubt; and we are right there
as this occurs” (Weisbuch, “Prisming” 214). Earlier, he claimed: “Apparently then, the dashes work.
How? They are a final, most iconic example of that merger between pure thought and individuated
experience which we have traced throughout Dickinson’s poetic strategy” (Weisbuch, Poetry 73).
2 As Christanne Miller observes: “Dickinson gives no sign of being flexible about her style of
punctuation. She lists alternative words in poems; she apologizes for her misspellings and modernizes
archaisms in later copies of early poems; but she never apologizes for her unorthodox punctuation or
provides variants for it” (Miller, Grammar 50).
3 Somewhat more cautiously, Denman adds a valuable historical context for understanding the shift in
editorial protocols: It must be stressed that ideas about punctuation were by no means uniform in
Dickinson’s time. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, there was a lively debate about pointing
theory. The elocutionary school held that punctuation had a primarily rhetorical function: to indicate
the length of pauses and rises and falls in the voice when declaiming a written piece. But as the
medium of print became more widespread, the syntactic school gained increasing support, claiming
that the primary function of punctuation was to reveal the grammatical structure of each sentence. In
the absence of a voice to clarify ambiguities about the relations of words to one another, the eye must
take the place of the ear in receiving and interpreting meaning. Park Honan tells us that by mid-
century, the syntactical view had prevailed over the elocutionary. (Denman 23, fn. 4)
4 Denman observes the diminishing use of dashes in later Dickinson, and that they seem most prevalent
in what she describes as the urgent period of 1862–63. For disagreement with this claim, see Sharon
Cameron (and Denman’s argument against her). Paul Crumbley observes that following Dickinson’s
resistance to religious conversion, dropping out of Mount Holyoke in 1849, “we see a steady increase
in confidence along with a corresponding dependence on dashes” in her letters (Crumbley 75).
5 Paul Crumbley explains “Dickinson’s experiments with poetic voice. The broad category of marks that
come under the heading ‘dash’ suggest subtle gradations of inflection and syntactic disjunction that
multiply the voices in poems and letters” (Crumbley 1). Or as he later states, more strongly: “Rather
than being a painful symbol of loss and division, the dash suggests that disjunction, to Dickinson, is
one of the defining characteristics of the self in language” (Crumbley 15). Crumbley believes
Dickinson’s dashes can be subdivided semantically depending on length and angle: Our solution to the
difficulty of matching print to Dickinson’s variable “dashes” has been the creation of sixteen dash
types, each of which stands for a range of similar handwritten marks. The end result is visual
semblance rather than exact replication. We have, for instance, angled all the upward- and downward-
slanting marks at 20 degrees, not because Dickinson’s angles were uniform but because this angle
fairly reflects the visual character of her multiple angles. To represent the different lengths of
 Dickinson marks, we developed six types that either extend or reduce the en-dash. (Crumbley u.p.
preface). Christanne Miller offers a salutary perspective: “Several critics have attempted to categorize
her ‘pointing marks,’ dividing her slanting lines into (among others) angular slants, vertical slants,
elongated periods, stress marks, and half-moon marks, and differentiating them according to their
position above, at, or below the writing line. No one has argued convincingly, however, that such
categorizations in any appreciable way affect our reading of the poems” (Miller 50).
6 Again, as Denman argues: Unlike the exclamation mark, the dash that dominates the prolific period is
a horizontal stroke, on the level of this world. It both reaches out and holds at bay. Its origins in ellipsis
connect it semantically to planets and cycles (rather than linear time and sequential grammatical
progression), as well as to silence and the unexpressed. But to dash is also “to strike with violence so
as to break into fragments; to drive impetuously forth or out, cause to rush together; to affect or qualify
with an element of a different strain thrown into it; to destroy, ruin, confound, bring to nothing,
frustrate, spoil; to put down on paper, throw off, or sketch, with hasty and unpremeditated vigour; to
draw a pen vigorously through writing so as to erase it; [is] used as a euphemism for ‘damn,’ or as a
kind of verbal imprecation; [or is] one of the two signals (the other being the dot) which in various
combinations make up the letters of the Morse alphabet.” (Denman 32–33)
7 Robert Weisbuch more generally asserts of Dickinson’s paradoxical formulations: “These negations of
vision create their own vision in turn: the symbolic intelligence which sees everlasting paradise in a
commonplace pleasure must see death and hell in a commonplace pain. Thus, ‘Remorse’ becomes ‘The
Adequate of Hell—’ (744) . . . . Dickinson does not proclaim and proselytize in this second world; she
confesses” (Weisbuch, Poetry 2). Offering an enacted interpretation, Sharon Leiter claims: By
personifying Remorse and Memory and the Presence of Departed Acts, the poet creates the drama of a
startling and painful awakening in the middle of the night. Instead of being told that the speaker’s own
sleep has been disturbed, we are given an image, parallel to and probably motivated by that
disturbance. Memory, which has been sleeping, is jarred by the arrival of unexpected visitors at
window and door. The “Parties all astir—” in this house of the soul may be merely “interested parties”
or, as Dickinson’s dictionary records, “disputants” on “opposite sides” of an issue. The agitation and
inner conflict stirred by the sudden arrival, as well as a sense of immediacy, are enhanced by the use of
dashes, in place of a connecting verb (“Her Parties are all astir as they see ‘A Presence of Departed
Acts—’”). Of course, the lack of logical connection also leaves open the possibility that the disputing
parties are the departed acts themselves. Instead of a neat, one-to-one correspondence between images
and what they represent, Dickinson achieves a sense of upheaval and disorientation. (Leiter 167–68)
8 As Cameron continues: “Remorse (for that is the match) illuminates the past so that the flash revealed
to us is simply accusatory. . . . The hell of remorse is that it blinds us to the real meanings of our
experiences and simultaneously convinces us that the distortion we are seeing in place of that meaning
is reality” (Cameron, Lyric 36).
9 For a further interpretive angle, see Sharon Cameron’s reading based upon Dickinson’s fascicle
groupings: “To see a poem contextualized by a fascicle is sometimes to see that it has an altogether
different, rather than only a relationally more complex, meaning when it is read in sequence rather than
as an isolated lyric” (Cameron, “Dickinson’s Fascicles” 149). In response to Cameron’s urging to read
the poems contextually, one might observe that “Remorse—is Memory—awake” appears in the middle
of fascicle 37, between “The Birds reported from the South—” (a poem ostensibly about forgetting
spring’s allures) and “Renunciation—is a piercing Virtue—” (about “letting go”)—both of which do
provide an interpretive context for the poem.
10 The poem occurs, to contextualize again, in Fascicle 23 between “The Beggar Lad—dies early” and “I
lived on Dread—.” Neither one on first reading seems useful in understanding the mid-sequence poem.
See Miller 247.
11 Paul Crumbley declares that “Close attention to the expanding life of words within the poems means
reading with an eye toward spatial rather than linear progression. The dash liberates meaning from a
syntax that would ordinarily narrow the field of reference for specific words; at the same time it alerts
readers to the role they play in expanding these fields of reference” (Crumbley 29). Earlier, Geoffrey
Hartman concluded of Dickinson’s poetry: “Her attitude is almost spectatorial. Can we define that
attitude exactly? It is clear that Emily Dickinson’s art creates a space. It allows the threshold to exist; it
extends the liminal moment” (Hartman 350). As he added, “Emily Dickinson does not ‘tell all’; there
is no staring recognition in her poetry. Her fate is to stay profane, outside the gates, though in sight of
‘the promised end’” (Hartman 351). And that explains her infrequent periods, as Christanne Miller
explains: “Dickinson is apt to use the period ironically, to mock the expectation of final certainty”
(Miller, Grammar 53).
 5
Expansion: Woolf’s Semicolons

Buffeted by Dickinson’s destabilizing dashes and in search of relief (as if guided

by a dash), one would be hard-pressed to come up with an author less attuned to
such slashes of meaning than Virginia Woolf (though Gustave Flaubert and
William James make compelling candidates).1 Her habitual use of “the semi-
colon, that supremely self-possessed valet of phraseology” (Baker 70) seems
defiantly to jettison Hemingway’s full stops and Henry James’s and Dickinson’s
reversible maneuvers in favor of sliding things along, doing so more decidedly
than commas.2 Outside of the compressed syllabic gymnastics of poetry, one
might suppose this preference is linked somehow to gender dynamics, of intrepid
(purportedly masculine) assurance in the power of sheer syntactical brevity or
abrupt thematic about-faces versus more temperate feminine inflections that
build cumulatively. But that is clearly too facile.Consider Mrs. Dalloway (1925),
in its gradual slippage from exclamation marks to commas, settling at last with a
decided preference for semicolons. Part of the distinctive effect Woolf achieves
is via sentences that never quite finish but linger instead protractedly, extending
into byways, modifying themselves ever further, in the process accommodating
an unfurling mode of contemplation. Ben Dolnick insists that semicolons
uniquely honor “this movement of mind, this tendency of thoughts to proliferate
like yeast”; and as if with Woolf in mind, he confirms: “No other piece of
punctuation so compactly captures the way in which our thoughts are both liquid
and solid, wave and particle” (Dolnick). In consort with this syntactic pattern,
Mrs. Dalloway resists dividing into conventional sections, either chapters or
“books,” tending instead to advance amid swerves and diversions, interrupted
only occasionally by breaks of white space.
That propulsive rhythm is largely generated by punctuation once again, even in
the briefest of moments. Midway through the novel, Richard Dalloway makes a
gift of roses to his wife out of a gesture of heartfelt love, appreciated from his
perspective: “She understood; she understood without his speaking; his Clarissa”
(Woolf 115). However straightforward and inconsequential the moment may
seem, the doubled semicolons achieve an oddly intense complication, as if
Richard’s emotion were transposed into a wave of affection that laps against the
shore of “his Clarissa.” And as with James’s clotting of dashes in “Daisy Miller,”
a certain clotting of semicolons occurs here, drawing attention to themselves.Or
take an earlier passage, triggered by Clarissa’s apparent regret—“Oh if she could
have had her life over again!” (Woolf 10)—followed by thoughts of what
“would have been,” supplanted in turn by her recurrent sense of immense
dissatisfaction.
But often now this body she wore (she stopped to look at a Dutch picture), this
body, with all its capacities, seemed nothing—nothing at all. She had the
oddest sense of being herself invisible; unseen; unknown; there being no more
marrying, no more having of children now, but only this astonishing and rather
solemn progress with the rest of them, up Bond Street, this being Mrs.
Dalloway; not even Clarissa any more; this being Mrs. Richard Dalloway.
(Woolf 10)
Notice how the opening sentence, prompted by exclamatory regret over the past,
tumbles into a discombobulated flurry of repetitions (“this body,” “nothing”)
marked by commas, a parenthesis, and finally a dismal em dash reiteration. Yet
Clarissa quickly recovers control even in the midst of dismay; as the next
sentence flows back into consciousness, single words pause at the behest of
semicolons, then commas, then semicolons again. The rhythm here seems
notably varied, shifting mercurially as Clarissa’s thoughts and feelings waver,
with possibilities closed off by a dash (“—nothing at all.”) that then founders on
a period, before continuing with the dull beat of negations that constitute her
present sense of herself.
And the semicolons calmly serve to confirm that negation, at least as she
perceives her state, building on each other not as abbreviated sentences (with
firm full stops) or accumulating clauses slightly slackened (through dilatory
commas), but in a more percussive beat that separately marks each clause,
forcing the reader to slow down and absorb one by one a series of distinct
sovereign judgments.3 The next sentence extends the cadence, though shifting
perspective from morose self-regard to a newly engaged delight with the world
passing by:
Bond Street fascinated her; Bond Street early in the morning in the season; its
flags flying; its shops; no splash; no glitter; one roll of tweed in the shop where
her father had bought his suits for fifty years; a few pearls; salmon on an
iceblock.
“That is all,” she said, looking at the fishmonger’s. “That is all,” she repeated,
pausing for a moment. (Woolf 10–11)
What we quickly realize is not that Clarissa is inherently different from a
character in James, say, or even Hemingway, but that Woolf’s punctuational
presentation of her reveals a consciousness radically unlike any they attempt to
imagine.The resilient, spirited, wayward mode of thought by which Clarissa
shifts abruptly from discouragement to delight, from disillusioned vision of her
past suddenly interrupted by enchanted glimpses of the present, seems
characteristic of Woolf’s creation. It is as if each surveyed observation were
isolated, held up to the light—an aperçu, an impressionist moment at once
detached and woven into subjectivity. Woolf adapts the semicolon in strictly
ungrammatical ways to detach the elliptical absolute construction more
completely than otherwise from a continuous syntactic embrace.
The implications of this presentational method can perhaps best be ascertained
by contrast with James’s treatment of Marcher in The Beast in the Jungle, which
begins: “The escape would have been to love her; then, then he would have
lived.” Despite the initial semicolon, thereafter punctuation appropriately serves
to sideline and defer revelation of meaning, which is of course the story’s
premise. For Woolf, however, revelation occurs gradually, incrementally, parsed
semicolon by semicolon, which also paradoxically enough occurs in large
swatches of James (except for when it doesn’t). These are moments when he,
like she, homes in via hyper-punctuated sentences on a distinct idea or meaning.4
Yet it is not only Clarissa whose thoughts are mapped so, as we realize a few
pages later in the shift to Lucrezia Smith, embarrassed by her husband
Septimus’s outburst in public: “People must notice; people must see. People, she
thought, looking at the crowd staring at the motor car; the English people, with
their children and their horses and their clothes, which she admired in a way; but
they were ‘people’ now, because Septimus had said, ‘I will kill myself’; an awful
thing to say” (Woolf 15). Again, quickly as semicolons appear, they vanish, as
Lucrezia teeters between absolute dismay and fond memories of the autumn
before, mortified at how she appears to others, ironically matching Clarissa’s
self-consciousness about her own social status. Of course, even delight is
expressed with similar punctuation, as Clarissa soon recalls her love of Sally
Seton:
Then came the most exquisite moment of her whole life passing a stone urn
with flowers in it. Sally stopped; picked a flower; kissed her on the lips. The
whole world might have turned upside down! The others disappeared; there she
was alone with Sally. And she felt that she had been given a present, wrapped
up, and told just to keep it, not to look at it—a diamond. (Woolf 35)
The sequence from run-on summation, to recollection broken into triple
semicoloned clauses, to a compound sentence expressing the rapture Clarissa
feels about the gift of love: it is as if Woolf engineers her prose to capture the
intersection of present ebullient emotion and past transforming event.Granted,
periods do seem to reinforce closure, sealing off uncertainty that can emerge
with semicolons: “She was not old yet. She had just broken into her fifty-second
year. Months and months of it were still untouched” (Woolf 36). But semicolons
unfold and blossom into a certain psychological reassurance, as when Peter tries
to grasp Clarissa’s allure through a series of negations that suddenly become a
simple affirmation, repeated for emphasis: “Not that she was striking; not
beautiful at all; there was nothing picturesque about her; she never said anything
specially clever; there she was, however; there she was” (Woolf 74). And the
very proliferation of semicolons here at once anticipates and enforces the
thought’s very constancy, persevering at last as the closing lines of the novel
itself.
No syntactical rule applies absolutely, of course, and the effect of different
forms of punctuation alters through the novel. But Clarissa’s lively openness to
incompatible possibilities sequestered by semicolons does contrast rhythmically
with those who never swerve from sanguine beliefs. And that unflappable self-
confidence achieves its own cadence in the augmented syntax calmly endorsed
by commas, with accretions and additions brooking less hesitation than
extending confirmation. Consider the close-minded vision of Sir William
Bradshaw, expressed as an unquestioning faith: “Shredding and slicing, dividing
and subdividing, the clocks of Harley Street nibbled at the June day, counseled
submission, upheld authority, and pointed out in chorus the supreme advantages
of a sense of proportion” (Woolf 100). The clauses simply ratify the
proportionate logic of “shredding and slicing,” as if a mechanical series of
subdivisions were converted through the magic of syntactic apposition into a
common good.
Tellingly, Bradshaw’s unblinkered trust in convention is matched by
unshakeable others, as Clarissa considers Miss Kilman’s ruthless efforts to
convert her daughter Elizabeth, just before she contemplates the alternative in an
attentive (yet tentative) view of her elderly neighbor:
The cruelest things in the world, she thought, seeing them clumsy, hot,
domineering, h ypocritical, eavesdropping, jealous, infinitely cruel and
unscrupulous, dressed in a mackintosh coat, on the landing; love and religion.
Had she ever tried to convert any one herself? Did she not wish everybody
merely to be themselves? And she watched out of the window the old lady
opposite climbing upstairs. Let her climb upstairs if she wanted to; let her stop;
then let her, as Clarissa had often seen her, gain her bedroom, part her curtains,
and disappear again into the background. (Woolf 123)
In the punctuation itself we are confirmed in twin halves of this passage,
revealing two possibilities for facing life: one, in comma-burdened arrogance;
the other, in diffident openhandedness. Clarissa’s delight in “the privacy of the
soul” (Woolf 123) finds confirmation in the syntax of her expression, as she
refuses the beguiling balm of “love and religion” involved in wanting to change
another.5 The mindful, even apparently “legal” semicolons dividing clauses in
the last sentence are kindly intended to allow the old woman her temporal
autonomy. What we realize about Clarissa is that the visual marking itself of her
expressions becomes a rendering of consciousness, already revealing her
flexible, ever inquiring, open-minded view of life in London.
Again, it is worth noting that Woolf’s preference in Mrs. Dalloway for the
accretive possibilities of semicolons does not extend as fully to her other, later
works. With Hemingway, the terse style of abrupt period-ending sentences
worked effectively to realize the vision of his early stories, though his novels
tended to modulate into a less clipped, more expansive style. James, by contrast,
incorporated dashes as an essential structuring component of his signature
perspective, early and late, in both published fictional and private epistolary
realms. Critics of Dickinson have astutely identified a particular biographical
period where she indulged a predilection for dashes, invoking them more often
than she had earlier or later. In Woolf’s first masterpiece, we are aware of a
writer not simply discovering the possibilities of punctuation but inventing a
distinctive style adequate to her characters’ various (and only gradually revealed)
capacities. By To the Lighthouse (1927), two years later, she would alter
strategies further in sentences that skip and dance, weaving clauses together
through runs of commas; in fact, eleven of them on the first page divide up a
hundred-word sentence, and rarely do two simple sentences (two periods) occur
in sequence. Indeed, here and after she peppers her prose with semicolons,
dashes, parentheses, exclamation marks, and ellipses.
As if to extend the possibilities of the semicolon, Andre Dubus II offers a very
different rendition of consciousness in a story that models its syntax after
Woolf’s characteristic mode. Only six pages long, “A Love Song” divides into
distinct (white-space-divided) paragraphs, with some twenty-nine semicolons
clustered at particular moments (in the fifth, twelfth, and fourteenth paragraphs)
—clustering that reminds us of James’s own fusing of punctuation in “Daisy
Miller.” Here, however, the recurrent punctuation registers the devastated
consciousness of a wife named Catherine abandoned by her unnamed husband.
Consider the fifth paragraph, pinballing among fifteen commas, a couple of
colons thrown in, with five interruptive semicolons breaking up the closing
cadences of this long single sentence:
She never again perceived time as she had before, as a child, then an
adolescent: a graceful and merry and brown-haired girl, in infinite preparation,
infinite waiting, for love; and as a woman loved and in love: with peaceful and
absolute hope gestating daughters, and bravely, even for minutes gratefully,
enduring the pain of their births; a woman who loved daughters and a man,
would bear her daughters’ sorrow and pain for them if she could, would give up
her life to keep theirs; and loved him with a passion whose deeper and quicker
current through the years delighted her; gave at times a light to her eyes, a hue
of rose to her cheeks; loved him, too, with the sudden and roiling passion of
consolable wrath; and with daily and nightly calm, the faithful certainty that
was the river she became until it expelled her to dry on its bank. (Dubus 22)
The entire emotional arc of the story is contained in this run-on single-sentence
biography of “before,” not simply with the tumultuous repetitions of “love” and
its denial but with its variously timed hesitations. And hesitations marked out so
differently.
The question, however, lies in what ways the semicolons and colons differ
from commas in their overall effect. Do they actually offer a meaningfully fuller
pause, and if so, why? Can the clauses be interpreted idiosyncratically based on
their different punctuation? Of course, in both instances the answer is “yes,”
though leading in separate turns to separable interpretations.6 In either of dual
cases, however, this paragraph is followed by others in which the frequency of
colons diminishes sharply before Catherine takes “her first lover,” and suddenly
the unpredictable emotional turmoil seems reflected in another paragraph of
mixed, volatile punctuation. When that relation ends, she meets a divorcée
whose anguish over his marital betrayals matches her own:
She learned all of this while drinking two Manhattans at the party; then she
went home with him, to his apartment without plants or flowers or feminine
scents, a place that seemed without light, though its windows were tall and
broad; then she knew why: it was not a place where someone lived; he ate and
slept there and did this in his double bed, did this tenderly, wickedly; his home
was like an ill-kept motel. (Dubus 25–26)
The impersonality of his apartment matches the single sentence’s own disarray:
with its stream of consciousness paused by a semicolon; then a series of less
interruptive commas; then a semicolon again; before finally being put on full
pause with a colon that announces this was not “a place where someone lived.”
The very confusion, intensely felt, in Catherine’s discovery of the man she thinks
she knows is reflected in the paragraph’s hiccuping punctuation.
For a writer so attuned to swings of emotional perturbation, it seems odd that
Dubus does not evoke those states more often through such punctuational
shuffling. But here, with our eyes scanning the page as if over a far-off
landscape, emotions are silently swayed by a topography we barely notice as
topography.7 Again, as with Woolf, the punctuated rhythm of the narrative not
simply mirrors the affair but actively creates its rhythm, of engagement yet
reserve, of tenderness yet self-division. What seems at moments like an
indefinite continuation becomes at others a chronicle of sudden, abrupt pauses
shackled by doubt, as if the sexual allure that had finally engaged Catherine and
seemed to give her peace were altered by punctuation itself, the unstated turns in
a sentence and a relationship that reveal how impossible the two (sentences,
relationships) actually turn out to be.
Dubus’s smooth punctuational shaping offers a sharp contrast to other
American authors, equally notable. Willa Cather, for instance, has a well-
deserved reputation for lyricism, though she generally achieves that effect with
only a minimal play of punctuation, tending to echo or otherwise simply
elaborate expressions otherwise stated straightforwardly. Rarely does she deviate
from a conventional syntactical structure, exemplified in Tom Outland’s account
in The Professor’s House (1925):
 The bluish rock and the sun-tanned grass, under the unusual purple-grey of the
sky, gave the whole valley a very soft colour, lavender and pale gold, so that
the occasional cedars growing beside the borders looked black that morning. It
may have been the hint of snow in the air, but it seemed to me that I had never
breathed in anything that tasted so pure as the air in that valley. (Cather 178)
The passage is punctuated as it is because her syntax demands almost no
punctuation at all; nothing is “left out” and therefore nothing needs to be added,
grammatically speaking. Indeed, we might remove even the few marks she does
insert without altering either rhythm or sense, perhaps because the limpid
revelations of prose stripped to such colorful description is enough, without the
entangling pauses and brakings registered by interruptive signs.8 Cormac
McCarthy likewise tends to avoid unusual punctuation, as shown in Adam
Calhoun’s “heat map” of Blood Meridian, revealing merely that he depends on
question marks as an indication of his reliance on how dialogue is presented and
subsequently referred to. In fact, the most common punctuation in McCarthy are
periods, followed by commas, confirming again how thoroughly McCarthy was,
even early in his career, a stalwart of Hemingway rather than Faulkner, at least
syntactically speaking.

