Punctuation (Opposition)

"Like a , , , , , , , , , , this look between us."

JORIE GRAHAM

While writing existed long before punctuation was invented, there is no more rudimentary form of inscription than the punctuation mark. The dot, the line, the curve — these are writing's elements. As marks of punctuation — as period, comma, hyphen, parenthesis, or question mark — they both interrupt and conjoin. They divide, but also mark time. Punctuation makes us feel writing. It makes the virtual real.

There is no shortage of scholarship on punctuation. We have numerous accounts of the invention, the fashionability, and the fall of certain types of punctuation marks (whither the semicolon). And since the late eighteenth century, we also have numerous prescriptive works on punctuation's rules. With the spread of literacy and the expansion of print in the nineteenth century, the manual of style would emerge as a quintessentially modern genre, books of syntactical paternalism encircling the unruly hordes of the printed masses. And then there is the seemingly endless parade of interpretive engagements with singular moments of punctuation: the disputed semicolon at the close of Faust 2; the famous dash of Kleist's "Marquise von O."; the missing period at the end of Whitman's first version of "Song of Myself"; or the parenthesis in e. e. cummings's "windows go orange in the slowly" that is both its own line and a visual index of the quarter moon about which the poem speaks — a form of onomatographia, when we use punctuation marks to look like objects in the world.

Throughout all of this, however, we have never had a history of what Georges Bataille might have called the general economy of punctuation, a study of the norms and excesses of punctuation in a given period. What is the meaning of punctuation's distributions, its luxuriant overaccumulation, as well as its rhythmic rise and fall, "the delay of language," in poet Amiri Baraka's words? To study the economy of punctuation, and not just a few singular auratic marks, is to study the way spacing and pacing make meaning on the page. It is to understand the way tactics of interruption, delay, rhythm, periodicity, and stoppage are all essential ways of communicating within literature's long history. The economy of punctuation allows us to see the social norms surrounding how we feel about the discontinuities of what we want to say.

Take for example Paul Scheerbart's Lesabéndio, a science fiction novel written in the opening decades of the twentieth century. The story concerns the main character's wish to build a tower to transcend his planetary limits. His goal, he says, is to commune with "the Larger [das Größere]." Quantity for Scheerbart is the new Babel. The planet on which Lesabéndio lives, an asteroid off Jupiter named Pallas, is populated by stretchy people with suction feet who have telescopic eyes. They don't have sex and are born from nuts. Their books are microfilms that they wear around their necks. When they die, they are absorbed by another member of the planet, who stretches extremely high and takes in the dying member through his or her pores. It was one of Walter Benjamin's favorite novels.

Whatever else it is, Lesabéndio is unique in its predilection for periods. It belongs to a select group of novels in the German canon that use an almost equal ratio of periods to commas (the average since the late eighteenth century is closer to 2.6 commas for every period). Even more telling is when the novel uses periods. There is a moment around the midpoint of the novel when the amount of periods increases significantly (fig. 1.1). Even the lowest occasions of period use after this moment are above the highest in the novel's first half. What has happened?

Over the course of the first half of the story, Lesabéndio has been building support for his tower. In the process, he has overcome one obstacle after another. But a crisis is reached when his colleague Peka, the artist, feels that his role in the project has been undermined. In the segment with more periods than any other in the novel, Peka cries: "You have destroyed me! You have taken everything from me. You have annihilated me. Your cursed tower has made a poor end of my artistic dreams." It is at this point that Peka begins crying, only to realize that his tears provide a new kind of glue that is needed to overcome what initially appeared as an insurmountable technical obstacle. Technology triumphs on the fluid surfaces of human sadness.

This moment marks a major turning point in the novel, a kind of conversional axis within the narrative. And it is the period and its accumulation that captures this conversion, the fate of art in the age of industrialization. "This is no longer an artistic story — it is something other — something incomprehensible," says Lesabéndio just after the novel's meridian. The period's rise marks a turning point toward something unknown, something greater than oneself, something potentially inhuman.

The General Economy of Punctuation

Lesabéndio's predilection for periods was not unique. Over the course of the twentieth century, both novels and poetry, at least in English, were increasing the frequencies with which they used periods, at the same time that commas were decreasing (fig. 1.2). Indeed, in the case of English-language poetry, punctuation itself has been decreasing for the past century or so. Poetry appears to be heading toward writing's unpunctuated origins as a form of continuous script.

If novels like Lesabéndio were increasingly relying on periods to mark their punctuatedness, this was true within novels as well. Like Lesabéndio, more often than not novels in English tend toward using more periods as the plot progresses, especially as we move into the twentieth century (fig. 1.3).

One way we might try to understand this is to see it as a trend toward narrative resolution. The pensiveness and contradictions of commas give way to the clarity and pointedness of periods. Periods mark ends, and thus there are more of them as the narration reaches an end. This is certainly true in a work like The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), whose commas decline precipitously toward the close of the novel as we move out of the young man's sentimental outpourings and into the colder, more clinical narrative of the editor. The utter erasure of punctuation from Molly Bloom's monologue at the close of James Joyce's Ulysses tells the same story in reverse. The absence of punctuation reminds us how much this novel resists closure.

But rather than see the period as a mark that exclusively indicates an end, whether narrative or glottal, Scheerbart's novel suggests the power of the increased quantity of periods to signal a sense of an opening. Quantity makes a difference to the dot's meaning. As Lesabéndio ascends his tower ever further...