Quoting With Selah Saterstrom
During the course of the last year, Selah Saterstrom and I have been in conversation about the role of quotation marks. During my investigation of that elusive and incorrigible quotation mark, Selah was gracious enough to further our conversation of the topic by answering a few of my questions.
Do you find that your punctuation choice (in this case with quotation marks) comes from the piece you are writing, or from your own overall aesthetic preference?
When I write, at a certain point, I try to comprehend the logic that arrives with the piece – the work so often seems to have embedded within it enigmatic postcards clues or a blueprint for its own becoming. I want to interpret that blueprint/logic so that I can be in service of the story (which usually is the crossroads-place where I must examine my own attachments to what I thought the story was “about”…what I’d hoped it would be about…). Questions arise: how does every mark serve, realize, illuminate this piece? Aesthetically, I believe every mark counts. Punctuation marks: these are gestures, and I like to engage with them, but not only as technical hinges…though they certainly have their place as such and I value that.
As gestures, each mark has its own dynamic, history, suggestions. Simplistic, but you could say that commas have a yielding energy. Semi-colons pitch juxtapositions, calling attention to the space between objects and can thus illumine existing dissonance and/or harmony within the piece. Periods are anchors and where you drop this weight, you constellate your syntactical “kapows!”. And so on.
These marks are also cues – they alert us how to read according to taught/conventional ways, which we can then also question. In the scheme of language, standardizing punctuation is a very recent development – the truth of language is that for far longer it has been un-fixed…so/and…I think it is important to remember this and question how we read and why.
Do you feel that the use of quotation marks would hinder or propel your work in any way?
In my last book, I quickly realized I wouldn’t be using quotation marks and thinking about it now, I do think it had to do with narrative speed. There was a way I needed that story to urge-forward and it felt like quotation marks slowed down the text even in their innocuous, subtle correctness. I needed there to be no nets – for the text to exceed even the moment it was in.
There is also this way that quotation marks insinuate an inside/outside. Like, if we know who is speaking, we know where and how to position ourselves – in a fundamental way: I know where I am in this story. But it is not really certainty that I am looking for when I write or read. I tend to look for more poignant ways to recognize or deal with or celebrate or bear the mystery of uncertainty.
Do you find that you were influenced by another writer with this style, or was it an organic expression?
I am not original. So I am quite sure there were influences despite the fact that I didn’t have any in particular in mind (in terms of punctuation) when I wrote my first two books.
After I finished my second novel I read McCarthy’s THE ROAD in which he does not use quotation marks. It was a brilliant choice – in a post-apocalyptic world (with all of its radicalized absence), would grammar survive? Would there be meat on the bone? Post-apocalyptic scenarios = lots of bones; a profound return to the essential…like language without the luxury of the marks which structure it. Language changes (hybridizes) after huge trauma and reflects its transfiguration from root-to-surface, and I think McCarthy realizes that through his choices in a very keening way.
When I tell you that the quotation mark wasn’t used in text as a conventional way of marking speech until the late seventeenth/early eighteenth century, does that speak to you at all about its role as conventional? In other words, since the world went on for several centuries without this need for demarcation of dialogue in this way, does the original absence of it say something about the modern desire to eliminate it. Could it be a more natural way of conveying speech?
What would a “natural way” of conveying speech actually be or look like? I don’t know.
I’m thinking about this notion that punctuation marks are a kind of midrash – i.e., comments/interpretations we perform on language itself as well as in/through our own texts. We bring things into being, we eliminate things. I’m less interested in the “effectiveness” of punctuation (even as I appreciate it and teach it) and more fascinated by the back-and-forth gestures we make as we touch/re-touch the surfaces of language.
Selah Saterstrom is the author of The Meat and Spirit Plan (Coffee House Press 2007) & The Pink Institution (Coffee House Press, 2004) You can visit her at http://selahsaterstrom.blogspot.com/
First: A nice introductory discussion to an oft overlooked aspect of fiction writing. Thanks for that.
Next: Let me put this in quotes: “the quotation mark wasn’t used in text as a conventional way of marking speech until the late seventeenth/early eighteenth century.”
I think it’s worth pointing out that this is also largely considered the eden-time of the English novel. While other kinds of writing made use of dialogue, none did so in quite the way or to the degree required by the novel. Thus, for instance, while there is (to the best of my memory) not a single quote (nor a double, for that matter) in Malory’s Le morte d’Arthur (a protonovel, published in the late fifteenth century), Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688) is replete with them.
Also, while I appreciate Selah’s read on The Road, I’d like to point out that his unconventional punctuation was not a choice McCarthy made for this book but one made early in his career, perhaps before he’d written his first novel.