Notes
1 Flaubert’s delight in semicolons has long been noted, beginning with Marcel Proust’s claim that he
typically omits “and” for the last item in a list (such as three adjectives), but that he includes a colon or
semicolon followed by “and” as “an indication that another part of the description is beginning, that
the withdrawing wave is going once again to reform. . . . In short, ‘and’ in Flaubert always opens a
minor clause and hardly ever concludes an enumeration” (Proust 591). Nabokov would later comment
that “This semicolon-and comes after an enumeration of actions or states or objects, then the
semicolon creates a pause and the and proceeds to round up the paragraph, to introduce a culminating
image, or a vivid detail, descriptive, poetic, melancholy, or amusing. This is a peculiar feature of
Flaubert’s style” (Nabokov, Lec 171). For a wry survey of contemporary French proponents of the
point-virgule (who argue that “the beauty of the semicolon, and its glory, lies in the support lent by this
particular punctuation mark to the expression of a complex thought”), see Jon Henley.
Of William James, Ben Dolnick has stated:
James’s paragraphs, as lucid and unpretentious as can be, are divided and subdivided, as intricately
structured as the anatomical diagrams he includes in “Psychology: Briefer Course.” Semicolons, along
with exclamation points and dashes and whole sackfuls of commas, are, for him, vital tools in keeping
what he called the “stream of thought” from appearing to the reader as a wild torrent (Dolnick).
2 According to Joseph Boone, Woolf uses parentheses in Mrs. Dalloway as a means of segregating social
and emotional issues: “the quotidian detail, the social fabric, of daily life that one might expect of a
society-oriented novel is continually deemphasized, often cordoned off in parentheses, while Clarissa’s
expansive memories deluge the foreground and provide the novel with its primary tension and interest”
(Boone 178). More generally, Jennifer Brody claims: “These days the semicolon, one of the least
 loved, least understood marks, barely ekes out a living between the period and the comma. It suffers
nightmares from its precarious situation” (Brody 141). See also Anna Davies 14; and Cecelia Watson,
passim.
3 Again, Joseph Boone observes: On the level of the sentence, Woolf creates highly elliptical structures
that can easily cover the space of a page or more, structures whose phrases and clauses, sutured by
semicolons that allow an unbroken accretion or amplification of detail within the individual sentence,
force the reader to keep reading forward. Similarly, the ubiquitous use of present-tense participial
phrases generates forward motion; their litanic repetition creates the sensation of action about to be
completed, of meaning about to emerge, if we just keep pushing ahead. Complementing the strategic
use of commas, semicolons, and dashes to extend such clauses and phrases in what come to seem
endless, unbroken lines, Woolf frequently uses parentheses to open up spaces within the sentence or
paragraph whose content creates a simultaneity of action or laying of multiple viewpoints without
breaking the grammatical unit. (Boone 179)
4 Franco Moretti contrasts Woolf’s focus with Joyce’s style in Ulysses (1922), which he argues presents
everything as an unfocused foreground (Moretti 156).
5 And not only Clarissa. Richard’s own self-division between certitude and surprise is likewise conveyed
through differently noted pauses: “It was a miracle. Here he was walking across London to say to
Clarissa in so many words that he loved her. Which one never does say, he thought. Partly one’s lazy;
partly one’s shy. And Clarissa—it was difficult to think of her; except in starts, as at luncheon when he
saw her quite distinctly; their whole life” (Woolf 112). And the rest of his thoughts continue to stress
his hesitations.
6 According to Ernesto Franco, “what is juxtaposed” by the semicolon “is both separated and united”;
the semicolon requires the reader to interpret because “‘the interpretation of the semicolon is not
simple but open’ it is ‘a mark that raises doubts’” (cited by Dury xlviii). Among notable writers,
Robert Louis Stevenson offers (like Dubus) a strong contrast to Woolf in his “obsession” with
semicolons. Richard Dury, for instance, claims that he relies on its “frequent use” for “fragmentation”
(Dury, “Introduction” xlvii), and that he “typically places a semicolon before a conjunction, perhaps to
render problematic the link between the two parts of the sentence” (Dury “Stevenson”). Barry
Menikoff offers an analysis of Stevenson’s punctuation as “integral” to his “main objective of
replicating the Pacific world that he knew so well” (Menikoff 35). Not only his “calculated and
deliberate” use of commas, or his “unsettling” syntax (Menikoff 38), but his quarrels with compositors
who altered his manuscripts reveal that concern. But the semicolon is the triggering device, revealing
Stevenson’s habit of stringing together details in a loosely punctuated sequence. Through the lucidity
of his prose Stevenson discloses a fundamental irony: that things in the world are not clear and lucid;
that the more one aspires to express their coherence, and is successful at it, the more one recognizes
the futility of the pursuit; that language itself, and the way in which we organize and build our
sentences, provide an illusion at odds with reality. The semicolon, with its pause—virtually a full stop,
yet not the end of a sentence—fits Stevenson’s scheme beautifully: it is neither a terminal mark, like a
period, nor an intermediate device, like a comma. This ambiguity is apparent even in simple compound
sentences, where Stevenson almost invariably uses the semicolon. He does not separate the clauses
with periods, nor does he use commas. It is as if he were not sure whether to make his statements
independent or to connect them. There is an uncertainty built into his style that is encouraged or
assisted by his use of the semicolon. (Menikoff 43) Even earlier, Graham Good observed of Stevenson:
“In sentence structure, he liked to produce a kind of ‘knot’ or ‘hitch,’ a ‘moment of suspended
meaning’ (this may account for his near-addictive use of the semi-colon). The aim is to create suspense
on the syntactical as well as the plot level” (Good 51; see as well Dupee, “Stevenson”).
7 Russell Bogue has observed a completely different context of “the word ‘topography’ applied to
language: Mandarin Chinese. Tonal languages (like Mandarin, Cantonese, and Vietnamese) are often
said to have an auditory topography. To romanize Chinese requires using accents that graphically
 represent what one’s voice must do while pronouncing the syllable. Thus, the sentence wo hěn xíhūan
shūo zhōngwén (‘I like to speak Chinese’) physically instantiates what you will hear when someone is
conveying this meaning to you. Attention to the aural topography of the sentence is a key part of
Chinese poetry” (private communication).
8 As Janet Giltrow and David Stouck observe, “The echo effect, that reverberation of something from
the past, is one of the most obvious and accessible of Cather’s literary techniques. Traditionally, critics
have approached it through studies of repetition and parallelism” (Giltrow and Stouck 11).
 6
Hemorrhage: Joyce, Morrison, Saramago,
Sebald

At this point, it may be worth addressing more forcibly what punctuation

achieves by turning to passages that abandon its sway altogether. For without
marks to stem the ongoing verbal stream, run-on prose tends to produce a
hemorrhaging effect, as if the figurative tourniquet of periods and commas no
longer tightened and compressed lexical choices into viable form. That effect
can be offset by the systole and diastole of syntactical word order, but with no
punctuation at all we are left with a more or less unimpeded flow of surging,
turbulent lexemes. Still, by contrast with writers above who sometimes seem to
indulge too exaggerated a taste for punctuation, others have inventively
experimented with the opposite. And the absence of marks in their work reveals
possibilities—cadenced, rhythmic, even musical—that are not discerned so
dramatically in conventionally marked prose. Simply taking out periods and
dashes, even serial commas, opens up intriguing ambiguities and semantic
opportunities that can enrich our reading, if at the seemingly unwelcome price of
slowing us down. Keep in mind that the long history of punctuation since the
first millennium CE has been one of increasing attention to ever-expanding
punctuational maneuvers. The more recent turn to a punctuation-less terrain all
too familiar to early scribes thus offers an intriguing reminder of how prose was
actually first meant to be read.
One possibly perverse way to engage the issue is by reversing the
punctuational habit of even a minimalist like Hemingway, removing the reliable
periods he felt it necessary to invoke at the very least. But did he genuinely need
them for semantic clarity or could syntax have done the work by itself? As
importantly, does the accented rhythm of his signature early style remain roughly
the same without such nominal marks? The answers may not be altogether
forthcoming, though a vignette from In Our Time offers something like a test for
how linked (or alternatively, disconnected) punctuation can seem from syntax:
It was a frightfully hot day. We’d jammed an absolutely perfect barricade
across the bridge. It was simply priceless. A big old wrought-iron grating from
the front of a house. Too heavy to lift and you could shoot through it and they
would have to climb over it. It was absolutely topping. They tried to get over it,
and we potted them from forty yards. They rushed it, and officers came out
along and worked on it. It was an absolutely perfect obstacle. Their officers
were very fine. We were frightfully put out when we heard the flank had gone,
and we had to fall back. (Hemingway 37)
In pausing over the pulse and tempo here, we begin to suspect that the passage
may not need punctuation at all, at least to achieve its fragmented effect. Quite
the contrary:
It was a frightfully hot day we’d jammed an absolutely perfect barricade across
the bridge it was simply priceless a big old wrought-iron grating from the front
of a house too heavy to lift and you could shoot through it and they would have
to climb over it it was absolutely topping they tried to get over it and we potted
them from forty yards they rushed it and officers came out along and worked
on it it was an absolutely perfect obstacle their officers were very fine we were
frightfully put out when we heard the flank had gone and we had to fall back.
It is as if Hemingway’s modulated verbal expression were enough, unmarked,
since even his minimal full stops simply coordinate discriminations and
elaborations that straightforward syntax already lays out.
Among the first to anticipate this realization was James Joyce, whose closing
eighteenth section to Ulysses offers in Molly Bloom’s long soliloquy a narrative
all but entirely lacking in marks at all. Though it consists of eight apparent run-
on “sentences,” they are defined not by periods but by paragraphing: the only
punctuational device allowed. Beginning innocuously, the section moves via
conjunctions, prepositions, and restrictive clauses:
Yes because he never did a thing like that before as ask to get his breakfast in
bed with a couple of eggs since the City Arms hotel when he used to be
pretending to be laid up with a sick voice doing his highness to make himself
interesting to that old faggot Mrs Riordan that he thought he had a great leg of
and she never left us a farthing all for masses for herself and her soul greatest
 miser ever was actually afraid to lay out 4d for her methylated spirit telling me
all her ailments she had too much old chat in her about politics and earthquakes
and the end of the world let us have a bit of fun first. (Joyce 997)
Flowing from an initially affirmative “Yes,” Molly’s stream of consciousness
quickly shifts to annoyance at being asked to serve her husband breakfast in bed,
finally to a culminating orgasmic shiver pages later as she recalls his marriage
proposal years before, concluding her uninterrupted monologue:
and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the
rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how
he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another
and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me
would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him
yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and
his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes. (Joyce 1069)
Even here, the capitalizations of the passage seem superfluous, the final period
extraneous, while polysyndeton throughout renders clauses clearly understood,
as if something of an invisible line break that poetically serves as faux
punctuation.
Each of the long monologue’s eight unpunctuated sections seems to operate as
a sentence, in part because of syntactical conventions that allow readers to intuit
where sentence divisions would in fact be (though neither Molly Bloom nor
Joyce decides to enforce those divisions). That creates an interesting tension
between the reader’s impulse toward structure and the novel’s defiance of it, at
least here, with a conspicuous lack of discriminating marks. And in part because
unpunctuated, the final section enforces a narrative and emotional return,
circling back on itself in far from random sequence. Indeed, modeled on
Homer’s Odyssey, the entire novel traces a circular cycle, with Molly’s
monologue (the only female voice in Ulysses) returning at last to its opening
affirmation. Marking a forward and backward weaving of words, she matches
Penelope’s ancient weaving and unweaving of the burial shroud meant to deter
beleaguering suitors. Moreover, that warp and weft tension, alternately created
and released, prominently occurs at the lexical level, as Lisa Sternlieb observes:
Leaving out any direct reference to weaving, while the rest of the nov el is rife
with such allusions, Molly instead plays with a wide range of related words. By
omitting apostrophes she puns with several words crucial to her narrative
 —“cant,” “wed,” “ill,” “wont,” and especially “weve.” In a passage which
clearly illustrates her ability to weave and unweave simultaneously, she shows
how women are deserving of contempt and pity: “weve none either he wants
what he wont get or its some woman ready to stick her knife in you I hate that
in women no wonder they treat us the way they do we are a dreadful lot of
bitches I suppose its all the troubles we have makes us so snappy Im not like
that.” Contradictions are seamlessly woven into Molly’s pattern as she moves
from “weve none” to “all the troubles we have.” (Sternlieb 110)
Displaying a capacious ability to balance these contradictions, Molly gradually
fashions meaning out of what seems initially formless.
More generally and at the level of syntax, we slowly realize how fully the
absence of punctuation throughout this final section reveals the most elaborate
structure of the novel. The whole is tightly organized according to an octagonal
pattern, Diane Tolomeo argues, with sentences paired forward and backward
leading to a rich fabric of consciousness: “as Molly relaxes and begins to sink
into the misty realm which precedes sleep, her thoughts become richer and more
inclusive: a withdrawal from and an embracing of the world appear as two
aspects of the same process” (Tolomeo 452). The very absence of full stops in
her soliloquy allows not simply a flow to her thoughts but the recurrence of
certain resistances that Molly then maneuvers around. It is as if periods
represented something like a weaver’s knotting of fabric that is silently unwoven
at moments where we would otherwise expect closure.
Of course, the knotting in Joyce is homophonically undone with verbal
affirmatives, as Lisa Sternlieb observes: “The first word of her soliloquy
—‘Yes’—may represent the removal of the first of these knots and every one of
the many yeses that follows is another ‘not’ undone” (Sternlieb 115). In the
process, Molly finally escapes the negative implications of masculine definition:
“Her overlapping words resist stops, periods, and definitive meanings; she insists
on using pronouns so that Bloom, Boylan, and Stephen overlap indistinguishably
through the word ‘he.’ The quotidian and the epic overlap as do the present, past,
and future” (Sternlieb 120). In short, her resistance to closely punctuated control
allows a flexibility, a capaciousness of consciousness that expands possibility by
allowing contradictions and conflicts to emerge.
More than half a century later, a similar embrace of unpunctuated prose occurs
in Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), preceded in Chapter 20 with the escaped
slave Sethe musing over the ghost of her long-dead child in an anguished
monologue: “Beloved, she my daughter. She mine” (Morrison 236). As she
recalls having killed Beloved to save her from the unendurable horrors endured
by slaves at Sweet Home plantation, we hear her thoughts turn by the end to her
second child Denver:
But the Bodwins got me the cooking job at Sawyer’s and left me able to smile
on my own like now when I think about you.
But you know all that because you smart like everybody said because when I
got here you was crawling already. Trying to get up the stairs. Baby Suggs had
them painted white so you could see your way to the top in the dark where
lamplight didn’t reach. Lord, you loved the stairsteps. (Morrison 240–41)
Immediately following, Sethe’s paratactic style is matched in Denver’s
monologue, beginning with “Beloved is my sister” (Morrison 242), continuing in
a stream of consciousness that obsessively goes over the facts of Beloved’s
return. The whole, expressing how desperately Denver wants to forge a sororal
relationship severed by death, ends by recollecting Sethe’s motherly advice to
her: “She said the ghost was after Ma’am and her too for not doing anything to
stop it. But it would never hurt me. I just had to watch out for it because it was a
greedy ghost and needed a lot of love” (Morrison 247). Again, phrases emerge in
staccato bursts, with emotion trumping calm sequential sense, if finally
understandable nonetheless.
By the third monologue, however, punctuation has disappeared nearly
altogether as evocation of the dead Beloved’s far more fragmented state of mind
—understandably so as a ghost of the past:
I am Beloved and she is mine. I see her take flowers away from leaves she
puts them in a round basket the leaves are not for her she fills the basket
she opens the grass I would help her but the clouds are in the way how can
I say things that are pictures I am not separate from her there is no place
where I stop her face is my own and I want to be there in the place where her
face is and to be looking at it too a hot thing. (Morrison 248)
The monologue continues as a patchy account stringing together memory shards,
though Morrison assists the reader (in the absence of punctuation marks) by
including spacing as here between clauses. That serves to diminish any potential
confusion involved in words simply succeeding one another: “again again
night day night day I am waiting no iron circle is around my neck no
boats go on this water no men without skin my dead man is not floating
here his teeth are down there where the blue is and the grass so is the face I
want” (Morrison 251). If the sequence and sense with Beloved prove less
obvious or accessible than with her sister’s or mother’s monologues, uncertainty
results less from the absence of punctuation than the confusion of referents, of
context and relations.
And the fourth, final monologue, Beloved’s once more—“I am Beloved and
she is mine” (Morrison 248)—then takes on a more fully embodied form that
shifts from punctuated expression into clear sentence form, then into recollected
dialogue between Beloved and Sethe arranged by lines, finally to something like
poetry integrating the voices of all three women together.
She said you wouldn’t hurt me.
She hurt me.
I will protect you.
I want her face.
Don’t love her too much.
I am loving her too much.
Watch out for her; she can give you dreams.
She chews and swallows.
Don’t fall asleep when she braids your hair.
She is the laugh; I am the laughter.
I watch the house; I watch the yard. (Morrison 255)
Here, the unholy trauma of the past seems at least temporarily forestalled via the
fragile conventions of punctuation and unsteady end-stopped lines, before the
fuller bleak narrative recommences: all as if to confirm that the past has been
uncertainly accommodated, shaped for a time by the present into a more
adequate accounting.
Unlike Joyce’s final Penelope section, where the prose confusion seems driven
by Molly’s creative ardor, here it seems as if the disruptive effects of Beloved’s
fragmented emotional state drive the chapter’s unpunctuated progress: “as if the
text itself were in danger of fragmentation” (Page 134).1 After all, the entire
novel immerses us in the never-ending anguish of the past, the deranged
psychology wrought by chattel slavery, leaving no single perspective secure,
much less dominant. On the contrary, each of the three main characters (Denver,
Sethe, Beloved) wants desperately to possess the other, in an emotional gesture
that matches the political tenor of slavery itself. As Jean Wyatt explains:
 The speakers in the three-way dialogue in Beloved reject the separation of
persons required by the subject positions of language, where “I” is separate
from “you” and “she”: they insist on the interpenetration of identities.
Consequently, their language erases linguistic demarcations between self and
other:

I have your milk. . . .

