Demise of Quotation Marks

I recently finished reading Autumn, the recent novel of the British novelist Ali Smith. The novel was short-listed for the 2017 Man-Booker Prize.

I am not planning to review Autumn in this post; I shall do it some other time. Suffice to say that I did not like the novel. It was reasonably riveting in parts; it even brought a smile to my face a couple of time; however, it lacked focus and coherent narrative, I thought.

Smith has a peculiar writing style. Not my cup of tea, I have to say. I have read reviews of Smith’s novels, which are encomiastic of Smith’s narrative style. Smith’s writing is often described as lyrical. I find the sentence structures clunky. Smith sometimes uses words, which, while they broadly convey the accepted meanings, are employed to perform syntactic roles that are unconventional. For example, in Autumn, Smith uses the word ‘maudlin’ as a noun, and not as an adjective which is its accepted role.

I can live with that. Thus when a character in Autumn declares that she is descending into 'the maudlin' I have no difficulty in understanding what is being conveyed.

What I find not easy to countenance is Smith’s use of punctuation marks which could be described, depending on your turn of mind, quirky or maddening. In Autumn Smith has dispensed entirely with quotation marks. I can’t remember whether she has done this in her earlier novels. I had read a novel of Smith a few years ago, the unusually named There but for The. I don’t remember anything about this novel other than that it was (like Autumn) an easy enough read, mildly amusing in parts, but overall, something of a let-down. Perhaps Smith did not use any quotation marks in that novel either.

Smith is not the only novelist who has decided that quotation marks, like NHS and EU-membership, are indulgences the British public can do without (although, throughout Autumn (the novel, that is, not the season) there is an undercurrent of despair at the UK’s exit from the EU, which suggests that Smith is not as much against the EU-membership as against quotation marks). There are other novelists, including some American novelists, who have stopped using quotation marks in their novels.

I don’t know about you, but I find reading books which do not use quotation marks while directly quoting someone irksome. You can argue that the quotation marks are not necessary to indicate a dialogue; anyone with two neurones to rub together will understand a dialogue even when there are no quotation marks. I wold say that quotation marks make it easy and obvious to the reader when a dialogue is being reported or quoted in the book. Absence of quotation marks makes reading a bit more tiring (and tiresome) for me. In Smith’s novel, for example (as in some other novels I have read but can’t remember), a comma serves the purpose of indicating to the reader that the character in the novel is speaking.

I read an article in the Guardian which suggested that the practice of not using quotation marks is relatively recent. The Guardian traced it to an issue of Granta magazine, in 2012, when its then editor, the American novelist John Freeman, decided to remove all the quotation marks in the magazine. Freeman’s purported intention was to make the writing ‘more immediate, more with it’. I have no idea what Freeman meant by this. I also wonder whether Freeman envisaged that some novelists would take to this practice like Damian Green to Internet porn and make a bonfire of quotation marks.

Authors going back as far as the first century have used some or the other symbol to indicate noteworthy text, so I read in the article in the Guardian. The quotation marks as we know them have been used for close to two centuries. They were preceded by double commas to indicate quotations.

Some novelists like Ali Smith are doing away with at least two centuries of conventions when they dispense with quotation marks in their novels. One can only speculate what their intentions are; perhaps, like John Freeman who started this trend, they feel that their writing becomes more direct to the reader when they remove quotation marks. To this reader the writing does not become more direct when quotation marks are removed. It becomes irritating. I am glad that this practice is not widespread.