Curious

I’m a faithless Internet surfer “visited on a lunar basis by these great unspecific waves” of bloglust. And that is all I can say in defense of such a belated response to Lionel Shriver’s WSJ article, “Missing the Mark.” Shriver’s opening argument explains why I think a rebuttal is still worth dishing out:

Literature is not very popular these days, to put it mildly. According to the National Endowment for the Arts, nearly half of Americans do not read books at all, and those who do average a mere six a year. You’d think literary writers would be bending over backwards to ingratiate themselves to readers — to make their work maximally accessible, straightforward and inviting. But no.

Augh! Make it stop. Even on a forgiving day, one cannot overlook the faults in her opening argument. Where are her formal definitions of “literature,” “books,” or “literary writers”? (One assumes from the tone that the “popular[ity]” of these “books” has fallen into decline, although her standard for such a judgment is unclear.) In addition her assumption that writers write for the average American reader, as implied by her use of the NEA statistics, is naive and possibly invalidates her case for anomalistic behavior among “literary writers” altogether.

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.

By putting the onus on the reader to determine which lines are spoken and which not, the quoteless fad feeds the widespread conviction that popular fiction is fun while literature is arduous. Surely what should distinguish literature isn’t that it’s hard but that it’s good.

On a more personal note, if I were Shriver I’d don a little humility before publicly vilifying writers such as Saramago or Coetzee. And “surely” nothing should be assumed, especially any universal agreement regarding a decades-old debate about the merits of difficulty and aesthetic “greatness.”

The text should be as easy to process as possible, saving the readers’ effort for exercising imagination and keeping track of the plot.

It sounds as if she’s describing the writing rubric for a DIY instruction manual.

Nevertheless, to give credit where credit is due let me admit that Shriver does imply that a writer’s decision to drop quotation marks is not inherently evil…

What effect is this quote-free format meant to achieve? Ideally, a minimalism that lends text a subtlety and sophistication.

…before utterly failing to find any examples of such artistic justifications no matter how hard she tries. Although she stops short of declaring quotelessness a sin, she fails to enumerate any distinctions between laudable artistry and the gilded lilies that surround her, leaving me to wonder: is it ever OK to omit quotation marks? Here’s her evaluation of McCarthy’s trademark dialogues.

The absence of quotation marks may intensify the gruffness of the exchange. Punctuation errors may also imply the lack of formal education typical of his characters. Perhaps the dialogue is all the more swallowed by a vast Western expanse, in which human utterances amount to mere tufts of sage-brush.

Yet take the same passage with quotes* added…Is that landscape any less vast? Honestly, what do we lose when we insert those quotes? To Mr. McCarthy’s credit, he has at least carved out his own style, which other writers have aped. Yet it is hard to imagine that his often riveting, atmospheric novels would be of any lower literary quality with proper punctuation.

This evaluation of McCarthy is at best harsh and at worst a losing battle; fortunately, Shriver’s other criticisms, like that of Susanna Moore, are more meritorious. Shriver’s main arguments are as follows: omitting quotation marks (a) can prove confusing, (b) does not free a work from clutter, and (c) encourages solipsism. I won’t argue with her criticism of the “faddish,” stylistic trademarks aspiring novelists misguidedly pin to their uniforms. Nevertheless, what’s lacking is any recognition that confusion, clutter, and solipsism can serve a legitimate purpose in literature (cf. Faulkner’s Light in August).

Shriver’s criticisms could be tolerable if she framed them with more reserve. Why not write “In Defense of the Quotation Mark”? It proves much easier to swallow than “Missing the Mark.” Shriver would have done well to issue a modest call for re-evaluation rather than a witch-hunt. It’s a classic case of overbidding, a fault which I must shamefully own as a frequent, personal trespass, and something I’m surprised to see the Wall Street Journal didn’t question.

*Lest I appear too harsh, let me acknowledge that few can journey through life without forming idiosyncratic pet peeves. Mine, a staunch disgust for the use of (the verb) “quote” as a noun, probably affected my charity toward Ms. Shriver, who violated this “rule” more times than I care to count. But my obsession with the functional distinction between “to quote” and “a quotation” is just that: a passe obsession, and not one of the ten commandments.

Relevant Blog: http://quotation-marks.blogspot.com/