I brought you milk
It is impossible to determine who is speaking: Does the “I” in “I have your
milk” refer to Sethe, who might be saying that she “has” (is carrying)
Beloved’s milk, or to Beloved, who could just as well be the “I” who speaks,
saying that she “has” Sethe’s milk inside her? The dedifferentiation of
possessive pronouns dramatizes the impossibility of separating what belongs to
the one body from what belongs to the other when the two are joined by the
milk that flows between them. (Wyatt 26)
As Wyatt adds about repetition and the problem of identity in the novel,
“Language operates more like interreflecting mirrors than like dialogue: it exists
to assure the speakers that they are there and they are the same. There is no
absence and there is no difference” (Wyatt 27). Moreover, everything occurs in
these sparsely punctuated monologues in the present tense, matching the
appalling, disorienting nightmare of slavery’s Middle Passage itself—a
nightmare whose pain is present long after its enslaving cause is past. The
question left unanswered is how to respond to this prosaic lack of definition and
boundary.
Perfecting a very different defiance of conventional punctuation, the
Portuguese Nobel laureate José Saramago embraces a signature style
exemplified in his best-known novel, Blindness (1995). Like most of his fiction,
it consists of long, breathless sentences in which commas take the place of
periods, quotation marks, semicolons, and colons, shaping a heated magma flow
of clauses rushing past. As well, the lack of any quotation marks for dialogue
means that the speakers’ identities (or the fact that dialogue is even occurring) is
not immediately apparent to the reader, though a change of unnamed speakers is
commonly marked by new capitalization.
Blindness begins with the onset of contagion as a driver all of a sudden finds
himself inexplicably blind, a condition he then mysteriously transmits to
everyone he meets, leading to a general collapse of government, utilities, civil
norms, civilization itself. The setting is uncertain (though evocative of Portugal),
and coupled with the characters’ anonymity contributes a fable-like quality to the
whole, in which the novel offers a rearguard “attempt to avoid sinking back into
a final blindness, a dark blindness, where there is no love and no stories”
(Miller). The question that lingers is what exactly the epidemic represents, to
which the one character saved from blindness, whose fate is to witness the
horrors of all-embracing social collapse, responds: “Why did we become blind, I
don’t know, perhaps one day we’ll find out, Do you want me to tell you what I
think, Yes, do, I don’t think we did go blind, I think we are blind, Blind but
seeing, Blind people who can see, but do not see” (Saramago 326). In short, as
Andrew Miller mordantly observes, blindness “is an allegory for not being able
to see. What exactly it is we should see, what Saramago—with all his years as a
man and a writer and having lived through dictatorship and revolution—fears we
cannot see, is present in the writing, present abundantly, but it is not to be
paraphrased” (Miller).
That ineffable presence is signaled only gradually in Blindness, which opens
more or less conventionally, at least in terms of punctuation, with simple and
compound sentences intertwined: “The amber light came on. Two of the cars
ahead accelerated before the red light appeared. At the pedestrian crossing the
sign of a green man lit up” (Saramago 1). But by degrees, as vision is
extinguished one by one, the clear sequestering effect of grammatical periods
disappears as commas surreptitiously begin to take over:
The unexpected voice startled the new arrivals, but the two men remained
silent, and it was the girl who replied, I think there are four of us, myself and
this little boy, Who else, why don’t the others speak up, asked the doctor’s
wife, I’m here, murmured a man’s voice, as if he could only pronounce the
words with difficulty, And so am I, growled in turn another masculine voice
with obvious displeasure. (Saramago 42)
Voices begin to mingle as sentences tumble out unhitched for pages and
polyphonic paragraphs extend even longer. The reader’s confusion about who is
speaking at any given moment more than occasionally matches characters’ own
blind bewilderment. And though it is Saramago’s trademark technique, this run-
on style works forcefully (if with little ophthalmic verisimilitude) to evoke what
might be envisaged as a figurative condition of sightlessness. Groping in the
dark, unable to apprehend verbal milieus, readers are immured as well in an
ostensible conversion disorder, of blindness provoked by a “flickering of tense
and subject so that we glide between first and third person, between stream of
consciousness and wry objectivity” (Miller).
Smoothly shifting between overriding narrative commentary and unsettled
individual voices, Saramago scripts a tautly accentuated harmonization of the
two. At one moment, we learn of fierce beatings and sheer panic: “they could go
neither backwards nor forward, those who were inside, crushed and flattened,
tried to protect themselves by kicking and elbowing their neighbours, who were
suffocating, cries could be heard, blind children were sobbing, blind mothers
were fainting” (Saramago 110). Moments later, the personal anguish is silenced
by an eerily calm officialese:
The arrival of so many blind people appeared to have brought at least one
advantage, or, rather, two advantages, the first of these being of a psychological
nature, as it were, for there is a vast difference between waiting for new
inmates to turn up at any minute, and realising that the building is completely
full at last, that from now on it will be possible to establish and maintain stable
and lasting relations with one’s neighbours, without the disturbances there have
been up until now, because of the constant interruptions and interventions by
the new arrivals which obliged us to be for ever reconstituting the channels of
communication. The second advantage . . . (Saragamo 114)
The contrast between two modes here could not be more dramatic; in the first, of
clauses that proliferate full tilt in savage sequence, like blows to the body
impossible to ward off; in the second, of phrases that accumulate gradually,
slowly diverting attention in the corkscrew periphrasis of rational discourse. As
Rhian Atkin observes of this idiosyncratic rhythm, ambiguity is created by
switching inconspicuously among registers, sometimes half-a-dozen times a
paragraph: “The digressive form of his novels thus serves to emphasize and
reiterate their content, highlighting in particular Saramago’s constant challenge
to grand narratives and official discourses” (Atkin, “Tell” 100). Instead of
abstract summations, which feed a regulatory bureaucratic agenda, Saramago
invokes a twisting perspective resistant to any adequate generalization itself.
Frequently, the strategy compels rereading, retracing one’s steps through “an
overflow of language that is never redundant. All of the seeming repetitions are
in fact ways of being precise, of continuously searching for yet another way of
expressing truth, a truth which although never relative, is certainly always
multiple” (de Medeiros 178).2 The digressions of the novel become increasingly
labyrinthine as a means of breaking up not so much a supposedly seamless text
but more importantly a putatively neutral, objective perspective. Characters cast
doubt on each other’s accounts, with exaggeration and embellishment variously
exposed, alerting readers actively not to accept blindly all they are told, even by
the narrator. Finally, the effect of Saramago’s punctuational choices is to confirm
that our interpretive efforts must always consist of insight built on a certain
constitutional blindness, a condition that seems at first to emerge as a virus but is
actually constituent of our identity as readers.
David Frier interprets this bleakly, concluding that “the picture of humanity in
Blindness is an abject one, with little left towards the end of the text to
distinguish the human beings from the scavenging dogs around them in the
streets of the city” (Frier, “Righting” 104). Yet one might well demur, guided by
the doctor’s wife who at the very last seems to waver between the dread of
incipient blindness and the flickering prospect of blinding insight: “The city was
still there” (Saramago 326). Not only the scene we have before us, but its
presentation—in conventionally punctuated clauses that mirror the novel’s
opening—leave at least a wrinkle in any firm conviction, holding forth the
glistening faith that unlike “scavenging dogs” we can indeed learn from having
had our sight put in jeopardy. That may prove small consolation, but perhaps
adequate to the kind of reading Saramago celebrates: of searching uncertainly
for meaning, moving through landscapes of doubt, with any final interpretation
left disturbingly unresolved.
Fully as distinguished a writer as Saramago, W. G. Sebald likewise
reconfigures punctuation to hammer out a disquieting vision that similarly flouts
conventional understanding. His handful of genre-defying works mix memoir,
travelogue, and history, magical realism and postmodern pastiche, combining
fiction and nonfiction in bearing witness to the Holocaust without reducing it to
hackneyed commonplaces or sentimental bromides.3 Like Saramago, he
embraces a diversionary mode, trying to approach a horrifying history without
ever risking a direct frontal view:
I don’t think you can focus on the horror of the Holocaust. It’s like the head of
the Medusa: you carry it with you in a sack, but if you looked at it you’d be
petrified. I was trying to write the lives of some people who’d survived—the
“lucky ones.” If they were so fraught, you can extrapolate. But I didn’t see it; I
only know things indirectly. (Jaggi)
Again, like Saramago, he distrusts calming notions of presumed objectivity so
fully that he resists the very affiliations he so convincingly imagines, or as Maya
Jaggi states: “he connects with immense pain, only to say you can’t connect; he
tries to make you imagine things that he then delicately says are unimaginable”
(Jaggi).
Unlike Saramago, however, Sebald persists with one central historical theme in
each of four major works, and only gradually, studiously discovers the
possibilities of a style that will become fully (or at least, more fully) adequate to
it. Arthur Williams has observed, in terms that help explain his punctuational
experiments, that “Sebald’s oeuvre can be read as a series of threads tied
skilfully together, not so much as ‘bow ties’ . . . but rather as ‘stitches’ as in
knitting or crotchet-work, or, . . . a ‘net’ or ‘mesh,’ possibly even a ‘snare’”
(Williams 27). Of course, the need for such nets occurs because his
performances ramble so strenuously, and indirectly, not only in the actual
peregrinations of his narratives across foreign shores but in the verbal twists and
turns that lead the reader ever afield. His testimony occurs not as finished and
systematic account but as ever incomplete fragments, expressing an irresistible
vision through what Carol Jacobs calls his “meandering detours, his shattering of
frames, crossing borders, writing tangentially, disintegrating the name,
surreptitiously citing, and announcing blindness” (Jacobs x). Asked to describe
one of Sebald’s strangely hybrid books (half fiction, half nonfiction, though the
line between is rarely clear), one is hard-pressed to pull the whole together. Or as
J. J. Long more critically intones: “The story is not only spun out but is also
clogged up by the proliferation of inventories and lists, micronarratives and
reminiscences, which not only defer the arrival at the end of the main story, but
make it impossible to say with any certainty what the main story is” (Long 141).
The Rings of Saturn (1995) offers a perfect entry into Sebald’s customary habit
of surveying history’s effects, in describing the walking tour he took through
England’s Suffolk County, the now-settled site of military resistance to the Nazis
that everywhere reminds him of that past. Yet his digressive account ranges from
Sir Thomas Browne’s skull, to a Rembrandt painting, to sericulture and a
gardener amazed at how thoroughly Germans had repressed their own history:
“No one at the time seemed to have written about their experiences or afterwards
recorded their memories. Even if you asked people directly, it was as if
everything had been erased from their minds” (Sebald, Rings 39). In the midst of
these travels occur musings on Roger Casement and the Belgian Congo, a link to
thoughts of Swinburne, a review of the Irish Troubles in 1920, even a wooden
model of the Temple of Jerusalem.
But invariably, reflections, allusions, and alleged facts of the Third Reich
intrude, intersecting with images that thread through each of the ten chapters,
prompting a shock of recognition about an actual burgeoning silk industry in
Germany that curiously paralleled the buildup of Nazi concentration camps.
Throughout, Sebald strangely avoids paragraphing, even though he still divides
the whole into ten unequivocal chapters.4 As well, frequently drawing on
photographs, he converts them into a singular form of punctuation, of odd
landscapes with armaments placed mid-sentence to mildly alter the text,
enhancing “the melancholic tone . . . , the feeling the reader has that it is always
grey and rainy” (Jarosz 24). More importantly, Sebald relies (as Saramago never
does) on the pause evoked by dashes, pauses that erupt infrequently but that
nonetheless punctuate an emotional silence. Late in Rings, he suffers through a
sandstorm that evokes for him the great British storm of 1987 not simply as an
immense natural disaster (fourteen million trees upended) but as reminder of
human impotence in the face of meteorological as well as historical and
geopolitical forces:
Gasping for breath, my mouth and throat dry, I crawled out of the hollow that
had formed around me like the last survivor of a caravan that had come to grief
in the desert. A deathly silence prevailed. There was not a breath, not a
birdsong to be heard, not a rustle, nothing. And although it now grew lighter
once more, the sun, which was at its zenith, remained hidden behind the
banners of a pollen-fine dust that hung for a long time in the air. This, I
thought, will be what is left after the earth has ground itself down. —I walked
the rest of the way in a daze. (Sebald, Rings 229)
The extended series of brief clauses builds to and trails off from the “deathly
silence” in a scene that at once stands free of any past and yet whose imagery
once more evokes the horror of Nazi ideology. Even so, the scene is split off by a
dash from Sebald’s resumption of his walking tour. As Nathan Goldman writes:
“The dash invites the reader to pause—to linger for a moment. The earth bereft
of life—can we imagine such a thing? The dash creates a space to encounter, or
at least to attempt to encounter, the notion’s terrible sublimity” (Goldman).
Perhaps the most dramatic use of the dash occurs in the closing discussion of
silkworm production as a perfect cultural model for “the best and cleanest of all
possible worlds,” at least as it was understood in prewar Germany (Sebald, Rings
292). If “silkworms afforded an almost ideal object lesson for the classroom,”
they also were “taken by breeders to monitor productivity and selection,
including extermination to preempt racial degeneration.—In the film, we see a
silk-worker receiving eggs despatched by the Central Reich Institute of
Sericulture in Celle, and depositing them in sterile trays . . . and so on until the
entire killing business is completed” (Sebald, Rings 294). Sebald uses this kind
of dash repeatedly to “signify breaks in the narrative,” but breaks so severe, as
Nathan Goldman points out:
as an attempt to capture the horror of what the words that precede and follow it
only allude to. The dash, situated between the talk of schoolroom sericulture
and the talk of silkworm execution, creates a moment of silence—the very
opposite of talk—for the victims of the death camps. It’s Sebald’s attempt to
make legible a loss that language can circle but never quite reach. (Goldman)
These occasional dashes in Rings of Saturn erupt into the text, suggesting all the
ways in which dislocations occur between present memory and past trauma,
immediate recollection and initiating pain. And in so doing, they afford a brief
respite for the reader to contemplate the troubling junctures of interlinked, often
bizarre ruminations.
Sebald resists any simple accommodation to the past even as he draws on the
very means by which accommodation might be reached: photograph, montage,
intertextual allusion, even a mix of nostalgic reminiscence and Orwellian
bureaucratese. For while the past is silent, having left only traces behind, the
need to pause before those traces in order to grant them room to speak, rather
than being simply ventriloquize d by a self-satisfied present, remains Sebald’s
steadfast conviction. The past, after all, has created him (as a German born in the
war to a soldier for the Third Reich). Not until the transition to Austerlitz (2001),
however, did he feel equal to offering an account of what he judged to be the
wasteland of his life, “of the destructive effect on me of my desolation through
all those past years” (Sebald, Austerlitz 137). The whole encompasses his
anxiety attacks, severe mental distress, and suppressed memories in a continuous
prose sequence, with one single paragraph (p. 88), and in a sequence that has
abandoned divisions by chapters, though relying on asterisks three times instead
for sectional divisions (pp. 32, 117, 254; with a white space on p. 290). Overall,
as well, his sentences linger on ceaselessly much longer than in earlier work.
Still, his obsession remains similar. Instead of a walking tour through Suffolk
that evokes the effects of the Holocaust, however, he stands aside from his own
autobiographical musings, becoming instead the imagined narrator of a displaced
self, his equally peripatetic friend, Jacques Austerlitz (though we are never quite
sure whether this figure was actually real or not). Raised by foster parents in
Wales, Austerlitz belatedly learns he was secreted as an infant refugee away
from the Nazis by his biological parents, later killed in the camps. In the course
of recounting his research of their fates, Austerlitz reveals his own continuing
sense of abandonment, his subsequent nervous breakdown, the discovery of an
elderly nanny now in Prague, and the propaganda video he obtains of the
Theresienstadt concentration camp where he thinks he recognizes a clip of his
mother. Like Sebald, he continues to feel a failure, worried that his sketches
were “misguided, distorted, and of little use,” leaving him “increasingly
overcome by a sense of aversion and distaste, said Austerlitz” (Sebald, Austerlitz
121). Or as he, an architectural historian, ponders the analogy between language
and urban sprawl:
If language may be regarded as an old city full of streets and squares, nooks
and crannies, with some quarters dating from far back in time while others
have been torn down, cleaned up, and rebuilt, and with suburbs reaching
further and further into the surrounding country, then I was like a man who has
been abroad a long time and cannot find his way through this urban sprawl
anymore, no longer knows what a bus stop is for, or what a back yard is, or a
street junction, an avenue or a bridge. The entire structure of language, the
syntactical arrangement of parts of speech, punctuation, conjunctions, and
finally even the nouns denoting ordinary objects were all enveloped in
impenetrable fog. (Sebald, Austerlitz 123–24)
Moreover, the architectonics of Sebald’s sentences themselves reflect this
breakdown: with clauses that fold back or digress; with multiple levels of
narration signaled by the use of inquit (“said Austerlitz”), often mid-sentence, or
even double inquit (“said Vera, Austerlitz added”); and again, with photographs
that sometimes validate, at others deviate from the sentences they interrupt.
It is as if the Nazi horror emerges only glancingly through isolate moments in
the text, seen briefly before Austerlitz returns to another digression, admits to
additional failure, surveys the imperiously out-sized architecture of modernist
Europe that forms the continuing heritage of the Third Reich. As Mark
McCulloh has observed, “the detachment of the narrative approach, not unlike
that of Kafka’s, seems to be an integral part of Sebald’s authorial strategy, since
he is obviously determined to look at everything anew, with the eyes of an
extraterrestrial who is experiencing the susceptibilities of life on earth for the
first time” (McCulloh 82). Or as McCulloh adds, “the fascination elicited by his
kaleidoscopic continuum of associations” is enhanced by the erasure of history
and memory that lies at the heart of Sebald’s vision (McCulloh 82). The
diversionary, digressive syntax that keeps swiveling us among disconnected
moments and fractious observations stands as implicit critique of the relentless,
inflexible monumentalism of Nazi ideology. Style, from this perspective,
condemns the world it evokes inadvertently.
That is, it does so with one telling exception: near the close, having discovered
a Nazi account by H. G. Adler of Theresienstadt, Austerlitz reproduces a
photographed list tersely describing camp jobs. In an eight-page sentence, he
then mimics the horrifying, emotionless Nazi view in a desiccated recitation of
the grueling conditions under which prisoners were forced to work. The orderly,
calculated meticulousness of the sentence induces deepening unease, as we learn
“of the precinct mending and darning rooms, the shredding section, the rag
depot, the book reception and sorting unit, the kitchen brigade, the potato-
peeling platoon, the bone-crushing mill, the glue-boiling plant, or the mattress
department, as medical and nursing auxiliaries, in the disinfestation and rodent
control service, the floor space allocation office” and so on (Sebald, Austerlitz
237). The apparently detached mode is the sole reaction possible to the barbaric
“final solution” implemented by the Nazis, then carried out with “crazed
administrative zeal” (Sebald, Austerlitz 241). But we also realize that this
description is made from Austerlitz’s perspective, suggesting his own run-on
helplessness in the face of what he depicts. Sebald’s prose narrative ends
precipitously, with no summary conclusion, before Austerlitz has presumably
learned the mystery of his father’s death. All we are left with is a sense of
deplorably silent indeterminacy in the face of history’s horrors. Though as
Tholeif Persson concludes about all of Sebald’s melancholy efforts, “the central
issue at stake is the relationship between the ethics of representation and the
politics of remembrance” (Persson 205).5

