NEW WRITING: MODERNISM, PUNCTUATION, AND THE INTERMEDIAL TEXT
BY
SUSAN SOLOMON
B.A. UNIVERSITY OF CONNECTICUT, 2001
M.A. UNIVERSITY OF CONNECTICUT, 2005
A.M. BROWN UNIVERSITY, 2009
A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS
FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN THE DEPARTMENT OF
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE AT BROWN UNIVERSITY
© Copyright 2013 by Susan Solomon
iii
CURRICULUM VITAE
Susan Solomon was born in 1979 in New London, Connecticut. She graduated with a
B.A. from the Honors Program at the University of Connecticut, Storrs, where she
majored in English and German and minored in Women’s Studies. She spent 2001-2002
at the Humboldt Universität zu Berlin as a Fulbright Student. In 2003, she returned to the
University of Connecticut to earn an M.A. in English, where she also taught freshman
writing seminars. In 2005, she entered the graduate program in Comparative Literature at
Brown University and received her A.M. in 2009. In 2008-09, she participated in an
exchange between Brown University and the Eberhard Karls University in Tübingen. At
Brown she served as a teaching assistant and instructor for the Department of
Comparative Literature, and as a proctor for differences in the Pembroke Center for
Teaching on Women and Gender and the Modernist Journals Project in the Department
of Modern Culture and Media. Her essay, “Turning Points: Periodizing New Writing,”
received the 2013 Albert Spaulding Cook prize for best comparative essay by a graduate
student from the Department of Comparative Literature at Brown.
iv
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would not have completed this dissertation without the extended fellowship
support I received from the Graduate School, the Department of Comparative Literature,
and the Modernist Journals Project/ Modern Culture and Media Department at Brown
University. I am extremely grateful to Karen Newman, Robert Scholes, Kenneth Haynes,
Susan Bernstein, Esther Whitfield, Susan Davis, Charles Auger, and Dean Brian Walton
for their efforts in helping me to this end. I must acknowledge Carol Wilson-Allen and
Charles Auger for their regular assistance in navigating the tangled administrative paths
of the university and for their daily kindness.
I am thankful to all of the graduate students in comparative literature with whom I
have studied, learned from, and been supported by during my time at Brown University,
especially those in my entering cohort; extra thanks to Signe Christensen for her
unequalled friendship and comraderie.
I would like to express my gratitude to Dana Gooley for teaching me to listen to
the music Adorno wrote about, to Zachary Sng for his always thoughtful comments, and
to Karen Newman for the opportunity to teach an undergraduate seminar related to this
project as well as for her guidance and encouragement. I am grateful to Arnold
Weinstein, from whose lectures I have learned a great deal about modernism, and more
recently to Michelle Clayton, whose teaching of Ulysses energized my last months here.
My heartfelt thanks to Margaret R. Higonnet for introducing me to comparative literature,
teaching me to be a scholar, and for her dedicated mentorship over the past 14 years.
I owe limitless thanks to my committee members, each of whom I deeply admire
as scholars and teachers. Thank you to Ravit Reichman for her advice and encouragement
since this project’s earliest phase as a short paper in her Modern Novel seminar and for
acting, unknowingly, as a wonderful role model. I am grateful to Kevin McLaughlin,
Robert Scholes, and Susan Bernstein for the massive amount of time they have dedicated
to this dissertation by reading, commenting on, and discussing it in its various pieces and
forms over the past four years. To Kevin for his guidance and intellectual inspiration
since my first semester at Brown, for his patience, and for persisting as an advisor despite
tremendous responsibilities as Dean of Faculty. To Susan for her patience, attentive
reading, encouragement, and for her high standards. And to Bob for his generosity as a
teacher, employer, and friend, for insisting that I include James Joyce in this project, for
his confidence in me, and for continuing as an active member of this committee even in
his retirement.
Thanks to my mother for being a loving parent and for teaching me to read
closely. To my father, in memoriam, for being proud of me and for teaching me never to
take the easy way. To Wyle, Sung-Hee, Moise, Stephanie, Carly, and all of my family,
including Oskar, for being supportive. And to Nick for putting up with me throughout
this process and always believing in me.
v
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction......................................................................................................................... 1
Chapter One: Counterpoints: Music, Language, and Intermediality .................................. 1
Chapter Two: Turning Points: Periodizing New Writing ................................................. 60
Chapter Three: Joyce, Adorno, and the “Perverted Commas” of Unreality................... 114
Chapter Four: Keeping Time in the Space of To the Lighthouse ................................... 167
Works Cited .................................................................................................................... 202
vi
1
INTRODUCTION
New Writing: Modernism, Punctuation, and Intermedial Text. This dissertation
sets its eye on the sliding index of the “new” in the advancing motion of avant-gardism
and in the very idea of modern-ism during the early twentieth century. Punctuation, I
argue, plays a central but paradoxical role in the modernist premise of making it new. Its
significance operates on the levels of structural and visual form and on the levels of the
logical and temporal syntaxes of writing. It produces seams or reveals ruptures between
and within the mediums of literary writing, music, and pictorial art. It is punctual and it
periodizes; it serves as an instrument and a symbol of modernism’s temporal selfawareness. I understand the avant-garde as a subset of modernist art that has an extreme
interest in the historicity of its form. However, in the context of modernist studies, the
term “avant-garde” has been used in a very precise way to denote art that does not submit
to the paradigm of aesthetic autonomy, which from one point of view applies to precisely
the opposite of what I intend by the term. I will dwell on this point briefly, in part
because this line of criticism traces itself to the work of Theodor Adorno, whose writings
on newness, new music in particular, supply a basis for this project’s title and likewise
play a vital role in the present study.
Modernism and the Avant-garde
For Adorno, new art not only defines itself against the past, but against its
contemporary society: all art, he emphasizes, “is defined by its relation to what it is not”
2
(“Sie bestimmt sich im Verhältnis zu dem, was sie nicht ist”; 3; Ästhetische 12). Art,
writing, and music become linked to their contemporary culture by means of their
antagonism to it. He stresses the importance of form in this social connection, “Die
ungelösten Antagonismen der Realität kehren wieder in den Kunstwerken als die
immanenten Probleme ihrer Form. Das, nicht der Einschuß gegenständlicher Momente,
definiert das Verhältnis der Kunst zur Gesellschaft” (“The unsolved antagonisms of
reality return in artworks as immanent problems of form. This, not the insertion of
objective elements, defines the relation of art to society”; 160; Aesthetic 6).1 This is to say
that the art’s medium registers and reflects its surroundings more authentically than its
representation does. This would also suggest, for example, that the form of an avantgarde manifesto conveys as much about itself and its period as the content it supports.
Peter Bürger and Andreas Huyssen entirely discard the category of newness both
from their definition of modernism and of the avant-garde, because the new fails to
distinguish between the two entities. “[T]he historically unique break with tradition that
is defined by the historical avant-garde movements” (60), writes Bürger, should not be
reduced to the “developmental principle of modern art as such.” Both he and Andreas
Huyssen classify modernism as autonomous aestheticism maintaining the boundary
between art and life, “which for the most part insisted on the inherent hostility between
high and low” (Huyssen viii), and the avant-garde, in contrast, as a force working to
1
The German text will be supplied before English, unless it is incorporated into the
syntactical structure of my own sentence. All translations are my own, unless otherwise
noted with a page number.
3
collapse that border “often by incorporating elements of mass culture into the work of art
or by promoting specific political programs” (“avant-garde,” Columbia).2
Both scholars draw heavily from Adorno’s writings on artistic autonomy, and
Huyssen even describes Adorno as “the major theoretician of the Great Divide” (x). As a
result, many readers have interpreted his vision of autonomous art as a proposal for
“hibernation” (Schulte-Sasse xviii) from a hostile society and have seen his view of other
sorts of cultural production to be “kitsch” conformities to the culture industry that he and
Horkheimer had theorized in the 1940s. Yet Adorno clarifies his concept of autonomy
repeatedly, for instance by stating, “Vermöge ihrer Absage and die Empirie—und die ist
in ihrem Begriff, kein bloßes escape, ist ein ihr immanentes Gesetz—sanktioniert sie
deren Vormacht” (“by virtue of its rejection of the empirical world—a rejection that
inheres in art’s concept and thus is no mere escape, but a law immanent to it—art
sanctions the primacy of reality”; 10; Aesthetic 2). This empirical reality one may see as
the “life” to which Huyssen refers. Put differently, the impulse toward autonomous
aesthetics (and away from society) is seen by Adorno as a reaction against and therefore
engagement with society. The artwork thus bears the negative imprint or impression of
the society from which it is supposed to seek refuge.3
Whereas Adorno assumes that all art is produced by the impulse of having an
inverted relationship to society, Bürger argues that the “historical avantgarde” intended
the opposite. Because appraisals like Schulte-Sasse’s above presume a stable opposition
2
Despite its applicability to certain aspects of Futurism and Symbolism, when applied to
a broader national and historical scale the high-low distinction within global and local
concepts of modernism has meanwhile been very convincingly dismantled.
3
The question that arises is to what extent this art is determined only by that society as its
negative imprint and to what extent it also expresses more.
4
between the social-historical and the aesthetic realms, it does not recognize those aspects
of avant-gardism organized around innovative form or the extent to which modernist
form relates to its social-historical contexts. Their conclusions, in other words, would
preclude the basis of much of this dissertation. Discounting form from definitions of
avant-gardism, Jochen Schulte-Sasse writes, benefits the goals of periodization. It “gives
us a historically concrete and theoretically exact description of the avant-garde” (xiv).
Huyssen likewise cites the historical precision of defining avant-gardism in this way: it
manages to “distinguish the historical avantgarde from late-nineteenth-century
modernism as well as from the high modernism of the interwar years” (viii). It is
interesting that their readings are motivated by a desire to precisely date the movements
they study or to isolate them into categories. The same impulse drove the selfproclaiming and periodizing manifestos of the early twentieth century.
In their desire to give unity to the movements they seek to identify, their approach
tends to eliminate as irrelevant those traits that contradict their thesis. Such demarcation
performs in the context of literary history what Samuel Weber has described as the logic
of isolation at work in disciplinary fields. Drawing from Sigmund Freud's analysis of this
dynamic in the psyche of the individual subject, Weber writes that drawing such borders
serves “to keep away not only what is irrelevant or unimportant, but above all, what is
unsuitable because it is contradictory” (Freud qtd. in Weber 29; my italics). In order to
maintain clear borders—in this case those of a particular literary movement that begins
and ends at a specific historical moment and that shares a set of characteristics—
contradiction must be eliminated. Otherwise, from this point of view, conceptualizing the
literary historical field is impossible. Thus in forming definitions of modernism and the
5
avant-garde as two distinct entities, Huyssen and Bürger’s works also isolate a single
component of Adorno’s philosophy—the autonomy of the work of art—from its place in
the complex dialectical constellation of tensions in which his writings locate it.
By contrast, unresolved contradiction is the driving force of Theodor Adorno’s
negative dialectic. The anxieties expressed by Bürger and other critics about historical
precision and categorical exactitude obscure the tensions, contradictions, and paradoxes
that most concerned Adorno and that also characterize the broad phenomenon of
modernism.4 The risk that the avant-garde would lose its unique characterization is hardly
an issue if different avant-garde generations react against not just a static “bourgeois
culture” and aesthetics, but a perpetually developing and historically specific set of
aesthetic standards and artists. In other words, the move to a methodology requiring
stable historical categories necessarily distorts Adorno’s writing and his understanding of
it as a process of thinking through. His writings on modern art, which influence this
project generally, appear to treat the categories of avant-gardism and modernism
interchangeably.5 This is not to say that his work treats the principle of innovation as the
sole motivator behind the break with the “old.” Instead he analyzes the dialectical process
in which innovation and traditional elements come into contact in works of art. Precisely
this aspect of his analysis is excluded from both Huyssen’s and Bürger’s accounts of the
two entities. Such delineation exemplifies the stable conceptualizations and universalized
principles that Weber critiques. This project understands the phenomenon of modernist
4
See Scholes, Paradoxy of Modernism.
“Was Beckett an Philosophie aufbietet, depraviert er selber zum Kulturmüll, nicht
anders als die ungezähltenn Anspielungen und Bildungsfermente, die er im Gefolge der
angelsächsischen Tradition der Avantgarde zumal von Joyce und Eliot” (“Versuch
Endspiel” 281).
5
6
writing to encompass conservative and avant-garde approaches to form, and it sees
technically new ways of writing to play a constitutive or provocating role in all of them.
Punctuation, perhaps the most formal aspect of writing’s form, would logically be
foregrounded in such a study.
Certainly, Adorno’s criticism has its own limitations, which derive from the very
quality that lends it its most distinctive character: dialectical thought. From the point of
view of modernist studies, his polarization of autonomous art and mass culture, in which
art’s authenticity is defined by its resistant and antagonistic relationship to the mass
culture surrounding it, has been the most problematic. Not all art aims, intentionally or
unintentionally, at an oppositional relationship. As we have seen, this indirect relation to
society is often perceived in a manner that invokes a division, instead of a network, of
tensions. Of most interest to this study is the extent to which such tensions are located in
a larger constellation of factors and conditions. In the case of lyric poetry, Adorno writes
that the medium of language “establishes an inalienable relationship to the universal and
to society” (“die unabdingbare Beziehung auf Allgemeines und die Gesellschaft
herstellt”; “Kulturkritik” 56), through its history of social usage, even if it resists that
history. This is also to say that its social significance lies in its medium and the
historically contingent associations embedded in it, not its representational content or the
intention of its creator. It is through the dialectical inversion that this possibility emerges
in Adorno’s writing. What interests me is not merely that art signifies by not signifying,
but that the nonsignificative features of art have significance. For instance, Adorno’s
condemnation that popular protest lyrics such as Joan Baez’s are incapable of serving as
7
authentic political protests appears to foreclose interpretive possibility.6 However, at the
same time, it leads to the question of where else protest, as one category of social
meaning, might lie. Consequently, nonsignifying art forms such as music emerge as a
carrier of meaning, as a place where art’s mediated and antagonistic relation to society
might be interpreted. Adorno was in fact among the first musicologists to study how
music’s formal make-up bears traces of the social and conceptual.7 This dissertation has
no interest in excluding certain styles of works from serious scholarly consideration.
Rather it views the challenge of locating meaning elsewhere as well and not necessarily
instead of to guide its own analysis of literary form.
Punctuation Marks
Theodor W. Adorno extends this pattern of interpretation to his Notes to
Literature essay “Satzzeichen,” which implicates punctuation in larger dialectical
patterns of history and identifies its role in building tension and critique within
propositional language. For example, in a reading of the semicolon, Adorno describes
how in German the mark is a sign of complex thought, because it enables syntactic
complexity. He laments the disappearance of both, which he attributes to capital-driven
publishing and editing practices. These cater to a “marketplace” of readers who have not
been conditioned to put forth the effort required to read long sentences or process
complex thought by extension. Concepts like “lucidity, factual stability, and terse
precision” (“Ideologien wie die der Luzidität, der sachlichen Härte, der gedrängten
6
See undated recording of television interview:
<http://archive.org/details/RicBrownTheordorAdornoonPopularMusicandProtest>
7
See Subotnik, Rose. Developing Variations: Style and Ideology in Western Music.
Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1991.
8
Präzision”; 110) are its defining “ideologies,” he writes. The result is a “simple
registration of facts” ‘bloße Registrierung der Tatsachen’ resembling “meeting minutes”
‘Protokollsatz’. This writing refrains from using the “syntax and punctuation” that have
hitherto “articulate[d] facts, give[n] form to them, practice[d] criticism on them” (“diese
zu artikulieren, zu formen, Kritik an ihnen zu üben“). Not only is language a precondition
of thought, but the punctuation and syntax that organize verbal language are as well. The
limitations embedded in certain conventions of writing, therefore, articulate
correspondingly limited modes of thought: “Mit dem Verlust des Semikolon fängt es an,
mit der Ratifizierung des Schwachsinns durch die von aller Zutat gereinigte
Vernünftigkeit hört es auf” (“It begins with the loss of the semicolon, and it ends with the
ratification of idiocy through rationality that has been cleansed of every ingredient”; 11011). He thus considers punctuation according to historical dialectics, its connection to
societal shifts, and its role in the formation of meaning and critique of language. In this
view punctuation is both bound to and resistant of convention, where conventions can be
worthy either of preserving or attacking. Along these lines, this dissertation seeks to
orient its discussion of punctuation’s formal impact in writing among aesthetic, social,
and historical concerns.
Short, generally overlooked, and at times more playful than his better-known
essays and volumes, “Satzzeichen” has been described as an example of Adorno’s
atypically “light-hearted criticism” (Litvak 34-35), dealing with straightforwardly
“trifling matters” (36). But others, especially those reading his work in its original
language, have considered it evidence of the importance of “matters of language and
presentational form” to his theory of aesthetics (Nicholson ix). His translator Shierry
9
Weber Nicholson argues that in “Satzzeichen,” along with other Noten zur Literatur
chapters “Der Essay als Form” and “Fremdwörter,” “Adorno is virtually explicating his
own mode of writing.” In fact the entire essay reverberates with concerns found in his
better-known publications: his meditations on different marks resemble case studies of
his broader theories. Sitting on the margins of his canon, it appropriately locates the
issues most important to Adorno’s philosophy in the “minutiae” of writing (Buck-Morss
74). This focus is hardly unusual for Adorno, who, according to Susan Buck-Morss,
believed that “a microscopic analysis which could identify the general (i.e., the bourgeois
social structure) within the particular (the details of bourgeois philosophical texts) could
indicate more than the social function of ideas (Ideologiekritik); it promised to make
possible statements of objective truth, albeit historically specific” (76). Moreover, “the
very words and their arrangements, apparently insignificant details, became meaningful,
releasing a significance not even intended by the author. Indeed, ‘unintentional truth’ was
precisely the object of Adorno’s critical inquiry.” Though not “words,” the seemingly
“insignificant details” of punctuation marks under consideration certainly serve as
suitable objects of such a hermeneutic. Perhaps because they are not words, but are
involved in words’ arrangements and phrasing, punctuation provides music and language
with an affinity to one another. By remarking upon this in “Satzzeichen,” Adorno situates
it in dialogue with his other essays on music and language and within the philosophical
heart of Noten, the title of which is a self-conscious pun on musical notes,8 as well as
with later volumes like Philosophie der neuen Musik and Ästhetische Theorie.
8
Adorno describes how his title Noten—not Notizen—zur Literatur is a play on the
musical note in his essay from that collection, “Titles:”
10
Let us consider a concrete example of how punctuation marks may be involved in
literary experiments with aesthetic and social significance, by glancing briefly at the short
prose work “Die Zwiebel,” or “Merzgedicht 8,” by Kurt Schwitters, the Hanover Dadaist
best known for his sound poetry and collage work. The Merz poem is one of a range of
Merz forms, the name of which Schwitters would have derived from Kommerz, or
commerce. Thus, we can see from its subtitle alone that it has no interest in cutting itself
off from commercial life, which is consistent with Huyssen and Bürger’s views of the
avant-garde. Yet at the same time it is impossible that this work would have been
Auch in ‘Noten zur Literatur’ war es nicht an der Wiege gesungen, daß sie
das wurden. Ich hatte sie, nach der ¨Uberschrift einer Aphorismenfolge,
die ich vor der Zeit des Hitler in der Frankfurter Zeitung veröffentlichte,
‘Worte ohne Lieder’ getauft. Mir gefiel das, und ich hing daran; Suhrkamp
fand es zu feuilletonistisch und zu billig. Er grübelte und stellte eine Liste
zusammen, aus der ich nichts annehmen wollte, bis er verschmitzt als
letzten Vorschlag ‘Noten zur Literatur’ anmeldete. Das war
unvergleichlich viel besser als mein etwas dümliches Bonmot. Was mich
aber daran entzückte, war, daß Suhrkamp, in dem er meine Idee kritisierte,
sie festhielt. Die Konstellation von Musik und Wort ist ebenso gerettet wie
das leise Altmodische einer Form, deren Glanzperiode der Jugendstil war.
Mein Titel zitierte Mendelssohn, der Suhrkampsche, einige Etagen höher,
die Goetheschen Noten zum Diwan. An der Kontroverse habe ich gelernt,
daß anständige Titel solche sind, in welche die Gedanken einwanderten,
um darin unkenntlich zu verschwinden. (“Titel” 328-29)
Nor was it ordained at birth the the Noten zur Literatur [Notes to
Literature] would be called that. I had christened them Words without
Songs, after the title of a series of aphorism I had published in the
Frankfurter Zeitung before the Hitler era. I liked that, and I was attached
to it; Suhrkamp found it too feuilletonistic and too cheap. He mulled it
over and put together a list, no item on which I was willing to accept, until
he slyly announced Notes to Literature as his final suggestion. That was
incomparably better than my somewhat stupid bon mot. But what
delighted me about it was that Suhrkamp had retained my idea while
criticizing it. The constellation of words and music is preserved, as is the
slightly old-fashioned quality of a form whose heyday was the Jugendstil.
My title cited Mendelssohn, while Suhrkamp’s, several levels higher, cited
Goethe’s notes to the Divan. From the controversy I learned that decent
titles are the ones into which ideas immigrate and then disappear, having
become unrecognizable. (“Titles” 6)
11
produced with commercial profit in mind. Nonetheless, the processes of commerce and
exchange are at work in the story between the areas of art and society as well as of
literature and visual art. In it, the narrator of “The Onion,” Alves Bäsenstiel, relates his
own execution, disembowelment, and reconstruction; in spite of its content, this plot line
is fairly conventional. Appearing in 1919, we might view this also as the motion of the
prewar avant-garde, which shared the Great War mentality that destruction would give
way to renewal.
Beginning with the second sentence of the story, Bäsenstiel’s voice is interrupted
by diverse interjections, which at first are enclosed in parenthesis marks. These then
appear to escape the marks’ isolating enclosures to infiltrate the primary narrative. The
relationship of these interruptions to the main narrative becomes at times inverted: that is,
the digressions become so dominating that they too are interrupted by one another and by
reports on the progress of the plot. It hardly requires saying that this method applies
Schwitter’s visual montage work to the textual medium.9 Of course, collages often
included text among their materials, so it is difficult to characterize any linear sequence
or priority from one art to the other. Because Schwitters was deeply invested in
experiments of applying “techniques and subject matter [. . .] developed in one genre to
another” (Dietrich 71), his montagist literary work relies to some extent on the
conventional function of parentheses and full stops to realize its form. Punctuation draws
boundaries to enforce prioritized forms of logic, sequence, and propositionality. Yet for
9
According to Patrizia McBride, “Merz poetry [like Merz painting] is abstract in the
sense that it aims at establishing unconventional relationships among the broadest range
of materials. This is obtained by playing off words against each other, as well as any
available, preformed linguistic units, which represent the equivalent of the sundry
materials Schwitters used for his visual collages” (254).
