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BUY ME THREE #2

11.10.05

Pond Scum: punktuation

By Steve Finbow

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It resembles a circus seal about to balance a ball on its wet and shiny nose. Or a tear just leaving a mascaraed eyelash. Or the plash from the first drop of rain to fall on the dark waters of Lake Baikal. Or a wink. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the semicolon. A number of writers – Robert McCrum, Lynn Truss, and Maud Newton among others – have recently discussed the semicolon. I was about to research their findings when I thought, “Fuck it, I will come up with a theory all by my lonesome.”

 

By Nicholas Allanach

The semicolon – and to a lesser extent its bolder but less-useful partner the colon – has always intrigued me. My interest peaked last week while reading Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men. This is not an attack on American writers’ use, misuse, or non-use of the previously mentioned punctuation mark. Nor is it a defence of British writers’ addiction to the little fellow. Rather, I will argue that the use of the semicolon mirrors the rhythm of American and British speech.

So, where do we begin? Well, I think it will have to be with a hero of mine. I give you none other than Gertrude Stein. Gertie regarded semicolons as pretentious commas and eschewed their use. She stated that modernity required a “continuous present” (see Composition as Explanation) and this is the basis for the prose of Ernest Hemingway, Raymond Carver, Richard Ford, and Cormac McCarthy. The very idea of modernity, of the 20th century being the American century, is that we live in a continual present, a narrative without a past, a future inscribed in the now.

The hills across the valley of the Ebrol were long and white.
On this side there was no shade and no trees and the station
was between two lines of rails in the sun.

The use of the conjunction rather than the comma causes the sentence to pulse with the present. Let us rewrite the second sentence: On this side, there was no shade, no trees; the station was between two lines of rails in the sun. This is how a British writer of the period would have written the sentence. Discuss. And: On this side there was no shade. No trees. The station was between two lines of rails in the sun. This is how a contemporary American writer would have written the sentence. Discuss. I believe the second example is closer to American speech patterns. William Carlos Williams argued that American poetry should be closer to common American speech. Williams’ staccato lines surrounded by white space

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

are forerunners of Raymond Carver’s pithy and sparse short stories. The rhythm of the voice provides its own punctuation. I would argue that Williams’ use of the American voice, coupled with the influence of Hemingway’s conjunctions in place of commas and commas in place of semicolons, informed punctuation usage in contemporary American fiction. Whereas, the British have largely maintained the high-Modernist (almost Baroque) punctuation of Pound and Eliot:

No, hardly, but, seeing he had been born
In a half savage country, out of date;
Bent resolutely on wringing lilies from the acorn;
Capaneus; trout for factitious bait:

And what about Joyce? He used the semicolon sparingly and of course did away with all punctuation in Molly Bloom’s soliloquy, providing us with the patterns and rhythms of her thoughts and consciousness.

Martin Amis bestraddles the style-divide between the US and the UK. His writing shows the influence of Bellow, Roth, and Leonard but also that of Nabokov, Ballard, and Borges. Money is Amis’s attempt at the Great American Novel. Only on the very last page does a semicolon appear:

now here’s that Georgina at last, moving clear of the crowd;
her smile is touching and ridiculous

And in the last sentence he uses that ultimate postmodern punctuation mark – the dash.

– delighted yet austere, and powerfully confident – as she ticks
toward me on her heels.

With this, Amis acknowledges his Britishness – John Self has been defeated in his attempt to take Hollywood by storm and Amis uses punctuation as a metaphor for his acceptance that Money will not be a Humboldt’s Gift or even The Great American Novel. Later, Amis would adopt the verbal mannerisms and tics of American language in The Night Train (much to the disgust of John Updike) and in so doing pinpointed the American voice as the voice of the (post)modern world.

Cormac McCarthy takes this one stage further in No Country for Old Men. His dialogue is almost haiku-like in its brevity and heft.

You could head south to the river
Yeah. You could.
Less open ground.
Less ain’t none.

And this is from All the Pretty Horses:

There was someone there and they had been there. There was
no one there. There was someone there and they had been there
and they had not left but there was no one there.

This is not the arch-Modernism of Beckett, but the way we think and speak.

I did a quick survey of my book collection. I chose, at random, novels by five of my favourite contemporary American and British writers and noted how soon a semicolon appeared within the first ten pages. I was a bit drunk, so if you find any earlier, let me know.

Americans Page
Bret Easton Ellis – Lunar Park, Nada
Paul Auster – The Brooklyn Follies, page 5
Cormac McCarthy – No Country for Old Men, Nada
George Saunders – The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil, Nada
Hunter S Thompson – Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas, Nada

Brits Page
Martin Amis – Yellow Dog, page 4
Ian McEwan – Saturday, page 4
Salman Rushdie – Shalimar the Clown, page 1
James Kelman – You Have to be Careful in the Land of the Free, page 2
Jonathan Raban – For Love and Money, page 2

Brits prefer semis – this is what the world believes.  During that survey, I noticed that semicolons are more prevalent in fiction and some of my favourite writers, notably Orwell and Christopher Hitchens, appear not to use them at all. It was also evident that everyone uses colons. Mmm…that gives me an idea for a column.

Click here to read previous Pond Scum columns.

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Click here for Steve Finbow's bio and a list of works published.

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