Notes
1 As Page adds: The “voices” of the three women, which the reader finally hears on pages 200–217, also
cut two ways. On the one hand, their song is a testimony to their intimacy, to their shared sense of
family, to their common lives and memories, and their three-in-one union is the most fully developed
female triad in Morrison’s fiction. But on the other hand, their ingrown dependencies drain away their
lives. . . . In fact, their relationships, for all their love, are increasingly possessive. The one word that
Stamp can make out is “mine,” the key word in each of their monologues. (Page 138–39)
2 Though unconcerned with Saramago, Samuel Frederick offers an interpretation of digression useful in
reading Blindness, arguing against both Seymour Chatman’s and Peter Brooks’s opposed premises, as
either anathema to plot or conversely essential to it: “Instead, I want to show how some radical forms
of digression resist plot’s teleological imperative and its demand for unity, and how, in this resistance,
 they produce a different mode of storytelling altogether: one in which plot and narrative need not
coincide; a narrative freed from the structures of plot” (Frederick 17). Or as he claims: “digression
delays not just the end, but also the plot elements that would point towards that end. The postponement
that results from digressive manoeuvrings, however, is not one that denies satisfaction. Rather, it insists
on its own kind of satisfaction through this denial” (Frederick 22).
3 For deft explanations of Sebald, see Mark Anderson and Maya Jaggi.
4 There are, as it happens, two paragraphs on p. 59, one on p. 64—both of which seem as arbitrary as
their absence earlier. See also the paragraphs on pp. 80, 85, 88, 89, 90, 92, 96; 104, 105, and then only
occasionally and ever more sparsely on pp. 259, 278, 286, 289, 294. As Ceri Radford has observed,
“Jane Austen didn’t write in paragraphs, which were inserted by editors. Nor did Jack Kerouac tapping
out On the Road in three weeks on a 120-foot-long scroll of paper. In both cases, only the manuscripts
point to a certain breathlessness” (Radford).
5 The postmodern novelist who most resembles Sebald in his bleak vision and punctuational
experimentation is the Hungarian László Krasznahorkai. Throughout, he extends his sentences
interminally, dissolving the boundaries of narrative voices, until in The Last Wolf (2009), he unfolds
the entire seventy-six-page novella in a single epic sentence, unbroken by paragraphs. His sentences,
admired the 2015 Man Booker judges, “like a lint roll, pick up all sorts of odd and unexpected things
as they accumulate inexorably into paragraphs that are as monumental as they are scabrous and
musical” (Nowell). He is among the better recent writers who, in James Wood’s words, concentrate:
on filling the sentence, using it to notate and reproduce the tiniest qualifications, hesitations,
intermittences, affirmations and negations of being alive. This is one reason that very long, breathing,
unstopped sentences, at once literary and vocal, have been almost inseparable from the progress of
experimental fiction since the nineteen-fifties. Claude Simon, Thomas Bernhard, José Saramago, W.
G. Sebald, Roberto Bolaño, David Foster Wallace, James Kelman, and László Krasznahorkai have
used the long sentence to do many different things, but all of them have been at odds with a merely
grammatical realism, whereby the real is made to fall into approved units and packets. (Wood,
“Madness”)
 7
Enjambment: Cummings, Williams, Giovanni

Surprising as it sounds, prose may well be more readily left unpunctuated than
poetry, though poets have a longer modern history of experimenting with an
absence of marks. And when they do, it is often because line breaks serve as a
form of disguised punctuational guide or, in Charles O. Hartman’s words, “as a
kind of master punctuation mark” (Hartman 153). Arguably as well, the less
punctuation poetry exhibits, the less simply verbal it seems to become and the
more its impact verges on the visual, which may explain the allure of shaped or
pattern poems (sometimes known as visual or concrete poetry) that burst into
prominence in the mid-twentieth century. Typographical marks convey meaning
in poems as much ocular as rhetorical, whose effect is thereby largely lost when
read aloud. Yet short of such experiments, poets often enjamb lines or drop
capitalization and periods, evincing poetic statements with neither pauses nor
caesuras.1
A trio of American poets has been drawn to this structural possibility out of a
shared resistance to conventional modes, though for reasons that curiously
happen to be diametrically opposed. E. E. Cummings, William Carlos Williams,
and Nikki Giovanni each embraced the freedom of abandoning punctuation, with
its assorted implications, and in the process offer a sharp contrast not only to
other figures in this study but distinctively to each other. Cummings turned from
conventional punctuation as a means of exploring what otherwise seemed
hidden, the visual realms of poetry; Williams did so out of a radical reconception
of the relation between image and referent; Giovanni did so out of a desire to
perfect an exhortatory, distinctively oral mode. Yet each of these three
anticipated the wonderfully fruitful ambiguities generated by a lack of
punctuation in poems, especially with regard to agency and perspective. Indeed,
Cummings resisted marks so assiduously that he published under the sobriquet e
e cummings, while Giovanni reframed stanzaic conventions in an effort to
proclaim a distinctive black consciousness. Along with Williams, their poems
establish borders where punctuation might forcefully seem to detract from rather
than add to a poetic resonance. And from this perspective, it is as if Cummings
and Williams, who each admired the other immensely, helped prepare the way
for Giovanni’s success in an entirely different formal venture.
Cummings is usually associated with the modernist turn toward free-form
poetry, following rhythms of natural speech to delight in whimsical possibilities
of verbal and visual play. Indeed, the visual at times seemed to overtake the
verbal, as Marianne Moore exuberantly proclaimed: “The physique of the poems
recalls the corkscrew twists, the infinitude of dots, the sumptuous perpendicular
appearance of Kufic script . . .” (Moore 47).2 Over time, he would even abandon
the conventional syntax and capitalization of his early stanzaic poems, often in
celebrating a spirit of carpe diem.
In his celebrated poem “since feeling is first,” from his second collection, Is5
(1926), Cummings expresses a belief in the primacy of emotion over reason, part
of a perfectly recognizable romantic tenet:
since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;
wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world
my blood approves
and kisses are a better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don’t cry
—the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids’ flutter which says
we are for each other: then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life’s not a paragraph
and death i think is no parenthesis (CP 291)
Love’s essential nature, so Cummings would have it, emerges less as a matter of
acquired knowledge than irrepressible passion (“kisses are a better fate / than
wisdom”), corresponding at first glance to the poem’s uniform lack of studied
capitalization, along with its minimal punctuation: a semicolon, period, dash,
and a colon, which finally seem themselves unneeded.3 The series of individual
marks affords a fourfold template for what might be assessed as outmoded
punctuational guides, each used only once as if vestigially. And while the whole
is set up with “since,” as part of a potential argument requiring “then,” the
second line immediately dismisses any need for so conventional a sequential
logic.
Yet both the presence and the lack of punctuation unsettles our initial
assumptions, immediately seeming to require a rereading. The first hesitation
occurs with the doubling of “wholly” on either side of a semicolon, which at first
might suggest the continuation of a thought but in this case seems to disrupt it.
The initial “wholly” relies on a partner who seems bound by “the syntax of
things”; the second starts by linking to that partner, then all but immediately
pivots to the poet himself, ready to insert himself in this dynamic, eager “to be a
fool.” Then his desire for rational argument suddenly reasserts itself, in an effort
to convince his love that “kisses are a better fate.” That forms the apparent link
between the first and the second stanzas, as if the capitalized “Spring” of the first
jump-started the emotional gesture of the second.
Even in so simple a poem, the wonder lies in how fully it becomes self-
referential. Incorporating the very punctuation it denies as a theme at the end,
with two neat five-line stanzas reduced to a three-line suspension, then a one-
line conclusion, it shows form itself breaking down in confirmation of the
poem’s delicate (mildly erotic, amusingly linguistic) resonances.4 The question
raised by the second line of “who pays any attention” becomes the calling card
of the poem, though each line then incrementally alters what has come before.
And by the end, we realize that “life’s not a paragraph,” in any sense able to be
constrained by rule, nor is it contained by the customary “parenthesis” of death.
The indeterminacies of punctuation, or its lack, seem to press along in the rush
of erotic emotion that carries an argument against grammatical rule.5 As
Rushworth Kidder remarks of the obvious reading of “abandon” celebrated by
the poem: “Feeling, for Cummings, may well be ‘first’ over logic; but the poet in
this poem bends this idea to his own ends with a logical skill carefully calculated
to ensnare his prey” (77). In fact, the central stanza encapsulates the speaker’s
emotional declaration as a moment of defiance, dismissing “syntax” in the very
addition of punctuation (period, capitalization, dash) with end-stopped lines
making themselves as clear syntactically as enjambed ones. Strangely, we realize
that syntax does matter in the ways the stanza seems akilter, matching the
ebullient fashion in which the speaker wants to win his lady.
Cummings, lighthearted and relatively easygoing in this jeu d’esprit, is clearly
not changing our fundamental vision of love, nor the meaning of words, nor the
shifting poetics of conventional usage. Typographic marks may be removed like
summer clothes, but that doesn’t quite alter our understanding of the way words
work in his poems. “Tumbling-hair” (1923), however (from his first collection,
Tulips & Chimneys), presents a potentially darker, mythically more resonant
scenario in the image of a child simply picking flowers:
Tumbling-hair
picker of buttercups
violets
dandelions
And the big bullying daisies
through the field wonderful
with eyes a little sorry
Another comes
also picking flowers (CP 31)
Unlike the earlier poem, here the lineation alters, with spatial pauses adjusting
our sense of lines as we read, even as each line seems end-stopped with
punctuation simply removed (mostly commas), or a verb (before “through the
field wonderful” with the long indentation allowing a reader’s open choice
among possible verbs).6 We shift from “tumbling-hair / picker,” assumed to be a
child roaming through a field, to a scene in which small flowers are succeeded
by “big bullying daisies” that somehow lead us into “eyes a little sorry.”
Moreover, the poem’s abbreviation along with its lack of punctuation makes it
hard to understand where aggression begins and ends—whether with the daisies
or beyond (“through the field wonderful”). Only the final determinate turn to
“Another comes” suggests the arrival of an eery additional presence, possibly
death or the tumbler herself grown older or even the poet himself. In every case,
however, the way “through the field wonderful” of childhood delight is
necessarily evanescent, while the descriptive “through” reveals itself as
ambivalent syntactically, tilting between “big bullying daisies” and “eyes a little
sorry.”
The poem’s very brevity; its lack of any punctuation other than three
capitalizations that seem to register new sentences, though without
accompanying periods; its curious depersonalization amid a floral landscape—
all contribute to a certain allegorical resonance in which agency disappears, with
a curious admixture of sexuality and death linked somehow to childhood
innocence. Looming behind the scene is the Greek myth of Persephone, the
young goddess of spring abducted by Hades as she was picking flowers, then
taken against her will to the Underworld. But the poem also invokes the idea of
death as God’s gardener, a tender of souls, who cuts life short at moments when
we are taken aback, heedless and unaware. And even the flowering sequence
registers a rise in narrative tension nowhere else apparent, from buttercups to
timid (delayed) violets, then dandelions pushing to the head of the line, displaced
by “bullying daisies” (a bloom like violets usually associated with innocence and
purity). The absence of punctuation, moreover, leads to the ambivalence of “eyes
a little sorry”—as perhaps the figurative yellow eyes of the daisies immediately
preceding the phrase, or of the “Another” who also comes to gather flowers.7
More than most of Cummings’s poems, this one holds back from clear
paraphrase, teetering on the edge of a tradition that returns ineluctably to the
classic scene, extending from Homer through Milton and Tennyson to Louise
Glück. As even enthusiasts acknowledge of Cummings: “The style almost
always employs novel images, simple diction, casual conversational phrasing
and syntax, and a visual form that moves slowly along to create its delicate
impression or modest assertion” (Kennedy 5).
The enigmatic absence of punctuation in Cummings prompts one to wonder at
the alternative, when poetic markings are by contrast deliberately included, even
indulged in overabundance. As it happens, Cummings himself wondered at the
possibility, most famously in “r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r” (1935). The poem went
through multiple drafts in which he altered its radically conceived punctuation,
exchanging one mark for another, revising spacings, indentations,
capitalizations, and combinations. From its title on, in fact, it hardly seems like
any poem we have seen before.
r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r
who
a)s w(e loo)k
upnowgath
 PPEGORHRASS
eringint(o-
aThe):l
eA
!p:
S a
(r
rIvInG .gRrEaPsPhOs)
to
rea(be)rran(com)gi(e)ngly
,grasshopper;
A first reading defies comprehension, though clearly punctuation itself
dominates any possible meaning, with hyphens, parentheses, capitalization,
colons, semicolons, even spacing dictating what can hardly be read, much less
expressed orally as a poem.
By the last line, we encounter a named grasshopper (the only distinct word
other than “who” in the poem) and realize in turn that it has been named
anagrammatically three earlier times (including the title). As Sam Hynes first
noted, the poem is not so much about a grasshopper but
about an object which becomes a grasshopper in the course of the poem. In the
first line it is simply something, in the grass or on a twig, extended (lower case
letters separated by dashes) but unidentified. But as we glance toward it (the
double take, in two quick parentheses) it draws itself together, becomes taller
and more condensed—becomes a definite and particular object, a The. It leaps,
and we follow its course with our eyes, from S to a. A grasshopper’s leap is a
sudden, startling thing, and so there is an exclamation point imbedded in the
word.
The thing, the The, lands, in an attitude halfway between the contraction just
preceding the leap and the extension of the first line. Now we see him clearly,
and as we look he rearranges himself to become a grasshopper. (Hynes)
The poem, in short, resists being read rather than seen as a mental sequence, “a
picture of an action rather than a description of it” (Hynes), imaging each part of
the grasshopper’s leap as if realized simultaneously. That helps explain the
exclamation point and colon in the middle of “leA!p:S” and the superimposition
of the penultimate line of “become” over “rearrangingly”:
“rea(be)rran(com)gi(e)ngly.” It also explains the precise configuration of each
anagrammatical variation, with the first (“r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r”) instance
suggesting a certain alienating abstraction, an unrecognizable, physically
articulated (thus hyphenated) object. The second reference occurs all in
uppercase (“PPEGORHRASS”), bringing to mind, according to Vakrilen
Kilyovski, “the maximum muscle tension of the ‘beast’ at the precise
millisecond of its leaping off the ground” (Kilyovski 103). What begins as a
jumble of punctuation between and amid an assortment of apparently random
letters becomes a visual poem, radically reorienting our sense of poetry itself. As
Cummings admitted: “not all of my poems are to be read aloud—some . . . are to
be seen & not heard” (Letters 267).8 Yet as Brian Gingrich admits, even in this
extreme case we “keep bouncing back (and forth) from the visual-pictorial
appearance of the poem to an attempt to `read’ it nevertheless—as if reading now
means something more like deciphering, seeing the letters not as images/icons
but as symbols, and deciphering now includes not just the letters but the
punctuation marks too” (Gingrich private correspondence).
William Carlos Williams strongly admired Cummings, esteeming him along
with Ezra Pound as “the two most distinguished American poets” of his time
(MacLeod 31). As it happens, however, Williams’s own efforts with an
unpunctuated visual style tend to be even more radical than Cummings’s.
Stripping out what he regarded as extraneous syntactical marks, he strove to
forgo a long tradition of poetry that presumed a descriptive relationship with the
natural world. Williams himself declared that “Design makes things speak. In
Spring and All, these two concepts are in creative friction. The book rejects
‘verisimilitude, that great copying’ as plagiarism of nature, insisting instead on a
‘separation. The word must be put down for itself, not as a symbol of nature but
as a part, cognizant of the whole’” (Costello). Williams achieved this
appositional vision of art, no longer contingent on a predetermining natural
world, largely through meter and line. And by experimenting in particular with
enjambment even more severe than Cummings’s, he focused attention on the
isolate shimmering of individual words themselves, words like “wheelbarrow”
and “plums.”
Throughout a long career, Williams would regularly include punctuation,
though it is worth attending to what happens when he resists its structuring
appeal, as in one of his better-known early poems, “The Great Figure” (1921)
(SP 36):
 Among the rain
and lights
I saw the figure 5
in gold
on a red
firetruck
moving
tense
unheeded
to gong clangs
siren howls
and wheels rumbling
through the dark city.
Here, the poem emerges as a long, complex sentence, beginning with
capitalization and ending with a period in traditional format. But the hourglass
shape of the whole consists of five lines of opening clauses and four of closing
ones, separated by four lines that slow our reading to concentrate on single
words detached from the other. The effect is to focus attention on words as
words, not referring to something other than their own linguistic resonance but
as “black letters on a white page,” in Peter Halter’s description; “words that can
be moved around on the page so as to form a pattern and become part of a
design” (Halter 47).10
The very isolation of a word in a line lends it a certain lustrous power, defying
the grammatical connections that might leach away its sound and bite into the
words hemming it in. As well, the lack of punctuation that enforces the poem’s
enjambment contributes to an ongoing slippage of verbal meaning even as words
join each other: “clangs/siren”; “howls/and wheels”; “rumbling/through the dark
city.”11 The painting that Williams’s good friend Charles Demuth made of the
poem, I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold (1928), captures the poetic resonances with
pictorial flair, tripling (or more) the number 5, breaking the fire engine into red
blocks, incorporating Williams’s names (“Bill,” “Carlo”) as part of the poetic
valance. And the angled forms of this “poster portrait” nicely match the poem’s
own angling.
Williams had already returned the favor in “The Pot of Flowers” (1922) (SP
40), conceived of as a “painted poem” inspired by Demuth’s Tuberoses (1922) in
a self-conscious effort, as he conceded, “to fuse the poetry and painting, to make
it the same thing” (Costello). Yet the poem is not a literal transcription or
otherwise ekphrastic, since various details decidedly differ. In a far more radical
gesture, Williams matches Demuth’s visual performance of removing the flowers
from a garden setting; “he floats and isolates them in empty space,” James
Breslin observes, “at once permitting him to define their contours with sharp,
distinct lines, yet to remind us that these objects are abstracted, lifted from any
context, for heightened aesthetic contemplation; the space they dwell in is an
artistic space” (Breslin 251). Williams’s parallel effort suspends words rather
than colors and shapes, though to the similar end of defining an autonomous
world of art. As Breslin remarks of Williams’s habitual declaration that poems
are made of words and the spaces between them:
Notice how he says “words and the spaces”—not “pauses,” as we might expect
a poet to do—but spaces, as if a poem were first of all a physical, a visual,
object . . . More important, “words and the spaces between them” suggests an
esthetic clearly enacted in the short, broken lines of the poems, an esthetic that
is concerned with isolating objects in space—in order (as in Demuth) to keep
them distinct. (Breslin 252)
Context seems defied in the poem, with colors, shades, light itself “contending”
with the “dark” pot.
It is as if words do not so much recover a spatialized moment or remind us of
an elaborate floral scene as register a disconnected series of referents,
independently incandescent, pointing to nothing but themselves as autonomous
verbal forms in space focused by the poet’s intense gaze and stunningly
sensitized ear:
Pink confused with white
flowers and flowers reversed
take and spill the shaded flame
darting it back
into the lamp’s horn
petals aslant darkened with mauve
red where in whorls
petal lays its glow upon petal
round flamegreen throats
 petals radiant with transpiercing light
contending
above
the leaves
reaching up their modest green
from the pot’s rim
and there, wholly dark, the pot
gay with rough moss.
Instead of single or one-word lines (with a solitary exception), stanzas of varying
lengths, varying words, varying spaces tumble down the page. The inversion of
“flowers and flowers reversed” enhances the word as word, almost encouraging
the reader to imagine it reversed into “srewolf” (occurring again with “petal lays
its glow upon petal”). The eye-rhyme of “darting” and “darkened” increases the
verbal resonance, as does “where in whorls.” Moreover, the spatial pause at
“above” splits the poem all but in two, if likewise binding the two parts together
with that verbal splice. The curious effect of Williams’s placement of
prepositions, as here, or adjectives and conjunctions alone or at the end of a line
is to focus our eye on these otherwise, seemingly subsidiary, suturing lexemes as
themselves substantive, just as forceful in their meaning as any verb or noun.
Williams’s agenda may be even better appreciated in two versions of a later
poem, “The Locust Tree in Flower” (SP 93). The first, written in 1933, is lesser
known, with only one dash as punctuation coming precisely midway through the
eight stanzas, each three lines long. And the question remains why the dash
(along with capitalization) remains:
Among
the leaves
bright
green
of wrist-thick
tree
and old
stiff broken
branch
 ferncool
swaying
loosely strung—
come May
again
white blossom
clusters
hide
to spill
their sweets
almost
unnoticed
down
and quickly
fall
The poem is carefully balanced and enjambed throughout, moving in a sprightly
rhythm (half iambic, half trochaic) as if in celebration of the newly pointed
(hence “bright green”) leaves and the drooping clusters of fragile white flowers.
The dash splicing the whole together by halves serves to join the mid-May
construction of this tree. Of course, the poem even so offers a more or less
conventional presentation of vernal attributes, yet set off with short lines and
jaunty diction, including the compound neologisms “ferncool” and “wrist-thick.”
Again, like Cummings he delights in single-word lines, but mixes up single and
double as if to let us off the leash then pull us gently back to a tighter
concentration.
The second version (SP 94), written two years later, reduces the whole from
eight stanzas to ten stark lines of only thirteen words. Dropping earlier figurative
language along with all but one possible verb (“come”), the new version prompts
us to wonder after reading the first what is gained by this fine-tuned verbal
dismantling.
Among
of
green
 stiff
old
bright
broken
branch
come
white
sweet
May
again
Most obviously, Williams succeeds in his ongoing effort to make our viewing of
words restricted to their performance as individual words, breaking linkages
between parts of speech. The opening simply disarms the reader in the standoff
between prepositions, as if it were undecided about how to launch itself, caught
between two alternatives: being in the midst of, yet separate from, other parts
versus being identified with those very parts themselves. Do we begin as abiding
in the green environ or somehow apart from it? Without answering, the poem
moves us word by word through “the locust tree in flower,” as if in a random set
of observational accretions shorn of syntactic placement, requiring a reader’s
sprightly assist. The line breaks and apparently missing punctuation compel us
simply to contemplate the sequence of “broken / branch / come,” pausing to pull
the images into alignment with diction, registering this flowering as an
experience once “again.”
Few have come closer than J. Hillis Miller to the delight of the poem, as it
establishes what is most distinctive about so full a concentration on single words
shorn of punctuation:
The words hang freely in the air. Moreover, the verb presupposes a plural
subject, so the reader must balance between the possibility that the word “has”
may have been left out and the assumption that “come” is to be taken as an
imperative. This grammatical uncertainty forces him to hold all the words
before his attention at once as he tries various ways to make a sentence of
them. He is like a seal juggling thirteen brightly colored balls, and this is
exactly what the poet wants. The poem is as much all there at once as the locust
 tree itself, in its tension of branches, leaves, and flowers. The poem is not a
picture of the tree, but is itself something substantial echoing in its structure of
verbal forces the birth of white blossoms from stiff boughs. (Miller 45)
In short, words do not stand for anything outside themselves, or otherwise (at
least at their most irresistible) mean anything but themselves. We turn to them,
especially in the more cherished realms of poetry, for their sound, their shape,
their distinctive place in our vocabulary that so rarely seems so distinctive. And
one way to foreground that importance was to get rid of punctuation altogether,
any marks that slowed words down, or stopped them, or reversed their course.
That condition lay at the heart of a robustly concentrated poetic vision.
Williams had an immense influence on subsequent poets of every stripe,
though few abandoned punctuation entirely in their various efforts. Perhaps the
most important of his legatees, Nikki Giovanni transformed that legacy in
largely confessional poems that first grew out of the Black Arts Movement of the
1960s, which shared a resolutely militant African-American perspective. Unlike
Cummings, focused on tight, visually configured poems, or Williams, in his
devotion to the import of individual words, Giovanni has concentrated
throughout her career on poetry’s distinctively oral qualities and its performative
possibilities.15 As effectively as any of her poems, “Habits” (1978) (CP 262–63)
lays out what would become her main concerns:
i haven’t written a poem in so long
i may have forgotten how
unless writing a poem
is like riding a bike
or swimming upstream
or loving you
it may be a habit that once acquired
is never lost
but you say I’m foolish
of course you love me
but being loved of course
is not the same as being loved because
or being loved despite
or being loved
 if you love me why
do i feel so lonely
and why do i always wake up alone
and why am i practicing
not having you to love
i never loved you that way
The absence of punctuation, a half-century after the lead of Cummings and
Williams, veers admittedly nowhere close to the disorienting landscapes of their
poems. Perhaps this is due to Giovanni’s three nearly equal stanzas (of first
eight, then two six-line stanzas) consisting of enjambed lines that nonetheless
seem to contain themselves line by line. The first stanza unfolds predictably as a
series of statements, then reconsiderations, with the second pivoting on a near
chiasmus—“of course you love me / but being loved of course”—that puts into
question the logic of that reiterated “of course.” By the third stanza, the poet at
last acknowledges how little she shares the feelings of love her lover claims to
feel for her, admitting that she is left “alone,” “practicing / not having you to
love.”
This opening segment, which had begun with the painful concession of no
longer being able to write, turns to a forlorn admission of no longer being able to
love, as if the two conditions were somehow intertwined. And the first stanza’s
professed unease in writing (not having “written in so long”) is matched by the
third stanza’s admission that not having to love requires “practice” as well. The
very lack of punctuation itself reinforces a settled equivalency in the poem’s
opening sequence—of writing versus love; of love spelled out versus love
simply present; of “you” and “i” forced to shift uneasily back and forth in a
fraught relationship—before further stanzas establish the poet’s achieved
equilibrium: “but I sit writing a poem / about my habits / which while it’s not / a
great poem / is mine.” Neither Cummings’s whimsical play nor Williams’s
searing attention to isolated words and their resonance interest Giovanni, caught
likewise in the creation of poems unmarked by punctuation that are meant
nonetheless for investigating traditional humanistic subjects.
That intention is on full display in the title poem from her 1978 collection,
“Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day” (CP 227–29), which grew out of an experience
with her nephew at the Cincinnati Zoo. When a concession clerk officiously
refused to sell her cotton candy because the rain would melt it before it could be
enjoyed, Giovanni became infuriated. The idea of proscribing indulgence
because delight was evanescent seemed to her bizarre, even inimical to any full-
throated embrace of life itself (see Fowler, Nikki 88). And that feeling erupted in
the meditation offered through the long poem’s four opening stanzas:
Don’t look now
I’m fading away
Into the gray of my mornings
Or the blues of every night
Is it that my nails
keep breaking
Or maybe the corn
on my second little piggy
Things keep popping out
on my face
or
of my life
It seems no matter how
I try I become more difficult
to hold
I am not an easy woman
to want
They have asked
the psychiatrists psychologists politicians and
social workers
What this decade will be
known for
There is no doubt it is
loneliness
The first stanza replaces punctuation with silently enjambed lines, confirming
through the very absence of marks the fluid, indeterminate shape of first-person
cotton candy melting in rain (“I’m fading away”). It is as if the lines themselves
were somehow transformed into spun sugar, contemplating their own verbal
melting. Still, the melting has only slightly distorted the stanza’s overall shape
and prosody, with two unbroken, unrhymed couplets askew by just a few feet as
the opening spondaic beat slips first into an iambic, then an anapestic rhythm.
As well, however, the stanza can be read as expressing the poet’s own
emergent voice, trusting to a newfound willingness to embrace vaguely
untoward possibilities, opening her up to less restrictive gendered and
psychological realms. Moreover, the wonderful repetition of a long “a” sound
through to the second stanza (echoing the dominant “rainy day” of the poem’s
title) somehow replaces the punctuational sequestering, from “fading away . . .
gray . . . nails keep breaking / Or maybe.” The sound is then suppressed for a
stanza before reemerging in the “decade” of the fourth, and again “If loneliness
were a grape” in the fifth. The absence of commas, periods, and dashes only
encourages our subliminal desire for a punctuated sequence that might explain
our loss, our change, our life’s descent. Some assistance is provided by
capitalization at the beginning of lines, with spaced pauses suggesting the
possibility of separate sentences. Yet otherwise, nothing more than that long “a”
sound reminds us of what we once were.
The second stanza confirms that the poet’s body itself is changing, according to
laws of physical decline that seem to anticipate as well a psychological toll. With
the third, the poet fully confronts that toll, realizing how her efforts at love are
stymied by an independent streak, playing out the conundrum of enjoying cotton
candy as it melts in the rain. Still, an ambiguity lies at the heart of the stanza,
sustained in part by its unpunctuated form, as she admits to making an effort to
“try,” though without indicating whether it is to try to become less difficult or
become more independent. In any case, “more” is what occurs, with another’s
desire to “hold” her deflected by her own understandable changes, confounded
by her lack of easy accessibility. The fourth stanza then turns to “They,” an
assorted group, who register how fully her personal sense of isolation has
become a wider sociological condition. “Loneliness,” in short, is recognizably
the condition of life—of change, diminished powers, melting possibility, imaged
figuratively in the “Cotton Candy / on a rainy day” that appears in the sixth,
middle stanza of the poem. Throughout, the absence of punctuation reinforces
the poem’s exposure to a general, unconditional pressure from which we all
succumb.
As the eighth stanza proclaims, “We all line up / at some midway point” in the
general downward sweep, without the handrails and traffic signs that might help
forestall further melting. Only in the tenth stanza are sound, space pauses,
capitalization, and italics brought together, conjoined by the proudly proclaimed
repetition of the titular strong “a” in “the same . . . STAY . . . don’t change baby
don’t / change”:
We are consumed by people who sing
the same old song STAY:
as sweet as you are
in my corner
Or perhaps just a little bit longer
But whatever you do don’t change baby baby don’t
change

