Punctuation

By Mary McLoughlin

All definitions of punctuation agree on one point. Punctuation marks serve to clarify meaning. They are used to mark a pause within a sentence in order to help the reader or listener understand better what the writer or speaker is trying to convey. It is an address to the other. But punctuation exists in fact in the negative. Even in its visible form as in a text, it is never named. It is silent, but it is a silence that can be heard, a break in words, or a change in intonation to express a question, surprise, an emotion. It can be compared to the grammar of music and, as in music is concerned with the prosody of words. It is a regulation of the tempo, beat and intensity of what is being said. It is also an interpretation; it imposes a choice and gives a certain direction. For example “To be or not to be, that is the question” is very different from “To be or not, to be that is the question”. It is the scansion that Lacan used in his sessions, because, as he said, “this technique breaks the discourse in order to deliver speech.” (Function and Field of Speech and Language).

Punctuation often follows the respiration of the speaker, so is in direct link with the movements of the body. It embodies the text, gives corpus to what is being said. It is difficult to say whether there is more punctuation in French or in English. All I can say is that when I translate from one to the other I lose all my bearings. As if I am losing the anchors and stabilizers of the language, the bones and muscles of the text, the very foundations of language.

Punctuation can be seen as a way of grounding the discourse, giving it a particular direction. So what happens in the absence of punctuation? When thinking about this what first came to my mind was that particular style of writing at the beginning of the 20^th century known as stream of consciousness. Writers such as James Joyce and Virginia Wolff, immediately spring to mind. Stream of consciousness is a narrative device that attempts to give the written equivalent of the character’s thought processes. It often takes the form of an interior monologue that excludes the other. One of the characteristics of this style is often a lack of punctuation. The thoughts ramble on in a continuous flow, apparently following no rule or convention; no acknowledgement is given to the reader/listener, there is no effort at facilitating understanding. James Joyce’s Ulysses is a prime example and in particular Molly’s monologue, which comprises some 60 pages without any form of punctuation, and marks the end of this majestic work. There is an anecdote attached to this monologue. Apparently when it was being translated into French for the first time Joyce refused the use of French accents on the words, saying that the only accent he wanted for Molly was the Irish one.

Another Irish writer known for his originality and invention of style is Samuel Beckett, who had the added particularity of writing in both languages, French and English. One of his major works is “Comment C’est” (a play on words on “commencer”), written first in French in 1961, and in English in 1964 with the title of “How is it”. This very strange text is again an interior monologue, concerning a man who lies panting in the mud and murmuring his life as he hears it uttered by a voice inside him. The style is dense, poetic and unpunctuated. Beckett’s aim in this particular style of writing is to force the reader to undergo the same experience of suffocating. The reading of the text attacks the very core of the body and its respiration. It is a very solitary experience. Like in a dream, or rather a nightmare. This raises the question of punctuation in dreams but that is another subject.

Maybe the first form of punctuation is to be found in word separation, the blanks or spaces between words. This technique was apparently invented by Irish scribes in the 7^th century when confronted with the Scriptio continua(“continuous script”) of Medieval Latin manuscripts. The monks started using blank spaces to improve the intelligibility of the texts and to allow for silent reading. By the 8^th and 9^th century spacing was being used fairly consistently across Europe.

I have chosen today to talk about punctuation, or the lack of it, from an Irish point of view because somewhere we can say that punctuation was invented by the Irish in the 7^th century, and a form of unpunctuated writing was invented by the same in the 20^th century.

(This text was originally presented at the Exiled in Language conference in London, 2019)