12
this very reason, the symbol can be repurposed to open different forms of logic, order,
and expression.
The interjections vary in theme and type. Many evoke the types of phrases found
in popular magazines. For example, from the first paragraph: “(Fürchte dich nicht, glaube
nur!)” ‘(Don’t fear, just believe!)’, “(Andenken an die Konfirmation)” ‘(Memento of the
confirmation)’; and range from the commercial brand of soap “(Sunlight)” to the
magazine title “(Zeitschrift für Haus- und Grundbesitz)” ‘(Journal for Home and Property
Ownership)’, to the kinds of empty moral phrases that served propagandistic purposes
during the First World War—“(Die Opfer der Mutterschaft)” ‘(The sacrifice of
motherhood)’, “(Glaube, Liebe, Hoffnung)” ‘(faith, love, and hope)’ (299). Acting as
another style of quotation mark the parenthesis facilitates a multivocal narrative. Still, the
boundary-drawing lines of the parenthetical brackets visually and functionally resemble
the cut edges of the pasted collage piece. The language is drawn from newspaper
headlines, advertisements, greeting cards, and political slogans, but these are not only
infiltrating the singular voice of the narrator. Isolated from their contexts, they become
infiltrated as well as parodies of themselves. While the story progresses, the type of
insertion the parentheses enclose varies, as does the relationship or lack thereof to the
material it interrupts or modifies. In turn, the digression or interruption often goes
unmarked. The result is paratactic juxtaposition, which transforms the interrupted plot
line and blurs its boundaries. The importance of togetherness in Schwitters’ story, the
taking apart and putting back together of the human body it narrates, and the ultimately
unsystematic use of parentheses to mark or leave unmarked digressions is indicative of
how Schwitters assaults linear thinking in the story. By using the mark inconsistently, he
13
stages a narratological revolution in which the rebels are self-acting fragments of
discourse that are both different and the same. The dual movement of imposing and
obscuring boundaries takes place on the level of syntax, content, and genre.
Crucially, the montaged assembly of language in “The Onion” mirrors the
narrative of the execution and reconstruction of the narrator’s body. At the moment his
skull is broken, which is the turning point of the story, he collapses or “bricht
zusammen.” Harriet Watts translates it “collapsed, lapsed lapsed lapsed” (86), but
Schwitters’s word is zusammenbrechen, which provides the counterpart to the later
movement in the story, when he is ‘”zusammengesetzt” or reassembled. When he writes,
“Zusammenbrechen zusammen zusammen zusammen” the reiteration of zusammen or
together emphasizes not a lapse, but the “co-” or togetherness of the collapse. Alves
“breaks together”—not apart. Punctuation is instrumental in the patterns of relationship
portrayed in the story, which have clear applicability to the concept of intermediality,
which will be discussed shortly. Indeed even the content of the story is indirectly
ekphrastik. We could easily call it an allegorical narration of the collaging process. Used
as a disruption of convention that directs attention to the written medium, punctuation
serves both to delineate and to collapse borders between historical periods, cultural
spheres, and aesthetic mediums.
14
Punctuation, History, and Modernity
“PUNCTUATION (Lat. Punctus, “point”). A system of nonalphabetical signs that
express meaning through implied pauses, pitch shifts, and other intonational features”
(“punctuation,” The New Princeton 1006).
punctuation, n.
1.†a. The action of marking the text of a psalm, etc., to indicate how it should be chanted;
= pointing, n. 4 Obs. rare.
b. The insertion of points indicating vowels, accents, etc., into Hebrew and other Semitic
texts; the system by which such points are inserted.
2. a. The practice, action, or system of inserting points or other small marks into texts, in
order to aid interpretation; division of text into sentences, clauses, etc., by means of such
marks; (occas.) an instance of this. Also: these marks collectively. (Now the usual sense.)
†b. In reading or speaking: the observance or articulation of appropriate pauses and
phrasing, as indicated or as if indicated by punctuation in a text. Obs.
c. fig. The fact of occurring or being distributed at intervals throughout an area, period,
etc., in the manner of punctuation marks in a sentence; something which occurs or is
distributed in this way.
†3. The action of marking something by pricking or puncturing; spec. tattooing. Obs.
4. Zool. = punctation n. 2. Now rare.
†5. A form of percussion massage using the tips of the fingers. Obs. rare.
6. Biol. Rapid or sudden evolutionary change, esp. speciation, as suggested by the theory
of punctuated equilibrium; an instance of this. (“punctuation” Oxford)
Over the last twenty years, the dominant scholarly approach to punctuation within
Anglo-American literary studies has been concerned with its wide-scale historical
development and its role in delimiting interpretive possibility. The pioneering study of
this sort is M.B. Parkes’ 1993 Pause and Effect, which, opposed to linguistic and
grammatical treatments of the topic, makes the claim that punctuation’s “primary
function is to resolve structural uncertainties in a text, and to signal nuances of semantic
significance which might otherwise not be conveyed at all, or would at best be much
more difficult for a reader to figure out” (1). Thus Parkes’ volume takes a historical and
what he calls a rhetorical approach to punctuation, which attends to punctuation’s
15
development since antiquity vis-à-vis oration and silent reading:10 The first marks of
punctuation that Parkes studies are in Latin texts from the first six centuries A.D., in
which the insertion of points belonged to the process of interpretation. Because these
texts were written in scriptura continua, the reader divided the text into segments, or
words and sentences and noted appropriate pauses to guide his performance, particularly
his breath and intonation. Towards the end of this period, punctuation and line division
increasingly were inserted in advance by scribes to guide the understanding of readers in
England, for instance, where literacy was limited and Latin was a second-language. Into
the Middle Ages, scribes developed the graphic organization and notation of liturgical
and non-liturgical manuscripts into a refined artistic and interpretive, disambiguating
undertaking. With the rise of Humanism in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries,
punctuation’s grammatical and logical functions and the symbols of which it made use
continued to evolve. At the same time, with the rise of print culture and rationality during
the Enlightenment, these practices became increasingly standardized—literally cast into
type and circulated—, and the role of syntactical or logical relationships among sentence
segments came to dominate the punctuation of texts, which were intended primarily for
silent readers. As Cecilia Watson points out, it was during this time that punctuation was
incorporated into studies of and handbooks on English grammar. In languages such as
German and Russian this wave of rationalization coalesces in orthography reforms at the
10
Parkes identifies two modes of analysis: grammatical and rhetorical. The grammatical
study may be found in debates on editorial intervention in ancient texts, in which the
introduced marks adopt one literal interpretation of an extinct language over another by
identifying one grammatical structure over other potential ones. The other is rhetorical
analysis: “With its emphasis on pauses for breath this mode of analysis has been
preoccupied with bringing out correspondences between the written medium and the
spoken word” (4). This is visible in Parkes’ own study of novelistic depictions of
dialogue, for instance.
16
turn of the twentieth century.11 Meanwhile, according to Parkes, novelists revived
punctuation’s rhetorical past as they sought to communicate the rhythm and intonation of
spoken dialogue to the silent reader.
In conjunction with this history, Parkes redefines in pragmatic terms the measure
by which punctuation is defined and understood: “The fundamental principle for
interpreting punctuation is that the value and function of each symbol must be assessed in
relation to the other symbols in the immediate context, rather than in relation to a
supposed absolute value and function for that symbol when considered in isolation” (2;
my italics). This can only make sense, given the lack of any widespread codification
before the eighteenth century. Likewise, in a monograph on the history of parentheses in
English verse, John Lennard rejects the institutional definitions of the round brackets that
surround parentheses:
The repetitive insistence of grammarians and lexicographers that
parenthetical clauses are subordinate makes the idea of emphatic lunulae
strange to the modern reader; but lunulae only distinguish. Their valency,
whether that which they distinguish is subordinate, neutrally isolated, or
emphatic, is determined by the pressures of use, definition, and convention
on the context in which they are employed: and there is nothing in
11
Orthographic reforms Russia and Germany perhaps contributed to the visibility of the
silent features of text, in particular because they were suddenly subject to regulation and
reformation by law. In Russia the debate over plans to eliminate the letter Yat (Ѣ) from
the Russian alphabet, were initiated in the Academy of Sciences (1885) and officially
eliminated shortly after the 1917 revolution. In Germany the 1901 Staatliche
Orthographie-Konferenz adopted the Duden’s standardized rules of spelling and
punctuation. Around the same time debates over retaining gothic script or adopting Latin
also gained intensity.
17
principle or practice to prevent them from being as inevitably emphatic as
a box drawn around an item on a list. (But I Digress 5)
Although it is difficult to perceive how “immediate” Parkes and Lennard intend the
context to be, both downplay the role of regulated contemporary conventions, which are
present in the context of modern literature. In the twentieth century it is sure that
established systems ruling the use of punctuation marks had some impact on the interest
and significance of such marks in literature. The litotes of the parenthesis could not
achieve its turn of irony if it did not turn away from the marginalizing institutional use of
round brackets. Virginia Woolf, I will argue in Chapter Four, creatively draws from the
institutional and editorial function of square brackets in her instrumentation of them to
represent loss. When Andrei Bely litters the pages of Petersburg with ellipses, he creates
substance and rhythm out of elision. Likewise, it is how he transforms and revises the
single period mark, and the logic and state of completion it entails with its multiplied
form in the open ellipsis that interests me in Chapter One. Although culturally-inflected
grammatical norms are evolving and even arbitrary, the use of punctuation is influenced
by and understood in their context.
Studying related movements associated with a single historical period reveals a
different category of findings from those produced by tracing historical progressions.12
While these histories include analyses of modernist authors, the tendency has been to
treat these as representative case studies of the entire period. Lennard iterates that
concentrating on “individual use can be regarded as diagnostic of variations in the
12
One benefit of the historical approach is outlined in Anne Henry’s survey of the
ellipsis, where she shows that its use in modernism is hardly unique. Instead, “it was the
achievement of modernism to transform ‘. . .’ from a mark of the aberrant or climactic
narrative occurrence to a symbol of everyday speech” (138; my emphasis).
18
personally and historically generated pressures” (But I Digress 9), yet this structure
implies a continuous linear development of such use.13 As a result, Parkes’ reading of
Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, for example, is determined by its position in a
chronological narrative of genre development. He interprets Woolf’s punctuation as a
commanding guide to readers that offsets the lack of an authoritative, central narrator.14
Punctuation appears here as a compensatory element that controls, rather than opens,
interpretive possibility. Instead of positioning prose by Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein,
Andrei Bely, James Joyce, Italian and Russian Futurists, and Theodor Adorno in a genre
history concerned primarily with form, I am interested in how these authors’ formal
styles respond to historical forces as well as to conventions of genre.
A common characteristic of research on punctuation has been its attribution of
authorial intent as well as its focus on single works by individual authors. In Lennard’s
words, the author “exploits convention,” by responding to it with “unconventional
punctuation [. . .] made potent by the expectation which it thwarts” (But I Digress 9).15
13
The historical breadth—from the Renaissance into the twentieth century—of Lennard’s
monograph illustrates the fascinating variation with which lunulae and the language they
enclose may be used. Chapter by chapter, the volume builds a chronological narrative
from the representative cases it selects, which however imply a continuous development.
As a result, the study of Eliot’s modernism is influenced by the narrative in which it is
positioned. The chapter can hardly account for the diversity of modernist writing, as the
present dissertation at least begins to.
14
For example, Parkes emphasizes repeatedly how “the reader is encouraged to” (95); the
marks “alert the reader to the fact that direct speech [. . .] is being represented;” “the
unusual pauses also arrest the attention of readers, thus encouraging them to relate back
to the image of [. . .]” (95).
15
This perspective is repeated in countless articles. Rachel May calls it “the author’s
visual tool for manipulating the reader’s response” (4). Sarah van den Berg goes so far as
to say that Ben Jonson’s “distinctive punctuation of his works, in print as in his
handwritten signature, is an important vehicle for the creation and maintenance of his
authorial presence. The body of his texts is kept alive, maintained, by the breath of
punctuation, the illusion of the time and motion of utterance” (25).
19
Punctuation plays a decisive role in how the reader’s mind processes logical connections
among the words on the page. It stays off ambiguity by partitioning sentences and
phrases into determined units of logical meaning. This controlled approach to art is a
significant aspect of modernism. T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, particularly during the
Imagist phase of Eliot’s objective correlative, used strategies of “authorial power” to
communicate subjective emotion and experience to their readers (Scholes, Parodoxy
103). Influenced by contemporary marketing strategies and graphic design, many authors
made more expressive, persuasive use of font, punctuation, and compositional layout to
achieve particular effects on their readers. This important aspect of modernism
notwithstanding, it is only one side of a larger story. There were good reasons to refuse
such techniques of control as well, precisely because they aim to force a perfect
communication between author and reader. Parkes’ account of Virginia Woolf does not
consider her resistance to the totalitarian aesthetics of the devastating century in which
she lived and wrote.16 Instead of directing, she characterizes her style as “rhythmical,”
which, as Chapters One and Four will explore, likens writing to music. My approach
attends to the place of punctuation in a larger rhythmic tendency in her work, which
introduces a musiclike, nonverbal element to her novels. 17 The project examines how
16
See Schulze.
Gertrude Stein’s well-known comments on the comma and period reinforce the
suspicion that punctuation was also employed for noncommunicative purposes. Periods,
by her account, are not among the author’s ready tools. Instead, they “have a life of their
own a necessity of their own a feeling of their own a time of their own” (“Poetry and
Grammar” 218). Rather than using the mark to fix authorial intent and close the
production of meaning, Stein celebrates it as a symbol of independence. Her view of the
comma, on the other hand, acknowledges that punctuation may be used to guide reader
interpretation. However, on this basis she rejects it: “A comma by helping you along
holding your coat for you and putting on your shoes keeps you from living your life as
actively as you should lead” (219-20). Marks such as this one “enfeeble” language and
17
20
such intermedial treatments of punctuation negotiate the pauses, silences, and interstitial
dimensions of language and how they direct our attention to issues outside of the
supplemental and signifying utility of writing that Derrida associates with logocentrism.
The methodology and underlying assumptions of this dissertation differ from
those of the research mentioned above in crucial ways. First of all, this is a study of
modernism. In place of historical breadth it examines works from roughly the first half of
the twentieth century. Yet, in selecting this focus, I do not mean to imply that
experimental or interesting uses of punctuation are unique to this period. As indicated, an
array of existing studies testify to this long history and to its impact on modern and
contemporary writing, and my own work is indebted to these. The present study
investigates, in contrast, how punctuation is itself brought into theories of the modern.
Theories, that is, through which artists and critics engage narratives of historical
continuity and discontinuity.
Intermediality and the Text
Punctuation’s uses to interrupt thought, disrupt the order implicit in syntax,
undermine propositionality, or impose silent space take on especial prominence and
relevance in modernist texts. If modernism as a general category thematizes rupture,
displacement, and shock (where the general tendency is, paradoxically, to resist
generalization), then punctuation marks are an apt device in achieving this on numerous
impose unnecessary “care” and “help” onto words, thereby lessening their “force” (220).
Stein’s ideal reader therefore is not in the passive position of receiver, is not standing by
for commands dictating his or her interpretation. He or she must reckon with the forceful
sentences alone. In this view, commas are at odds with something fundamental to Stein’s
conception of writing: its movement, its vital rhythm, the spontaneity of its operation, and
the interactivity it enables between writer, text, and reader.
21
levels. Visually abstract, evocative of rhythmic sound, and wordless, they produce seams
or ruptures between and within the mediums of literary writing, music, and pictorial art.
When used in a manner that draws attention to itself, punctuation interrupts and suspends
the forward motion of the sentence’s train of thought. It impacts pacing, slows the motion
of the reader’s eyes across the page,18 and distracts his or her attention away from the
content signified. Perhaps what makes punctuation interesting is that its meaning can be
understood according to multiple referential frameworks. The period which marks
completion in grammar indicates the opposite as a decimal point in mathematics. In
liturgical texts of the Middle Ages, it signifies “inhale.” In the iconic language of
emoticons, it represents a human eye. As a “point” and “dot” it may be interpreted
metaphorically or metonymically in association with those terms’ attendant applications.
The uses of punctuation in graphic design and logos, for instance, are not determined or
even associated with the function attributed to them in writing handbooks.19 Along these
lines, John Lennard elaborates on the “deictic” or “emphatic” element of punctuation.
Constituents of the latter class “are neither usually regarded nor widely understood as
being punctuation at all” (“Mark” 1) and include spacing, pagination, or typeface. He
proposes an alternative understanding of punctuation, based on an “axis of analysis [. . .]
which can accommodate these variant understandings, and supplement the received
analysis by function” (5). The levels begin with “letter-forms” to “mise-en-page,” and
proceed up to the “book itself punctuating space.” The upper, “bibliographic” levels in
particular point to the close relationship between research into literary punctuation and
18
Hirotani, Masako, Lyn Frazier, and Keith Rayner. “Punctuation and intonation effects
on clause and sentence wrap-up: Evidence from Eye Movements.” Journal of Memory
and Language 54 (2006): 425-443.
19
See Rössler.
22
word/image studies, which encompass punctuation marks among the many graphic
characteristics peculiar to a (usually original and authorized) text. The basic premise they
share is that while literature is made up of words, those words are communicated by the
textual material of punctuation marks, paper, and page layout.20 These themselves have
been influentially recognized by scholars such as Jerome McGann and Gerard Genette as
languages in themselves.
As Parkes’ history indicates, while punctuation marks were not necessarily
believed to have been modeled after speech, they are said to have originated in the
Greco-Roman tradition to aid the spoken delivery of texts to an audience. Here
punctuation and text layout have been utilized to bridge a perceived gap between the
written “record” and the spoken word and to support vocal and bodily gestures that
accompany and support the intended message. Where the points indicate pauses for
breath or variations in intonation to guide the orator’s performance, they are intended to
direct his interpretation (in both senses of making meaning and bodily performance) of
the disembodied and impersonal text. This style of performative encoding is visible in
features of theatrical scripts, musical scores, and dance notation. In verbal text, the marks
are soundless in themselves, but they are involved in the indexical operation of modifying
20
See, for instance, the well-known example of the interference of contemporary editors
in Emily Dickinson’s poetry. Publishers found its aberrent form, including its
punctuation, so illegible that they considered their revisions a precondition of publication.
Only in the twentieth century (with modernism, in fact) did editors begin to return her
poems to their original states—titleless, in the order she stitched them together into
fascicles, following the layout she spelled out in her own hand, and with the
unconventional punctuation she used to structure it. Mc Gann writes of her poetry in its
original form, “openings to alternative sense arrangements emerge principally because of
the text’s visual structure” (31) and advocates reading it at “face value, to treat all her
scriptural forms as potentially significant at the aesthetic or expressive level” (38).
23
the tone of the words they accompany. The realistic dialogue that Parkes identifies in his
study of the novel, in which punctuation communicates the rhythm and intonation of
fictional spoken dialogue to the silent reader, could be seen as drawing from the dramatic
script, where on-stage delivery is often directed through intervening parentheses, dashes,
or ellipses. The nonverbal materiality of punctuation marks gesture away from the
disembodied text to the empirical, three-dimensional world of bodies and objects. Yet the
idea is that these are also textual, not the ends toward which writing and punctuation
marks are the means. Thus in discussing embodied language acts, I am not privileging
them as pure or unified, prior or prioritized, but recognizing the body’s value as a
linguistic medium. If writing has been seen as the accessory of speech that turns out to be
both necessary and ubiquitous, punctuation bears this same relationship to writing.
Thus the present study’s premise of intermediality, a term meant to encompass
both the traditional interartistic comparisons and adaptations that cross between distinct
genres and arts, as well as the view of media that the interarts have given way to: as W. J.
T. Mitchell writes, “all media are mixed media” already (Picture Theory 6). Whereas the
interarts generally derive from classical premises of unity, harmony, and correspondence,
intermediality does not affirm any given aesthetic taxonomy or system. It locates the
image- and music-like element of literature in its own mediation, not in a crossing,
mixing, or totalizing action between painting, music, and writing. What Deppermann and
Linke describe as the “aesthetic, pragmatic-social, normative, and affective qualities and
functions” of language in written or spoken form are not accounted for by language’s
entity as an “abstract system.” These can only be attended to through language’s
24
“materiality, as visual, acoustic and bodily appearance and its respective concrete
situatedness” (ix).
The name of Kurt Schwitter’s prose form (Merzgedicht) raises already a difficulty
in terminology, which I can only acknowledge, rather than resolve: that between poems
and works of short prose, between writing and other genres of expression, whether that be
speech, instrumental performance, musical notation, or visual art. The same holds true of
the term “text,” which extends far beyond the physical page into the world of signifiers
that constitute human experience. Still, the chapters that follow concentrate on literary
texts, not works of visual or musical art. The analysis here explores interactions,
commonalities, and overlaps among genres and mediums, but it does not erase those
distinct identities. Thus a similar difficulty arises with my use of “text” in the title, which
is intended to delimit the area of research to literary arts. At the same time its use
acknowledges that there is no outside of the text, il n’y a pas de hors-text, that the
illimitability of text or the legibility of perceptible experience provides the basis for
intermedial study in the first place. This appears particularly crucial when intermediality
is emerging from the textual features of punctuation.
Modernism and History
Like Lennard, I observe a broad view of punctuation as it attends to the traditional
“marks” as well as their spacing and typeface. Yet this move is hardly groundbreaking. In
1935, Gertrude Stein commented on capitalized letters alongside remarks on punctuation
marks in her lecture “Poetry and Grammar,” and Theodor Adorno’s 1956 essay on
“Punctuation Marks,” includes a line on the German Fraktur typeface (107). This is to be
25
expected, given both writers’ interest in the suggestive impact of the symbols’ shapes.
