Love and dialogue.

Salinger is just an amazing stylist of everyday language, amazing at conveying what he wants to convey, casually without any unnecessary flashiness. I was thinking of that today, looking closely at this quick interchange between the English Esmé (who is about twelve) and the American narrator (a soldier in his twenties who, like Salinger, will be part of the imminent invasion of Normandy):

She guided the conversation in a different direction. “I’d be extremely flattered if you’d write a story exclusively for me sometime. I’m an avid reader.”

I told her I certainly would, if I could. I said that I wasn’t terribly prolific.

“It doesn’t have to be terribly prolific! Just so that it isn’t childish and silly.” She reflected. “I prefer stories about squalor.”

As with almost all of their conversation, in this exchange the narrator reports Esmé's speech verbatim and his own in indirect discourse ("I said that...."). This gives her a vividness that he lacks -- which is the point. I like the way we can tell he did use the exact phrase "terribly prolific" since Esmé repeats those words verbatim in her response. But her vividness comes from the English spin she puts on them. The idiomatic way that Americans use terribly in a sentence is usually in the negative: "I'm not terribly eager to go to that movie." It's understatement via negation of overstatement. The English way is the opposite. It's gracefully hyperbolic. (At a restaurant: "I'm terribly sorry to bother you, but may I have a glass of water without ice?") Esmé (who of course doesn't know what either "prolific" or "squalor" means) is reassuring him that a little prolificacy will be fine. And it's that difference that makes it possible to hear her voice against the grey background of his indirect speech. Another example of what I love about Salinger as a writer.

“Parentheses” (and quotations)

Geoffrey Nunberg (somewhere) makes the point that parentheses and quotations follow similar typographical, and, you could say syntactic rules: If you open a parentheses (with a lunula) you have to close it (with another, facing the opposite way).  Likewise if you open a direct quotation (with raised, inverted commas (auf Englisch, zumindest), you have to close it (with reverted commas, but at the top of the line as well (das gilt auch für Deutsch, für die „Gänsefüßchen”)). (Look closely at what surrounds the words “inverted commas;” there's also a more minor question about punctuation, which can sometimes go inside a closing mark without suggesting that it's part of the original inscription, whereas parenthetical insertions are treated as either part of a sentence, so that there is no punctuation mark just before the last lunula, or they are sentences in themselves, as here, so that the parenthetical at the end of the previous sentence is part of a longer sequence of words and therefore does not itself end with a punctuation mark, whereas this parenthesis is a stand-alone sentence, so it does.)


Another typographical convention that intuits the similarity is the rule that when you break a quotation into paragraphs, you open each paragraph with inverted commas, but only put the reverted commas at the end of the entire quotation.  (Cf. Virginia Woolf's The Waves as a good example of the Hogarth Press's conformity to this rule.)  Similarly, parentheticals that are broken into paragraphs have opening (concave) lunulae at the beginning of every paragraph but closing (convex) lunulae only at the end of the entire parenthesis (I am using “concave” and “convex” as understood intuitively, perhaps: the opening lunula opens an interior space: the closing lunula pushes us onward into the flow of the larger discourse).

I was thinking about this the other day, and realizing that there is an interesting and symmetrical difference between quotations and parentheses.  A parenthetical phrase (like this one) may refer to things outside of it, parts of the sentence it inhabits (say) that have no reciprocal need for the parenthesis (which is why it's parenthetical; look at how cleverly Pope allows you so skip parentheses in The Rape of the Lock without disturbing the rhyme scheme (though parenthetical phrases will often contribute (“(not in vain)” (The Essay on Criticism)) to the meter)).

Quotations on the other hand must not refer to the quoting context, since they precede it logically and temporally.  (“Scare quoted” material may, I suppose, but here they're pretty much meant to quote the context.)  So parentheses are outward-looking, supplemental to the discourse in which they appear, but quotation is inward-looking.  The quoting context is the late-coming supplement, unregarded by the haughty indifference of the quoted words.

Ghostlier demarcations

An Honest Ghost

A Novel

by Rick Whitaker

 

A book that furnishes no quotations is no book — it is a plaything. Next to the originator of a good sentence is the first quoter of it. How frequently the mere purchase of a book is mistaken for the appropriation of its contents.  Many will read the book before one thinks of quoting a passage.