Amid the formal display of nearly melted cotton candy, itself stalwartly holding
on, the poet resists that resistance, denies that ephemeral denial, and embraces
the laws that sweep the diminishing present into a nostalgia-laden past. The very
italicized phrases of this stanza register less an emphatic stress as punctuation
than the fact that they are part of musical culture, the comforting bromides of
lines from popular soul and R&B songs (see Fowler, Nikki 90; also Giovanni
417). And the space pauses that drive those lines to the far right of the page
confirm the poet denying their implicit comfort, speaking instead for how fully
desire possesses the other by demanding a life-denying lack of change, walling
off consciousness against mutability.
The poem ends with something like a return to a more conventional (unmelted)
form in two stanzas that confirm how little life can be understood by those
willing to cling to permanence:
I strangle my words as easily as I do my tears
I stifle my screams as frequently as I flash my smile
it means nothing
I am cotton candy on a rainy day
the unrealized dream of an idea unborn
I share with the painters the desire
To put a three-dimensional picture
On a one-dimensional surface
The indented “it means nothing” comes as something of a surprise, as both
apposition and entirely new statement, sliding the reader into the negligible
naught of “I am cotton candy on a rainy day.” We seem to have recovered from
the apparent disarray of the tenth stanza, though only to prepare ourselves for
another shower of rain and change. Curiously, the continuing absence of
punctuation this late in the poem has little effect, since the end-stopped lines
confirm at once the conviction of the poet in resisting change, and as well her
own continuing uncertainty. Giovanni, like Cummings and Williams before her,
seizes on the possibilities of punctuational guard rails removed, if only like them
to reveal how words, spacing, and lines themselves can proclaim their own
resonant if frequently unnoticed constraints.

Notes
1 Phil Provance has observed:
Usually a lack of punctuation creates what might be described as “internal enjambment,” or in other
words, it “annotates” the line by making two phrases seem to flow into each other, providing multiple
ways to read the line. Another use, as seen in Frank O’Hara’s “Lana Turner Has Collapsed” is to
speed up a line, as if the speaker is whipping through the language quickly; the effect in O’Hara’s
poem is to create a snarky, sarcastic rhythm, in other words, a “short” delivery in the sense of “being
short”/“being snide.” Finally, if punctuation would fall in the line break but isn’t there the purpose of
omitting it is frequently to prevent the reader from pausing longer than the break itself before heading
to the next line, an option that may be used for rhythmic purposes (since a line break is already a
“quarter break” in a music analogy, a comma at a break is equivalent to a period or semi-colon,
roughly), but also, if a subsequent line has a “back-enjambed” line through caesura (i.e., when a word
or phrase is set off alone at the start of a line, forcing the reader to read it both as part of the preceding
syntax AND as itself alone) the effect is often to create speed to that line whose phrasing may create a
double-entendre, in addition to being emphatic. (Provance)
2 As she had already proclaimed rhapsodically:
One has in Mr. Cummings’ work, a sense of the best dancing and the best horticulture. . . . Settling
like a man-of-war bird or the retarded, somnambulistic athlete of the speedograph, he shapes the
progress of poems as if it were substance; he has “a trick of syncopation Europe has,” determining the
pauses slowly, with glides and tight-rope acrobatics, ensuring the ictus by a space instead of a period,
or a semicolon in the middle of a word, seeming to have placed adjectives systematically one word in
advance of the words they modify, or one word behind, with most pleasing exactness. (Moore 46)
3 As Rushworth Kidder has noted of the “rules” for reading Cummings, a reader should “Supply
punctuation and capitalization as necessary. Cummings often deletes periods, commas, colons, and
quotation marks, which need to be reinserted by the reader” (Kidder 11). Alternatively, in many of
Cummings’s later poems, he brandishes punctuation in unusual ways, sometimes within words
themselves. Norman Friedman argues that Cummings is upgathering, leaping, disintegrating, and
rearranging. . . . partially by the distribution of parentheses, punctuation marks, and capitals; and
partially by the joining, splitting, and spacing of words. The over-all intent, then, is not primarily
visual at all, but rather figurative and aesthetic . . . to loosen up the effect of a metrical line, to suggest
the thing or idea spoken of, to alter and reinforce meanings, or to amplify and retard. (Friedman 124;
see also 114–16)
4 William Heyen wants
to read this poem as though it speaks better than its speaker knows. I want to say that its essential
thrust is its duplicity. I want to say that Cummings does not go as far as many of his critics have said
he has gone in denying rationality, intelligence, logic; that these abstractions are indeed his whipping
boys, but in a more complex way than Cummings has been given credit for. (Heyen 233) As he adds,
“the poem can be read as a defense of spontaneous poetry, as a confrontation between poet and muse.
 What it should not be read as is a blanket condemnation of rationality” (Heyen 234).
5 Richard Kennedy observes: “Cummings liked to startle whenever he could. The parentheses around
‘Do you think?’ [in his first poem ever] do not belong there; they belong in the next line, surrounding
the intruded phrase ‘i do’” (Kennedy 2). And Kennedy later adds: “At times Cummings violates
typographical norms only to be different—as with the comma that begins line ten, or the oddly placed
period in line thirteen” (Kennedy 8).
6 Daniel Matore has pointed out that “The negative doubt implicit in typographical blanks, their frailty
of dimension, is what their prosodic value is predicated upon. Prosody is a current that is not reducible
to any single type of sonic or visual content—intonation, pitch, accent, or quantity become prosodic by
assuming meaningful contours, but prosody itself transcends these given incarnations of it” (Matore
1528).
7 Richard Kennedy states: The lack of punctuation in the poem allows for a double reading of one of the
phrases: the daisies are “through the field wonderful,” but “wonderful” can also modify another noun:
“through the field wonderful . . . / Another comes.” The capital “A” on “Another” begins to give
mythic significance to the scene in the same way that myth entered the poem about the “balloonMan.”
The final phrase, “also picking flowers,” refers us back to the beginning, and we realize as the poem
comes to a close, that she is the flower that he will pick. (Kennedy 22)
8 For excellent analyses of this poem, see as well Gillian Huang-Tiller and Michael Walker.
10 J. Hillis Miller earlier had commented: The simplicity of the sentence structure here, and the emphasis
on the tensions between the words makes them stand separate and yet together. Rhythm also works to
achieve this end. Williams’s metrical effects have an extraordinary power to bring each word out in its
“thingness,” to make the reader pause over it and savor its tang before going on to the next word. . . .
The independence of the words in the poem matches the independence of the things they name. The
short lines and brief monosyllables of Williams’s verse have exactly the opposite effect from the long
rapidly rolling blurred periods of Whitman’s line, with its tendency to absorb all particulars into one
sonorous whole. (Miller 39)
11 As Charles O. Hartman has observed of another poem: “By dissolving a little of the syntactic glue that
holds the poem’s sentence together line breaks paradoxically enable connections across wider stretches
of language” (Hartman 154).
15 For the best assessment of Giovanni’s developing interest in poetry as oral performance, see Virginia
Fowler (Literary Biography 57 ff.).
 8
Incarceration: Nabokov’s Parentheses