Adorno, for instance, compares the effect of a horizontal dash or a vertical parenthesis
mark on the aside that either could be used to surround, and Stein calls quotation marks
and exclamation points “ugly” (“Poetry” 215). The former example of Fraktur is worth
pausing upon, because it illustrates a dimension of punctuation that has received very
little attention from scholars: its aesthetic involvement in questions of social and political
import.21 Although calls to assimilate (what came to be known as) Deutsche Schrift to
romanized type were voiced in Germany as early as the Renaissance, by the turn of the
twentieth century, Fraktur was perceived by many as a symbol of a German identity that
was likewise endangered by pressures of modernization and internationalization. In
response to a 1911 hearing in the Reichstag, writers of (the American) Monatshefte
associate the campaign against Fraktur with the suppression of German racial pride by
Rationalist proponents of a world citizenry: “Tatsächlich entbrannte der Kampf gegen die
Fraktur zum erstenmal, als das deutsche Rassenbewusstsein unterdrückt war und unter
dem Einfluss des Rationalismus das Streben nach Weltbürgertum alle Schranken der
Stammesart zu verwischen drohte” (“Der Sieg” 15). Antiqua font, they argue, may be
appropriate for scientific and scholarly publications, but not for German literature:
Anders, wenn das künstlerische creativity, die Eigenart des Innenlebens,
kurz, das eigentliche Wesen des Volkes in Wort und Schrift zum
Ausdruck kommen will; in diesem Falle wird sich ein nach innen reich
21
Recent exceptions of general interest are Jennifer Devere Brody’s chapter of
Punctuation: Art, Politics, and Play on “Hyphen-nations” and Cecilia Watson’s
discussion of the Semi-colon Law in “Points of Contention.” On German typographic
history, see Howes and Paucker, Hartmann, Killius, Kapr.
26
begabter und scharf ausgeprägter Volkscharakter auch nach außen
eigenartig zu gestalten wissen. (16)
It is different when artistic creation, the uniqueness of inner life, in short
the true essence of the (German) people intends to be expressed in speech
and writing; in this case, the bountifully gifted and sharply impressed
inward character of the people knows how to take its outwardly unique
shape.
The passage, first of all, uses the language of print (Ausdruck, ausgeprägt,
Volkscharakter) to describe the very content it is supposed to mediate, and this is
precisely the point: the two are inseparable, the writers insist. In their view, the pure form
of the font carries national and cultural meaning. For the very same reason, during the
Weimar Republic publishers used Roman font to distance themselves not only from a
strict national identity but also from old-fashioned tradition. In effect typography served
to market their modern identity. Even Hitler advocated Latin, or Normalschrift, as the
typeface appropriate for the age of “Stahl und Eisen” and associated gothic script with a
hitherto Jewish influence on German printing (Hitler).22 In these cases, typeface is itself
working, like the traditional purpose of punctuation, to divide and disambiguate. It is seen
by German nationalists as a positive circumscription of their cultural identity and by
modernists and Hitler alike as a demarcation drawn between the past and the present. Yet
at the heart of this conflict is the iconic and visual impact of punctuation and font, and its
22
When the Nazi party finally abolished Fraktur from textbooks in 1941, however, he did
so as much for practical as for symbolic reasons. Although he suddenly associated it with
Jewishness, it seems likely that the change was made to improve communication with the
Third Reich’s expanded or conquered territories, where inhabitants were unaccustomed
to reading the typeface. Fraktur interfered with the effectiveness of National Socialist
propaganda.
27
ability to speak as loudly as the content it is supposed to be merely mediating. The
awareness of and interest in punctuation marks among modernist writers must be as
varied as their philosophies, politics, and aesthetics are diverse. Indeed, as I have
suggested, punctuation cannot be separated from these influences.
Overview of Chapters
Chapter One, “Counterpoints: Music, Language, and Intermediality,” begins by
examining literary treatments of the interarts, as exemplified in essays Edgar Allen Poe
and Andrei Bely. These demonstrate how the figure of music especially serves as an
aesthetic ideal, through which writing aspires to give form to a timeless creative spirit.
From a critical point of view, the chapter goes on to establishes the idea of intermediality,
which it differentiates from the closed, hierarchical system upon which many
experiments in and studies of the interarts operate. In this regard I look to ways in which
literature may cultivate its likeness to music by way of its own medium and form.
Theodor Adorno’s essays “Punctuation Marks,” “Music, Language, and their
Relationship in Contemporary Composition,” and “On Some Relationships between
Music and Painting” provide the chapter with the heart of its material on this subject.
Adorno proposes that the arts of literature (including philosophy), painting, and music are
conjoined through language, more specifically writing. Most of the texts by Adorno that I
analyze are essays, themselves both a critical and literary genre. As we follow the track
of his arguments, particular note is given to how the syntactical and compositional
structures of his writing actualize the arrangements it describes. Instead of an unchanging
and static aesthetic system, we recognize through our analysis that these media are
28
interconnected through their evolving historical nature. The dialectical succession of one
written code after another constitutes another level of writing, and this writing, however,
is ambivalent to the ideal of unity. The great metaphysical aim is always deferred and
“not here,” but it appears to operate as a motive in art and Adorno’s philosophy alike.
Locating significance in the accidentals of punctuation does not only follow the wellestablished critical reversal of center and margin, or of essence and accident, within
material hermeneutics. Rather, its accidental status as a nonintentional, even dissonant,
language of its own ruptures the classical privileging of unity, essence, and wholeness, a
rupture modernist aesthetics sought to act out more generally. On this point we turn to an
example of how punctuation is involved in modernist intermedial experiments, where
they are integral to the staging of a prerevolutionary terrorist plot in Andrei Bely’s
Petersburg. The novel’s material form is orchestrated to this purpose as an extension of
the author’s existing theories of the arts. However, the tempo measured out in the novel
through the repetition of both structuring and disjointing series of dots is one of entropy,
as the narrative builds with anticipation towards the detonation of a ticking time bomb
delivered by the son (even wrapped in a newspaper) targeting the father. It can hardly be
a coincidence that Leo Trotsky described the 1905 Revolution as beginning over a
punctuation mark, in which striking typesetters demanded a pay scale based on the
number of characters laid, including punctuation. Revolution, both political and aesthetic,
is in other words staged typographically. These are also seen as part of the novel’s
depiction of a Dionysian-Apollonian tension, which is in turn thematized in the
generational, historical, and political conflicts that brought about the 1905 revolution (a
first step in the direction of the revolution that would follow twelve years later).
29
If modernism is itself an event or rupture into a new era in correlation with new
aesthetic principles, the second chapter, which is entitled “Turning Points: Periodizing
New Writing,” argues that temporal and syntactical segmentation or periodization
appears as a central topic and practice in modernist writing as well as in writings about
modernism. It thus explores avant-gardism as an extreme instantiation of the desire for
the new and as itself a formalized militarism that pairs the perceived emergence of a
modern era with new technologies of motion and typographic and syntactical revolt. In
general, Futurist writings initiate this drive unabashedly in exclamatory self-postulations
by writers like F.T. Marinetti (who announce the “future starts here!”). Their example
supplies a foil and object lesson for other modernists, such as Virginia Woolf, Gertrude
Stein, and Theodor Adorno in their own writings about how modernism happened, or put
differently, how it is written and rewritten. In this context, Stein and Woolf remark on the
form of their own writings and their relation to their notions of temporality and change.
The second part of the project investigates how similar reflections are also built
into novels by Virginia Woolf and James Joyce. In Chapter Three, “Joyce, Adorno, and
the ‘Perverted Commas’ of Inauthenticity,” I situate Joyce’s use of punctuation and other
accidentals in his fiction vis-à-vis intersecting tensions between literary realism and
linguistic experiment, literature and journalism, speech and print, and repetition and
originality. The chapter traces how essays by Theodor Adorno in debate with George
Lukács turn to the recurring example of Joyce Joyce’s work as they break down the
traditional aesthetic opposition between essence and accident, a step that Adorno traces in
the modernist rejection of realism. Unlike the model of newness typically found in avantgarde aesthetics seen in the previous chapter, Ulysses exemplifies for Adorno the linkage
30
between the rebellion against the realist novel and that against signification. Modernism
reacts to the replacement of realist fiction by entertaining reportage, he holds, by
emphasizing its own mediation. This calls attention to how the concept of realistic
reportage depicted in the novel’s seventh episode intersects with the experimental forms
it introduces and adds definition to the roles played by commercial journalism, orality,
writing, and the epic. Yet, if “Aeolus” supplies an added basis for the opposition between
art and reportage, it also scrutinizes it. In this context, Joyce’s famous renunciation of
quotation marks not only loosens demarcations among voices in the narrative, but also
rejects the underlying premise of enclosing unique, original, or spoken language and
setting it apart from the rest of the narrative.
In contrast to the concept of originality proposed in the very idea of the avantgarde, Joyce represents aesthetic change as an historical fold. I argue that the linguistic
and textual experiment of the “Aeolus” chapter chiastically inverts and recasts existing
convention (as it is established in the novel) in a pattern that resembles the alternative
genealogies between Stephen and Bloom or Hamlet and Shakespeare in other sections of
the novel. In this way, Joyce stages the intersecting shift from realism to experimental
modernism within the novel’s framework. Set in the building of a newspaper company,
the implicit realism of journalism overlaps and contrasts with the Dadaist montage
evoked by the chapter’s division under newslike headings.
The project concludes with “Keeping Time in the Space of To the Lighthouse,”
which reveals how Woolf’s innovations in To the Lighthouse spatially register temporal
change in its narrative and its typographic form. Virginia Woolf uses parentheses and
square brackets to register the passing of time, specifically the passage into modernity, in
31
the changing space of the novel. The vacation home in which the novel is set and the
painting created by its character Lily Briscoe serve as architectural and visual doubles for
the novel in this regard. In the novel’s material composition, the losses are betrayed in the
revisions Woolf made to the “Time Passes” section, in which she entered bracketed
passages to abruptly mark the most dramatic events of the ten-year interlude. On one
hand, the rounded parentheses used throughout the novel are associated with physical
presence and communal closeness, as they enclose intimate encounters such as Minta and
Paul’s kiss on the beach or descriptions of physical movements interjected into stream-ofconsciousness sequences. On the other hand, the passages surrounded by brackets include
information of the deaths of three of the characters, the square mutilation of a fish, the
publication of a volume of war poetry, and the reading of Virgil. As a result, death, the
empty space it leaves behind, the historical trauma of World War One, and the workings
of literary representation are bracketed together, so to say, in an operation resembling the
rhetorics of musical motifs and spatial composition. In fact Woolf’s brackets provide an
inverted link between the novel and its epic predecessor, alluded to through a volume of
Virgil and Mr. Ramsay’s failed embrace of his absent wife, a scene loosely drawn from
the Aeneid. Through its conventional association with editorial deletion and its visual
continuity with the empty extended arms of Mr. Ramsay and Aeneas, the bracket
performs this shared scene typographically. Through punctuation, the novel’s connection
to epic is likewise represented as an absence that connects.
It should be mentioned, finally, just how rapidly scholarship on punctuation has
developed since I first began my research in 2008. A number of full-length studies based
32
in philosophy, aesthetics, or interdisciplines have been published recently in the U.S.,
Germany, and France.23 Collectively, however, they have hardly been in dialogue or
formed a field, given their disparate foci and the languages in which they are printed.
Many of these studies express the desire to raise the visibility of punctuation marks. The
modernist authors with whom this dissertation engages were seeking to do the same. The
present dissertation, “New Writing: Modernism, Punctuation, and the Intermedial Text,”
though far more focused than most of the publications listed in the footnote, still counts
itself among this wave of new, more capacious approaches to the topic of punctuation.
My purpose here is to supply a deeper view of the role of punctuation in writings about
modernism as well as the writing of modernism, where its interconnections with formal
innovation and intermediality become apparent.
23
In the U.S., Jennifer Devere Brody’s interdisciplinary book Art, Politics, and
Punctuation combines the study of textual punctuation with its incarnations in
performance and visual arts. Her expansive approach to sculpture and performance art, as
well as literary text, suggests that the rhetorical, grammatical, and deictic categories are
still far from exhausting the spectrum of punctuation’s possible incarnations. Christine
Abbt and Tim Kammasch, the editors of the 2009 Punkt, Punkt, Komma, Strich: Geste,
Gestalt und Bedeutung philosophischer Zeichensetzung bring together more than twenty
theorists to meditate on the philosophical dimension of punctuation as well as the role of
those symbols in philosophical thought. The anthology is unique in stressing that its
essays do not consist of linguistic or stylistic studies of single authors. Instead each
contribution is dedicated to to an individual symbol, with readings of the marks’
individual usage. Die Poesie der Zeichensetzung: Studien zur Stilistik der Interpunktion
(2012) was the product of a team-taught lecture of the same name at the Humboldt
Universität zu Berlin. Dedicated by and large to punctuation in German-language literary
texts, it covers a range of theoretical approaches to the topic of punctuation from the early
modern period to the present. In France, Isabelle Alfandary’s study of the materiality of
the letter and punctuation mark in American modernist poetry, La risque de la lettre
(2011), brings Lacanian concepts of drives and and the Real to bear on stylistic analysis
of poems by Gertrude Stein, e.e. cummings, William Carlos Williams, and John Cage.
Isabelle Serça’s Aesthetique et le Ponctuation (2012) explores the concepts of temporal
and spatial punctuation as they are used in cinema, painting, architecture, and music, as
well as in modern French prose, and Peter Szendy’s A coup de points: La ponctuation
comme expérience, a study of punctuation and the Lacanian subject, will appear in 2013.
1
CHAPTER ONE: COUNTERPOINTS: MUSIC, LANGUAGE, AND INTERMEDIALITY
“Every branch of art strives to express in
images something typical, eternal,
independent of place and time. It is in music
that these vibrations of eternity are most
successfully expressed”—Andrei Bely
Comparative readings of the arts have traditionally treated music, architecture,
dance, sculpture, drawing, and literary genres as individual arts capable of adapting and
assimilating the methods and features of one another. From this perspective they are
discrete entities and their interartistic relationships are viewed as border crossings into
alien territory or as foreign infiltrations. The study of collaboration and influence, for
example among visual artists and authors, often presumes more differences among these
modes of expression than it does similarities. From another direction, Richard Wagner’s
theory of the Gesamtkunstwerk celebrates the ideal of completely eliminating these
borders. Yet this total work of art affirms the aesthetic system that delineates these
borders to begin with, by merging the individual arts into a single unitary form.
Inquiries into the interarts descend from a critical tradition classifying them
according to the higher and lower orders of the Great Chain of Being. According to
Herbert Schueller, eighteenth-century aestheticians often studied the “correspondences”
among the arts with the aim of accessing a rational connection to the harmony of the
divine order. From the parallels they traced, they drew the outlines of what they supposed
2
to be a universal, supreme, and unchanging theory of aesthetics.1 Beginning with the
Romantic period, theorists and artists alike modified this view and emphasized the
inclusion of human emotion into the system, which, although it was still considered
timeless and Absolute, was constantly unfolding and instantiating itself.2 Many modern
appreciations of the correspondences are therefore rooted in a metaphysically and
spiritually inflected aesthetics organized around the concept of harmonic unity. In this
sense, by believing that the categories of each individual art could be transcended to
culminate in the Gesamtkunstwerk, the Romantics were even more idealistic than their
predecessors. Edgar Allen Poe and early modernist authors such as Charles Baudelaire,
Stéphane Mallarmé, the early Stefan George, and Andrei Bely were influenced by these
ideas, even as they introduced new aesthetic standards that modified existing perceptions
of the system.3
Within this ideology, music serves as a figure of artistic autonomy and aesthetic
purity. In his lecture “The Poetic Principle” (1848), Edgar Allen Poe turns to music as
poetry’s ideal aspiration. The concept of musically-inspired poetry is removed from the
1
See, for instance, Du Fresnoy, Charles Alphonse De arte graphica (1688); Dryden,
John “Parallel of Poetry and Painting” (1695); Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim Laokoon, oder
über die Grenzen der Malerei und Poesie (1766); Jones, William. “Essay on the Arts
Commonly Called Imitative” (1772); Mason, William. “Instrumental Church Music” The
Works of William Mason 3 (1811):285-326; Krause, Karl Christian. Darstellung aus der
Geschichte der Musik (1827); Etienne Souriau. La corespondance des arts. 1947; Brown,
Calvin. Music and Literature (1948); Munro, Thomas. The Arts and Their Interrelations
(1949).
2
See Coleridge, Fragment 2035 and “Lecture Four”; Ruskin, John. Poetry of
Architecture (1838) and Modern Painters (1843); Richard Wagner. “Kunstwerk der
Zukünft.” (1849); J. W. von Goethe. “Zur Farbenlehre” (1869); See also Abrams, M. H.
The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition. (1953);
3
For examples, see especially Charles Baudelaire’s “Correspondences,” Roger Fry’s
New Directions translation of Stéphane Mallarmé’s Poems, Stefan George’s Hymnen,
and Andrei Bely’s essay “The Forms of Art.” Edith Sitwell’s “Some Notes on My Own
Poetry”; T.S. Eliot’s “The Music of Poetry”
3
fluctuating concerns of daily life and elevates the poet’s attention away from his or her
social surroundings. Poe orders both arts into a harmonious aesthetic when he comments,
“An immortal instinct deep within the spirit of man is thus plainly a sense of the
Beautiful. [. . .]. It is no mere appreciation of the Beauty before us, but a wild effort to
reach the Beauty above” (91-92). He continues, “it is in Music that the soul most nearly
attains the great end for which, when inspired by the Poetic Sentiment, it struggles—the
creation of supernal Beauty” (93). Instrumental, lyricless music is framed in this instance
as an abstract, nonrepresentational extreme of poetic form and in such a way that
presumes the correspondences between art forms correlate also to timeless aesthetic
truths.
Although Poe’s ideas were very influential on French Symbolism, the Russian
Symbolist, Andrei Bely identified him as an “illusionist” (“Symbolism and
Contemporary Russian Art” 105) and insisted on attending to both the conditions of
modern life and the “vibrations of eternity” through the idea of music (“The Forms of
Art” 179). In a 1902 essay, “The Forms of Art,” Bely wrote that “Каждый вид искусства
стремится выразить в образах нечто типичное, вечное, независмое от места и
времени. В музыке наиболее удачна выражаются эти воления вечности” (“Every
branch of art strives to express in images something typical, eternal, independent of place
and time. It is in music that these vibrations of eternity are most successfully expressed”;
103; 179). Though both writers’ works aspire toward a “supernal beauty,” Poe calls on
poets to do away with the world “before us” altogether in their writing. Bely, on the other
hand, believes the earthly and the eternal belong to the same universal system and that the
underlying structure of their enigmatic relationship can be explored through the interarts.
4
More specifically, Bely describes how (“В музыке нам открывают тайны движения,
его сущность управляющая миром” (“In music the secrets of movement are opened up
to us, the essence of movement that governs the world”; 102; 178). In his novel
Petersburg, which will be discussed in the final section of this chapter, he seeks to
capture the great through the minute, the timeless through the hours of a day, and the
universal through specificity of place. However, the correlation he draws between the
modern world and the eternal is not mimetic, but indirect. Bely seeks to acknowledge the
artist’s situation in an imperfect, not totalized, modernity, although he does not give up
on the unified and ideal system in which he positions it.
According to Bely, the order of the universe is characterized by an inner,
“unfathomable” (бездонность) structure (181). Unlike the mimetic arts, music, he
imagines, engages with the intervening constitutive motions of daily life as well as the
order that rules it: “Зодчество, скулптура и живопись заняты образами
действительности, музыка—внутренней стороной этих образов, т.е. движением,
управляющим ими” (“Architecture, sculpture and painting are concerned with the
images of reality, music—with the inner aspect of those languages, i.e. with the
movement that governs them”; 100; 175). All art is deeply concerned with its relationship
to empirical reality for Bely; that is, experience provides the sustenance without which art
could not be created. However, the more abstract the art form, the stronger its
relationship to both reality and the “eternal” is. Music, therefore, is distinct from other art
forms not only because of its mode of mediation, but because what it represents or
expresses is altogether different. Rather than expressing ideas or images, it expresses
what he calls their timeless essence by capturing their “movement” (движение) and
5
“rhythm” (ритм). This is notable in view of the role of tempo and time in Petersburg,
which is dominated by the ticking of a time-bomb. He comments,
В музыке постигается сущность движения; во всех бесконечных
мирах эта сущность одна и та же. Музыкой выражается единство,
связующее эти миры, бывшие, сущие и имеющие существовать в
будущем. Бесконечное совершествование постепенно приближает нас
к сознательному пониманию этой сущности. Надо надеяться, что нам
возможно приблизиться в будушиваемся к этой сущности . . . (101;
ellipses in original)
In music the essence of movement is apprehended; in all infinite worlds
this essence is one and the same. It is music that expresses the unity which
links all these worlds, those that have been, those that are, and those that
have yet to be in the future. The infinite process of perfection is gradually
bringing us closer to a conscious understanding of that essence. We have
to hope that it will be possible for us to come close to such an
understanding in the future. In music we listen unconsciously to that
essence. In music we can catch hints of a future perfection. (176)
As he repeatedly writes, “Музыке—о будущем”; ‘music is about the future’ (101; 177).
The verbal and participial basis of the Russian word for future implies an ongoing action
of “will be-ing”: the noun is itself a verbal form. As a temporal art, music is never still or
stable, which it shares with the idea of the future’s present unfolding, where the future is
necessarily deferred.
6
Thus Bely believed that by “incorporating a musical structure into a work of
literature,” he could access a higher form of art “sought by the Symbolists more
generally” (Janacek, “Rhythm” 12). To this end, he wrote four prose narrative
“symphonies” between 1902 and 1908. Like the symphonic form, the overarching
structure of three of these narratives is arranged into four movements. These themselves
are divided into subsections, consisting of as few as one and as many as 35 numbered
sequences. Each of these segments range from one sentence to a paragraph in length.
