The Post-Punctuation World?

Perhaps no single emblem better epitomizes the perversity of my colleagues than the lowly quotation mark. Some rogue must have issued a memo, "Psst! Cool writers don't use quotes in dialogue anymore" to authors as disparate as Junot Díaz, James Frey, Evan S. Connell, J.M. Coetzee, Ward Just, Kent Haruf, Nadine Gordimer, José Saramago, Dale Peck, James Salter, Louis Begley and William Vollmann. To the degree that this device contributes to the broader popular perception that "literature" is pretentious, faddish, vague, eventless, effortful, and suffocatingly interior, quotation marks may not be quite as tiny as they appear on the page.

Lionel Shriver laments the demise of quotation marks in much modern fiction in the Wall Street Journal [via Literary Saloon].

This is an argument we've had on this blog before. And as I said back then, personally I'm not a fan of quotation marks (stuffy, old fashioned, unnecessary things!) and have no problem when authors such as McCarthy, Coetzee and Diaz drop them. (Though as I've said before, McCarthy's apostrophes are another matter!)

These authors are not a jot more effortful to read, I'd say, than Ms Shriver. (Members of my book club complained about needing a dictionary by them to cope with all the new vocab chucked up in We Need to Talk About Kevin. "No-one would really use these words in a letter," thay said.)

But maybe Shriver has a point that the lack of quotation marks is a bit of a turn off for the less convinced reader?

His Inestimable Self

There's a very nice interview with Peter Carey in the Scotsman. I've just bought his new novel His Illegal Self which is yelling, nay shrieking, at me louder than all the other books on my TBR shelf. ReadmereadmereadmenownownownowNOWNOWNOWNOW!

Carey is my darling* and I'm so scared of even the teensiest spoiler in Jackie McGlone's piece that my eyes skip over (for the moment at least) all mention of the novel, but fasten onto all the little snippets about Carey the man and Carey the writer.

Some insights into his creative process:

... What really fascinates me ... is the power of the imagination. I believe that writers should write about what they don't know, not about what they do know. Some of my students become trapped in their own lives, churning over the crimes of parents and siblings, which stops them discovering the incredible joys of invention.

... Perhaps it was writing The True History of the Ned Kelly Gang that really freed me up – maybe it was being brave enough to abandon all punctuation in that book that did it. Getting rid of punctuation means you have to get rid of all sorts of sloppiness in your writing, you have to be really, really exact. And it allowed me to be playful with language, which is what I'd admired in serious literature when I first started to read it when I was about 18.

... Writing's a mysterious process. It doesn't do to analyse it too much. This will sound romantic coming from me, but I do feel it's often like I've been through a fit of madness. When I'm a little anxious or insecure, I'll take down one of my earlier books to try and cheer myself up. It never works. I either think, 'God, this is crap!' or 'This is good, I couldn't do that again!' Sometimes, though, it's like someone else wrote a particular book."

McGlone adds some previously quoted Carey nuggets:

On creating characters:

I do not speak to them outside working hours, although the pleasures of creating proper characters is enormous, especially since novelists are prone to magical thinking anyway. You write something; then you meet someone who's exactly like the person you invented. My novel Illywhacker has some of that argument about it – the storyteller, Badgery, tells lies which later become truths."

On writing novels:

It's a privileged way to spend your mornings. When you have made some nice sentences, how thrilling is that? And then you get to go to lunch – I'm enthusiastic about lunch.

On the unexamined life:

For a writer it's the only one worth living. As a human I'm better off knowing why I do things, but as a writer I don't want to know. Everything that happens to me goes down like sediment to the bottom of the river. I do draw on that swampy stuff, but it's better not to know where it came from; also it's a good excuse not to improve my character.

Here's the trailer for the new novel:



*Reminder to self, try to be more cool and detached as a literary blogger ...

Postscript:

The Guardian podcasts an interview with Carey about the novel.

Nuke Them Darn Apostrophe's!

Ahah! I said to myself. A typo. A carelessly missed apostrophe.

Why it should be there on the second page of the novel, I couldn't imagine: this was certain not the first edition of this book, it was published by Random House, honoured with the Pulitzer, endorsed by our beloved Oprah.

I looked again.

He thought the month was October but he wasnt sure.

Frustrations of frustrations - I didn't have a free hand to fumble in my big bag for an editor's pen (automatic reaction), trying to read while strap- hanging on the LRT.

And then the next sentence:

He hadnt kept a calendar for years.

Ouch and double ouch!

