the mcluhan galaxy: punctuation as massage
Last week, I was thinking about punctuation that is authorial and punctution that is editorial, trying to argue that the former does not necessarily take precedent over the latter in the understanding and appreciation of a literary piece of work. This led me to re-read McKenzie’s lectures on the sociology of bibliography, how meaning is created at the interface of writer, transmitter, reader, textual material, and circumstances of production. And this, in turn, led me to dip into the work of Marshall McLuhan, which is a fun and crazy ride through a prolific oeuvre of thought that becomes particularly curious with hindsight, now that we have the internet which he predicted in the 1960s, that return to an oral culture of collective identity and tribe-like affinities and behaviours. Although, of couse, it’s the written oral, or oral written, as we translate speaking into a hyper-literate world of digital communication (emoji emergence might qualify that dominance of phonemic writing, perhaps).
In McLuhan’s aphorism, the message is not content, what is semantically or metaphorically said, but the social effect of the characteristics of the medium. The ground, as it were, or context, of culture, religion, beliefs, values, practices, attitudes. Things that change imperceptibly, and are hard to notice. For example, planes are not hard to notice, but the change of attitude that goes with travelling so quickly is. A different perception of time, and connectivity, of distance, how to bridge it physically, in reality.
In that sense, punctuation is a medium, and the changes of cognition and attitude that it brings with it are the message, even (or particularly) changes in cultural practices that go beyond the individual, and affect the customs of large groups of people.
One hypothesis for the increased introduction of several signs of punctuation within just two hundred years or so, between 1400 and 1600 (in comparison to the slow diffuse evolution of spaces, dots, colon, and comma over 2000 years) is that it improves reading speed: as you don’t have to pore over letters forever trying to figure out syntactical relationships as well as tone and emotional meaning, you can get the gist quickly through the clarification afforded by punctuation. You can react faster, dash a reply off, and continue with your business. Quite literally, the hypothesis argues, since the faster pace of epistolary communication particularly concerned merchants and other kinds of business people who were able to do more in less time. Fifteenth-century proto-capitalists.So, in the McLuhan world, punctuation is the medium which allows for faster communication, hence better trade relationships, hence enabling capitalism (the message).
While I think that this is a valid and useful way of understanding punctuation, I also believe it’s too neat. Would McLuhan subscribe to this way of applying his dictum? Perhaps not. But he did say that reading is guessing. In a televised interview in Australia, McLuhan explores the etymology of ‘to read’, coming from the Old English ‘raedan’, going back to ‘raten’, to guess, which is still used in modern German for example. He says a reader needs to guess, or pick rather, one of the manifold meanings of any one word based on its wordish neighbours and the general drift of the text, the word’s environment, word-wise and sense-wise. A good reader is thus someone who is good at guessing, someone who takes decisions quickly, snatches them out of the mist of their mind, their intuition, experience. A good reader is a good executive.
And punctuation, speeding up this guesswork, is a handmaid, then, to the executive. But punctuation is also more headstrong than that, it also slows reading down, and it also complicates meaning, multiplies polysemous possibilities and connotations. Take, for example, one of my favourite poems by Kim Addonizio.
Obviously, most work of punctuation confusing-where-one-sense-stops-and-another-starts is done by the mere space between words. And then there’s the enigmatic ampersand and forward slash in the penultimate and last lines of the sonnet, just before the volta, preparing us for the jolt of the personal pronoun and the expression of affection and the promise (mark the lack of full stop: it’s a promise, it’s future, it’s ever coming towards us).
I have to admit… I have no idea (yet) what’s up with the ampersand. It’s like Addonizio tries her best to avoid writing ‘and’, instead offering us strings of conditional clauses, all governed by the one ‘if’ at the beginning of the octave, and again another at the beginning of the sestet. ‘And’ would compartmentalize all those enumerated experiences, but without any conjunction or actual mark of punctuation in between, all experiences are somehow all one, and if you have experienced one, you’ve also experienced the others, and so this poem is for you, and for you, and for you, and for me. For all you who have and so on.
In literary criticism jargon, the rhetorical device governing the structure of the syntax and poem as a whole is apo koinou. A word, or expression, referring backwards and forwards at the same time, belonging to both clauses, providing the link between them, a conjunction without ‘and’, as it were. For example: ‘if you swam across a river under rain sang/using a dildo’ (lines 8-9). The apo koinou here is ‘under the rain’, because it connects swimming across a river and singing with a dildo as mic. The (lack of) punctuation of the poem thus mimics the multi-directionality of reference, of pointing here and there, to you, and me, and her, the woman in the next stall.
None of this explains the ampersand.
Perhaps it’s a case of the ampersand’s sinuous involved shape, folding back on itself while leaning forward. The perfect form representing the apo koinou.
Perhaps we’re also not even supposed to replace the ampersand with a spoken ‘and’ in our mind’s voice or otherwise. Just registering the shape and what it does is enough. It’s an elegant visual marker, allowing the eyes and the mind to rest after the rolling avalanche of if-clauses.
The last line puzzles me, too. Should we efface the forward slash into ‘no one can listen’, or does it provide a true stop, refusing the workings of apo koinou while still nudging towards it, acknowledging that this has been its way of thinking all the way through – but now the poem refuses pointing everywhere and at everyone, because now it’s about ‘I’ and ‘you’.
The Old English etymology of reading also includes ‘making sense’, ‘interpreting’, and also ‘counseling’. Reading gives counsel and comfort. Punctuation confuses and clarifies. Literature, good literature (good punctuation!), is always more wayward than one thinks.
[last updated 31 August 2022]