 

This book consists of quotations and nothing but quotations.  They are ordered according to a rigorous system of semantic relationships, which like an invisible hand guides the seeker to his "lucky” find.  In this case, a love story with a somewhat bizarre and morbid twist. 

 

But isn't that what David Markson did (for longer) in This Is Not A Novel?  No. Not at all. This book is different, for all its seeming fragmentation, nonetheless obstinately cross-referential and of cryptic interconnective syntax.  Here's a guy who has turned his genre into a vehicle for serious ideas and serious emotion--and has never, unlike Markson, been tempted to write more than necessary.  Markson hesitates to label his work "experimental" and instead characterizes his novels -- both "literally crammed with literary and artistic anecdotes" and "nonlinear, discontinuous, collage-like, an assemblage" -- as "playful."  There is no linear (or nonlinear) sequence of events to exploit with a wink-nudge because there is no novelistic time employed at all, no events that would require such sequencing.

 

Whitaker deserves more credit.  What he’s doing is harder.  And much more entertaining.  More like Christian Marclay. Watch the Clock.  Time, so to speak, is everywhere in the movies, and the delight of the experience is that the grab bag becomes a fun house: you never know what’s going to pop up.

 

A book may measure so-called reality as a clock measures so-called time; a book may create an illusion of reality as a clock creates an illusion of time; a book may be real, just as a clock is real (both more real, perhaps, than those ideas to which they allude); but let's not kid ourselves - all a clock contains is wheels and springs and all a book contains is sentences.

 

But what else is love?  Words heated originally by the breath of others.  The value of a sentence is in the personality which utters it, for nothing new can be said by man or woman. The hidden life of love is in the most inward depths, unfathomable, and still has an unfathomable relationship with the whole of existence. Call those works extravagance of breath, of the incalculable amount of tenderness contained in the world; of the fate of this tenderness, which is either crushed or wasted, or transformed into madness; of neglected children humming to themselves in unswept corners; of beautiful weeds that cannot hide from the farmer.  And bid them love each other and be blest.

 

 

Derrida, Austin, Quotation, Evolution

Derrida's critique of Austin isn't an unhelpful one, since it evinces just the sort of metaphysical thinking that Austin and Wittgenstein are concerned to think past.  Basically, Derrida's claim in "Signature Event Context" is that quotation can't be "parasitic" on performative utterances because to engage in such an utterance requires a citation or quotation of the appropriate formula.  (Like everyone else, and I do mean everyone Derrida neglects Austin's distinction between "hollow" and "void" performative utterances, but that's for another post.)  So performative utterances are logically dependent on a practice of quotation.

This is wrong.  It would be far better to say that the very idea of quotation arises out of performative utterances.  Performative utterances -- or Wittgenstein's language games -- come first.  It may be possible to formulate the rules of such games, but those formulations are descriptive, not prescriptive, attempts to formalize what we do.  Performative utterances, and moves in language games more generally, are practices before they are more-or-less-successful attempts to be adequate to some set of rules governing them.

For Wittgenstein these are practices which arise out of what he calls "agreement in forms of life." The supersubtle mechanisms by which such agreement could evolve (see, for example, Robert Axelrod's Evolution of Cooperation) can't and won't have presupposed something so crude as Derridean citation. Quotation in the Paris-is-Burning Jennie Livingston sense, possibly, where quotation is something closer to biological mimesis as Roger Caillois understands it: interaction, gaming, self-exposure to the spatial world. But this has almost nothing to do with Derridean formalism.

But what we could see, and say, is that citation, verbatim quotation, the idea of the verbatim, Quinean inscription, arise from performatives.  Formulae are fossilized performatives, and the idea of a formula (which is of course manifold in rituals and rites themselves dependent on prior belief in the performative power of utterance, a belief raised to a magical pitch) can give rise (see Homer and Milman Parry) to the idea of quotation itself.

So the great, Emersonian literary device of quotation is secondary to performative utterance.  That's what makes it literature: the evocation of a fictive world, where the performances aren't real, and all the more haunting for that reason.  Maybe I should say something about the hollow vs. the void.  In Austin hollow performatives are those which are not "meant," are those which the utterer performs without any intent to back them up.  Void performatives are those which have no standing, no matter how passionately they are uttered.  Fiction or the literary is the region, then, of the void, not of the hollow.  The poet nothing lieth because he nothing affirmeth, but instead gives us some sense of what the void is, next to which our loquacious selves are so precariously perched (to allude to Kenneth Burke).