Their text resembles free verse in its visual layout, and as Gerald Janacek points out,
repeated patterns in the language have the effect of a leitmotif (12). He remarks further,
“Of course, significant internal details of symphonic form, such as contrasting tempos
and keys, are missing, since they are unrealizable in a literary medium.” The unrealizable
and “unfathomable” was, however, precisely the aspect of music that interested Bely. The
musical quality for which he aimed had very little to do with sound. Instead, it involved
an evocation of what he hoped to be an eternal structure, which in the case of the
Symphonies and Petersburg manifests in the layout of the literary page. In fact, the
qualities of music that Janacek identifies as most inaccessible to literary narrative are
precisely the elements to which Bely dedicates his attention by enhancing his attention to
the visual nature of his texts. By attending to the mise-en-page that would normally be
treated as invisible during the process of novel reading, he extends a temporal-spatial link
between the traditional arts of music, literary narrative, and pictorial depiction. Whether
or not it was successful, his rejection of the paragraph form in favor of grouped and
numbered sentences was an attempt at literary tempo and compositional coherence. These
serve, in place of the conjunction and logical transition inherent in narrative, to establish
7
a paratactic pattern within the work and to relate it to a larger symbolic order. The use of
spacing, punctuation, and page layout furthermore function in Bely’s literary works as a
bridge between the temporal and the spatial arts. Bely’s method of accessing the musical
in his novels makes use of the very medium that differentiates the two arts most, the
story’s written form. In this way, the unresolvable difference between the two media is
made use of. The ideal that all arts are the expression of a great creative force, or God,
persists as the motive behind his experiments.
This chapter treats punctuation, broadly defined, as a modern intermedial device,
a term I use in place of interartistic. The model of interrelation that the typical idea of the
sister arts depends upon hierarchizes forms of human expression and privileges music’s
abstraction as providing a particular link to a divine or utopian order. Even if the interarts transgress traditional boundaries between themselves, their crossings identify and
affirm the distinction between art genres by necessitating the imitative crossing or
absorption in the first place. In my use of the term intermediality, I suggest that as W. J.
T. Mitchell writes, “all media are mixed media” (6) to a certain extent already, which is
not the same as saying that they are the same. My selection of Andrei Bely’s example is
not coincidental. In the readings of essays by Theodor Adorno that follow, I trace how
the musiclike element of literature emerges from its own written medium, not from a
crossing, mixing, or totalizing action. Locating significance in the accidentals of
punctuation does not only follow the established critical reversal of center and margin, or
essence and accident. Rather, its “accidental” status as a nonintentional, even dissonant,
language ruptures the classical privileging of unity, essence, and wholeness, a rupture
modernist aesthetics sought to act out or engage more generally.
8
9
“In keinem ihrer Elemente ist die Sprache
so musikähnlich wie in den Satzzeichen”
—Theodor Adorno
In “Über einige Relationen zwischen Musik und Malerei” (1965), Theodor
Adorno critiques the practice of imitative or merged art forms when he writes that “Das
Wagnersche Gesamtkunstwerk und seine Derivate waren der Traum jener Konvergenz
als abstrakte Utopie, ehe die Medien selbst sie gestatteten. Es mißglückte durch
Vermischung der Medien, anstatt des Übergangs des einen ins andere durchs eigene
Extrem hindurch” (“Über einige” 637); (“The Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk and its
derivatives were the dream of that convergence as abstract utopia, before the media
themselves permitted it. It failed by mixing media, instead of making the transition from
each to the other by way of its own extremity”) (74). Here he identifies the
Gesamtkunstwerk as a purely theoretical and abstract construct, which is the offspring of
a dreamlike utopianism. It prematurely forces distinct media together, which produces a
hybrid, mixed-medium, not the coherent and unified form intended. On the other hand,
Adorno’s own ideal of intermediality consists of each medium having an extreme through
which it passes into the other. These clauses are difficult to paraphrase, first because one
has the choice of interpreting “extreme” in two very different ways. Is the extreme an
extremity, an outer limit or border of music where it ceases to be itself? Or is it extremely
itself, as in extremely loud, or as musical as music can be? The second difficulty is that
Adorno manages to sketch this without any predicate. Another, more literal translation of
the clause would be: “instead of the segue of one into the other straight through its own
extreme.” The segue, like any transition, bridges two musical compositions together
while maintaining their independence from one another. The passage is made
10
emphatically with the “durch […] hindurch.” My understanding, which will be supported
by further passages, is that painting and music meet in a connecting crossover that lies in
the midst of their respective mediums. This crossover, we will see, is writing. By reading
these related essays side-by-side, we will gain a far more complex understanding of the
epigraph above, which states that language is its most musiclike in its punctuation marks.
Aside from the model of relation described above, Adorno observes two opposing
trends among the interrelation of media: first, the method of treating one art as if it were
the other; and second, a reaction to the first, of attempting to purge an artistic genre of all
external influences. In contrast, his own commentary pursues these tendencies until the
demarcations around which they are organized collapse. Even in regard to the inscrutable
difference between music as a temporal art and painting as a spatial one, he shows the
obvious ways in which each is fundamentally impossible without the other. Put
differently, the perceived orientation of music and painting each around a single
dimension is exaggerated. He claims instead, “Konvergieren Malerei und Musik nicht
durch Anähnelung, so treffen sie sich in einem Dritten: beide sind Sprache” (“If painting
and music do not converge by means of growing similarity, they do meet in a third
dimension: both are language”; 633; 71). The junction, segue, or crossover from the
former passage is identified in this latter one. The convergence is not an absorption, but
an intersection that is conducted through a third intervening medium. Music and painting
each constitute language, in the singular, which is to say that they are not merely brought
into contact through their shared status as languages of sorts. We will return to this
triangulation later in this section after establishing more clearly what sort of language is
being designated.
11
Let us turn to another essay, written almost ten years earlier, in which Adorno had
traced similar connections in regard to music and language. In “Musik, Sprache und ihr
Verhältnis im gegenwärtigen Komposition” (1956), he specifies a series of linguistic
devices shared by the two media. These structural features also share the same names of
the same language:
Nicht nur als organisierter Zusammenhang von Lauten ist die Musik analog
zur Rede, sprachähnlich, sondern in der Weise ihres konkreten Gefüges.
Die traditionelle musikalische Formenlehre weiß von Satz, Halbsatz,
Periode, Interpunktion; Frage, Ausruf, [Parenthese;]4 Nebensätze finden
sich überall, Stimmen heben und senken sich, und in all dem ist der Gestus
von Musik der Stimme entlehnt, die redet (649; [“Fragment” 251]).
(Not only as an organized relation of sounds is music, in analogy to
discourse, languagelike, but in the manner of its concrete structure. The
traditional musical theory of form/morphology knows of the sentence,
phrase, period, punctuation, question, exclamation, [parenthesis;]
subordinate clauses find themselves everywhere, voices rise and fall, and in
all of these things the gesture is taken over from the music of the voice that
speaks.)
The actual features described by the shared terms derive, he speculates in the last
sentence, from the common ancestor of the voice. Yet the opening introduces the
sequence of similarities as clearly exceeding acoustical likeness. The languagelike
elements listed do not have independent sounds; in themselves they are silent. Instead
4
“Parenthese” or parenthesis is included only in the shorter, first publication, “Fragment
über Musik und Sprache” (1953).
12
they are the tools by which pieces or units of the composition are inflected and brought
together, or are concretely gefügt. In fact, these analogies are drawn between the musical
forms that correlate with those syntactical and rhetorical forms marked by punctuation in
literary writing. They are designated by the non-phonetic and silent graphemes in written
language. The compositional analogies are enriched by their components’ shared names.
Consequently, the terms illustrate not only the overlapping rhetorical purposes of the
linguistic and musical forms, but how the shared vocabulary—in German, as in
English—used to describe them contributes to the coincidence, ambiguity, or intercourse
between them. Although there are some words music and language are not obliged to
share, Adorno makes no effort to avoid the language of language to describe music.5
These compositional features and the words by which they are named guide the listener
through a process of reading. What they tell us is that the coherence of the composition
and its concrete fabric in music and language are analogous to one another. The two are
not fused as a single musicolinguistic entity, but co-positioned alongside one another
through their shared language of composition, which composes even their relationship to
one another.
This bears some scrutiny. The overlapping diction in the following excerpt
illustrates that languagelikeness is a determining factor in making music musical, not
mere sound, because it lends it a sensible and regulated system of organization. By the
same token, music can become too predictable as a result:
5
For example, he writes, “Sprachähnlich ist sie als zeitliche Folge artikulierter Laute, die
mehr sind als bloß Laut. Sie sagen etwas, oft ein Menschliches. Sie sagen es desto
nachdrücklicher, je höher die Musik geartet ist” (“It is language-like as a chronological
sequence of articulated sounds, they are more than mere sound. They say something,
often something human. The higher the style of music it is, the more emphatically they
say it”; “Musik, Sprache” 649; my italics).
13
Sie benutzt wiederkehrende Sigel. Geprägt wurden sie von der Tonalität.
Wenn nicht Begriffe, so zeitigte diese doch Vokabeln: vorab die stets
wieder mit identischer Funktion einzusetzenden Akkorde, auch
eingeschliffene Verbindungen wie die der Kadenzstufen, vielfach selbst
melodische Floskeln, welche die Harmonie umschreiben.
It uses returning ciphers. They became imprinted by tonality. If not
concepts, they at least brought about vocabulary: first the chords inserted
again and again with the same function, used up combinations like those
of the steps of cadence as well, often even the melodic clichés that
indirectly describe the harmony. (649-50; my italics)
The scheme of tonality has been the defining system of composition within modern
western music. In it, chords are structured around a referential tonic, which in effect
“manage[s] expectation and structure[s] desire” (Hyer). With the twentieth century,
however, composers began breaking with this tradition more dramatically. For Adorno, it
has stood as a symbol of arbitrary authority, institutionalized and thereby naturalized as
the system upon which compositions were to be unquestionably based. Because its
materials always served the same function in the composition, they had taken on an
ossified predictability. Exposing it as mere second-nature, the Viennese classical
composer Arnold Schönberg replaced it with atonal compositional concepts and
techniques lacking “contextual definition in reference to triads, diatonic scales or keys”
and in some cases came close to abolishing the “hierarchical distinctions among pitches”
altogether (Lansky). Schönberg’s innovation again and again exemplifies in Adorno’s
writing the breaking of existing aesthetic standards, the precise timing of which makes it
14
meaningful. In the passage above tonality is characterized as a languagelike system that
lends music coherence and meaning, by stamping music’s components as signs within the
compositional structure. They actually become meaningless empty phrases, he explains,
because their encoded signification arises from their repeated use. Yet the possibility of
transforming these conventions is also languagelike and is suggested on one hand through
Adorno’s own defamiliarizing treatment of language in the two passages above.6 The
dual applicability of terms used in the comparisons—such as sentence, punctuation, and
phrase—repeatedly draws attention to the fact of their intermedial co-incidence, in excess
of their applications in the context of one art or the other. As a result, the two contexts are
con-fused with one another, as is the question of where their similarities in structure and
name begin and end. In other words, although Adorno refers to the languagelikeness of
music, the analogy moves in both directions. The ambiguous play of names releases the
words from the determinacy associated with their naming function and as a result reveals
what is considered their musiclikeness.7 This confusing language, which gives way from
one medium’s system of composition to the other’s is beginning to sound a great deal like
the écriture of Derrida’s Of Grammatology, certainly not only in its status as writing, but
6
See Paddison.
Susan Bernstein writes of the music-language comparison that “music becomes a
dummy figure for reflecting language, a figure for language’s failure or inability to
explain itself linguistically” (Virtuosity 55). Furthermore “this musical character plays an
important part in the critique of metaphysics emphasizing the historicity of articulation
and the materiality of subjectivity.” Peter Dayan similarly remarks, “Music provides a
privileged vocabulary drawing on the history of interpretation of music that understands
it as disruptive of a logocentric organization of meaning – a disruption that privileges
precisely the discursive extension of enunciation. The critical potential of musical
analogy lies in the nonoppositional and nonhierarchical relationship between composition
and performance. Yet these terms tend to be immediately co-opted by a linguistic
orientation and are called in to mend a linguistic problem encountered in binary terms”
(52).
7
15
in its deconstructive operations and effects on closed systems of composition and
aesthetics. Adorno’s understanding of new music develops out of this class of writing. As
the example of the scheme of tonality above suggests, what is at first viewed as an
unchanging and universal principle of form may give way to new compositional
principles (which in turn become the new norms in need of overturning). The next
paragraphs will show how the materiality of this writing, its typeface, punctuation, and
compositor-related constituents, serve as a powerful figure and instrument in the process
of aesthetic reform, or in identifying the opening through which the new can emerge.
The title of the essay, “Music, Language, and their Relationship in Contemporary
Composition,” implicates “composition” (Komponieren) in the relation between music
and language. This activity (the German term is a gerund and does not refer to the
composed product) refers to the rhetorical assembly of words in oratory and writing, the
“due arrangement of words into sentences, and of sentences into periods; the art of
constructing sentences and of writing prose or verse” (“composition, n”). Precisely this
activity—if we recall from this document’s Introduction—constituted the earliest
practices of punctuation in the Greco-Roman tradition of letters. Punctuating consisted of
segmenting scriptura continua texts into paragraphos, comma, colon, and periodos. In
drawing or painting, composition is used in the service of “arranging in due order the
parts [. . .] to form a harmonious whole.” In music, it similarly describes the act or art of
composing a musical work, often vis-à-vis canonical rules of harmony. In each of its
artistic senses, it is conducted in concert with established principles of “wholeness” and
“harmony.”
16
In fact, as we will see, the composition history of this essay—from what can be
divined from its publications—itself dramatizes the music-language analogies this
chapter has been outlining. The essay (which for simplicity’s sake will be referred to as
“Composition”) was written as a reproduction and extension of the 1953 “Fragment über
Musik und Sprache” (hitherto known as “Fragment”). The implication is that his second
publication was a type of musical reinterpretation of the first. Publications of
“Composition” do not only continue as the sequel to the “Fragment,” but reproduce the
initial work in its first twelve paragraphs, which undergo minimal revision. Two blank
lines follow the textual reprise to indicate an ambiguous demarcation of difference
between it and the fourteen new paragraphs that follow. Judging from the 1956 change in
title, the fragmented nature of the first essay and its subject would, one would expect, be
completed through the introduction of modern musical composition into the
investigation, particularly because of composition’s association with canonical, harmonic
form. Ironically, “Composition” did not replace its predecessor; instead “Fragment” has
maintained its autonomy from the latter essay. Though the second version was
satisfactory enough to Adorno to be printed twice in a single year, he selected the original
fragment for inclusion in his 1963 volume Quasi una fantasia. Consequently it remained
the more authoritative version, while the other was only posthumously included in the
appendix of the third volume of Musikalische Schriften. Its editor Rolf Tiedemann
remarks that the choice to include the full version of “Composition” in this way (“diese
anhangsweise mitzuteilen”) was determined by the interest of its content (“sachliche
Bedeutung der vollständigeren Version”) on one hand and its possible incompleteness
17
“[E]rgänzungsbedürtig[keit]” and what Heinz-Klaus Metzger called its “dubios” status on
the other (680).
The confusions accompanying the essays’ publications reflect the difficulties
posed by the so-called musical element of writing, particularly in Adorno’s oeuvre.8 The
revision of the fragment is paradoxically both “vollständig,” complete, and possibly in
need of completion—“ergänzungsbedürftig.” Adorno writes in these very works that to
treat language as though it were music would be to treat it as “a broken-off parable”
(“Musik, Sprache” 651). As an illustrative story that does not succeed in demonstrating
an external principle, a broken-off parable must be the narrative equivalent of an empty
signifier. It follows that the “Fragment,” as a literary form, would be considered at least
music-like insofar as it does not fully disclose itself or come to completion. The scrutiny
of the authoritative and complete status of the revised version makes also the extension of
the fragment fragment- and therefore music-like. Read together, the echoes of key
phrases and formulations shared by the essays (sprachähnlich, musikähnlich,
musiksprachlich) vary on one another and mark out an approximate and unconcluded
territory characterized by their potential likenesses (and not by a dialectical absorption
realized with a third term). The essays on music and language, themselves essais or
“attempts,” appear in more ways than one to be musikähnliche linguistic forms.
In correlation to the aesthetic principles associated with the term “compose” are
the material counterparts of the arts, where physical objects are arranged, ordered, joined,
and built in spatial relation to one another. This class of positioning is also denoted in the
term more generally. In writing, notably, it designates the technical arrangement of
8
See Gillespie.
18
setting type or “composing [] pages of matter for printing” (“composition, n”) as well.
Our interest in it lies in its dual nature as aesthetic and conceptual on one hand and
material or even mechanical on the other. In view of nineteenth-century anxieties
regarding mass print production (which, it will be shown, is echoed in the threat of mass
revolution in Petersburg), Susan Bernstein writes that “Perhaps the printer’s composition
[…] must be understood as a metaphoric double of what comes to be called the ‘ideal’
composition of the poet or musical composer” (Virtuosity 22-23).9 This metaphor, in
other words, privileges the creative genius of the ideal composer and renders the material
compositor its unequal, mechanical double. We are discovering instances here, on the
other hand, in which the two acts of composition become indistinguishable and the
hierarchy upon which they are positioned collapses, particularly when the discourse
concerns comparisons of music, painting, and language. Even in the text of Adorno’s
essays and their translations, language and music come together through their composed
inscriptions (i.e. musikähnliche Sprache, sprachähnliche Musik, musiksprachlich), in the
togetherness of compound word forms, in the flexibility of German word construction,
and in the hyphens that join “language-” and “like” in English.
It has often been noted that Adorno’s style of writing dramatizes on a formal level
much of what it posits in a propositional manner.10 In this way, the language assembled to
9
Jerome McGann pursues this not as a metaphor, but as an “analogy between
‘composition’ as it concerns the typographer and ‘composition’ as it concerns the visual
artist. [. . .]. ‘Composition’ is an activity of musicians, and the printed page may equally
be produced as a kind of musical score, or set of directions for the audition of verse and
voice” (Black Riders 83)
10
In Negative Dialektik Adorno writes, “was in ihr zuträgt, entscheidet, nicht These oder
Position; das Gewebe, nicht der deduktive oder induktive, eingleisige Gedankengang.
Daher ist Philosophie wesentlich nicht referierbar. Sonst wäre sie überflüssig” (44); (“it is
what happens in philosophy that is decisive, not a thesis or position; its fabric, not the
19
describe the languagelikeness of music itself appears musiclike. Of the very few revisions
made to the section of “Composition” that had previously appeared in “Fragment,” the
revision of the following sentence rearranges the relationship between music and
language represented in its earlier version through a compositorial change. Adorno
changes “Gegenüber der meinenden Sprache ist Musik eine von ganz anderem Typus”
(“Opposed to intentional language, music is one of a completely different type”;
“Fragment” 252) to “Gegenüber der meinenden Sprache ist Musik Sprache nur als eine
von ganz anderem Typus” (“Opposed to intentional language, music is language only as
one of a completely different type”; “Musik, Sprache” 650; my italics). On a visual level,
the insertion of “Sprache” beside “Musik” brings the two words side-by-side on the page
for the first time in the essay, which forms an initial step toward the compound formation
of musiksprachlich introduced in the second part of the essay. If typographically the two
approach one another, symbolically they are separated from an equating or metaphorical
“is” by the “as” of simile. In the first version music is a completely different type of
language, but a language it is. The revised sentence signifies more forcefully by
identifying “eine,” but at the same time a distance is inserted: instead of being a
language, music is as or like a language of a completely different type compared with
intentional language. The double movement is a variation on the dialectical tension traced
everywhere in Adorno’s writing and that his own writing praises in music. This is
single-track train of thought, whether deductive or inductive. For this reason it is essential
to philosophy that it is not summarizable. If it were, it would be superfluous”; qtd in
Jarvis 128-29). Many scholars (see Nicholsen, Gillespie, Tiedemann) have described
Adorno’s writing as musical, in the sense that, as Simon Jarvis describes it, “Both
philosophy and music have a constitutive internal organization, whose articulation is as
essential to the meaning of a philosophical text or musical composition as the individual
propositions or thematic elements without which there would be no composition at all”
(129).
20
reinforced with the term Typus, which refers to categories of mediation and connotes the
material type of the page. Music and symbolic language would be like two different
types, typographies, alphabets, or styles of Schrift. By association, the kind of language
with which music is aligned is the language of material type. This material writing,
instead of serving as a supplement to or record of intentional or signifying language,
binds and differentiates literature and music. Pursuing this briefly, we recognize two
counterbalances: the type’s language/the intentional language (as terms and as descriptors
of the sentences) and is/as (as metaphor and analogy). All are equally at work in the
process of revision.
The “als” inserted is a cornerstone of Adorno’s writing and its repetitions
collaborate with the “ähnlich” compounds of these two essays to establish a logic of
simile. Both works begin as follows: “Musik ist sprachähnlich. Ausdrücke wie
musikalisches Idiom, musikalischer Tonfall, sind keine Metaphern. Aber Musik ist nicht
Sprache. Ihre Sprachähnlichkeit weist den Weg ins Innere, doch auch ins Vage. Wer
Musik wörtlich als Sprache nimmt, den führt sie irre” (“Music is languagelike.
Expressions like musical idiom and musical intonation are not metaphors. But music is
not language. Its languagelikeness leads us in the direction of the inside, but also
somewhere vague. Who takes music literally/by its word as language will be led into
confusion by it”; 649). On one hand, the words shared by language about language and
language about music draw our attention to the similarity, but language here does what it
always does, it signifies something that exceeds itself, that is not identical with itself (as
performed music would do). Here it names music as its foil or as a figure of language’s
21
own incommensurability.11 If the reader mistakes words as equivalence and treats music
as a word—wörtlich—literally as a naming language, the “Inner” he or she pursues turns
out to be “Irre.” “Inner” becomes “Irre” when the similarity between n and r is treated as
identity. The resemblance between the two words has to do with their wordliness, their
material, their letters, and the type from which they are composed, but not what they
might signify.
At the same time the music-language relation dramatized in his writings also takes
place on a propositional level. The two essays on music and language are collected in
Musikalische Schriften, a title which Rolf Tiedemann, the editor of Adorno’s Collected
Writings, describes as “kaum zufällig” (674) and writes that Adorno himself selected it as
the subtitle for both Klangfiguren (Sound-figures)and Quasi una Fantasia (after
Beethoven Op. 27 No. 1 and 2). According to Tiedemann it would be a mistake to call the
essays collected in the 16th volume of the collected works, Schriften über Musik or
Aufsätzen zur Musik, (Writings on or about Music or Essays to/on Music). He cites
Heinz-Klaus Metzger:
seine Musikbücher sind keine Bücher über Musik. Nie hat Adornos
Philosophie ihren Anspruch dahin zurückgenommen, die Alternative
zwischen dem musikalischen Denken und dem Denken über Musik
11
In considering the dilemma of music-language comparisons in Romantic texts, Susan
Bernstein premises that “The problem of talking about music, entrenched as it is in issues
of performance, repetition, broadcasting, transmission, and vibration, mirrors a problem
of language more generally, a difficulty in speaking about language’s own performance”
(3). Music and language serve as foils for one another. For the present purposes, what is
most notable is how neither music nor literary language cross into one another, but rather
underscore the less attended features that resemble the other already existing in each.