Between the preceding discussion of writers who resist punctuation altogether,

and the following investigation of an author who juggled an array of different
marks, a glance at literary parentheses is in order if only briefly (parenthetically,
as it were). No better instance presents itself than Vladimir Nabokov, who took
self-conscious care to defend his manuscripts from ham-handed editors, fighting
off prudent adjustments to his intemporate italicizations and moody ellipses. Yet
the far more salient punctuation marking Lolita (1955) is its bountiful array of
four hundred and fifty parentheses, which merge with a medley of other
punctuational pauses to regularly arrest narrative motion. Just as regularly, they
are meant to deflect attention from the narrator’s revolting, indeed criminal,
behavior in order to arouse appreciation for his stylish verbal facility; or as he
intones at the opening: “You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose
style” (Nabokov, Lo 9). A personality at once various and contemptible,
mesmerizing and abhorrent, lurks nearly everywhere through the calibrated
punctuation of Humbert Humbert’s confession, at once unmasked and
painstakingly couched in pockets of artful prose.
But the most playfully calculated insights peep out not from proliferating
commas or swiveling semicolons or sudden dashes, but from his surprisingly
ubiquitous parenthetical interruptions. And that calculation often depends on
reminding the reader of Humbert’s present incarceration at the moment of
writing, compounded by our subliminal awareness of a physical resemblance
between brackets and bars. Actually penned in his prison cell, he seems in
parenthetical asides to break through the fourth wall, reaching imaginatively
across to us even as he alerts us to his actual confinement. “The bracket marks
themselves serve as claustrophobic, typographical prisons of punctuation,”
Duncan White has observed; “as early as the second chapter, the reader is made
aware of Humbert’s jail cell: `nothing of her subsists within the hollows and
dells of memory, over which, if you can stand my style (I am writing under
observation), the sun of my infancy had set’” (White 52–53). And though the
example is innocuous, White goes on to approve Craig Raine’s (parenthetical)
dismissal of “(Those vicious Nabokovian parentheses)” (Raine 323), concluding
that the punctuational choice is always nefarious, decidedly “a symptom of
Humbert’s viciousness” (White 49). Or as he censoriously concludes: “Stylish
cruelty is the hallmark of the Humbertian parenthesis” (White 50).
A closer look suggests something considerably more varied than sheer
heartlessness in Humbert’s parentheses, even as early as that “(I am writing
under observation),” which Nabokov uses inventively to bring his fictional
author imaginatively alive. Occasionally, Humbert injects monosyllabic
descriptors to evoke a local reference, if only fleetingly. At one point, a “sleepy
small town (elms, white church)” displays a postcard-ready, lightning-like blur
of Norman Rockwell banality (Nabokov 35). Even earlier, he had filled in his
own troubled history, again elliptically: “My very photogenic mother died in a
freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three” (Nabokov, Lo 10), a gesture
that White considers “typical of Humbert’s flick-knife prose” (White 50).1
Yet the casual condensation of plot into minimal two-word constituents, though
bloodless, reveals as well a rhetorical flair in a narrator we have just barely met
—one whose parentheticals may appear offhand, even indifferent, but actually
constitute a more calculated, manipulative shaping of narrative. Later, he will
assess his suspected culpability for Charlotte Haze’s accidental death in a similar
if slightly more protracted series: “Within the intricacies of the pattern (hurrying
housewife, slippery pavement, a pest of a dog, steep grade, big car, baboon at its
wheel), I could dimly distinguish my own vile contribution” (Nabokov, Lo 103).
Our sense of his cruelty, in short, is suitably leavened by wry admiration at his
evocative narrative skill.2
More to the point, parentheses contribute to a range of emotional registers,
including the enthusiasm with which he offers shout-outs to friends, prominently
Jean Farlow: “‘we may see each other again’ (Jean, whatever, wherever you are,
in minus time-space or plus soul-time, forgive me all this, parenthesis included)”
(Nabokov, Lo 104–5). And his realization that the parenthesis relegates his
avowal to something like auxiliary status is registered silently elsewhere: with
“(hi, Ilse, you were a dear, uninquisitive soul, and you touched my dove very
gently)”; or “(hi Rita—wherever you are, drunk or hangoverish, Rita, hi!)”; or
“(Hi, Melmoth, thanks a lot, old fellow)” (Nabokov, Lo 198, 259, 307). With
Humbert, we can never rest assured in the depth of his alleged feelings or
purported intentions; after all, such exuberant acknowledgments may be
genuinely felt, but they may also be easily and effectively feigned to mislead the
reader into favoring him, disarmed by his dissembled high spirits. Either way,
the gestures are hardly cruel (in White’s calculation), as Humbert recalls the
Russian cab driver in Paris who stole his wife: “the good colonel (Maximovich!
his name suddenly taxies back to me)” (Nabokov, Lo 30). The anthimeria of
“taxies” coupled with the sudden recollected name exclaimed aloud alerts us to a
spontaneously frisky Humbert, alive to the account he pens as we read.
Other occasions offer similar performative delights, reminding us that Humbert
is ever attuned to his craft, misrecalling the name of an actor who “Appeared (I
notice the slip of my pen in the preceding paragraph, but please do not correct it,
Clarence)” (Nabokov, Lo 32). And in a later apologetic aside to that same lawyer
from prison, he admits: “(this is not too clear I am afraid, Clarence, but I did not
keep any notes)” (Nabokov, Lo 154). Occasionally, he simply throws up his
hands: “that only a spell of insanity could ever give me the simple energy to be a
brute (all this amended, perhaps)” (Nabokov, Lo 47). Such sundry gestures again
have the playful effect of alerting us to Humbert writing in the present, living in
the past, as if he were imaginatively soaring back and forth from a sequestering
cell to the unending stratagems of memory, capable simultaneously of freedom
and confinement: “I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself king of
infinite space” (Hamlet, II. ii).
Yet the brackets that serve as “prisons of punctuation” for Humbert also tend to
confine the reader into a series of presumed postures, all the while extending our
amusement at his resourceful ways of surviving “the opaque air of this tombal
jail” (Nabokov, Lo 109). When Lolita memorably (if only in memory) sits on his
knee, he almost kisses her, but “I cannot tell my learned reader (whose
eyebrows, I suspect, have by now traveled all the way to the back of his bald
head), I cannot tell him how the knowledge came to me” (Nabokov, Lo 48). And
that interruptive if stuttering repetition suggests how fully the parenthetical
image of his invoked reader’s shock has upset him. Much later, in a rare indirect
invocation, he admits that “otherwise the reader (ah, if I could visualize him as a
blond-bearded scholar with rosy lips sucking la pomme de sa canne as he quaffs
my manuscript!) might not understand” (Nabokov, Lo 226). Parentheses work, in
other words, to circumscribe both Humbert and the reader, as if we were both
being bracketed into prescribed roles.
Throughout, excessive self-esteem alternates with an apparently troubled
conscience in Humbert’s parenthetical insertions, keeping us teeteringly aware of
him as ever more than two-dimensional, always ready to shift gears and change
directions should logic require. Even his claims for evidence supporting his
narrative are apparently self-contradicted, as he admits of his preserved pocket
diary: “Actually, it was destroyed five years ago and what we examine now (by
courtesy of a photographic memory) is but its brief materialization” (Nabokov,
Lo 40). A few pages later, however, in disregard of his earlier “Actually” and
“brief,” what appears to be the authentically physical chronicle magically
reappears: “Only in the tritest of terms (diary resumed) can I describe Lo’s
features” (Nabokov, Lo 44). And as if further to confuse, he confesses of
Charlotte’s love letter to him that “What I present here is what I remember of the
letter, and what I remember of the letter I remember verbatim (including that
awful French). It was at least twice longer” (Nabokov, Lo 68).
By the end, amid seemingly muddled claims, we have grown thoroughly
skeptical of this faultless, ambulatory camera-eye as he describes trying “in the
remotest Northwest” to get a now married Lolita “‘to leave your incidental Dick,
and this awful hole, and come to live with me, and die with me, and everything
with me’ (words to that effect)” (Nabokov, Lo 4, 278). The more Humbert
affirms the power of a “photographic memory,” the less confident we become,
especially given his otherwise stylish élan and narrative ingenuity. His pride in
compositional skills, often registered as an aside, gradually makes us wonder at
what is at stake in the telling: “The disappointment I must now register (as I
gently grade my story into an expression of the continuous risk and dread that
ran through my bliss) should in no wise reflect on the lyrical, epic, tragic but
never Arcadian American wilds. They are beautiful, heart-rendingly beautiful,
those wilds” (Nabokov, Lo 168).Indeed, at various points, his gratified self-
satisfaction blends with a deliberate skewering of English itself, as when his
neighbor “barbered some late garden blooms or watered his car, or, at a later
date, defrosted his driveway (I don’t mind if these verbs are all wrong)”
(Nabokov, Lo 179). And when last departing from pregnant Lolita, Humbert
likewise shifts from the scene to its rhetorical effect in a punctuational hitch:
“She and the dog saw me off. I was surprised (this is a rhetorical figure, I was
not) that the sight of the old car in which she had ridden as a child and a
nymphet, left her so very indifferent” (Nabokov 280). Still, in writing up the
account months after, he admits to misleading those who might try to discover
her and her husband “(. . . I have camouflaged everything, my love)”; he even
disguises, with a parenthetical confession, their address as “let me see, 10 Killer
Street (I am not going very far for my pseudonyms)” (Nabokov, Lo 267, 268).
But each of these slightly humorous, marginally cruel, overly self-conscious
asides do not quite suggest the power of the many simply odd, often ironic
observations inserted by the way. Consider when Humbert first views the Haze
household, its interior itself become a metonymy for the possibilities represented
by Lolita, “with limp wet things overhanging the dubious tub (the question mark
of a hair inside)” (Nabokov, Lo 38). Later, in equally self-mocking moods, he
first apologizes, “as if (to prolong these Proustian intonations),” and then
complains: “this was the gesture (‘look, Lord, at these chains!’) that would have
come nearest to the mute expression of my mood” (Nabokov, Lo 77, 83). Caught
up in a passionate moment, he admits to a metathetic lapse: “‘What’s the katter
with misses?’ I muttered (word-control gone) into her hair” (Nabokov, Lo 120).
And only moments after, he suffers “a fit of heartburn (they call those fries
‘French,’ grand Dieu!)” (Nabokov, Lo 129). Even a casual glance across western
fields from their car provokes a whimsical excursus from Humbert: “there
sometimes stood simple cows, immobilized in a position (tail left, white
eyelashes right) cutting across all human rules of traffic” (Nabokov, Lo 153).
Few other writers have ever used parentheses so chimerically, so evocatively, so
mischievously as Nabokov, as if he were testing the playful potential of a
punctuational mark hitherto the tedious tool of footnoting sub-sub-librarians and
finicky paralegals.
On that same automotive excursion, for instance, more soberly and hilariously,
Humbert and Lolita “silently stared, with other motorists and their children, at
some smashed, blood-bespattered car with a young woman’s shoe in the ditch
(Lo, as we drove on: ‘That was the exact type of moccasin I was trying to
describe to that jerk in the store’)” (Nabokov, Lo 174). The conventional
balustrade partitioning off the appalling from the ludicrous is typographically
stamped, as so often in this novel, by the simplest of paired brackets, registering
two exasperatingly different modes of feeling and thought. Humbert regularly
pulls the reader out of one familiar emotional mode into another. In a more self-
lacerating mode (suggested by an assumed nickname), Humbert turns his gimlet
eye on himself, self-divided in a cross-examination about his abased demands of
Lolita, posing as both interrogatee and interrogator: “Sometimes . . . Come on,
how often exactly, Bert? Can you recall four, five, more such occasions? Or
would no human heart have survived three? Sometimes (I have nothing to say in
reply to your question)” (Nabokov, Lo 192, ellipsis in original). Again, rigid
defensiveness needs to be quarantined in close proximity to the behavior that has
generated it, unapologetically.
More generally, the point of so ample a review of Nabokov’s parentheses is to
reveal how they serve multiple, often conflicting purposes meant to engage the
reader by the figure of Humbert as larger than life. Punctuation, in short, would
seem to endorse him as charming, even charismatic, though those bracketed
moments also help make him dangerously persuasive, revealing layers of
emotional strife and intellectual friction that will never be resolved, but in their
irresolution become endlessly entertaining. At such moments, it could be said he
earns too much of our delighted interest, even sympathy, diverting attention from
what is otherwise appalling in his behavior. And in that regard, parentheses
become emblematic of the novel itself and its troubling oscillations.
Compounding their often wryly humorous, self-declaiming effect, parentheses
offer Humbert a relentless way to enforce a callous control, allowing him to take
delight in foreshadowing events that he obviously knows will occur (having
already lived through them in his pre-confinement days). Invoking “Aubrey
McFate (as I would like to dub that devil of mine)” (Nabokov, Lo 56), he
corporealizes the ominousness that threads through much of his account, with
brackets registering a supposed self-consciousness about doing so. Taking a fier
cely anticipatory pride in the narrative power he exerts, he imagines Charlotte
Haze’s murder from a double perspective, one that luxuriates at once
prospectively and retrospectively: “as I watched, with the stark lucidity of a
future recollection (you know—trying to see things as you will remember having
seen them)” (Nabokov, Lo 86). The point again, however, is that Nabokov’s
invocation of parentheses is otherwise multifaceted, making asides serve
different, even contradictory ends.
For instance, on various occasions Humbert stops his narrative abruptly to
allow a fuller, sometimes fantastical view of Lolita, as if to register how fully she
has interrupted his own world even in imagined circumstances that hardly acquit
him of the perversion he embraces so fully:
And, as if I were the fairy-tale nurse of some little princess (lost, kidnaped
[sic], discovered in gypsy rags through which her nakedness smiled at the king
and his hounds), I recognized the tiny dark-brown mole on her side. With awe
and delight (the king crying for joy, the trumpets blaring, the nurse drunk) I
saw again her lovely indrawn abdomen where my southbound mouth had
briefly paused, and those puerile hips. (Nabokov, Lo 39)3
But then, less fantastically if just as artfully, Humbert reads a list of her
schoolmates, and breaks into Elizabethan tempos: “A poem, a poem, forsooth!
So strange and sweet was it to discover this ‘Haze, Dolores’ (she!) in its special
bower of names” (Nabokov, Lo 52). The shift from an earlier, shamelessly
exploitative mode to this exclamatory delight in “(she!)” seems abrupt but no
more so than all the mercurial moods traversed by Humbert. Occasionally, the
object of his obsession even breaks into sentences as a two-letter expression of
wonder (“Lo! . . . And behold” [Nabokov 51]), only to emerge parenthetically in
her own person; a lower-case instance occurs unexpectedly when they drive past
motels that “gradually form the caravansary, and, lo (she was not interested but
the reader may be)” (Nabokov, Lo 210). Of course, the reader is always taken by
Humbert’s interpositions, as much for their content as for the accomplished,
protean figure who maps them.
Of all the parenthetical interjections in the novel, however, one stands
remarkably alone, appearing appropriately enough in the afterword penned by an
author self-styled as “Vladimir Nabokov” (allegedly in his own voice). And this
is the aside that conspicuously outlines his tersely expressed philosophy of art:
“For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly
call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with
other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the
norm” (Nabokov, Lo 314–15). The punctuation here does not quite wrap up
narrative parentheses in the novel, though this occasion is its most pointed
marking, signaling (as I have argued elsewhere) a vivid deflection from
Humbert’s prison-house preening through bracketing bars:
That sequence of four descriptive nouns entered parenthetically (“curiosity,
tenderness, kindness, ecstasy”) offers a curious re-introduction of the ethical
back into the novel, and in so doing establishes the terms by which a reading of
Humbert should be pursued. After all, kindness, curiosity and tenderness are
the very virtues he lacks in his narcissistic subjugation of Lolita—a subjugation
we eerily reinforce in our own delight at his dazzling verbal skill. But as well,
consider how the first three nouns (all ethical) require prepositions, involving
others—curiosity about, tenderness towards, kindness for—while ecstasy is
something that can be achieved alone, requiring neither preposition nor an
ethical component. (Mitchell, More 115)
Like Humbert, Nabokov can be a slippery figure prone to slyly equivocal claims,
though here he offers a staunch elucidation meant as indictment of his main
character, not endorsement. And it is appropriate that he inserts it as
parenthetical extension in a novel where parentheses never seem amiss, however
various their effects.
Returning to Humbert Humbert, we realize how fully his self-revelations also
occur in parentheses, though more often in sportively mocking tones than in
candid self-appraisal. His hesitant, unreliable claims to remorse seem
compressed most vividly, typographically, with his unregenerate lust. It is there,
in the exposed prison bars of that particular form of punctuation, that we are
reminded of Humbert’s arrant desire still peeking through his self-serving claims
of moral transformation and remorse. Every time parenthetical marks appear, we
are reminded of his exclusions, his unaccountable jumps of memory, his bipolar
compulsions, and the uses of irony he masters so transfiguringly into a double-
edged rhetorical sword.

Notes
1 Consider further White’s charge: He regularly abuses his position of narratorial power, giving away
glimpses of future developments: “A few words more about Mrs. Humbert while the going is good (a
bad accident is to happen quite soon)” (79). Having already slipped in that he is a murderer, Humbert
will keep providing further ambiguous clues. When Lolita is about to leave for Camp Q, Humbert
drops another teasing clue; again in “casual” parenthesis: “My Lolita, who was half in and about to
slam the car door, wind down the glass, wave to Louise and the poplars (whom and which she was
never to see again) (66)” (White 59–60).
2 Admittedly, Humbert’s implacable ruthlessness is on occasion unmediated, as when Lolita comes into
his room, noting “the hideous hieroglyphics (which she could not decipher) of my fatal lust”
(Nabokov, Lo 48). More dramatically, Lo recognizes friends on the road at a mountain pass, “the backs
of a family enjoying it (with Lo, in a hot, happy, wild, intense, hopeful, hopeless whisper—‘Look the
McCrystals, please let’s talk to them, please’—let’s talk to them, reader!—‘please! I’ll do anything you
want, oh, please’)” (Nabokov, Lo 157).
3 On the same page, another similar scene occurs, reinforcing the reader’s mixed response: In the course
of the sun-shot moment that my glance slithered over the kneeling child (her eyes blinking other those
stern dark spectacles—the little Herr Doktor who was to cure me of all my aches) while I passed by
her in my adult disguise (a great big handsome hunk of movieland manhood), the vacuum of my soul
managed to suck in every detail of her bright beauty, and these I checked against the features of my
dead bride. (Nabokov 39)
 9
Plenitude: Faulkner’s Array

