Marking Realism in Dubliners

Abstract

The relationship between the speech and the person making the speech, as between the action and the initiator of the action, has never been a constant one in the history of literary form.- Viktor Shklovsky, Theory of Prose115What is life? That's the question. Something not necessarily leading to plot. Burke the question of reality, in the absolute. Question only what is real to us. Something perhaps not dramatic nor humorous, not tragic: just the quality of the day.-Virginia Woolf, ModemNovels (Joyce)1161 IntroductionWriting to Harriet Weaver Shaw on 11 July 1924 regarding the setting of the Jonathan Cape edition of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce complains that They set the book with perverted commas and I insisted on their removal (LIII99).117 Joyce's objection to what he perceived as the abnormality of inverted commas is only one in a long series of examples where he protested against the actions of compositors, publishers, and printers who often changed his experimental punctuation to conform to their expectations of normal punctuation. In this essay, I examine Joyce's correspondence with Grant Richards in preparation for the first edition of Dubliners. Punctuation was a focal of their debate, a controversy that illuminates how the implied set of normative conventions that a reader (whether the publisher himself or what a publisher thinks about a body of general readers) brings to a text can profoundly impact the often-implicit aesthetic expectations that influence taste and textual production. In this case, their different points of view related directly to punctuation's representative capacity, which Joyce identified with a strand of realism.2 Historical contextIn the Dubliners manuscripts, Joyce wrote with what he called dialogue between (LI 75), meaning two dashes on either side of the dialogue. The decision to do so marked a deliberate affinity with continental realist novelists and a turn away from the standardized use of inverted commas, a printing convention used in English texts since Jane Austen.118 A closer look at the history of punctuation makes evident the ways in which the dash, deriving from printed dramatic texts, marks speech in English and French novels. In the eighteenth century, the English-language novel developed largely from the popularity of Samuel Richardson, a successful printer who used typographical features taken from printed dramatic texts to signify speech.119 Through Richardson, typographical conventions, such as the em-dash or ellipsis, migrated from printed drama to fiction. Plays such as The Provoked Wife (1697) and The Country Wife (1675), among others, use the dash as a point of suspension to suggest the illusion of speech as immediate, hesitant, or fragmentary, as the following examples demonstrate:In the early stages of the novel, writers used many punctuation marks, including the em-dash, ellipsis, and diple (the single quotation mark at the beginning of each line) to signify speech. Printings of Clarissa (1748), for example, use the diple to indicate speech:An example from Pamela (1740) shows how the dash gives the impression of immediacy:120According to M.B. Parkes's authoritative book, Pause and Effect: An Introduction to the Histoty of Punctuation in the West, the French use of the tiret, or single dash, may well have been influenced by those of Samuel Richardson and other English novelists.121 The guillemets (« ») followed by tirets (-) were used by Balzac as early as 1822. Images included here show representative examples.Most French novels still use the tiret to mark the beginning of a character's speech. English novels, by contrast, began regularly using inverted commas by the early nineteenth century, thus giving the illusion of direct speech associated with the realist tradition, as seen in the below example from Middlemarch (1874):Inverted commas and quotation marks give the impression of citing, miming, or otherwise mimetically reproducing a character's speech, with the effect that the spoken word of a character has been realistically transcribed onto the page. …