Quotation Marks

Maybe I never understood Cormac McCarthy's lack of quotation marks. For me, this made his novels to be read out loud, as I do with poetry.

Then came some critiques of my writing dialog, which I will summarize as being more about exposition than a conversation. All right, I have spent much time reading plays and trying to write a few.

All these thoughts came out as I read Larissa Pham's Thought, Speech: Dialogue Without Quotation Marks (Poets & Writers).

In my second semester of graduate school, I stopped setting my dialogue in quotation marks. At the time, I was working on a historical novel, set in Vietnam, and I was struggling with the voices of my characters—they felt too stagey, too dramatized. I suspected it was something about the quotation marks—the way they drew the eye immediately, throwing the dialogue up onto a slightly different plane from the rest of the text. It read like lines, not speech. 

And they are lines for me, just as if the story were a play. I have a sense that people act, so my characters were acting. Some of that acting was meant to be explicit.

I continue to work on “Love Stinks” in which I use two different time frames. Memory was meant to be a construct like a play. But then Ms. Pham blows that idea up.

Though I don’t replicate Moss’s technical trick in Discipline, I was interested in a narrator who filters experience for the reader, and who also withholds information—and even emotion—from other characters, as well as herself. Christine, the narrator of Discipline, is a writer, one who has turned a real-life relationship into a sensationalized novel. She’s an unreliable narrator precisely because she is a writer—she knows the power storytelling holds—and it was a pleasure to push that part of her character, applying pressure on what not only Christine but also the reader takes to be the truth. When we see quotation marks on a page, we assume what they contain is, in some way, true. We believe someone said that, for dialogue is faithful. In removing quotation marks, we ask the reader to read carefully, thoughtfully, and to trust our narrator to take them somewhere else, somewhere new.  

Do I want to rethink “Love Stinks”? I am always thinking and rethinking. The point trying to be made in that story (and several others) is to put the purported truth in one character's memory against the purported truth in another's memory. The truth would contain parts of both characters's memories. Of juxtapositions showing unreliabilty.

But what if instead of a contrast conveyed through competing marks, what about memory without quotation marks and current affairs denoted by marks?

Something to think about. It is also easier typing without quotation marks.

sch 5/27