So, How Do You Feel About Quotation Marks?

 Why Are So Many Authors Abandoning Speech Marks? Sally Rooney, Ian Williams, and Lauren Groff are just a few of the contemporary authors avoiding quotation marks for dialogue by Maija Kappler from The Walrus asks a question that interests me as a technical matter. I did not think of it as a political matter.

The choice can be somewhat disorienting, and it can take readers a little longer to get into the book’s flow. But it’s a choice that’s increasingly common in modern fiction. Some of the best and buzziest contemporary writers—Sally Rooney, Ian Williams, Bryan Washington, Celeste Ng, Ling Ma—render their dialogue free of quotation marks. The reasons vary, but more writers are dropping speech marks to explore distances between readers and narrators and even to eliminate hierarchies.
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Today, many writers who go quote free, Toews among them, say it’s more of an instinct than a specific choice. Quotation marks are “just not my thing,” Toews told me in an email. “It just felt right at the time, when I started writing one hundred years ago, and I never stopped.” To start using them now would feel alien, she said. “I often don’t even know where they actually go, they look a bit messy on the page.” (In an interview with Oprah Winfrey, Cormac McCarthy cited James Joyce in a similar explanation for making the same choice: “There’s no reason to block the page up with weird little marks,” McCarthy said. “If you write properly, you shouldn’t have to punctuate.”) But Toews acknowledges that the choice has allowed her writing to embody a certain propulsive rhythm: “I didn’t want quotation marks to slow me down.”

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Choosing not to demarcate what a character observes and what they say out loud is still a rare enough choice in fiction that it can communicate urgency or poignance; it can create the sense that there’s no separation between a character’s experience of the world and the world itself. Billy-Ray Belcourt avoided quotation marks in his novel A Minor Chorus, one of the most acclaimed Canadian books of last year, in part, he said, because of his unnamed narrator’s subjectivity. The book wouldn’t exist outside of the character; everything filtered through his experience. “Maybe because it’s in the first person, I couldn’t rely on the omniscience of complete memory,” Belcourt says. “It didn’t make sense to me to suggest that what these characters were saying was something that the protagonist would be able to seamlessly recall.”
Many contemporary novels that style dialogue no differently than internal narration play with that sense of how subjective everything is: rather than position their narrators as impartial observers, these novelists draw attention to just how implicated they actually are. Ian Williams used quotation marks in his 2011 short story collection, Not Anyone’s Anything, but left them out of his 2019 novel, Reproduction. “Their absence indicates to me the fluidity between our language and our thoughts or between our language and our being,” he told Hazlitt. “We tend to think of language as something that’s intended for the outside but really language is constantly running inside of us. It’s hard to know exactly where a sentence starts.”

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The movement away from quotation marks may be contagious. Deborah Levy used them in her acclaimed 2019 novel, The Man Who Saw Everything. But she was tempted not to, she told Penguin UK, because “most of the contemporary writers I admired had skillfully ditched them and I knew this was the way to go.” Lauren Groff has abandoned them in most of her recent work: “Quotes feel declaratory, as though the speaker steps onto a pedestal before they speak,” she wrote on Twitter, now known as X, in 2021. And Don Gillmor also got rid of them for his new novel, Breaking and Entering. “Removing the quotation marks changed the mood in a sense and created a slight distance that altered the feel of the prose,” he said in an interview with his publisher, Biblioasis. His inspiration: two Canadian writers he admires, Lisa Moore and Miriam Toews.

KH sent me a pithy (he does pithy quite well) analysis:

I believe the actual motivation for eliminating quotation marks may be found in the last paragraph- "...Twitter, now known as X..."

I don't think it's coincidence that this movement gains momentum with the arrival of the text message. For all the high-falutin' talk, I suspect sloth to be the culprit.

I know I hate hitting the quotation key. Which is why I would like to omit the mark, but why and where remain unanswered questions.

sch  10/12