Few other prose writers have had so deft an understanding of the power of
suppressed punctuation as Faulkner, apparent in his embrace for extended
stretches in prose of the absence of any punctuation at all. More generally, he is
unsurpassed in self-consciousness about the swerves of language, in all its verbal
disruptions and rhythmic fluctuations. Clearly, he grasped how fully
punctuational marks—and all the other iconographic gestures, ligatures, signs,
and spacings—succeed not simply in guiding expression but in actually creating
meaning. Nor did he limit himself to single options, self-consciously inserting
both idiosyncratic graphic figures and odd poetic spaces in his fictions,
presenting us with nonverbal shapes and physical images, interspersing his
narrative lines with a mixed cocktail of punctuation marks, and marks combined
and commingled (parentheses within parentheses and dashes that pause prose for
pages at a time): all as a means of reminding the reader of what diction by itself
both actually accomplishes and where it can founder. For all its variety, however,
his prose experiments track a certain pattern that leads from early minimalism to
a later inclination toward amalgamated (and complicated) punctuational
matches.
Start with his early story “A Rose for Emily” (1930) in which he relies on
dashes as thoroughly as James: thirty-five times in only nine pages, accompanied
by two parentheses. What does that unusual accumulation achieve? Or perhaps
more productively, what do such frequent dashes in this narrative context
presume, especially given how little Faulkner relies on them (at least
exclusively) in later fictional explorations? Part of the effect has to do with the
retrospective nature of the narrative, circling back from its opening “When Miss
Emily Grierson died” through a shuttered biography of her, to the moment
immediately after the funeral when the town discovers the mummified corpse of
a poisoned lover in her bed (Faulkner, “Rose” 47). We realize that Emily’s
reclusive antipathy to change itself, stalwartly denying time’s effects, is reflected
in the narrative, in her resistance to burying her father, to paying taxes, to
acknowledging peoples’ deaths, to accepting temporal transition of any kind. Yet
the narrator repeatedly registers through adverbial clauses her immersion in time,
effectively celebrating while at the same time ruefully exposing her history as a
figure of staunch resistance to Northern aggression.
That persistent, dominant rhythm posing Emily against temporal sequence is
configured, and strangely compounded, through the em dashes Faulkner adopts.
Dashes more than occasionally slow the narrative pace, as if confirming the
story’s plot, and do so self-consciously as an all but visual cue. After her father’s
death, Emily is described as physically transformed, yet having “a vague
resemblance to those angels in colored church windows—sort of tragic and
serene” (Faulkner, “Rose” 52). Later, Homer Barron appears, and the town
wonders at his attraction, especially since “Homer himself had remarked—he
liked men, and it was known that he drank with the younger men . . . —that he
was not a marrying man” (Faulkner, “Rose” 55). Or when the town rebels
against her dalliance, “at last the ladies forced the Baptist minister—Miss
Emily’s people were Episcopal—to call upon her” (Faulkner, “Rose” 55).
In a narrative so calculatedly oriented to reversing the effects of time, with
Emily’s death announced at the outset only to be delayed until the end, and with
Emily herself tenaciously opposed to any transition or variation, it is as if her
spirit were somehow emblematized by em dashes. Her energy is as abrupt as the
marks that brake the pace of the chorus-narrator’s patter so as to define a more
intrepid allegiance to the past. And ironically, her death at last achieves for both
town and reader precisely the suspension of time that she had striven to achieve
throughout (configured in the absence of dashes, all but one set, in the story’s
final section once she is dead).
In the same year, As I Lay Dying (1930) offered a fuller test that variously
advanced on Faulkner’s break-through novel, The Sound and the Fury (1929), in
which punctuation had already been disrupted giving voice to the three acutely
aggrieved Compson brothers. Both novels toyed with augmented possibilities of
italics as a displaced form of punctuation, invoking the font in the earlier novel
as rough marker for shifts in time (in Benjy’s ever-present section) or to register
fluctuations in consciousness (in Quentin’s desperately psychopathological
section).1 But Darl Bundren’s gift of clairvoyance in As I Lay Dying forms
something of a punctuational leap, with impossibly far-flung or otherwise
clandestine events represented in roman type, coupled with a shift into italics
that evokes circumstances available to normal sensory contact.2 As well,
Faulkner flirts with other italic possibilities in monologues by Dewey Dell and
Vardaman as well as Vernon Tull, alerting the reader to apparent revelations, or
unacknowledged self-divisions, or competing internal voices.3 In each case, a
distinct punctuational meaning needs to be actively interpreted rather than
simply read out as either pause or digression.
As well, Faulkner registers an odd marking of ellipses in the novel, using seven
periods rather than the customary three, making us wonder what is conveyed by
extending the conventional series (a habit that continues in Absalom, Absalom!).
Is it to suggest typographically that the omitted sequence of words or even sheer
time itself is greater than we might typically imagine? Then why not vary the
number of periods to adjust each breach appropriately?4 A more obvious
temporal explanation occurs for the insertion of actual spaces between words,
sometimes as physical emblems of silence in the recurrent “Chuck chuck chuck
” of Cash’s adze, or as visual epitomes in Addie Bundren’s description of her
body before her family began, where she “used to be a virgin” (Faulkner, AILD
5, 173).
At other moments, Faulkner surprises the reader with a vivid absence of
periods, when instead of signaling a sentence’s closure punctuation is simply
removed, leaving us to wonder why. In Vardaman’s sections, this reflects little
more than his loose grasp of events (and proper grammar). But in Dewey Dell’s
third section, it occurs abruptly and more significantly, as she now is notably
pregnant and no longer suffering menses. Of Cash’s five sections, two end in
mid-sentence (the only ones in the novel to do so), with an absence of periods
leading to ambiguous possibilities: the first, that he has proved so unimaginative
and predictable that we can presume what he is about to say, as sheer run-on
continuation of his mildly obsessed trains of thought; the second, that he actively
exceeds the meanings suggested by his monologue, as if he were actually more
expansive and self-sufficient than his dull words might otherwise intimate.
By contrast to spaces and periods, invoked so resourcefully throughout, only
one parenthesis occurs in the entire novel, appropriately in Darl’s section as part
of a precise depiction, with the bracketed insertion revealing a further dimension
to his circumspect eye: “The wagon is hauled clear, the wheels chocked
(carefully: we all helped; it is as though upon the shabby, familiar, inert shape of
the wagon there lingered somehow, latent yet still immediate, that violence
which had slain the mules that drew it not an hour since) above the edge of the
flood” (Faulkner, AILD 157). Of course, the precision here is again akilter, part
of the same psychological dissonance revealed in the dismayingly long mental
turmoil sandwiched between Anse’s early question on one page, “Where’s
Jewel?” and Darl’s terse response more than a page later, “Down to the barn”
(Faulkner, AILD 10–11). Darl’s inability to subordinate needless verbiage from
essential facts is so fundamental a part of his psychology that paradoxically what
might seem to be the appropriate punctuation for untangling his psychology
(parentheses) cannot be invoked without misrepresenting that psychology, in his
unwavering inability to subordinate. Notably, moreover, though Faulkner earlier
relied heavily on dashes in stories, rarely does he turn to them in his early novels
despite sliding into nearly every other form of punctuation.5
The sense one gains, especially as evoked in Faulkner’s later works, is that
consciousness is not so much broken into or otherwise sharply disrupted as it is
shaped, molded, swayed, slipped from one accessed corner to another.6 And
Absalom, Absalom! finally explores most forcefully and ingeniously the
potential of punctuation pressed to the limits. This first occurs in the initial
account of the scene that forms the novel’s center, as a mystified Quentin
Compson tries to make sense of Rosa Coldfield’s outraged account:
—the two separate Quentins now talking to one another in the long silence of
notpeople in notlanguage, like this: It seems that this demon—his name was
Sutpen—(Colonel Sutpen)—Colonel Sutpen. Who came out of nowhere and
without warning upon the land with a band of strange niggers and built a
plantation—(Tore violently a plantation, Miss Rosa Coldfield says)—tore
violently. And married her sister Ellen and begot a son and a daughter which—
(Without gentleness begot, Miss Rosa Coldfield says)—without gentleness.
Which should have been the jewels of his pride and the shield and comfort of
his old age, only—(Only they destroyed him or something or he destroyed them
or something. And died)—and died. Without regret, Miss Rosa Coldfield says—
(Save by her) Yes, save by her. (And by Quentin Compson) Yes. And by Quentin
Compson. (Faulkner, Absalom 4–5)
This lightning flash of revelation encapsulates the entire novel, though at this
early point it is hardly apparent what the flash might actually mean. Hereafter,
the scene will be repeatedly glossed, distended, embroidered, unfolded, and
filled in. Yet here, the alteration of italic (recollected time) and roman (present
time); the syntactical disruption of so many dashes; the appositions, repetitions,
and Rosa’s overzealous corrections, signaled by parentheses; even the unruly
periods that mark off not complete sentences so much as disconnected outbursts:
all figure forth at once the disarray of the past in its urgency and violence, and
the incomprehension of the present in the face of such an inaugural outburst.
Quentin’s dismay vividly matches our own at this juncture, though names,
events, and unbridled passions (all unraveled in the novel to follow) are less
compelling than the punctuational explosion that leaves us figuratively blistered
and mentally riven. Even the strange compound words, collapsing nouns into
their own negatio n, present a series of miniature versions of the tableau vivant
revealed more generally here in its first visual form.7 And the center of this
subjective confusion occurs when Quentin overtakes Rosa’s hortatory
correctives to unmask his own dismayed incomprehension: “only—(Only they
destroyed him or something or he destroyed them or something. And died)—and
died” (Faulkner, Absalom 5). Finally, amid the jungle gym of punctuation, their
two voices intertwine, with Rosa confirming Quentin’s central role as if
displacing her own, with punctuation confirming the narrating reversal at work.
This would seem as important as the accumulated, barely understood narrative
itself, attempting to weave together a history that might actually, adequately
explain the brutal murder of a brother.
Perhaps more saliently, however, is the way revelation and obscurity are yoked
together through punctuation that folds the passage repetitively back on itself. It
is as if, in his most magisterial narrative, delving so ambitiously into the social
ravages of racism, slavery, and the historical debacle of the Civil War, Faulkner
could only weave his tormented account together through an equally tormented
syntax. And his complicated mélange of dashes, semicolons, colons, italics, self-
negating neologisms, parentheses (and parentheses within) all serve as a means
of foregrounding not simply the uncertainty of what is being described, or its
mutual negotiation and confluence of multiple voices, but also the meta-
textuality of the whole—the fact that punctuation serves here less to match oral
evocation than to clarify how fully the evocations are in fact being written,
imagined, indeed self-consciously distanced from the scene they are
transparently supposed to evoke.8
The novel’s first half shifts between Rosa’s impassioned outbursts at an
experience that has undone her (in chapters 1 and 5) and Mr. Compson’s tight-
lipped, primly judicious accounting (in chapters 2–4), inquiring into a past he
self-admittedly fails to understand. Accordingly, his three sections are dominated
by periods, sometimes dashes, occasionally commas, all suggesting something of
the deliberate, quietly balanced tone of his report. Only with Rosa’s second
section do we at last get a profound sense of the effect produced by her
inimitable voice: angry, outraged, unappeased after a half-century of rejection
obsessively remembered with fuller knowledge of the cause of it all perpetually
deferred. And the entire account occurs italicized, as if to register the contrast
between her own inordinately impassioned tone and Mr. Compson’s matter-of-
fact restraint. But as well, her voice is represented through the back-stepping,
circling, self-interrupting rhythm of all the punctuational pauses we have
reviewed up to now. Consider her remarkable lyric peroration, which begins with
a sharply dashed aposiopesis, unexpectedly interrupting herself before she has
truly begun:
Once there was—Do you mark how the wistaria, sun-impacted on this wall
here, distills and penetrates this room as though (light-unimpeded) by secret
and attritive progress from mote to mote of obscurity’s myriad components?
That is the substance of remembering—sense, sight, smell: the muscles with
which we see and hear and feel—not mind, not thought: there is no such thing
as memory: the brain recalls just what the muscles grope for: no more, no less:
and its resultant sum is usually incorrect and false and worthy only of the name
of dream.—See how the sleeping outflung hand, touching the bedside candle,
remembers pain, springs back and free while mind and brain sleep on and only
make of this adjacent heat some trashy myth of reality’s escape: or that same
sleeping hand, in sensuous marriage with some dulcet surface, is transformed
by that same sleeping brain and mind into that same figment-stuff warped out
of all experience. Ay, grief goes, fades; we know that—but ask the tear ducts if
they have forgotten how to weep.—Once there was (they cannot have told you
this either) a summer of wistaria. (Faulkner, Absalom 115)
The sentences appear to move as readily backward as forward, defying narrative
(even descriptive) sequence and refusing a cumulative understanding.
Indeed, the flow of syntax seems distinctively oral, though the alternation of
questions and answers, the development of what seems like an argument for
memory and sense, is all propelled by dashes, commas, and sequential colons
that reverse an onward flow: settling on a semantics that attempts to capture
memory with its distortions; to register bodily pain as analogy and
transformation. She begins with “Once there was—” as a gesture that
immediately derails into a consideration of the powers of memory itself, though
she does not return to the “was” of that preamble, instead simply denying the
existence of any “such thing as memory.” All we have, as Rosa’s account of
Sutpen will attest, are “incorrect” images that have the ligatured framing of a
dream. And finally Rosa returns to repeat her now-stuttering overture, having
moved us closer to the past not at all.
Anger so fiercely sustained only succeeds in infusing Rosa’s voice with a
densely poetic, evocative inflection, since though it is directed outward at that
“fiend blackguard and devil” (Faulkner, Absalom 10), it also turns inward,
making her more self-conscious, self-expressive, and finally as central a figure
in her account as Sutpen is to the story she otherwise wants to be told. Sounding
like someone at once deranged yet perfectly in tune with her feelings, she
fiercely pushes the limits of sensation and experience. That is, in her
interrogation of the past, Rosa extolls the possibility of memory even as she
defies its power, as if the experience that induced such anguish had somehow
disappeared, leaked away. Memory takes on a life of its own, somehow losing
connection with the very experience that sets it in motion. The body feels pain,
willy-nilly, and seems unable to forget that feeling forty-odd years later, only
kept alive by her own anguished voice. Reinforcing that memory in this summer
of 1909 is the blooming wisteria evoking that scent-laden summer of a half-
century before. Referents here seem unstable, but the meaning seems more or
less clear: that just as wisteria distills through a room, particulate “mote to mote”
in sheer permeating diffusion, so the body recalls its past. A sleeping mind
transforms pain into an acceptable fiction (via a dream) but the body always
refuses such fictions (“ask the tear ducts if they have forgotten how t o weep”).
Yet the striking aspect of the passage, like the rest of her section, hinges on
Rosa’s self-interruptions: the dashes that puncture the onward flow of memory
and contemplation; the parenthesis that contributes an unneeded detail; then the
sequence of clauses divided by colons that erupt four times before the sentence
is brought to a halt. Immediately, a dash occurs that seems again unnecessary
except to further break the flow. The whole defies coherent sequence, confirming
how fully her life has for decades consisted of bodily pain, grief regularly dying
back only to erupt again, sleep rudely interrupted, the redolent smell of wistaria
then and now. And again, it is bare punctuation that evokes this state, especially
in Faulkner’s defiance of conventional usage. Take simply his abundant
parentheses, as Fred D. Randel has duly counted: “Absalom, Absalom! pays little
heed to the voice of common sense on the parenthesis. In the three hundred
seventy-two pages . . . Faulkner uses . . . five hundred ninety-four parentheses or
an average of 1.6 per page. They range in length from one word to several
pages” (Randel 71).
 Greater interest than sheer numbers, however, lies in the way parentheses
become more intricate and confounding through the latter part of the novel.
Rosa’s central section tends to invoke parentheses as reminders (“so they will
tell you” [107]) or as obsessive reiterations (say, of Sutpen’s various brutalities),
but they do not fundamentally disorient the reader. By the opening of Chapter 6,
however, parentheses spread their compassing curves for a more complicated
verbal embrace, after the section opens in Cambridge with italicized lines from
Mr. Compson’s January letter informing Quentin of Rosa’s death. Precipitously,
that moment is then interrupted by roman type reminding us of “that very
September evening itself” months earlier, with Quentin’s irritated thoughts in
open parenthesis—“(and he soon needing, required, to say ‘No, neither aunt
cousin nor uncle Rosa . . .’”—as contested domains of Quentin’s consciousness
are revealed. The novel indiscriminately mingles italics and roman, direct and
indirect discourse, importuning demand and calm description, only finally to end
with a closed parenthesis that momentarily seems to contain the mental
upheaval, followed by a temporal repetition: “Why do they live at all)—that very
September evening when Mr Compson stopped talking at last” (Faulkner,
Absalom 142). A page later, Quentin’s Harvard roommate interrupts, his
exuberance bubbling over in a fashion that only spurs Quentin further—“(then
Shreve again, ‘Wait. Wait. You mean that this old gal, this Aunt Rosa—’”
[Faulkner, Absalom 143])—this time however with the absence of any matching
closing parenthesis itself. That absence seems to announce how fully Shreve
McCannon’s prodding to recall, rethink, recount, as well as his repetition of
Quentin’s words, will animate the rest of the novel.
Subsequent passages cordoned off by parentheses seem to grow ever longer, as
if thoughts generated by the narrative simply exfoliated—even as italics take
over (from pp. 148–52 entirely) to suggest how much alternative thinking is
occurring. Even then, we return once again to another of Shreve’s parenthetical
questions about Judith following Sutpen’s death: (“—‘How was it?’ Shreve said.
‘You told me; how was it?’” [Faulkner, Absalom 152]). And the very deferral of
closure to that parenthetical opening query suggests again how entirely an
answer puzzlingly eludes them both. Two chapters later, near the end of the
novel, a kind of resolution ensues in the return at last to Mr. Compson’s letter,
once again in italics.
The novel’s final three sections become at once clearer and more embrangled,
as Quentin and Shreve elucidate the mystery of why Henry murdered Bon at
Sutpen’s front gate amid punctuation that continues to tighten even as the flow
paradoxically seems less interrupted. It is as if the rhythm here defies the
cumulative, woodenly progressive pacing of Mr. Compson’s rational narrative
by contributing a more sequential (if broken) pattern in accessing the past.
Simply by pausing to dilate and expatiate (with dashes, parentheses, and colons)
that rhythm highlights the caution required in entering a realm that can never be
categorically known:
They stared—glared—at one another, their voices (it was Shreve speaking,
though save for the slight difference which the intervening degrees of latitude
had inculcated in them (differences not in tone or pitch but of turns of phrase
and usage of words), it might have been either of them and was in a sense both:
both thinking as one, the voice which happened to be speaking the thought only
the thinking become audible, vocal; the two of them creating between them,
out of the rag-tag and bob-ends of old tales and talking, people who perhaps
had never existed at all anywhere, who, shadows, were shadows not of flesh
and blood which had lived and died but shadows in turn of what were (to one
of them at least, to Shreve) shades too) quiet as the visible murmur of their
vaporising breath. The chimes now began to ring for midnight. (Faulkner,
Absalom 243)
Here, the initial reversal of dashes moderates immediately, while parentheses
quietly insert themselves (even within other parentheses, sometimes left
unclosed, as if in gentle accommodation to obscure, even simply imagined
recesses of the past).9 As well, commas, colons, and semicolons urge a depiction
of the Harvard roommates aligning themselves with the story they want told, but
doing so divergingly, in measured steps along forking paths. The tentative
quality of the punctuation itself, set in roman type, confirms a quality of
intelligent, nimble curiosity altogether different from Rosa’s anguished account
or Mr. Compson’s calm rationale.
The power of that active, shaping curiosity is signaled some pages later in
much the same way, when Shreve hypothesizes how Bon must have been
devastated by Sutpen’s refusal to send for him: “And maybe he didn’t even say
then, ‘But he sent no word to me?’” (Faulkner, Absa lom 267). Here again the
punctuation shifts with Shreve’s mental adjustment, as he and Quentin explore
the possible narrative swerves that could adequately explain the murderous
standoff at the gates of Sutpen’s Hundred. And the very repetitions help confirm
the need for tentativeness, carefully easing up on their joint assessment as they
align (“not two but four of them”) in imaginative partnership with the figures
they so want to understand.
Shreve ceased. That is, for all the two of them, Shreve and Quentin, knew he
had stopped, since for all the two of them knew he had never begun, since it
did not matter (and possibly neither of them conscious of the distinction) which
one had been doing the talking. So that now it was not two but four of them
riding the two horses through the dark over the frozen December ruts of that
Christmas eve: four of them and then just two—Charles-Shreve and Quentin-
Henry, the two of them both believing that Henry was thinking He (meaning
his father) has destroyed us all, not for one moment thinking He (meaning
Bon) must have known or at least suspected this all the time; that’s why he has
acted as he has, why he did not answer my letters last summer nor write to
Judith, why he has never asked her to marry him; believing that that must have
occurred to Henry. (Faulkner, Absalom 267)
There are other moments of joint invention that are more distressing, more
confusing, more precarious, but this nicely captures how central Faulkner’s
intricately mapped punctuation becomes.
Again, the experimentation in earlier narratives with different insertions,
pauses, and italicizings has merged in the effort to reveal Quentin’s and Shreve’s
collaboration in their ever uncertain enterprise. They actively create the past,
through sympathy and invention, but the necessary frailty of their endeavor itself
is enacted in the narrative’s own repetitions, appositions, and reversals. And the
disruptive parenthetical identifications have the paradoxical effect of keeping us
slightly off balance, alert to alternative possibilities, as if conjoined intellectually
with the roommates’ efforts, far more than we would be without them. As the
last two sections float into and out of italics, we grasp how fully the two
freshmen themselves are meant to be understood as floating into and out of the
past they invent.
In the midst of Absalom, Absalom!, we come to realize that its use of all the
differing categories of punctuation becomes a means of foregrounding the
narrative’s own textuality. Pointedly, it highlights those uncertain contingencies
and baffling enigmas obscured by any confident resting on unadorned fact. What
might otherwise consist of simple presentation—of character, event, or mood—
becomes through punctuational pauses, emphases, divergences, and reversals an
entirely transformed set of mental negotiations as voices conflict with
themselves, and unconscious thoughts and feelings erupt to the reader’s
uncertain dismay. Perhaps the point is just to remind us of the novel’s opening
claim, that Quentin's “very body was an empty hall echoing with sonorous
defeated names; he was not a being, an entity, he was a commonwealth”
(Faulkner, Absalom 7). And for Faulkner, deft punctuation assures that those
“defeated names” will find effective expression in that democratic
“commonwealth” of past and present. Throughout (to shift the analogy, if
abruptly), typographical marks operate like the automotive transmission
implicitly imagined by Adorno, contributing through characteristic
configurations a sharply braking, abruptly U-turning, sometimes simply soft-
pumping insistence to the ongoing flow of temporal narrative.