Perhaps for this reason, Bernstein resists translating what Adorno calls musikähnlich or
sprachähnlich as musical or linguistic, but instead as music- or language-like.
22
anzuerkennen [. . .]. [. . .]. Einzigartig steht Adornos oeuvre dafür ein, daß
Sache und Begriff nicht äußerlich einander zuzuordnen, sondern in der
Anstrengung des dialektischen Prozesses durcheinander zu vermitteln
sind, soll ihre Identität, welche ihre Erkenntnis heißt, irgend aufblitzen.
(qtd. in Tiedemann “Editorische Nachbemerkung” 675)
his music-books are not books about music. Adorno’s philosophy has
never yet withdrawn its claim to recognize the choice between musical
thought and thought about music [. . .] Adorno’s oeuvre uniquely vouches
that thing and concept aren’t to be artificially assigned to one another, but
are to be mediated through one another in the tension of the dialectical
process, should their identity, which is the name of their
realization/cognition, flash somewhere.
Here the emphasis is on how the volume’s title reflects not merely the content of its
essays, but the nature of their thought process. Both Tiedemann’s and Metzger’s
formulations are suggestive of the difference between the adjective form and the form
mediated by the prepositions über or zu. The adjective form indicates not merely that the
books’ essays are about music, but recapitulates how the writings are modified by their
content. What we are left with are musical writings, writing that is itself musical. The
present discussion has been emphasizing the intermedial form and process of this
“Denken” or “thought.” To be precise, it takes place in writing—writing, as a process of
thinking with material as well as signifying qualities, that is, as a process that is both
music-like and language-like. Adorno writes dialectic at the same time that he describes
it. Tiedemann also draws attention to the noun Schriften by distinguishing between
23
writings and essays. Schrift (writing, or script) is far more ambiguous and therefore
evocative than Aufsatz or (Metzger’s) Buch. Musikalische Schriften could also be
paraphrased as musical “systems of signs.”
In “Fragment” and “Composition,” writing is clearly foregrounded as Adorno
develops the comparisons between language and music. In continuation of the passage
that opens the essay discussed above, Adorno explains that interpretation is not
“accidental to music,” but is an integral component of it (“Darum gehört die Idee der
Interpretation zur Musik selber und ist ihr nicht akzidentell”; “Musik, Sprache” 651). Its
performance requires the ability “to speak its language correctly” (“Musik richtig spielen
aber ist zuvörderst ihre Sprache richtig sprechen”), yet “this demands imitation, not
deciphering” (“Diese erheischt Nachahmung, nicht Dechiffrierung”). The
languagelikeness of music then extends into the ways in which it is understood and
received. Whereas reception is usually considered secondary to the work, Adorno insists
that interpretation is essential to music. This is, of course, incontrovertible in the case of
instrumental performance. What he is getting at, slowly, is the determining and inscribing
role of understanding more generally, which recalls the work of early scribes who used
punctuation as an interpretive instrument as they copied. The following quote likens the
advanced reading of music to “silent reading” and states finally that a musical treatment
of language would be the equivalent of copying its text by hand:
Nur in der mimetischen Praxis, die freilich zur stummen Imagination
sublimiert sein mag nach Art des stummen Lesens, erschließt sich Musik;
niemals einer Betrachtung, die sie unabhängig in ihrem Vollzug deutet.
Wollte man in den meinenden Sprachen einen Akt dem musikalischen
24
vergleichen, es wäre eher das Abschreiben eines Textes als dessen
signifikative Auffassung. (651)
Music is accessible only through mimetic praxis, which could still be
sublimated into a silent imagination in the manner of silent reading; never
through an observation that it independently refers to in its performance. If
one wished to compare an act in intentional language to a musical one, it
would be more of a transcription of a text than its significative
understanding.
The musiclike treatment of language involves its textual rather than spoken transmission.
The comparison centers on script, rewriting as an understanding, or understanding as
reinscribing. In the essay “Voraussetzungen” (1960), Theodor Adorno offers a similarly
intermedial mode of reception. He interprets Hans Helms’ musicolinguistic text Fa:
M’ahniesgwow by focusing on the features it shares with nonrepresentational arts and
reads the experimental post-modernist text without documenting an explanatory and
definitive “understanding” of it. “To translate [art] into concepts,” he explains, would be
to fully “misunderstand” it (431). An alternative approach to interpretation results when
the reader is “immersed in [the work’s] immanent movement” (“in seiner immanenten
Bewegung darin ist”) or when the work “is recomposed by the ear in accordance with its
own logic, repainted by the eye, when the linguistic sensorial speaks along with it”
(“sobald es vim Ohr seiner je Eugene Logic nacho nochmals komponiert, vom Auge
gemalt, vom sprachlichem Sensorium mitgesprochen wird”; 97; 433). He describes this
mode of reading as a following, a repetition, or tracing, rather than a translation or
explanation. The extreme experiments of Helms’ work place Adorno’s intermedial
25
method (not exclusively concept-driven) of reading into relief, but the implication
remains that all literary texts could be approached in this way.
Writing also emerges in the comparison of music and painting. In the piece with
which this section began, “Über einige Relationen über Musik und Malerei,” Adorno
introduces a narrower category of shared language: écriture, a term drawn from DanielHenry Kahnweiler, the Parisian art dealer and critic to whom the essay is dedicated.
Painting, Kahnweiler theorizes in his monograph on Cubist painting, is a form of writing,
an encoded and decipherable écriture. Audiences find Cubism illegible, he explains,
because they are unfamiliar with its iconic vocabulary. The subjects of realist painting are
also recognized through a system of references and not simply because of the image’s
resemblance to its content. Kahnweiler holds that the painting’s viewer processes and
translates the work’s two-dimensional language into his or her knowledge and experience
of objects in a three-dimensional empirical world. Écriture, for him accordingly,
constitutes the pattern of references by which a work of music or painting is
communicated, or according to which it is composed and received (Confessions
esthétique). This system of references is replaced and renewed (“deformed”) with each
new movement. In other words, it is not a universal or historically stable set of signs, but
is repeatedly established. Adorno explains, “Darum ist écriture geschichtlichen Wesens:
modern. Sie wird frei kraft dessen, was man in der Malerei, mit einem fatalen Ausdruck,
Abstraktion zu nennen sich gewöhnt hat, durch Absehen von der Gegenständlichkeit”
(“écriture has a historical character; it is modern. It is set free on the strength of what in
painting, with a devastating expression, people have taken to calling abstraction, through
distraction from its representationality”; 634; 71-72). Écriture traces new paths of
26
correlations between the painting and the objects the painting represents.12 In the context
of Kahnweiler’s position, the historical nature of écriture, as Adorno uses it here, consists
of its replacement of existing convention, which is also écriture. Ever changing, it is
characterized by successive artistic movements and the codes they adopt. By extension,
music and painting resemble one another in the processes by which their languages are
written and rewritten. We will consider if the pattern of this process is also writing.
To relate back to Derrida’s writing of the same name, in Adorno’s discourse the
writing of the writing, or the historical language by which écriture is rewritten, is in itself
a performance of difference and temporal deferral. In his own tracing of these, Adorno
inevitably locates the movement of dialectic in innumerable variations. Even in its
negative form, it dictates a predetermined path and pattern by which history develops.13
The historical movement by which conventions succeed one another is the very pattern
that music’s form captures. It appears that the dialectic that Adorno uncovers may itself
be a variation of the very universal ideals valorized by Poe and Bely at the start of this
chapter. This is to say that dialectic constitutes an eternal tempo. Through its series of
12
See also: “In jüngeren Debatten zumal über die bildende Kunst ist der Begriff der
écriture relevant geworden, angeregt wohl durch Blätter Klees, die einer gekritzelten
Schrift sich nähern. Jene Kategorie der Moderne wirft als Scheinwerfer Licht über
Vergangenes; alle Kunstwerke sind Schriften, nicht erst die, die als solche auftreten, und
zwar hieroglyphenhafte, zu denen der Code verloren war und zu deren Gehalt nicht
zuletzt beiträgt, daß er fehlt. Sprache sind Kunstwerke nur als Schrift” (“In recent
aesthetic debates, especially in the fine arts, the concept of écriture has become relevant,
inspired probably by Klee’s drawings, which approximate scrawled writing. Like a
searchlight, this category of modern art illuminates the art of the past; all artworks are
writing, not just those that are obviously such; they are hieroglyphs for which the code
has been lost, a loss that plays into their content. Artworks are language only as writing”;
Ästhetische Theorie 189; 124)
13
My understanding of this is indebted to Lacoue-Labarthe’s “Caesur de la Spéculation”
and an unpublished essay, “Characterization, Animation, and Physiognomy: Adorno’s
Method and Script” by Susan Bernstein.
27
dialectical reversals, the path of each essay is also prescribed, even if it is ongoing. The
pattern by which his thought proceeds follows a rhythmic and agonistic back-and-forth
and to that extent remains always already predetermined and composed within his vision
of it. For him, this writing traces the pattern of the dialectical process that all arts follow.
Like Derrida’s écriture, it follows a sequence of deferrals and displacements; however it
leads, ultimately and implicitly, to the very utopian unity or telos that deconstruction
opposes. Yet still, insofar as Adorno’s negative dialectic reiterates deferral,
destabilization, reversal, and unresolvability, its process resembles Derrida’s écriture
itself.
The same essay goes on to a long citation of Walter Benjamin’s “Über Sprache
überhaupt und über die Sprache des Menschen,” which is among the essays that Adorno
had edited in 1955 (Schriften I-II). Here Benjamin also writes of an intermedial language.
He speculates that the language present in plastic and pictorial arts
etwa in gewissen Arten von Dingsprachen fundiert sei, daß in ihnen eine
Übersetzung der Sprache der Dinge in eine unendliche viel höhere
Sprache, aber doch vielleicht derselben Sphäre, vorliegt. Es handelt sich
hier um namenlose, unakustische Sprachen, um Sprachen aus dem
Material; dabei ist die materiale Gemeinsamkeit der Dinge in ihrer
Mitteilung zu denken. (Benjamin qtd. in Adorno 633-634)
may be grounded in certain kinds of object languages, that in them what
we find is a translation of the language of things into an infinitely higher
language, but perhaps, after all, one that belongs to the same sphere. We
have to do here with name-less, non-acoustic languages, languages from
28
the material; here one should reflect on the material commonality of things
in their communication. (Benjamin qtd. in Adorno 71)
This Dingsprache resembles the nonintentional, immanent, and material meaning Adorno
locates in writing. The material commonality is teilt mit, communicated, but also shared
and divided. Adorno continues to say that writing acts as a “figure” of painting and
music’s “essential form” (“die Figuren ihres Durchgebildetseins sind ihre Schrift”; 634);
the individual work “speaks” through its form and through the “way [it is] constructed”
(“Sie sprechen durch ihre Beschaffenheit, nicht dadurch, daß sie sich vortragen”). Its
“character as writing” has nothing “concrete to be expressed” (72), but its expressive
element moves the work “toward something that is not its own phenomenon and that
cannot be hidden in symbolic unity”; (“was sein Phänomen nicht selbst ist und was auch
weder in symbolischer Einheit in ihm sich versteckt”; 635). In other words, although it is
described as speaking and is materially present, Dingsprache’s signification performs
deferred difference rather than vocal plenitude. It exceeds propositional signification and
seems to speak out in spite of itself as its own side-effect.
It is worth pausing to attend more closely to the Benjamin essay from which
Adorno draws. There Benjamin calls language “das auf Mitteilung geistiger Inhalte
gerichtete Prinzip in den betreffenden Gegenständen” (“the principle directed toward
communicating/sharing/dividing the spiritual contents of the objects concerned”; “Über
Sprache” 140). He proceeds, “der größere oder geringere Bewusstseinsgrad, mit dem
solche Mitteilung scheinbar (oder wirklich) verbunden ist, kann daran nichts ändern, dass
wir uns völlige Abwesenheit der Sprache in nichts vorstellen können” (“the greater or
lesser degree of consciousness that is apparently (or really) involved in such
29
communication cannot alter the fact that we cannot imagine a total absence of language
in anything”; 141; 315). Words and the act of naming constitute the language of man,
whereas the language of things wordlessly communicates (mitteilt, shares with, divides
into parts with) their mental entities. However, Benjamin suggests that the latter language
bears traces of the human practices of naming and pronouncing prophecy, which was
coextensive with the identification and interpretation of the signs man located in patterns
in the sky or in the creases of the hand, for instance.14 Although these points and lines in
nature have no intention or subjectivity of their own, a predetermined future is thought to
be communicated through them. In this way inscription is a form of reading, a marking
and encoding of metadata on the actual objects observed. In the story of Oedipus, for
instance, Teiresias’ prophecy amounts to an inscription that propels the events of the
story. He interprets objects and other living beings in nature as signs inscribed by humans
for human-centered interpretations. These do not merely represent the future; they set the
events they predict into motion through their pronunciation/naming.
Writing, Benjamin notes in a related essay, bears the traces of this history: the
“unsinnliche Ähnlichkeit” ‘nonsensuous similarity’ (“Über das mimetische” 212; 335) of
language’s written form to what it signifies, whether that be the spoken word it
phonetically represents or the signified of both, is in part shaped by the object languages
described above. In particular, the study of handwriting, or graphology, treats the medium
of script as a communicative object independent from the words it records by attending to
the shapes of its letters. Just as mood or even the creator’s identity are perceived in the
brushstrokes of an Impressionist painting, the nature of the strokes and strikes of a pen
14
See McLaughlin, 123-139.
30
are also interpretable. This process of reading derives from preceding practices of
extracting mythic, magical, predetermined meanings from “things.” He writes, “Die
Schrift ist so, neben der Sprache, ein Archiv unsinnlicher Ähnlichkeiten, unsinnlicher
Korrespondenzen geworden” (“Script has become like language, an archive of
nonsensuous correspondences”; 213; 335). These objects retain some residue of their past
interpretations as they go on to be named and renamed. As one language gives way to the
other, it undergoes a translation resembling that between Dingsprache and the language
of man. Benjamin postulates, “Alle höhere Sprache ist Übersetzung der niederen, bis in
der letzten Klarheit sich das Wort Gottes entfaltet, das die Einheit dieser
Sprachbewegung ist” (“All higher language is a translation of those lower, until in
ultimate clarity the word of God unfolds, which is the unity of this movement made up of
language”; Über Sprache 156; 332). For Benjamin, the process and phenomenon of
writing itself connect this discourse to a utopian, metaphysical plenitude. However,
instead of extending outward, language opens into an interior infinity: “Denn gerade, weil
durch die Sprache sich nichts mitteilt, kann, was in der Sprache sich mitteilt, nicht von
außen beschränkt oder gemessen werden, und darum wohnt jeder Sprache ihre
inkommensurable einziggeartete Unendlichkeit inne” (“Precisely because what is
communicated in language cannot be communicated through language and will not be
externally limited or measured; therefore within every language its own
incommensurable, uniquely constituted infinity resides”; 143). The similarity or
nonsensuous correspondence appears in the “bearer” of naming language in a spatiotemporal formation, “like a flash” ‘blitzartig’ (335; 213).
31
Such shocks, shakes, or flashes are represented also in Adorno’s texts, and they
have an effect similar to the “segue” with which this section began, through which
painting makes its way into contact with music. In view of the subject at hand, these
junctures are produced by the collapse of one art into itself and onto the other. The
interruption moves beyond, for instance, the musical phenomenon musically and thereby
converges with painting without imitating it. In literature, the collapse also interrupts the
promise of representation, but more generally it suspends the compositional and
representational system’s authority. Adorno describes this coinciding self-interruption as
a “crackling” ‘knistern’ (72 ; 635), simultaneously percussive and visual in nature. It is
the closest thing to “the work’s character as writing” and “the convergence of painting
and music.” It is “seismographic,” because “it is induced by the distant, similarly
premonitory trembling during catastrophes. In reaction to it, the arts are startled; the
traces of these startle reflexes, retained in the works, are the graphic character in them”
(“Bewirkt wird er vom fernen, auch vorwegnehmenden Erzittern bei Katastrophen. Im
Reflex darauf zucken die Künste zusammen die Spuren solcher Zuckungen, welche die
Werke bewahren, sind die Schriftzüge an ihnen”; 72-73; 635). This authorless writing
works as an “involuntary” index of empirical events on art generally. It exemplifies the
“early mimetic behaviors that precede all objectivized art and that all art dreams of
objectifying” (“Also solche Seismogramme von Unwillkürlichem markieren sie den
Durchbruch jener frühen mimetischen Verhaltensweisen, die aller objektivierten Kunst
vorausgehen und die zu objektivieren insgeheim alle Kunst träumt”; 73; 635-636).
Linking the marks to facial expression, ritual dance, and to myth, Adorno identifies the
same logic that Benjamin locates in reference to the language of objects, in which the
32
interpreter determines the very meaning she or he is reading. This logic consists of
decoding nonintentional language as a sign of an event that has either taken place or is
immanent. They represent an entity or event that is not co-present; however, their
codification and ritualization expresses a belief in such plenitude, it appears. He
compares these traces to art inspired by the usually undesired, emotional, and irrational
expressions of the human body such as “blushing or gooseflesh” ‘Erröten oder der
Gänsehaut’ and the “graven images” ‘Eingegrabene Charaktere’ that “lend them duration,
without surrendering them to the seemingly objective rationality of the prevailing signs”
(“zur Dauer, ohne sie doch der dinghaften Rationalität des gängigen Zeichens zu
überantworten”; 73; 636). These body signs, as language, are important not because they
embody the ideal of full-presence, but because they serve as material signs of some
unknown through their choreographed figuration. Like Schrift, there are a material
language that do not name.
Similarly, in his essay on punctuation marks, Adorno tries to distinguish
punctuation marks from “names in language.” “Satzzeichen” (1956) opens with the
statement that, viewed in isolation, a punctuation mark behaves in the opposite manner of
“names” by having its own “Stellenwert” (status; positional value) or “Ausdruck”
(expression) (106).15 Its interest is further distinguished by the partial independence of its
expression from the system of writing in which it serves. Instead its autonomous
expression emerges from what Adorno terms its “physiognomic” character, a reference to
15
“Je weniger die Satzzeichen, isoliert genommen, Bedeutung oder Ausdruck tragen, je
mehr sie in der Sprache den Gegenpol zu den Namen ausmachen, desto entschiedener
gewinnt ein jegliches unter ihnen seinen physiognomischen Stellenwert, seinen eigenen
Ausdruck, der zwar nicht zu trennen ist von der syntaktischen Funktion, aber doch
keineswegs in ihr sich erschöpft” (106).
33
the pseudoscientific system of reading the human face. The subsequent passage illustrates
by drawing a series of playfully self-reflexive comparisons between the expressivity of
punctuation marks, bodily gesture, and facial features: “Gleicht nicht das
Ausrufungszeichen dem drohend gehobenen Zeigefinger? Sind nicht Fragezeichen wie
Blinklichter oder ein Augenaufschlag? [. . .] Das Semikolon erinnert optisch an einem
herunterhängenden Schnauzbart;” 16 (“Does the exclamation point not resemble the
menacingly raised index finger? Are question marks not like camera flashes or a wideeyed glance? [. . .] The semicolon visually evokes a hanging-down whisker;”; 106). The
implication, which has some currency in the age of emoticons, is that the punctuation of a
disembodied text can evoke the gestures of the human body that is always absent from its
linguistic communication across time and space. The bodily nature Adorno imagines in
punctuation differs from the symbolic work of names in language on one hand because its
meaning is only suggested or even imagined. On the other hand, as embodied expression
it suggests the symbolic unity of signifier and signified, to which metaphysical language
is supposed to aspire. However, the examples cited serve a purpose quite distinct from
that of dance performance or even the exaggerated hand and facial expressions of silent
film, in part because the adjective he uses to classify them recalls the deterministic
encoding of physiognomy, an obsession with knowing that went terribly wrong. The
problem with physiognomy is that it naturalizes as innate what it inscribes.
16
Schnauzbart is translated as “moustache” by Shierry Weber Nicholsen; GermanEnglish dictionaries identify it as an old-fashioned term for large, handle-bar, or “walrus
moustache” (Pons) “moustachio” (Oxford). Because the use of Schnauz (Schnauze means
muzzle) instead of the usual Schnur (Schnurbart: moustache) evokes an animal quality,
my translation is “whisker.” This word choice prepares the German reader for the gamey
or wild taste of the semicolon; following the standing translation, the English reader
might be more likely to this clause as “dark” or “cannibalistic” (Litvak 35).
34
Punctuation, a term signifying the insertion of material points on the page, derives
from the act of “distinguish[ing] by pointing” (“punctuation”), a phrase that encompasses
both the inked points on a page and the pointing motion of the index finger. In this way,
punctuation itself signals back to the body and away from it at the same time, because the
index finger signifies something else. As we have seen, historically, punctuation has
served the rhetorical function of indicating the rhythmic pauses a public reader should
place between words or when to take a breath. In the development of writing, punctuation
and text layout have been utilized to dictate oratorical delivery and from another point of
view to allude to the materiality of verbal intonation, facial expression, and haptic
gestures in an embodied rhetorical performance.
Notably, the visual resemblances Adorno identifies between the symbols and the
human body exceed, but do not always leave behind, their syntactical functions: the
resemblance of the vertical exclamation mark to an upheld finger, for instance, is
reinforced by the German grammatical rule that requires it for the imperative function.