Because now I could see that the novel was part of a sinister plot to rid the world of its apostrophes. I flicked through the pages with my nose to confront my darkest fears. With great relief I saw that this strange disease had not yet spread to other contractions:

I'm ... they'd ... there'd ... what's ...

maybe there was hope for the world after all!

As soon as I got home after teaching my class I googled:

"cormac mccarthy"+apostrophes

and found that numerous others had the same problem with his writing. Kimbofo of Reading Matters went so far as to write the author an open letter:

Dear Mr McCarthy,

I am currently about a third of the way through your latest book, The Road. I am very much enjoying it. The post-apocalyptic setting reminds me of Mad Max meets Stephen King's The Stand. However, there is one thing that is really bugging me, and it is this:

WHAT HAS HAPPENED TO THE APOSTROPHES IN THE CONTRACTED WORDS?

For example, why have you written don't as DONT, won't as WONT, couldn't as COULDNT?

Is this some kind of clever literary thing I don't understand, or a lazy editor's error? I find it so annoying I have to do everything within my power not to scribble proofing marks in red pen all over the book's crisp white pages.

Yours sincerely,
Kimbofo.

P.S. I wonder what the Apostrophe Protection Society would have to say about the matter.

Another blogger, Jodi of iwilldare.com writes:

The random apostrophes are bothering me and take me right out of the story. See, he apostrophizes I’m, I’ll, I’d, and It’s, but not cant, wouldnt, aint, isnt, and dont. It drives me bonkers. I think I am paying more attention to the contractions then to the story. While reading, I’m constantly making a mental tally of the apostrophes and trying to figure out the mystery. Why do some words get them? What could possibly be the symbolism? Does anyone have any idea why he did this?

Jordan Lapp reckons with some justification that McCarthy is resorting to what he calls Stupid Pet Tricks to get attention, and takes issue with his use (or lack thereof) of other punctuation marks.

But it's Sam Leith on the Telegraph blog who really gets it right about The Road:

Why, for example, is his vision of the apocalypse one in which the imaginary holocaust seems to have destroyed apostrophes? This is hard core stuff. ... These people don't just need gasoline and tinned food: they need punctuation.

Now I can live with the short choppy sentences, the incomplete sentences that present themselves as sentences, and the dropping of colons and semi-colons. The paucity of commas holds no fears for me. (Peter Carey didn't use a single one in True History of the Kelly Gang, recreating the voice of an unschooled man, based on the style of Ned Kelly's own writing.) And I'm perfectly happy to see inverted commas dropped from dialogue anyway.

But please, Mr. McCarthy, hands off the apostrophes.

Maybe Oprah can set you right when she interviews your reclusive self on her show tomorrow (only the third one ever). But then again, I think she (or whoever writes her publicity blurbs) might be apostrophically challenged too:

Oprah's Book Club has approximately one million online members. Each of it’s selections have skyrocketed to the top of bestsellers lists.

Punctuation aside, McCarthy's novel is very well worth reading, if harrowing. I'm reviewing it so will post more about it later.

Perverted Commas?

Of the many accomplishments of the fiction-writer's art, dialogue is surely the least exalted, the literary equivalent of peeling onions during the course of preparing a grand feast. While theoretically it could call for quite as great a level of skill as the narrative that surrounds it, in practice it hardly ever displays evidence of any such effort, particularly in the contemporary novel. All too often, dialogue is simply the default way of maintaining a vague sense of momentum, or a recognition that, with any luck, the novel will end up as a film treatment anyway, and here is the embryonic screenplay ...

Stuart Walton on the Guardian blog has a sound-off about dialogue in modern fiction as:

... a fairly obvious bulking agent in the kind of writing that isn't about narrative drive ...

and has a go at writers (such as Iris Murdoch and Henry James) who:

... never got the hang of dialogue, but persisted anyway...

If so many writers fail at writing dialogue, as Mr. Walton suggests, why is it so hard to get it right? (And it is difficult! Many is the page of aborted conversation I've scrunched into the bin.)

Which writers do you think handle dialogue well? I love Roddy Doyle's dialogue in The Barrytown Trilogy (though Mr. Walton probably wouldn't have approved of the "rendering of accents" , and Magnus Mills' utterly banal conversations (used to great comic effect) in The Restraint of Beasts. Paul Auster also handles dialogue very well in The Brooklyn Follies where the plot is very much developed through conversations. Readers of the blog have plenty more suggestions to add in the comments.

And how do you prefer your dialogue to be punctuated? James Joyce took against what he called "perverted commas" preferring the long dash, while writers such as James Kelman, for example, use no punctuation marks at all, leaving the writer to work out where the conversation begins and ends. (I must say, I like this method the best.)