Notes
1 Since James’s dictation of punctuation has been addressed earlier, it is worth noting that Faulkner’s
handwritten pages for the novel were quite precise in indicating italicization with underlinings,
confirmed by this manuscript page from the “Digital Yoknapatawpha” collection:
http://faulkner.iath.virginia.edu/media/resources/MANUSCRIPTS/AILDMS14.html
2 But see different use of italics for Darl (Faulkner, AILD 147–48, 180–83, 213).
3 See for Dewey Dell (Faulkner, AILD 121); for Vardaman (Faulkner, AILD 151, 194–96, 215 [with
italics but no periods], 223, 225, 249–520); and for Vernon Tull (Faulkner, AILD 90–92).
4 John Lennard has pointed to Harold Pinter’s variously dotted pauses in The Caretaker (1960): “Pinter’s
four-dot pauses are usually terminal, and appear to compromise the conventional number of suspension
marks and a period; but the use of a five-dot and many three-dot pauses in Aston’s long speech ending
Act II can only be interpreted as registering the different duration of different silences” (Lennard 285,
note 24). For an intriguing investigation of Ralph Ellison’s racialized use of ellipses in Invisible Man
(1952), see Jennifer DeVere Brody, who claims “the ellipsis is ambivalent, enigmatic, paradoxical—
the presence of absence (or vice versa) that like the blackness of blackness both ‘is and aint’” (Brody
73). Or as she reiterates: “The blackness of blackness is both textual and performative—figured as, in,
and by—the ellipsis” (Brody 74). As well, see Fredson Bowers on “normalizing” ellipses (Bowers 94–
95).
5 André Bleikasten has observed that “the suppression of punctuation not only breaks up syntactic
relationships but tends to annul them. In Dewey Dell’s account of her dream (115–16), as in
Vardaman’s relation of the river crossing (143–44), it leads to a leveling process in which words are
reduced to a sort of verbal magma” (Bleikasten 33).
6 In 1956, Faulkner claimed he “tried to crowd and cram everything, all experience, into each paragraph,
to get the whole complete nuance of the moment’s experience, of all the recaptured light rays”
(Faulkner, Lion 107). For a survey of critiques of Faulkner’s late style, see Eric Sandarg (34–6).
7 For a brilliant reading of Faulkner’s unpunctuated “adjectival chains,” beginning with the novel’s
opening words—“From a little after two oclock until almost sundown of the long still hot weary dead
September afternoon they sat” (Faulkner, Absalom 3)—see Garrett Stewart (111–13). As John Tamplin
has observed:
Faulkner uses this technique of stacking adjectives without any conjunctions, and he has developed it
since Light in August. The adjectives all modify the same thing—they delay the nomination of that
thing—they give ample time to the expression of many aspects of the thing—they correct each other,
or add layers and reduce misinterpretations possible from those that precede. This technique is a
miniature, word-level version of what Faulkner is up to in the rest of the novel—recurring images that
 only gradually come into focus. The interesting thing about this technique is that it opens the
possibility of its own infinite continuation. Faulkner shows that truth can’t be reached from one
perspective, by misleading us with each perspective in isolation from the rest. But this doesn’t entail
that there is a certain number of perspectives that, once expressed, will reach the absolute truth of the
matter. Faulkner’s technique questions the possibility of a truth, even in his choice of adjectives.
(Tamplin)
For an account of compound words in Faulkner, see BLD in MT and Clifford Wulfman.
8 As Eric Sandarg observes of Faulkner’s use of parentheses: “By prolonging the action, Faulkner
creates a significant level of suspense—but at the risk of confusing a likely already frustrated reader”
(Sandarg 47). See as well Sandarg’s useful distinction between the “periodic sentence” and the
“cumulative sentence” (Sandarg 47–49).
9 Michelle Denham has claimed, “For Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse, the parenthesis works as a
way of presenting simultaneity of experiences when spatially separated. For William Faulkner’s
Absalom, Absalom, the parenthesis creates a kind of compressed time, so that the past becomes a heavy
burden upon the present, as represented by the way a narrative experience can be extended within
parentheses” (Denham Abstract). For the best scholarly study of the emergence and use of parentheses,
see John Lennard passim.
 Epilogue: Punctuation as Style

Clearly, authors differ wildly from each other—indeed, differ from their earlier
selves—in the ways they wield syntax for a desired end. They stall time, bending
and wrapping it back on itself, delaying action, pausing, summarizing in all the
ways pacing allows, even as they find other means of sparking narrative
advances, lunging forward, keeping momentum sustained and sometimes
impelled.1 As importantly, authors notably seize on particular, sometimes
favored typographical means of defining consciousness, revealing mixed
understandings, sudden reservations, abrupt about-faces, or simply gentle
divagations via punctuation that silently promotes such effects. And much as
character and event are altered in the signature prose expressions invoked by
different authors, so too is expression altered by the rhythms in which it unfolds.
Like actual landscape itself, which offers up topoi we recognize in the rocky
synclines and horticultural prospects that differ region by region, creating
identifiable vistas, so textual landscapes become easily identifiable, shaped by
punctuation that looms far more importantly than geography in any reading of
fiction that truly moves us. As Garrett Stewart reminds us, proclaiming
punctuation as style’s unsung hero: “If syntax is the armature of prose and poetic
form, along with enjambment in the latter, punctuation is an active part of the
infrastructure in each case: the visible bolts and nuts, latches and hinges, of
grammar’s manifestation in literary pace and emphasis” (Stewart, private
correspondence).
Of course, assessments above have only hinted at the range of available
punctuational effects. Little has been said, for example, of exclamation points
(save for Poe’s hysterical short story), though few other marks draw such instant
attention to what is being expressed. F. Scott Fitzgerald once called for authors
to “[c]ut out all these exclamation points,” explaining that “[a]n exclamation
point is like laughing at your own joke” (Kunsa 146). And Elmore Leonard,
following Mary Oliver’s frugal vision of punctuation, has notoriously offered a
rule against any such indulgence: “You are allowed no more than two or three
per 100,000 words of prose.” But as Ben Blatt has noticed, even Leonard failed
this rule in over forty novels “totaling 3.4 million words. If he had followed his
own advice, he would have used only 102 exclamation points in his entire career.
In practice, he used 1,651. That’s 16 times as many as he recommended!”
(Blatt). Even Blatt concedes, however, that Leonard was a lightweight where
exclamation points were concerned, defeated by James Joyce with some 1,105
uses in only three novels.2
Despite such reliance on a sometimes abused punctuation mark, no one would
presume to claim that either Leonard or Joyce are defined by the choice, far less
that it expressed a “signature” style. Joy Williams, on the other hand, does
notably succeed through a variety of stories in transforming sheer disjointedness
into narrative delight through mere exclamation, “with deadpan pronouncements
erupting cheek by jowl amid mundane events, often set off by an uncommonly
loose splash of exclamation points” (Mitchell, Mere 115). Her preference for
such spiked delights offers a sense of wonder at the strangeness of her often
liminal, uncanny, even supernatural and spectral worlds. An exclamatory
punctuation mark attests to her strange sense of life lived at an angle askew from
common sense, where understanding breaks down and sheer untoward
experience becomes commonplace.
Then again, what do we make of moments where punctuation suggests not
surprise or wonder, but absence and bewilderment? What, in other words, of
things left out of account (themselves marked, once again, by present
punctuation itself)? Ellipses serve to sever dramatic moments through a breach
in continuity, shading off from emotional entanglement and moving us along as
readers through a transpositional gesture. First here, then there, without the sly,
trembling, irritated evocations that accompany our usual waking hours. That
seems to be the takeaway of an ellipsis contrasted with a period, much less the
possibilities (so far, unregistered) of a contrast with a colon. Further, what of
punctuation used against the grammatical grain, in the infractions of comma
splices and sentence fragments, where the common default of supposed
sloppiness is turned somehow purposeful.
But instead of turning backward to venues unexplored, it may be worth
directing our attention forwards to punctuational possibilities converted and
transformed by new social media. The rejection of periods in the internet age has
already been discussed, but what of other forms of punctuation, including emojis
and hashtags? Jeff Scheible has traversed much of this territory, allowing that
identifying such a mark as punctuation, when it has not traditionally been used
in writing as punctuation, productively alerts us to shifts in the ways language
and image relate to each other via contemporary textual practices. Perhaps the
most illustrative and familiar example of this is writing emoticons, where
iconic compositions of punctuation integrated within textual exchanges call
attention to new configurations and alliances between language and image
within social practices, mirroring and standing in for a broader shift that has
occurred with the emergence of digital media cultures. (Scheible 3–4)3
These “shifts” lay bare, as Marquard Smith has provocatively claimed, that in
our current moment, “all content has become largely irrelevant. What matters,”
he writes, “is not what is gathered, arranged, and transmitted, but how such
gathering, arranging, and transmitting works. ‘What’ is supplanted by ‘how’”
(Smith 385). From this perspective, typographical markers (emojis, digital icons)
might seem to have outflanked lexemic signifiers (words strung together in
sentences), which have for centuries formed the semantic basis of social
communication. But any transition to the overpowering role of punctuational
ploys seems true only in the admittedly very different realms of social media.
From a longer perspective, it is clear that punctuation actually subsists on
words, and matters only because of them . If nothing else, this book is meant to
convey how fully a generous symbiosis exists between marks of punctuation and
the specific diction they divert, like sheepdogs managing—sometimes gently,
sometimes not—a flock. Many of the most distinguished efforts of human
expression occur in ineffable prose and poetry, and those efforts exist as much in
the resonances evoked by unexpected words as in the suasions induced by
unforeseen typographical marks. But only by weighing the pressures of
punctuation against the syntax controlled by it (or, conversely, ignored) can we
begin to explain the magic we feel in the process of simply scanning a page: our
reading selves figuratively altered by the altering of marks themselves.

Notes
1 For the single best scholarly assessment of this issue, see Brian Gingrich.
2 Though it is still worth a look at this site: “Welcome to the blog that exists to chronicle the excessive
and unnecessary use of exclamation points we see in the every day world! Send your submissions to
http://excessiveexclamation.blogspot.ca/”
3 For fuller discussion of “the linguistics of emoji” and their “gestural” quality, see Gretchen McCulloch,
Ch. 5: “Emoji and Other Internet Gestures” (McCulloch 155–95).
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 Index

Adorno, Theodor here–here, here, here, here, here, here

Anderson, Mark here
Atkin, Rhian here–here
Austen, Jane here, here–here, here, here, here
and economization here
and internalized dialogue here–here
and monologue here–here
and revision here
and voice here, here, here

Babel, Isaac here

Baker, Nicholson here, here
Baldwin, James here, here–here, here
and anaphora here
and consciousness here–here
and hesitation here–here
and memory here–here
and polysyndeton here
and sentimentality here
and voice here
Beckett, Samuel here, here, here
and voice here
Beerbohm, Max here
Black Arts Movement here
Blatt, Ben here
Bleikasten, André here
Bogue, Russell here
Boone, Joseph here, here
Boren, Mark here–here, here
Bosanquet, Theodora here
Bowers, Fredson here
breathing here, here
and punctuation here
Breslin, James here–here
Brody, Jennifer DeVere here, here–here, here, here
Brooks, Peter here
Brownstein, Rachel here

Calhoun, Adam here, here, here

and heat maps here, here
Cameron, Sharon here, here–here, here, here
capitalization here–here, here, here, here, here–here
Carey, J.V. here
Cather, Willa here–here, here
Chatman, Seymour here
Chu, John here
clauses here–here, here–here, here, here–here, here–here
and sub-clauses here
commas
and antipodal logic here
and Baldwin here–here
and effect here, here–here, here–here, here–here, here, here
and Hawthorne here–here
and hesitation here–here, here
and liberal use here
and mood here
Costello, Bonnie here, here
Crair, Ben here
Crumbley, Paul here, here, here
Cummings, E.E. here–here
and allegory here
and ambivalence here
and hesitation here
and perspective here
and self-referentiality here
and sexuality here
and spacing here

dashes
and Austen here–here
and connections here, here
and Dickinson here–here
and digression here, here–here
and disruptions here–here, here, here, here
and emotive possibility here, here–here
and fragmentation here, here, here
and interpretive possibility here, here
and James here–here
 and oral tonality here, here
and pace here, here, here, here, here–here, here
and reconsideration here, here, here, here–here, here
and thought here–here, here, here, here, here, here
and uses here, here, here–here, here–here, here–here, here–here, here
and visuality here–here, here
Davidson, Jenny here
Davies, Anna here, here
de Medeiros, Paulo here
Demuth, Charles here–here
Denham, Michelle here
Denman, Kamilla here–here, here
dialogue here, here–here, here, here–here, here, here–here
and inquit here
and internalized dialogue here
Díaz, Junot here
Dickens, Charles here
Dickinson, Emily here, here, here–here, here
and anxiety here
and identity here–here, here
and memory here–here
and personification here
and synecdoche here
and voice here, here
disruptions here, here, here, here
in reading here
Dolnick, Ben here, here
Dubus, Andre II here–here
and emotional turmoil here–here
and hesitation here, here
and love here–here
and run-on prose here
and topography here
Dupee, F.W. here–here, here
Dury, Richard here

editing here
and editorial intervention here–here, here, here, here, here
and normalization here, here, here
and posthumous modification here, here, here, here
Eggers, Dave here
Eliot, George here
ellipses here, here–here, here
and ambivalence here
Ellison, Ralph here
enjambment here, here, here–here
as silent punctuation here
exclamation points here, here, here–here, here, here, here, here, here, here
and Joy Williams here–here

Faulkner, William here, here, here, here, here, here–here

and aposiopesis here
and appositions here, here–here
and memory here–here
and meta-textuality here
and revelation here, here
and time here–here
and voice here, here–here, here
Fisher, Laura here
Fitzgerald, F. Scott here
Flaubert, Gustave here, here
font
and bold face here
and italics here, here, here, here, here–here
footnotes here, here
Fowler, Virginia here, here, here
Franco, Ernesto here
Frederick, Samuel here
Friedman, Norman here
Frier, David here–here

Genette, Gérard here

Giltrow, Janet here
Gingrich, Brian here, here
Giovanni, Nikki here, here–here
and confessional poetry here
and desire here, here–here
and love here–here
and voice here
Goldman, Nathan here–here
Good, Graham here
grammar here
and grammarians here, here, here

Halter, Peter here

Hartman, Charles O. here, here
Hartman, Geoffrey here
Hawthorne, Nathaniel here, here–here, here
and ambivalence here, here
and commas here–here
 and consciousness here–here
and hesitation here–here
and revision here
Hemingway, Ernest here–here, here, here–here
and anxiety here–here
and consciousness here–here
and emotional connotation here–here, here–here
and indicative mood here, here
and lexical repetition here, here, here
and polysyndeton here, here
Heyen, William here
Howe, Susan here, here–here
Huang-Tiller, Gillian here
Hynes, Sam here

Irving, Washington here–here

Jacobs, Carol here

Jaggi, Maya here, here
James, Henry here–here, here, here, here
and consciousness here, here, here–here
and desire here
and hesitation here, here, here–here
and revelation here
and revision here
and voice here, here
James, William here, here
Jameson, Fredric here–here, here
Jarosz, Anna Maria here
Johnson, Thomas H. here
Joyce, James here, here–here, here
and fragmentation here
and monologue here–here
and polysyndeton here–here

Kennedy, Maev here

Kennedy, Richard here, here, here
Kidder, Rushworth here, here
Kilyovski, Vakrilen here–here
Krasznahorkai, László here
and voice here
Kunsa, Ashley here

Leiter, Sharon here

Lennard, John here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here
Leonard, Elmore here
line breaks here, here, here, here–here, here–here, here, here, here
and lineation here
Link, Alex here, here
Lockwood, Preston here
Long, J.J. here

McCarthy, Cormac here, here, here, here

and simile here
McCulloch, Gretchen here, here
McCulloh, Mark here–here
MacLeod, Glen here
Malvern, Jack here
Matore, Daniel here
Maugham, W.S. here
Melville, Herman here
Menand, Louis here
Menikoff, Barry here
Meyer, Charles F. here
Miller, Andrew here–here
Miller, Christanne here, here, here, here
Miller, J. Hillis here, here–here
minimalism here, here–here, here, here, here
Mitchell, Lee Clark here, here
modernism here, here, here
Moore, Marianne here–here
Moretti, Franco here
Morrison, Toni here–here
and identity here–here
and love here–here
and memory here
and spacing here–here
and voice here–here
Moss, Roger here

Nabokov, Vladimir here, here–here

and desire here
and memory here–here, here
and perspective here, here
Norris, Mary here
novel
and form here–here

O'Hara, Frank here

Oliver, Mary here, here
Ong, Walter here
orality here, here, here, here, here, here–here

Page, Philip here, here

paradox
and punctuation here, here, here, here, here–here, here, here
paragraphing here, here, here, here, here
and polyphony here
parataxis here, here
and resistance here
and style here, here, here
parentheses here
and asides here–here, here–here
and bracketing here–here
and incarceration here–here, here
and ironic observation here, here
and Nabokov here–here
and narrative control here–here
Parkes, M.B. here, here
Partridge, Eric here
pattern poems here, here
pauses here, here, here, here, here–here, here, here, here, here, here, here–here, here–here, here, here–here,
here, here, here
periods here–here, here
and Faulkner here–here
and Hemingway here–here
and uncertainty here
Persson, Tholeif here
Pinter, Harold here
Poe, Edgar Allen here–here, here–here
and anaphora here
and hysteria here, here, here, here
and uncanny here
and voice here
postmodernism here, here, here
Proust, Marcel here
Provance, Phil here
punctuation
and absence here–here, here, here, here, here, here–here, here–here, here, here–here, here, here–here,
here–here, here
and choice here, here, here, here, here, here
and clotting here, here, here, here, here, here–here, here, here–here
and consciousness here, here
as distinct from syntax here, here–here, here–here
and gender here–here, here–here
as infrastructure here–here, here, here–here
 and meaning here, here–here, here, here, here, here
and negation here, here
and pause here, here–here, here
and pre-twentieth-century standards here, here
and repunctuation here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Radford, Ceri here

Raine, Craig here
Randel, Fred D. here
Rée, Jonathan here
repetitions here, here–here, here–here, here, here, here, here, here–here
rhythm here, here
and ambiguity here–here
and propulsion here, here, here
and variation here, here, here, here, here, here, here
Riehl, Robin here
run-on prose here

Sandarg, Eric here, here

Saramago, José here–here
and allegory here
and digression here–here, here
and rereading here
and run-on prose here
and voice here–here
Sartre, Jean-Paul here
Scheible, Jeff here, here, here, here, here–here
Sebald, W.G. here–here
and anxiety here
and autobiography here
and digression here
and emotional connotation here, here
and ethics here
and memory here, here
semicolons here, here, here, here–here, here, here–here
and Woolf here–here
signature styles here–here, here, here, here, here
and punctuation here, here, here
Smith, Marquard here
Stein, Gertrude here
Sterne, Laurence here
and digression here
Sternlieb, Lisa here–here
Stevenson, Robert Louis here
Stewart, Garrett here, here
Stouck, David here
Stowe, Harriet Beecher here
Strychacz, Thomas here
surface reading here
Sutherland, Kathryn here–here
syntax
and digression here
and disruption here
and fracture here–here, here
and intensity here, here–here, here
and modification here
and self-policing here–here
and shaping here–here, here, here, here

Tamplin, John here

Teall, F. Horace here
Tolomeo, Diane here
transitions here, here, here, here
Truss, Lynn here
Twain, Mark here
typography here–here, here, here
and choice here
and typographic tools here, here, here, here, here

Victor, Daniel here

visual poem here, here, here, here, here

Walker, Michael here

Wallace, David Foster here, here
Watson, Cecelia here
Weisbuch, Robert here, here
White, Duncan here, here
Williams, Arthur here
Williams, James here
Williams, Joy here
Williams, William Carlos here, here–here
and ekphrasis here
and meter here
and shape here
Wood, James here
Woolf, Virginia here–here, here, here
and hesitation here
and love here, here–here
and perspecitve here–here
and revelation here
 and run-on prose here
and semicolons here–here, here
Wyatt, Jean here–here

Yagoda, Ben here, here

 BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Mitchell, Lee Clark, 1947- author.
Title: Mark my words: profiles of punctuation in modern literature / Lee
Clark Mitchell.
Description: New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. | Includes
bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “Shows how punctuation
and personality are intertwined through profiles of classic modernist
authors”– Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019045408 | ISBN 9781501360732 (hardback) | ISBN
9781501360749 (epub) | ISBN 9781501360756 (pdf)
Subjects: LCSH: English language–Punctuation. | Punctuation. |
Punctuation–Philosophy. | Punctuation–In literature.
Classification: LCC PE1450 .M58 2020 | DDC 421/.1–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019045408
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