The raised finger becomes directing or threateningly commanding especially because of
the mark’s syntactical service. Likewise, the question mark’s rounded curve resembles
the opening of an eye, but its function of marking the open question directs an exposing
flash of light or an expectant eye at the reader. Though he writes that “all are traffic
signals” (Verkehrssignale)—“Exclamation marks are red, colons green, the dash
commands stop (Ausrufungszeichen sind rot, Doppelpunkte grün, Gedankenstriche
befehlen stop)”—punctuation marks do not direct the motions of the reader’s
interpretation, the essay continues. “Instead in a hieroglyphic manner, they serve the
traffic that unfolds in the core of language itself, in its own tracks” (“sie dienen nicht
35
beflissen dem Verkehr der Sprache mit dem Leser, sondern hieroglyphisch einem, der im
Sprachinnern sich abspielt, auf ihren eignen Bahnen”; 106). Punctuation thus emerges in
an undecipherable dimension of language. A sacred system of inscription considered
more primitive than current writing systems, the hieroglyph recalls the early “graven
images” and ritual behavior that Adorno associates with écriture and Benjamin’s
language of things in “Über einige Relationen.” Immune to the contemporary language of
man, this spiritual language is preserved in the inner sanctum of writing, where writing is
itself something to be signified. As a result, its communication remains indeterminate,
suggestive, and incomplete, despite the concluding pause or resolution it is so often used
to mark.
In this regard, it is interesting to return to the epigraph with which this section
began. Theodor Adorno calls punctuation marks the most “music-like” (musikähnlich)
element of language: “In keinem ihrer Elemente ist die Sprache so musikähnlich wie in
den Satzzeichen” (106). What could Adorno have meant by identifying punctuation
marks as the most musiclike, as opposed to the most graphic component of language? On
one hand, punctuation’s resemblance to music lies in its difference from names. The
referential operation attached to the marks is iconic rather than phonetic. Because they
correspond with rhetorical intonations, such as the elevated voice of a question or a pause
after the completion of a thought, Adorno’s statement seems to suggest that punctuation
supplies the musicality of speech in written text. He goes on, in fact, to list specific
correlations between individual marks and features of musical composition, in a sequence
that resembles the analogies drawn in “Musik, Sprache, und ihr Verhältnis” earlier in this
chapter:
36
Komma und Punkt entsprechen dem Halb- und Ganzschluß.
Ausrufungszeichen sind wie lautlose Beckenschläge, Fragezeichen
Phrasenhebungen nach oben, Doppelpunkte dominantseptimakkorde; und
den Unterschied von Komma und Semikolon wird nur der recht fühlen,
der das verschiedene Gewicht starker und schwacher Phrasierungen in der
musikalischen Form wahrnimmt. (106-107)
The comma and period correspond to semi-cadence and perfect cadence.
Exclamation marks are like soundless clangs of the cymbal, question
marks, upward crescendos,17 colons dominant seventh chords; and only
one who realizes the different stresses of strong and weak phrasing in
musical form will feel the difference between a comma and semi-colon.
The comparisons’ importance lies in their similarity as compositional devices that signal
suspense, transition, and closure to the listener and reader, not in their corresponding
sounds. For example, cadence (similar to the period) leads to resolution or pause and
signals conclusion within musical works conforming to harmonic standards. The German
terms for cadence and semi-cadence, Halbschluss and Ganzschluss particularly invite the
comparison to the period or “full stop,” since Schluss also means conclusion or closing.
In classical European composition, the dominant seventh chord is used to build tension
through dissonance and to shift between keys; thus it correlates to the colon through its
signaling of suspense or transition. Finally, notes composed according to strong phrasing
are tightly unified, whereas weak phrasing grants the notes more independence, just in
17
This compound word is not defined as such in any of the dictionaries I have consulted.
“Phrasen” means phrase, in its linguistic and musical capacity. “Hebung” means
accentuation, strong beat, raising of the voice; rhetorically it means antithesis.
37
the way the semi-colon impacts the clauses it separates more strictly than the comma
does. Adorno concludes the analogy by stating that the possibility of punctuation in
language being comprehended at all is contingent on an understanding of its counterparts
in music.
As already indicated, Adorno acknowledges punctuation’s historical emergence in
relation to the voice in this essay, but he differentiates the modern punctuation mark from
its earlier oratorical uses when he concludes the essay:
Denn die Satzzeichen, welche die Sprache artikulieren und damit die
Schrift der Stimme anähneln, haben durch ihre logisch-semantische
Verselbständigung von dieser doch gleich aller Schrift sich geschieden
und geraten in Konflikt mit ihrem eigenen mimetischen Wesen. Davon
sucht der asketische Gebrauch der Satzzeichen etwas gutzumachen. Jedes
behutsam vermiedene Zeichen ist eine Reverenz, welche die Schrift dem
Laut darbringt, den sie erstickt. (112-13)
Because punctuation marks, which articulate language and thereby
assimilate the writing of the voice, have by means of their logicalsemantic independence parted with this and all writing and come into
conflict with their own mimetic nature. In this way the ascetic use of
punctuation seeks to redeem something. Every carefully avoided mark is
an offering of reverence paid by writing to the sound it smothers.
If punctuation at one time mimicked the “writing of the voice,” it now does the opposite
by “smother[ing]” “sound.” Adorno’s use of the term musikähnlich, clearly, has not
merely to do with invoking the rhythms of speech on the textual page. The likenesses
38
among musical and literary compositional devices at stake lie in the patterns by which
meaning is inscribed into their forms by changing aesthetic principles and not in their
compositional forms alone. The pattern he identifies alternates between similarity and
difference, but also between polarization and intersection. In other words, even though he
points out parallels almost identical to those found in classical treatises of the interarts,
Adorno draws correspondences between musical devices and writing without privileging
the concepts of aesthetic unity and totality.18 Instead, he calls for a denaturalization of
what were at times considered natural, divinely granted characteristics of art forms.
Because punctuation shares with music an ability to reproduce, negotiate with, or
pose resistance to those second-nature conventions of form in writing, Adorno explicitly
links musical tonality to punctuation in writing: “Kaum jedoch wird man es für Zufall
halten können, daß die Berührung der Musik mit sprachlichen Satzzeichen an das
Schema der Tonalität gebunden war, das unterdessen zerfiel” (“But one can hardly take it
as a[n] accident/coincidence that music’s contact with linguistic punctuation marks was
bound to the scheme of tonality, which meanwhile disintegrated”). Like the dominating
scheme of tonality, the rules of punctuation serve a normative function in literary syntax.
The particular use of punctuation that breaks from the rules, however, can undo and
reform prose composition and serve as an expression of the creative subject. Like the
scheme of tonality in classical European music discussed above, each language system is
characterized by what Adorno calls “frail” (hinfällig) and “abstract norms” of
18
According to the eighteenth-century theorist William Mason, “as no stanza can read
pleasingly, unless proper pauses be introduced, and these arranged with variety ;we
usually find various rests, as the strain proceeds, answering to commas in verbal
punctuation; and many half-cadences, like semi-colons and colons, before it concludes : a
perfect cadence then marks its termination, similar to that full point, either in verse or
prose, where the sense is completed, and which is called a period” (291-292).
39
composition. Though these rules are somewhat arbitrary and transform over time, they
regulate the mode and form of written propositions and determine when thoughts are
complete and how relationships among them are to be marked. The quote above
chiastically continues “nor is it an accident that the concern of new music could be
presented as one of punctuation marks without tonality” (“daß man die Mühe der neuen
Musik recht wohl als eine um Satzzeichen ohne Tonalität darstellen könnte”; 107).
“Punctuation marks without tonality,” as a representation of new music, symbolize the
possibility of breaking free from prescriptive systems of composition in both writing and
music. Instead of serving (tonal) convention, such punctuation would protest against
music’s normative language-likeness and the expectations of its listeners at the same time
that it asserts music’s status as the writing of a nameless language.
Like atonality in music, punctuation figures prominently in the foregrounding of
form in modernist writing. It facilitates experiments in syntactical arrangement seeking to
defamiliarize literary language and make it look, sound, signify, and operate in new
ways. Because the symbolism of punctuation does not function phonetically, its silence
supplies specific transformative possibilities to the literary sentence. When used to mark
parataxis or rupture, it seems to target the very concept of harmonic perfection. The
caesura, the structuring pause used in Homeric verse onwards and whose silence is often
represented by a blank space or || on the typographical line, itself traverses rhetorical
delivery, inscribed symbol, and spacing. It notates the momentary absence of words, and
its role in meter recalls literature’s song-like features. Its structural pause in poetry thus
designates “a break or joint in the continuity of the metrical structure of the line […] and
so concerns the division of lines into distinguishable cola” (“caesura” Princeton 159). As
40
a poetic device, it is integral in the history of traditional literary form, that is, it is hardly a
revolutionary innovation. Conceptually, however, it signifies a cut (caes) and is
associated with an opening or a birth, particularly with the so-called unnatural delivery of
Caesar, named after the caesarian section of his birth. As a “joint” or “break,” the caesura
constitutes a formal transition, change, division, and distinction; in this way its form
becomes thematically interesting for theories of modernism.
For Adorno, the caesura serves as a figure of the modern revolution against
compositional norms. For instance “Verklärte Nacht” is one of several works by Arnold
Schönberg to repeatedly exemplify modern artistic expression for Adorno. In this piece,
Schönberg purposely breaks the prevailing rules of harmonic composition by reversing
the ninth chord and the tonic.19 This inversion, Adorno writes, “produces caesuras in the
idiom” (“[Diesel wechselnder Auflösungen fatigue Accord] bewirkt Zäsuren im Idiom”;
655; my italics). The suspension of formal convention exemplifies the expression of the
new in modernist music, but the deviation is placed in analogy to art and writing as well,
made evident in Adorno’s word choice. In “Parataxis” and “Fragment über Musik und
Sprache,” he describes Hölderlin and Kafka’s innovations in their own genres in similar
terms, but in this regard the caesura has a more specific significance for Adorno. It serves
not only as a figure of aesthetic change and transition, but as an ongoing resistance to
perfected unity and wholeness in its application to the singular work of art as well as to
19
Specifically, “in einem seiner ersten Werke, der heute allzubeliebten ‘Verklärten
Nacht,’ spielt ein Akkord seine Rolle, der vor sechzig Jahren heftig schockierte. Er ist
nach den Regeln der Harmonielehre unerlaubt: der Nonenakkord in Dur in einer
Umkehrung, welche die None in den Baß legt, so daß der Auflösungston, die Prim zu
jener None, über diese zu liegen kommt, während die None doch angeblich als bloßer
Vorhalt vor dem Akkord erscheint in der ‘Verklärten Nacht’ wiederholt, und zwar an
entscheidenden Einschnitten der Form, absichtsvoll anorganisch” (655).
41
the systematization of the arts and interarts generally. Because the caesura elides logical
conjunction and moves through a transition without the conclusion of a closing mark, it
resists the propositional form (based on complete units of thought) as well. Thus, Adorno
writes, “Musiclike is the transformation of language into a series whose elements are
conjoined otherwise than in a proposition” (Adorno qtd. and trans in Gillespie 57). In this
sense the “Fragment” and “Composition” essays discussed earlier are brought together
musically with an open typographical line marking the transition from the first section to
the second. Because of their paradoxical status of incompletion, they resemble Adorno’s
view of musiclike meaning following a pattern of persistent deferral.
In “Satzzeichen,” he postulates that the caesura is represented in the dash, or
“Gedankenstrich” (thought-line, -stroke, or -cut). While the systematic norms of writing
demanding clarity and conclusion “link sentences to one another by logical particles,
despite the fact that their logical powers would not apply” (“Ihre Produkte haken die
Sätze durch logische Partikeln ineinander, ohne daß die von jenen Partikeln behauptete
Beziehungen waltete”; 108), the dash exposes classical definitions of unity as an imposed
and forced second-nature. In effect, by slicing into this constructed totality, it exposes a
broader view of the “whole” than classical definitions of unity and harmony offer. The
achievement of unity requires an efficient organization that necessarily excludes. The
Gedankenstrich implies that there is more than the sentence can say, but the more can not
be named and is only suggested by the empty space left open for it, like the seat left
vacant at Passover Seder for Elijah. Likewise, the invitation of this vacancy
simultaneously expresses both the loss associated with exile and the hope of Elijah’s
messianic prophecy. In aesthetic terms, Adorno writes of harmony in “Kulturkritik und
42
Gesellschaft” (1951) that “Gelungen aber heißt der immanenten Kritik nicht sowohl das
Gebilde, das die objektiven Widersprüche zum Trug der Harmonie versöhnt, wie
vielmehr jenes, das die Idee von Harmonie negativ ausdrückt, in dem es die
Widersprüche rein, unnachgiebig, in seiner innersten Struktur prägt” (“According to
immanent criticism, the form is successful, not so much by deceptively reconciling
objective contradictions to harmony, but rather by expressing the idea of harmony
negatively, by which it purely and adamantly stamps the contradictions into its innermost
structure”; 27). Because it is indexed by a “negative impression” of what it is not,
Adorno’s harmony might be criticized for being merely a derived expression of what it
replaces. Likewise, the unreconciled tension which opposes conventional harmony
becomes an essential constitutive of the new and unrealized idea of harmony. This,
perhaps, merely affirms the ideal against which the process was aimed. On the other
hand, the caesura can also be seen, structurally, as a pause and suspension. In this regard,
it is worth recalling Friedrich Hölderlin’s description of the caesura (which Adorno
studies in “Parataxis”): “the pure word, the counter-rhythmic intrusion, becomes
necessary in order to meet the racing alternation of representations at its culmination,
such that what appears then is no longer the alternation of representations but
representation itself” (Hölderlin qtd. in Lacoue-Labarthe 234). Its stillness interrupts the
dialectical motion traced everywhere in Adorno’s writings with a pause, implying the
limitations not only of the harmonic system, but also the dialectic which negates and
expels. In this view, the caesura does not only resist concepts of wholeness and unity, but
it also suspends the dialectical conflict that Lacoue-Labarthe finds complicit in and
ultimately affirming of harmonic, ordered wholes. Lacoue-Labarthe invokes Hölderlin’s
43
statement as a neutralization of dialectic that does not oppose, absorb, and expel. The
caesura “does not do away with the logic of exchange and alternation. It simply brings it
to a halt, re-establishes its equilibrium” (234-235). To do away with it would be to fall
further into the synthesis and sublation of dialectic. Instead it stills the progression toward
absolute Idealism and abstains from the cathartic sacrifice that the Aufhebung of Hegelian
dialectics requires. Adorno’s later writings examined in this chapter actually allow for
this—or question the operations of purification and sacrifice required by the dialectical
process. They do not relinquish the regular push and pull of his variation of dialectic,
however.
Not all punctuation marks mark a caesura. On the contrary, “Satzzeichen” depicts
punctuation in a series of images involving the ingestion and absorption that LacoueLabarthe critiques. In other words, it parodies the dialectical progression just described.
The colon, for instance, is described as opening its mouth, which the author is obliged to
“feed”: “Doppelpunkte sperren, Karl Kraus zufolge, den Mund auf: weh dem
Schriftsteller, der sie nicht nahrhaft füttert” (“Colons, according to Karl Kraus, stretches
the[ir] mouth open: woe to the author who does not feed them with nourishment”; 106).
The root verb of the opening, aufsperren, refers to textual spacing. The author is
described as feeding the symbol itself; however, the sustenance fed does not disappear.
The relation between the author and the writing is uneasy, in which punctuation is a site
of unresolved struggle and contested mastery. Although the writing resembles a domestic
animal requiring nourishment, the author’s obligation to feed it properly is a form of
service itself. Texts call for punctuation, Adorno implies when he writes that the “body of
language” ‘Sprachleib’ feeds on their “incorporeal presence” ‘körperloser Gegenwart’.
44
This exchange takes place independently of the author, and following the metaphor of
sustenance above, if the author must feed punctuation, it is for the sake of language,
which in turn feeds on punctuation. Although the colon never does swallow and close its
mouth, Adorno portrays the quotation mark as having enjoyed a triumphant meal:
“Dummschlau und selbstzufrieden lecken die Anführungszeichen sich die Lippen”
(“Cleverly silent and self-satisfied, the quotation mark licks its lips”). The trickster
quotation, which is both dumb and clever, has consumed something, but its clever silence
conceals the identity of what. In this case, the quotation has truly eliminated its opponent;
a synthesis has occurred, leaving no trace of what preceded it. Adorno, however, does not
endorse this step. He criticizes the quotation mark, as we will see in the third chapter, for
eliminating dialectical critique. Instead, as in the case of the colon, he believes the
dialectical struggle should remain in an unresolved state of tension.
Petersburg is the fourth dimension which is
not indicated on maps, which is indicated
merely by a dot.—Andrei Bely
This final section turns to Andrei Bely’s 1916/1922 novel Petersburg, where the
subjects of interest traced above (music, language, and punctuation; the upending of
aesthetic norms; and the actualization of the new) are also at work.20 As discussed early
in this chapter, Bely clearly subscribes in his essay “Forms of Art” to the metaphysical
view of music as the highest of the arts, as a disembodied embodiment of an “eternal
rhythm” of the universe. However, set in 1905, punctuation and mise-en-page stage the
20
The novel was revised into its present state after its first publication. For detailed
studies of these revisions and the novel’s publication history, see Ivanov-Razumnik and
Janacek “Rhythm.”
45
Russian Revolution of that year in the very pages of the novel. The tempo measured out
with the repetition of both structuring and elliptical series of dots and extreme variations
in margination is one of entropy, as the narrative builds with anticipation toward the
detonation of a ticking time bomb delivered by a son (even wrapped in newspaper print)
targeting his own father. The anticipation is intensified by the reader’s awareness of the
impending Russian Revolution of 1905, to which this single assassination attempt
belongs. As Bely surely was aware, the events of 1905 were said to have been set into
motion by a typesetters’ strike in Moscow, in which workers demanded a per character
pay rate that would include punctuation marks. “This small event,” in Trotsky’s account
of it, “set off nothing more nor less than the all-Russian political strike—the strike which
started over punctuation marks and ended by felling absolutism” (85). Petersburg’s
perspective on revolutionary change, which had been idealized in the same Marxist
theorizations of dialectic that had influenced Adorno, combines this political and
historical concept with the concerns of music and language hitherto dealt with in this
chapter. Notions of aesthetic rupture, generational conflict, and intermediality are
depicted and formalized at the same time that they address novelistic concerns regarding
compositional principle, unity, tempo, and typography. As in his earlier Symphonies, the
punctuation and page arrangement of Petersburg are influenced by the author’s
idealization of music in his Symbolist theory of the interarts. Directly related to this, I
argue, is the employment of the novel’s material elements in its thematics and plotline,
which culminate in the detonation of the time bomb. The idea of music in writing that
motivates Bely’s formal experiments in his Symphony narratives extends into the later
Petersburg, as well as its revised second edition. Instead of imitating the symphonic
46
form, this novel approaches music in the rhythms and movements of the city and the
characters that it communicates. Compared with other symphonic treatments of the urban
collective, such as the film Berlin: Sinfonie einer Großstadt, the novel’s emphasis on an
unfathomable gap clearly resists the fully composed, complete, and therefore closed
system of harmony within the conventional musical work. As a “full-stop” that
periodizes and implies completion and fullness, the period mark that the following
analysis concerns serves as an apt device of both closure and opening in systems of
aesthetics, politics, and history.
The central tension in Petersburg is between its main character, Nikolai
Apollonovich Ableukhov, a somewhat directionless young man with an interest in liberal
politics, and his father, a conservative upper-level government bureaucrat named Apollon
Apollonovich Ableukhov. The son Nikolai Apollonovich is not a committed
revolutionary, although he has friends and contacts who are. Through these he had been
challenged to pledge his willingness to assassinate his own father for the cause, which,
the narrator tells us, Nikolai had perhaps assumed was a joke. However, when he is called
upon to carry out the task with a 24-hour bomb, he passively accepts the explosive,
brings it into his home, and only ponders throwing it into the river. He is paralyzed from
responding in one way or the other. Instead the strange and aimless young man is
preoccupied by his infatuation with his best friend's wife and with a different kind
performative project: sightings of him disguised as a red domino around the city produce
a scandal in the news.
Nikolai’s father, Apollon Apollonovich, is associated as his name suggests with
an aestheticized order (Nietzsche’s Apollonian Kunsttrieb) and continued tradition (his
47
patronymic shows he carries the same name of his own father).21 Apollon’s preoccupation
with ninety-degree angles, symmetry, and linearity exemplifies the alliance of
conventional aesthetics with bureaucracy in the novel:
Аполлон Аполлонович Аблеухов покачивался на атласных подушках
сиденья; от уличной мрази его отграничили четыре перпендикулярные
стенки; так он был отделен от людей и от мокнущих красных оберток
Журнальчиков, прадаваемых вон с того перекрестка.
Гармонической простотой отлтчалися его вкусы.
Более всего он любил прямолинейный просрект; этот проспект
напоминал ему о течении времени между двух жизненных точек. (32;
my emphasis)
[AAA] was cut off from the scum of the streets by four perpendicular
walls. Thus he was isolated from people and from the red covers of the
damp trashy rags on sale right there at this intersection.
Proportionality and symmetry soothed the senator’s nerves, which had
been irritated both by the irregularity of his domestic life and by the futile
rotation of our wheel of state.
His tastes were distinguished by their harmonious simplicity.
Most of all he loved the rectilineal prospect; this prospect reminded him of
the flow of time between the two points of life. (10; my italics)
For Apollon Apollonovich, life consists of only two points or tochki—birth and death—
which are connected by a single, straight line. The path from life to death is
21
See Nietzsche, Friedrich. Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik (1872).
48
superimposed onto the plan of the city; unlike a country road that develops over centuries
and in coordination with the natural features of the landscape, the urban prospects are
direct, unwavering, and constructed according to a determined plan for a determined
purpose, just as the city of Saint Petersburg was in reality projected onto an
unaccommodating swampland. Opposed to Apollon's order are images of formless rags
and masses of laborers on the streets, who threaten revolutionary chaos. Of course the
largest threat to Apollon Apollonovich and his worldview is the time-bomb held in his
son’s possession. Not coincidentally, the bomb is built on Vasilievsky Island, housed in a
sardine can, and carried to the Ableukhov’s home in the packaging of a newspaper. The
first half of the novel anticipates the setting of the bomb and the second measures its
countdown to detonation. This is of course the “movement” and “tempo” of the novel and
these, I argue, are represented in the sequential and evenly spaced points that structure the
prose and narrative. These along with other rounded images, as we will see, constitute the
opposing force to Apollon. They are not so much a motif associated with Nikolai as they
are with the impending revolution, at this point only a terrorist plot, that claims him as an
agent. In the 1922 version this looming is extended and weighted with the even more
distant October Revolution. The narrator conveys this point by relating, “Уууу-ууууууууу: так звучало в пространстве; звук—был ли то звук? Если то и был звук, он был
несомненно звук иного какого-то мира; [. . .] Слышал ли и ты октябрёвскую эту
песню тысяча девятьсот пятого года” (Oooo-oooo-oooo: such was the sound in that
space. But was it a sound? It was the sound of some other world. And it attained a rare
strength and clarity. [. . .] Have you heard this October song: of the year nineteen hundred
and five?”; 100; 52). Opposed to the emotional distance, form, and epic-order of the
49
Apollonian, this intoxicating and destructive Dionysian force, itself associated with
music, has swept up even Apollon’s own aimless son. The Dionysian element associates
its otherworldly music with the revolutionary sphere that antagonizes Apollon’s
preference for lines and angles.
Active in this central tension is the period mark, which in series of three and four
litter Bely’s prose, and in series of eight interrupt the sub-chapters.22 In conjunction, as
the novel progresses, its pages become characterized by an increasing amount of open
space. Both ellipses and wide margins either impose a transitioning silence, measure and
count a movement, or mark an “unfathomable” (as Bely calls it in “Forms of Art”)
opening in the plot or sentence. In addition, the full-stop or period proves to be of
considerable importance to the content of the novel as its narrator depicts the mark as a
possible access point that unifies and harmonizes the trivial with the momentous, the
detailed with the universal, and the earthly with the cosmic. The spherical form of the
period’s point, which could be viewed as simultaneously abstract and material, is a
recurring motif in the novel’s diction, thematic patterns, and plot movements. Opposed to
the conventional plot line, according to Nina Berberova, Bely described the structure of
Petersburg as two adjacent circles, each sectioned into seven sections.23 Translators
Robert Maguire and John Malmsted have similarly pointed out that the Russian wordroot for “sphere” (shárik) is repeated countlessly in the novel’s prose. It becomes a
22
This occurs in both the 1922 Berlin edition and the English-language MaguireMalmsted translation of that edition. The Russian divisions are however aligned to the
left and not centered as they are in the English. The 1913-14 Russian edition also has
tochki, but the sequence of nearly thirty points that extend across the width of the page
has no suggestive correlative as the later Berlin edition has.
23
The sketch does not survive, but Berberova, who witnessed Bely produce the
explanatory drawing in 1923, has documented her recollections of the manner in which
the circles were sectioned off and how each figure glossed the other.
50
material motif “so prominent as to constitute yet another level of reality with which we
must reckon” (xviii).
Its [sharik’s] primary dictionary meaning is ‘corpuscle’; and it is a
‘neutral’ word in the sense that in ordinary contexts, no Russian stops for a
moment to think of its literal meaning, ‘little sphere.’ But in the context of
this particular novel, the reader is bombarded with other sounds made up
of the same or very similar sounds: shar (sphere), shirit’sya (expand),
rasshirénie (expansion, dilation). Typically spheres are shown as
expanding — a point made as much by the phonic similarity of the roots
shar-/shir- (they are not related otherwise), as by outright statement. The
ear pulls shárik into this same phonic pattern; and then we are likely to
remember that the primary component is shar. (xviii-xix)
Though they identify this instance as only “one handy example” (xviii) of Bely’s
patterned attention to the sounds of words, they later acknowledge that, “established here
is the pattern that underlies the entire novel: a sphere, or circle, that widens and brings
about disintegration and death” (xxi). Their observations on Bely’s complex style are
easily related to his interest in music, where the phonic similarities among words—not
their literal signification—form an underlying theme. Furthermore, in this case, the sound
patterns suggest a circular visual form, which supplies its own spectrum of meaningful
associations to the narrative.
From the first lines of the novel’s “Prologue,” the narrator connects the
importance of circularity in the novel’s plot, diction, and symbolic structure to its
51
volume’s material constitution. The sphere, which at its outer limits extends to universal
proportions, occupies in its most compact form an inked and rounded point on a map.
Как бы то ни было, Петербург не только нам кажется, но и
оказывается — на картах; в виде двух друг в друге сидящих кругов с
черной точкою в центре; н из этой вот математической точки, не
имеющей измерения, заявляет он энернично о том, что он — есть:
оттуда из этой вот точки несется потоком рой отцечатанной книги;
несется из этой невидимой точки стремительна циркуляр. (24; my
emphasis)
However that may be, Petersburg not only appears to us, but actually does
appear—on maps: in the form of two small circles, one set inside the
other, with a black dot in the center; and from precisely this mathematical
point, which has no dimension, it proclaims forcefully that it exists: from
here, from this very point surges and swarms the printed book; from this
invisible point speeds the official circular. (2; my italics)
The geographical and earthly spaces of Saint Petersburg the city momentarily collapse
with its inked cartographic representation as two circles surrounding a “period mark” or
point (tochka) on a paper map. The visible mark on the map is then collapsed with an
invisible and mathematical point in a spaceless, theoretical realm, since (like the form of
music, as Bely writes), it is without dimension. From this mathematical tochka derive the
two-dimensional pages and lines of the novel and the mundane “official circular” alike.
In this instance, neither tochka, krug, or stirkulyar bear a phonic resemblance or share a
direct word root in common with shar- or shir-. Instead the resemblance underlying the
52
visual motif is established semantically. The circulation of language performed by and
depicted in the novel, the material circles that situate its setting cartographically, and its
theoretical spherical point of origin become powerfully linked.
The circle that in its smallest form is a mere dot manifests itself also in the
narrator’s unifying and circular reasoning: “Petersburg, or Saint Petersburg, or Pieter
(which are the same) [. . .]” (“Петербург, или Санкт-Петербург, или Питер (что то
же)” (1; 23). In its logical and lexical collapse, the tautology does not necessarily return
to its point of departure; rather it moves forward by binding together as “the same” in the
curved and circular shape of the parentheses not only the different names — official and
unofficial for the city, but the city Saint Petersburg and the novel Petersburg. The novel
stands from this moment onward as a figure for the city and the city for the novel. For
example, the lines or numbered liniyi of Vasilievsky Island, where the bomb is built,
correspond to the lines of text in the novel, and the blocks of buildings and wide
prospects correspond to the paragraph forms. In turn, both the novel and the city
correlate, in Bely’s imagination, if not directly, at least “tangential[ly]” to an “immense
astral cosmos” in the words of the character Alexander Ivanovich:
‘Petersburg is the fourth dimension which is not indicated on maps, which
is indicated merely by a dot. And this dot is the place where the plane of
being is tangential to the surface of the sphere and the immense astral
cosmos. A dot which in the twinkling of an eye can produce for us an
inhabitant of the fourth dimension, from whom not even a wall can protect
us. A moment ago I was one of the dots by the window sill, but now I
have appeared . . .’ (207; my italics)
53
“Петербург: четвертое измерение не отмеченное на картах,
отмеченное лишь точкою; точка же—место касания плоскости бытия
к шаровой поверхности громадного астрального космоса—точка во
мгновение ока способна нам выкинуть жителя четвертого измерения,
от которого не спасает стена; так за минуту я был — в точках, у
подоконника, а теперь появился я . . .” (239-40; my emphasis)
Ivanovich connects the point of intersection between Petersburg and the universe,
himself, and the specks of dust in his apartment to the very dots on the page, which fail to
conclude his discourse or draw the circle to a close. The correspondences between what
is represented and marked in something else and what emerges in itself is played upon in
a series of translations transmitted in the figure of the dot.
Crucially, the tochki constitute the structuring element of the novel’s syntax on
both micro and macro-levels. They are used in the conventional manner to conclude
sentences and are posited nearly as frequently in sequential profusion to produce a
number of unconventional effects: the impressionistic opening of the ellipsis, the visual
representation of the steady ticking of the time bomb; and, in collaboration with the colon
and dash, it marks Nikolai’s (belated or simultaneous, it is unclear) cognition of the
annihilating and silencing explosion. Sequences of tochki also structure and interrupt the
sections of prose in a manner reminiscent of the numbered paragraphs or lines in Bely’s
Symphonies. The eight spaced points that separate Bely’s section breaks in the Berlin
edition reproduce the pattern of division in the novel itself, which is portioned into eight
54
chapters.24 The tautological reasoning reproduces itself ad infinitum, hence the
importance of the eight books, which in its Arabic numeral representation appears as two
circles that meet at one point, and symbolizes, when turned on its side, infinity. If the
tochka is Petersburg, and Petersburg is the same as Petersburg, then the novel itself is
metaphysically duplicated on infinite levels with each posited point.
Like the rectilineal prospects of the bureaucratic center of Saint Petersburg, the
paragraph blocks of the novel begin more or less in conformity with the ideals of the
father, Apollon Apollonovich’s, self-contained and unified view of the world. As the
novel progresses, the paragraph forms become increasingly, though not steadily and
progressively, irregular. Specifically, in the first chapter, three paragraphs are interrupted
by dashes and their remainder is tabbed to the right. In chapters four, five, and six, there
are two, three, and one dashed and indented paragraph, respectively. Finally in chapters
seven and eight, eleven and thirteen paragraphs are distorted. They deviate from
quadrilateral form, break into parts, marginalize into cordoned off sections, thereby
creating additional angles and lines of text, and sometimes diverge entirely from right
angles (see for instance pages 225-226 of the McGuire and Malmsted translation). At the
same time ellipses and serial points appear more frequently and more profusely on the
page. This progressive disordering of the Petersburg/Petersburg of Apollon Apollonovich
culminates in the explosion in chapter eight.
24
This occurs in both the Russian Berlin edition and the English-language MaguireMalmsted translation of that edition. The Russian divisions are however aligned to the
left and not centered as they are in the English. The 1913-14 Russian edition also has
tochki, but the sequence of nearly thirty points that extend across the width of the page
has no suggestive correlative as the later Berlin edition has.
55
The repeated positing of serial tochki in the midst of chapters and sentences works
to undo the certainty of linear bureaucratic space and exposes it instead to the dangers of
infinite, undelineated space and destabilized, intersubjective boundaries. The tochki are to
the text what the islands are to the city:
Аполлон Аполлонович островов не любил: население там —
фабричное, грубое; многотысячный рой людской там бредет по утрам
к многотрубным забодам; [. . .]: острова — раядавить! Приковать их
желозом огромного мосто, проткнуть проспектными стрелами. . . (33)
Apollon Apollonovich did not like the islands: the population there was
industrial and course. There the many-thousand human swarm shuffled in
the morning to the many-chimneyed factories. [. . .] The islands must be
crushed! Riveted with the iron of the enormous bridge, skewered by the
arrows of the prospects. . . . (11)
The islands, in his view, are unruly and disconnected—unpunctuated. With rivets and
skewers securing them in place, Apollon could order and straighten the islands in
correlation with the prospects of the main city and its connecting bridges. He feels
repeatedly threatened by what he calls their Mongol-like lack of definition and
delineation. The narrator also associates the circle with the shapeless crowds of the city
and with the threat of mass revolution. In the subchapter “Nevsky Prospect,” the
boundaries between individuals completely break down through the globular image of
salmon eggs, which adhere together in a sticky slime.
Что такое икринка?
56
Там тело влетающих на панель превращается в общее тело, в икринку
икры; тротуары же Невского — бутерсродное поле; мысль влипла в
мыслительность многоногого сушества, пробегающего по Невскому.
[. . .]
Не было на Невском людей; но — ползучая, голосящая многоножка
была там; сырое пространство ссыцало многоразличие голосов — в
многоразличие слов; все слова, перепутавшись, вновь сплетались во
фразу; и фраза казалась бессмысленной; повисла над Невским;
повисла над Невским; стоял черный дым небылиц. (210-11; my
emphasis)
What is a grain of caviar?
There the body of each individual that streams onto the pavement becomes
the organ of a general body, an individual grain of caviar, and the
sidewalks of the Nevsky are the surface of an openfaced sandwich.
Individual thought was sucked into the cerebration of the myriapod being
that moved along the Nevsky. [. . .]
There were no people on the Nevsky; but there was a crawling, howling
myriapod there. The damp space poured together a myria-distinction of
voices into a myria-distinction of words. All the words jumbled and again
wove into a sentence; and the sentence seemed meaningless. It hung above
the Nevsky, a black haze of phantasmata. (178-79; my italics)
Their mass identity threatens not only the state, but lexical order as well: the varied
voices of the crowd on the street coalesce into a scriptura continua, a singular utterance
57
characterized by the indistinguishability of its components. The sentence then hangs
above the street like a printed string of words that likewise become surreally obscured
into a “cherniy dim.” The printed page is superimposed onto the city; and its visual
appearance is imagined in terms of undelineated ambiguity. The boundaries of Apollon
Apollonovich’s vision implode as the correlations among these patterned entities
multiply. This reproduction transforms the closure of the period into an opening.
“And — here we put a full stop.” (289); “И —сдавим здесь точку.”; 323). With
this sentence the movement of the novel comes to a halt. Its tempo and tense transform
completely: from anticipation to retrospection. The explosion has taken place, the
anticipatory ticking of the clock mechanism is exhausted, and the text that follows reads
like an appendix to the novel. The chapter is broken into a new section, in which the
aftermath of the explosion is briefly glossed over from a distant and reconstructed point
of view. Shortly afterward the epilogue details the wandering life of Nikolai
Apollonovich over the course of years and years. The narrative as we knew it concludes
with the punctuating sentence cited above. The “stop” it narrates and posits must be read
in opposition to the countless sporadic tochki sequences that precede it. Apollon’s vision
appears in this way to have triumphed. The chaotic clutter of ticking ellipses are put to an
end. If the novel originates in a tochka in space, it also returns and concludes with one on
the page. However, the novel does not end, since the altered narrative persists for several
more pages. In other words, it does not “close” or “stop” “full[y].” Remarkably, the bomb
is accidentally carried to its intended destination by Apollon himself; yet it is an
unsuccessful assassination. No one is injured, and while Apollon knows it is his son who
brought it to the house, he never confronts him. The two do part, never to speak again:
58
the younger goes abroad and the elder retires to the country. The explosion does not
generate, but separates.
The narrator/writer’s statement that “here we place a full-stop,” depicts the scene
of writing and the embodied penned or typed performance that it entails. Its enhanced
attention to typography draws attention to the narrative’s mediation and its status as a
produced object. The emphasis ironically draws attention to the nonverbal and material
languages of the narrative that are usually treated as invisible: that is, the language of
intermedial writing that we traced in Adorno’s essays on language, music, and painting.
This writing connects the visual, aural, and narrative arts without merging or crossing
between them. Therefore, at the same time, their similarity reflects the
incommensurability of their respective mediums and resists the interartistic and
totalitarian ideal of the Gesamtkunstwerk.
In Bely’s vision of the future, with which he associates music, aesthetics aspire to
synthesis, but in the meantime he finds a unifying harmony even in the conflict, clash,
and explosion of the modern world. Like the newspaper wrapping transporting the
explosive sardine can, the daily “throwaway,” to borrow from James Joyce, is integral to
the “vibrations of eternity” ‘волнения вечности’ detected in the bomb (179; 103). In
Petersburg, Andrei Bely employs print materiality to perform, theorize, and narrate the
novel’s own formal and historical break into modernity. Whereas the profusion of
ellipses in the narrative evoke the regular ticking of the time mechanism attached to the
patricidal bomb, the final break in the narrative between son and father (or the modern
and the old) following the explosion is signified with a single period, which the narrator
places and asserts verbally. Because the modernist break or rupture with tradition was
59
understood as both an historical moment and an aesthetic principle, we have discovered
how Bely’s critical revisions of narrative and punctuation convention comment on the
novel’s own position in a larger social and historical narrative. The punctuated view of
literary history, where the new begins with a certain point in time, is in this way
metonymically linked to experimental treatments of punctuation in prose and, as such,
constitutes a central role in the intermediality of new writing. The following chapter,
“Turning Points: Periodizing New Writing,” addresses precisely this dilemma.
60
CHAPTER TWO: TURNING POINTS: PERIODIZING NEW WRITING
And now I will hazard a second assertion, which is more
disputable perhaps, to the effect that on or about
December, 1910, human character changed.
—Virginia Woolf
Das Meer des nie Geahnten, auf das die revolutionären
Kunstbewegungen um 1910 sich hinauswagten, hat nicht
das verheißene abenteuerliche Glück beschieden.
—Theodor W. Adorno
“About December, 1910, human character changed.” This famous account of
modernism from Virginia Woolf’s “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” is echoed 45 years
later in the opening passage of Theodor Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory. As Woolf explains it,
the turning point she identifies necessitated her own turn to new methods of
characterization in novel-writing (“Mr. Bennett” 96). At the same time, it led to more
dramatic experiments in language and genre by writers like James Joyce and T.S. Eliot
(116). The focus of Adorno’s statement, on the other hand, is on the avant-garde
introduction of new techniques themselves. Still, through the shared date of 1910 both
writers introduce the concept of an historical break in connection with modernism, where
modern art is either an impetus for, a response to, or itself a rupture. One could speculate
about what the event might be. Certainly, a number of important events did take place
61
around that year, and even around December.1 Despite the possibility that both authors
have the same unnamed event in mind, Adorno most likely is subtly citing Woolf, which
is unexpected, given that her work has no presence in his writing otherwise. The two not
only have the year 1910 in common. They also share a skepticism of the said moment,
this chapter will show, as they go on to undercut the precision of this periodization (“on
or about”; “around”), and of the avant-garde movements proclaiming their breaks with
convention as historical turning points in themselves. Both also portray this aesthetic
transition as a vehicularized journey: one pending arrival and the other departing. Woolf,
by extension, scrutinizes whether some “youthful” literary experiments were
unnecessarily farfetched in their anticipation of the train’s final stop; and what Adorno at
first implies to be an optimistic ship voyage turns luckless and without destination.
The motion or turn to which both writers refer has been, perhaps incorrectly,
described as the imperative to “MAKE IT NEW,” a phrase borrowed from Ezra Pound’s
1934 collection of essays and his later Canto 53, where it is scrawled in the bathroom of
the Chinese Emperor Tching Tang.2 The same era saw what is believed to be the
beginning of recorded history in China (18/17th century BC). This is when, in other
words, Chinese lettering was actually new and in its earliest stages of formation. “It,” the
1
In London, for instance, an audience gathered at the Lyceum Club witnessed the Italian
Futurist F. T. Marinetti’s first performance in England. Weeks earlier in November an
important exhibit of Manet and the Post-Impressionists opened in London’s Grafton
Gallery (the title of which echoes Mallarmé’s essay “The Impressionists and Edouard
Manet,” where he writes, in a similar vein, that “the eye should forget all else it has seen,
and learn anew from the lesson before it. It should abstract itself from memory, seeing
only that which which it looks upon, and that as for the first time” [29]). Months before,
George V had succeeded his father Edward VII to the royal throne; and in Münich, in
January 1911, Wassily Kandinsky first encountered atonal music in a performance of
Arnold Schönberg’s Drei Klavierstücke Op. 11, which would stimulate a new phase of
his painting.
2
See also Rasula, “Make It New.”
62
provocative, imperative event—which neither Woolf nor Adorno names or definitively
dates—is a foundational premise of the newness of modernism; “it” is seen to prompt a
widespread pursuit of intentionally new aesthetic practices whose rejection of existing
conventions in turn defined artistic identities. As Virginia Woolf explains in reference to
her generation and its realist predecessors, “But those tools are not our tools, and that
business is not our business. For us those conventions are ruin, those tools are death”
(“Mr. Bennett” 110). Modern British authors, she specifies, could not use Edwardian
techniques to portray the world they perceived and wished to portray (103). Selfdifferentiating rejections of existing aesthetic methods manifested to varying extents and
in differing ways as an ideology of the modern and were hardly limited to writers of
Britain and its empire. At its extreme, the experimentation to which Woolf refers is
exemplified internationally in Futurist movements. The founder of Italian Futurism,
Filippo Tommasi Marinetti, describes the great works as having lost their expressive
power through desensitizing overuse with an analogy to music, “Too often stimulated to
enthusiasm, haven’t our old ears perhaps already destroyed Beethoven and Wagner? It is
imperative, then, to abolish whatever in language has become a stereotyped image, a
faded metaphor, and that means nearly everything” (“Technical Manifesto” 16-17). The
new emerges, in this model, from casting away the old. For him, all of the arts must adapt
to their changing environment by rejecting their aesthetic legacies and by following the
rules dictated by modernity instead. Historical shift and renewal of artistic technique is
thus a central trope in modernism’s theorization of itself. Even where the premise of
abrupt change is rejected, as we will see ultimately in essays by Virginia Woolf and
63
Gertrude Stein, both still engage with and contemplate at length the aesthetic transition
into modernism.
The tendency of placing particular value on the unprecedented, or on forging
ahead of contemporary culture through innovative thinking and experimental form, have
been labeled, suitably, as avant-garde. As its name suggests, the avant-garde imagines
itself as following no one. According to the word history the Oxford English Dictionary
provides, this French expression for a military frontline was introduced into English
sometime in the fifteenth century (“avant-garde”). Yet only with the turn of the twentieth
century was it adopted to denote “the pioneers in any art in a particular period” (my
italics). Certainly, authors, artists, and composers had been innovating in their respective
forms for centuries, but the avant-garde impulse of early twentieth-century modernism is
dedicated to the idea as well as the act of innovation. By extension, the practice of new
art is a self-consciously modern phenomenon that considers even its idea of the new to be
novel. In this regard, the four authors studied in this chapter—F.T. Marinetti, Theodor
Adorno, Gertrude Stein, and Virginia Woolf—contemplate periodization as a defining
factor in the form and self-conceptualization of modernist literature.
Sitting astride the fuel tank of an airplane, my stomach
warmed by the aviator’s head, I felt the ridiculous inanity
of the old syntax inherited from Homer. A raging need to
liberate words, dragging them out from the Latin period.
Like all imbeciles, this period, naturally, has a prudent
head, a stomach, two legs, and two flat feet: but it will
never have two wings. Just enough to walk, take a short
run, and come up short, panting!
—F. T. Marinetti
64
The revolutionary view of cultural history to which Woolf and Adorno allude is
epitomized in the radical temporal break with tradition initiated by the founder of Italian
Futurism, F. T. Marinetti, who created countless manifestos, the chosen genre of the
avant-garde, to announce Futurism’s isolation of itself from its Romantic and Symbolist
predecessors. Although Marinetti’s movement grew to be increasingly nationalist in Italy,
its founding manifesto, which appeared in French on the cover of the Parisian periodical
Le Figaro in 1909, had repercussions on European and Transatlantic modernisms and
inspired similar movements in Russia, Eastern Europe, Spain, and England. Martin
Puchner writes, “The manifesto is the genre of the break: it announces and produces a
rupture in the historical continuum, guided by a belief in the value of the future and the
impossibility of returning to the past” (“Aftershocks” 47).3 This literary form acts as a
punctuating partition in time, as if it were placing a full-stop to conclude the line of
thought that precedes it and positing its own capitalized thesis. As a genre, it assumes a
bombastic rhetoric, and in the twentieth century it seeks through its own publication to
define a new era, separating one artistic and historical period from another. Following
this, anthologies like Maynor Hardee’s Manifestoes and Movements, for instance, use the
manifesto as an organizing principle to approach literary history.
The impetus that Marinetti cites as setting the Futurist movement in motion was a
violent stop, an automobile collision that he had experienced on October 15, 1908 in
Milan. While no one suffered serious injury during the accident, the vehicle did overturn
into a ditch. In his “Founding and Manifesto of Futurism” a few months later, which
3
Of course manifesto writing, as a genre, is itself a a tradition. See also Amidon and
Yanoshevsky.
65
appeared in French in Le Figaro, he describes this event as a baptism, from which he
emerged into the Futurist frame of mind:
Je virai brusquement sur moi-même avec l’ivresse folle des caniches qui
se mordent la queue, et voilà tout à coup que deux cyclistes me
désapprouvèrent, titubant devant moi ainsi que deux raisonnements
persuasifs et pourtant contradictoires. Leur ondoiement stupide discutait
sur mon terrain. . . Quel ennui! Pouah ! . . . Je coupai court, et par dégoût,
je me flanquai—vlan!—cul pardessus tête, dans un fossé. . .
Oh, maternel fossé, à moitié plein d’une eau vaseuse ! Fossé d’usine ! J’ai
savouré a pleine bouche ta boue fortifiante qui me rappelle la sainte
mamelle noire de ma nourrice soudanaise! Comme je dressai mon corps,
fangeuse et malodorante vadrouille, je sentis le fer rouge de la joie me
percer délicieusement le cœur. (“Le manifeste du Futurisme”)
I spun my car as frantically as a dog trying to bite its own tail, and there,
suddenly, were two bicyclists right in front of me, [. . .] wobbling like two
lines of reasoning, equally persuasive and yet contradictory. Their stupid
argument was being discussed right in my path . . . What a bore! Damn! . .
. I stopped short, and to my disgust rolled over into a ditch, with my
wheels in the air. . . .
Oh! Maternal ditch, nearly full of muddy water! Fair factory drain! I
gulped down your bracing slime, which reminded me of the sacred black
breast of my Sudanese nurse. . . . When I climbed out, a filth and stinking
66
rag, from underneath the capsized car, I felt my heart—deliciously—being
slashed with the red-hot iron of joy! (50)
Marinetti’s biographer has described the event as a “deep trauma” in the author’s life
(Salaris qtd. in Rainey, “Introduction” 5), but Lawrence Rainey rightly expresses
skepticism when he concludes that “Whatever it was that drove him, Marinetti now set
out to rework a modest traffic accident into an event of mythic stature, the birth-scene of
a traumatic yet emancipating modernity” (5). Drawing from religious ritual, Futurism
develops its own myths of origin. If the auto accident recalls the baptismal birth, another
exemplary scene of modern experience retold in the 1912 “Technical Manifesto of
Futurist Writing” carries echoes of Moses’ receiving and inscription of the
commandments on Mount Sinai. In this scene, the narrator first conceives the need for
syntactical freedom aboard an airplane:
Sitting astride the fuel tank of an airplane, my stomach warmed by the
aviator’s head, I felt the ridiculous inanity of the old syntax inherited from
Homer. A raging need to liberate words, dragging them out from the Latin
period. Like all imbeciles, this period, naturally, has a prudent head, a
stomach, two legs, and two flat feet: but it will never have two wings. Just
enough to walk, take a short run, and come up short, panting! (15)
It is worth emphasizing that the plane’s flight signifies freedom from the past made
possible by modern technology. Notably, this technology correlates to what may be
called the technics of writing. Following the parallel between the technology of flight and
the technical aspect of writing—both of which, it should be added, are treated as crucial,
active, and creative elements—Marinetti suggests that a revolution in writing is similarly
67
capable of freeing language from its foundation. In the same way that technology enables
men to fly and experience the world from new perspectives, technical innovation in
writing makes a metaphorical flight of consciousness possible. Beyond this analogy, the
new syntax is also called for by modern experience: the plane, itself a symbol of forward,
upward motion, literally dictates the necessity of writing in new ways to the narrator, and
the dim-witted and physically unfit “Latin period” can only watch Futurist flight, as its
own feet remain firmly planted on the ground. The old sentence in this parable, named by
the point that concludes and nails it down, can not keep up with modern demands. Thus
both the syntax of conventional logic and the punctuation that facilitates it are targeted as
an obstacle to freedom. The new laws of writing are commanded to him by the engine of
the plane, the new, man-made God.
The Futurist break was itself understood as a forward motion out of the past and
into the future, which symbolically aligned technically novel ways of writing with
technologically new ways of moving in automobiles, faster trains, and the airplane. In
particular, Marinetti opposes dynamism in writing to the “static ideal” of the French
Symbolists and describes instead how “the typographical revolution that I’ve proposed
will enable me to imprint the words (words, already free, dynamic, torpedoing forward)
every velocity of the stars, clouds, airplanes, trains, waves, explosives, drops of seafoam,
molecules, and atoms” (“Destruction of Syntax” 150). This crucial “movement” is
expressed and “imprinted” by the words’ arrangement, which are “without the connecting
syntactical wires and without punctuation” (146). These either pose an obstacle to the
expression of modern, liberated experience or prevent it from coming into being
altogether. The “Technical Manifesto” addresses how “punctuation is also annihilated
68
within the variable continuity of a living style that creates itself, without the absurd
pauses of commas and periods. To accentuate certain movements and indicated their
directions, mathematical signs will be used: + – x : = >, along with musical notations”
(120). Although the manifesto itself intends to bring its predecessors’ motions to a halt,
the Futurist idea of unceasing motion incorporates these mathematical relations of
addition, subtraction, multiplication, analogy, equality, and succession in place of a still
pause. He goes on to say that a single page may be printed in multiple colors of ink and
use as many as twenty different styles of typeface, which are meant to “double the
expressive force of words” (“Destruction of Syntax” 146) by way of their intermedial
written materiality.
For the Futurists, the existing conventions of what proves to be an arbitrary syntax
forces writing into unvarying, logical relationships, thus forming an imprisoning wire
around human consciousness. Writing emancipated from traditional syntax instead
produces what he calls the “Wireless Imagination” or “Words in Freedom,” in which
words are rearranged to forcefully reveal what he understands as new, more authentic
meanings. He writes:
Syntax has been a kind of abstract cipher which poets have used in order
to inform the masses about the color, the musicality, the plasticity and
architecture of the universe. It has been a sort of interpreter, a monotonous
tour-guide. We must suppress this intermediary so that literature can
directly enter into the universe and become one body with it. (“Technical”
124)
69
According to this, conventional syntax distinguishes literary from other expressive arts by
contributing to writing’s signifying linguistic nature, which suppresses its status as a
material feature of the empirical world. “It is not necessary to be understood” when it
comes to unmediated wireless language, writes Marinetti. Words liberated from their
“abstract” signifying powers are instead free to express through their unified material
performance. Similarly, Russian Futurists from the same period developed what they
called заумь or заумный язык, which is commonly translated as “transrational,”
“transmental,” “beyond reason” or “beyond mind” language.4 Zaum’ not only expresses
“emotional meanings” with “relations of sound” (Ziegler 305), but rids poetry of
traditional marks of punctuation. Instead, it makes more expressive use of bibliographic
materials—through illustration, hand-printed font, and punctuating use of page breaks.
Not only the musical sound-relations and onomatopoetic expression of the new coinages,
or the visual character of abstract illustrations, but also the material features of book
volumes rendered them objects of art—albeit ones that rejected the precious bindings and
fine paper of the nineteenth-century art book.5 Zaumnoe poetry attended to the musical
4
See Gerald Janacek, Zaum’ and Elizabeth Beaujour for detailed discussions of the
concept of zaum’. The Russian movement differed from its Italian counterpoint insofar as
this “new” language described a category of words that has been thought in part to have
sources in “sectarian glossolalia, folk spells and incantations, and certain principles of
poetic word formation” (Akhapkin 244). Thus its break with traditional language has
been related to a mythic, backward turn that only rejected the more immediate past.
5
Jerome McGann sees continuity between Futurism and the “late nineteenth-century’s
Renaissance of Printing” (41). By drawing attention to the “scene of writing,” McGann
claims that 19th-century literature concerns itself with the material, physical aspect of
writing and text. William Morris, he writes, “foreground[s] textuality as such, turning
words from means to ends-in-themselves. [. . .]. This text declares its radical selfidentity” (74). “The work forces us to attend to its immediate and iconic condition, as if
the words were images or objects in themselves, as if they were values in themselves
(rather than vehicles for delivering some further value or meaning)” (75).
70
and visual expression of its publications and operated according to the assumption that
music is a higher, more emotionally authentic art form than poetry. In this fuller sense
transrational expression should be understood as a “sign system which should be
comprehended with other faculties than reason” (Nilsson 139). In this way it is akin to
intermedial aspects of Gertrude Stein’s writing, which we will discuss shortly. Drawing
from the previous chapter, a pattern of intermedial comparison is evident already in the
few passages cited in these first pages. Writings about new ways of writing turn to other
arts as symbolic and material foils, because they seem to offer it alternative modes of
operation.
For Marinetti, the intuitive “wireless imagination,” replaces rationality. In
“Destruction of Syntax—Wireless Imagination—Words-in-Freedom” (1913), he
describes how this literary or compositional form is inspired by a state of human shock:
imagine that a friend of yours, gifted with this kind of lyrical faculty,
should find himself in a zone of intense life (revolution, war, shipwreck,
earthquake, etc.), and should come, immediately afterwards, to recount his
impressions. Do you know what your lyrical friend will do while he is still
shocked? . . .
He will begin by brutally destroying the syntax of his speech. He will not
waste time in constructing periodic sentences. He could care less about
punctuation or finding the right adjective. He disdains subtleties and
shadings, and in haste he will assault your nerves with visual, auditory,
olfactory sensations, just as their insistent pressure in him demands. The
71
rush of steam-emotion will burst the steampipe of the sentence, the valves
of punctuation, and the regular clamp of the adjective. Fistfuls of basic
words without a conventional order. Only preoccupation of the narrator, to
render all the vibrations of his ‘I.’ (145)
In this scene, “intense life” is exemplified as life under threat or in contact with its own
absence. Like his own auto crash—the foundational myth of the Futurist movement—a
violent and shocking event demands this new, unwired language. The thinking subject is
traumatically confronted with its own fundamental material nature in this near-death
experience, which demonstrates the perceived inadequacy of grammatically regulated
writing to the task of expressing modern human experience. He depicts the sentence as a
machine that is unfit for this level of belligerent energy. The force of the experience and
the forcefulness with which the shock demands to be expressed overcome the resistance
posed by the rules of logical proposition.
The very periodo he leaves behind on the ground in the “Technical Manifesto” is
both an historical and syntactical construction. Aristotle writes that in rhetoric a period
“has a beginning and end in itself, and a size which can be seen as a whole” (qtd. in
“period” 896). It is complete in its “sense” and its “rhythm” or “meter” (“period” 896)
and it “may be composed in cola or simple. A sentence in cola is one which is complete,
has subdivisions, and is easily pronounced in one breath” (Aristotle qtd. in “period” 896).
In modernity, its mark of punctuation makes the very premise of a logical thesis (also a
period) possible. As Christian Benne writes, the full-stop “markiert […] in der
Philosophie die kleinste Denkeinheit, nämlich die Aussage“ (“marks the smallest unit[y]
of thought in philosophy, namely the proposition”; 42). “Der Punkt definiert, was gesagt
72
und gesetzt wird. Was eine Aussage ist. Sein könnte. Oder sein soll“ (“It defines what is
said and posited. What a proposition is. Could be. Or should be”). Indeed this very logic
(ironized by Benne’s three incomplete sentences) is what Marinetti opposes, along with
the syntax that lends it durability and stability.
For Marinetti’s Futurism, the sudden violence of modern experience reveals an
intuitive truth that the logical structures of syntax suppress, and it requires a writing
appropriately capable of revealing and representing its speed, bodily sensation, and
authenticity as unmediatedly as possible. Further, the closure of a period or comma
would signify the pausing of thought and sound, whereas the dynamism of Futurism
requires ongoing continuity, the speed and pattern of which might change but never
stops. Instead, he calls for marks that encourage the “direction” of movements. Thus his
use of mathematical and musical notation. This writing effaces its own forms in an
attempt to achieve an unmediated effect, but it does so, paradoxically, by attracting
attention to its medium.
The “freedom” supposedly provided by rebellious syntax is, however,
contradictorily offset by Marinetti’s own style. The “Technical Manifesto” presents
Futurist techniques of writing with a ream of violent imperatives. The first of the eleven
(10+1) command(ment)s Marinetti receives from the plane propeller in the manifesto is
that “It is imperative to destroy syntax and scatter one’s nouns at random, just as they are
born” (119). The dictating voice is reinforced by a heavy framework of numbered bullets,
bold-faced font, and dashes. Paradoxically, while the numbered bullets and structure of
the imperatives command the reader to set language free, the grammatical mood of that
appeal seeks to deny the reader-writer of free agency. Thus, Futurism demotes the human
73
subject at the same time that it calls for its expression. This is also indicated in the second
article of the manifesto, which describes how verbs can be freed from their grammatical
subjects by being left in the infinitive. Thus, “the verb can be elastically adapted to the
noun and not be subordinated to the I of the writer who observes or imagines. Only the
infinitive can give a sense of the continuity of life and the elasticity of the intuition that
perceives it” (120). Yet because the Italian infinitive takes the same form as the
imperative, freedom from old rules only amounts to the erection of new ones—which
celebrate their own dictation to the followers of Futurism.
Along similar lines, when Marinetti proclaims, “I want to seize [ideas] brutally
and fling them in the reader’s face” (“Destruction” 150), he frames linguistic
communication as a direct, violent assault on its audience, instead of as a symbolic,
mediated action. The physical and material emphasis of his theorization of writing,
however violent, is related to the aim of bringing art in total contact with physical life. In
part because Futurism had later connections to the development of Italy’s fascist
totalitarian dictatorship, Marinetti’s program exemplifies how aesthetics and politics
converge. Reflecting on “Battle of Tripoli” (1912), in which Marinetti praises war’s
“beauty,” Walter Benjamin remarks, “Ihre Selbstentfremdung hat jenen Grad erreicht, der
sie ihre eigene Vernichtung als ästhetischen Genuß ersten Ranges erleben läßt. So steht es
um die Ästhetisierung der Politik, welche der Faschismus betreibt” (“[Mankind’s] selfalienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an
aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics which Fascism is
rendering aesthetic”; Das Kunstwerk 176; 242). Lawrence Rainey takes this up when he
writes that “in twentieth-century culture, Futurism is the litmus test for probing the
74
relationship between art and power, aesthetics and politics—the birth scene of aesthetic
modernity” (“Introduction” 2). Marinetti’s totalizing aesthetics befriend totalitarian
politics, and moreover the violence rendered against conventional language coincides
with and celebrates human slaughter. This alliance might also be to what Adorno refers
when he speaks of the unhappy failure of the avant-garde departure in his opening to
Aesthetic Theory. A military term used figuratively to describe artistic movements
considered ahead of their times, the avant-garde retains its combativeness as it connotes
the frontline assault of an army against a target. Futurism, whose name certainly
expresses the concept of being ahead of its time, broke free from the existing grammars
of all of the arts with an extremism that evoked cautious distance from other modernists
seeking aesthetic change.
Similar to Woolf’s statements from the chapter’s start and Marinetti’s above,
Russian Futurists Viktor Khlebnikov, David Burliuk, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and Alexei
Kruchenykh disown the Russian cultural and literary tradition as outdated and alien in a
1912 manifesto: “Академия и Пушкин неонятнее гиероглифов. Бросить Пушкина,
Достоевского, Толстого и проч. с парохода Современности” (“Academic art and
Pushkin are harder to understand than Egyptian hieroglyphs/ Let us throw Pushkin,
Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, etc., off the steamship of modernity”) (Пощечына общественному
вкусу; “A Slap in the Face” 120). Like Marinetti’s plane, the image of the ship implies a
departure from the speakers’ immediate predecessors and their contemporary audience.
Although the self-described avant-garde asserts a connection between itself and its
modern age, its art is still considered ahead of its time, because the tastes of
75
contemporary audiences had been conditioned according to past convention. Many avantgarde groups therefore expressed opposition to existing norms and to the contemporary
audiences accustomed to them, as the title of the manifesto cited above, “Пощечына
общественному вкусу” ‘A Slap in the Face of Public Taste', announces. The slogan
“Making No Compromise with the Public Taste” later adopted by the American Little
Review magazine is tame in comparison.
The metaphor of the Russian Futurist steamship furthermore suggests that new art
is a vehicle towards a transformed future, as though their movement were a boat heading
for an aesthetic New World. In the citation from Aesthetic Theory offered earlier in the
chapter, Theodor Adorno responds to precisely this pattern of optimistic leave-taking
among the avant-garde. To repeat, he writes that around 1910, “revolutionary art
movements set out into the sea of the formerly inconceivable” (“Das Meer des nie
Geahnten, auf das die revolutionären Kunstbewegungen um 1910 sich hinauswagten, hat
nicht das verheißene abenteuerliche Glück beschieden”; 1; 9). Crucially, however, the
emphatic content of the sentence’s main clause states that the trip “did not bestow the
promised happiness of adventure” (1) in the way one would perhaps anticipate. Although
Adorno’s volume is concerned chiefly with the implications of this adventure for the
theory of aesthetics on a broad scale, the absence of happiness might perhaps allude to
the later association of Futurism with fascist movements and its unabashed embrace and
aestheticization of military bloodshed. On the other hand it might also be continuing the
reference to Woolf—through an allusion to the incomplete and eponymous trip to the
lighthouse—in order to represent the lack of fruitfulness or satisfaction that landing at
that signaling location would be imagined to bring.
76
In formal terms, to pursue the above analogy a bit further, the ship does not arrive
to steady ground but remains at sea. Its abstract status, as that which signifies what is not
old, remains the same and therefore also outdated. Thus in a 1931 lecture Adorno writes,
“expressionism, constructivism, futurism, cubism, atonality, surrealism—as empty, banal,
and programmatic as they appear—may remind you of that shock as it was manifested at
the time those artistic tendencies were emerging” (“Why is the New” 127). New is an
indexical term, which is always contextually defined. Like the meaning of the spatially
oriented indexical “there,” which depends in part on the location of the speaker “here,”
the “new” is doubly deictic, because its meaning relies on the identification of what it
excludes, the old and/or the “now” that is always “then.” The new is by definition
previously unrealized and unknown; as a result, its significance is always changing and
never affirmed in a positive identification. In a reading of Aesthetic Theory’s opening
passage, David Ferris alternately chooses to translate it as “the sea of the unforeseen”
(192). He relates the “unforeseen” or “inconceivable” sea to the Futurist imperative “to
know nothing of it, nothing of the past” (“The Founding Manifesto” 5) when he expands
that “To set out on the sea of the unforeseen [. . .] is to foresee a future whose
significance resides in its promise of the new. [. . .] Oriented toward the impossible
knowledge of the unforeseen, Futurism can only promise that the continuing significance
of art alone resides in the future” (Ferris 192). This is the profound limitation of defining
art by its newness or advancedness. Marinetti is unaware of this or is unconcerned with it.
Stein and Woolf, as later sections explore, engage this irony as they look to circumscribe
the boundaries of their own literary invention. The danger for Adorno, Ferris explains, is
how, unhinged from the unchanging universals of past tradition, art has no prerequisite
77
foundation for its theorization. Because art is no longer regulated by stable rules of
composition, there are no sure measures against which it can be classified or understood.
However, the motion of modernism and the dynamism to which art like Marinetti’s
aspires constitute another sort of aesthetic principle. Indeed, as Adorno writes, “Deutbar
ist Kunst nur an ihrem Bewegungsgesetz, nicht durch Invarianten. Sie bestimmt sich im
Verhältnis zu dem, was sie nicht ist” (“Art can be understood by its laws of movement,
not according to any set of invariants. It is defined by its relation to what it is not”;
Ästhetic Theorie 12; 3). As the motif of vehicular motion that we have begun to observe
implies, while the point of arrival is always deferred for art focused on the
unprecedented, some significance dwells in its departure and passage.
“So the twentieth century had come it began with 1901”
“Beginning again and again is a natural thing even when
there is a series.
Beginning again and again and again explaining
composition and time is a natural thing.”—Gertrude Stein
In “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” Woolf laments an obstacle to new art: that its
contemporaries are unprepared to receive it, because they are accustomed to the very
norms of tradition new art rejects. In her own case, because her treatment of character
differs from that of the older “Mr. Wells and Mr. Bennett and Mr. Galsworthy,” she
imagines that the British public objects to her character Mrs. Brown: “how are we to
believe in her? We do not even know whether her villa was called Albert or Balmoral;
what she paid for her gloves; or whether her mother died of cancer or of consumption”
(113-114). The Futurist solution proposed in pamphlets like “Slap in the Face of Public
Taste” and commented upon in Adorno’s “Why is the New Art Hard to Understand”
78
would be to force art onto its audience. Gertrude Stein’s 1926 lecture “Composition as
Explanation,” which was printed by Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s Hogarth Press,
comments on precisely this dynamic.6 It points out the relativity of the concept of being
“ahead of one’s time,” which depends not only on the innovation that sets one’s work
apart, but on one’s contemporaries’ unpreparedness to appreciate it. She writes, “No one
is ahead of his time, it is only that the particular variety of creating his time is the one that
his contemporaries who also are creating their own time refuse to accept” (407).
Although the new art corresponds to its time of composition, its contemporaries are only
ready to acknowledge and accept its beauty and aptness once they have become
conscious of the distinct age in which they live. Stein suggests society only recognizes an
era’s cultural identity, its unique constitution or composition, retroactively. She writes,
“Those who are creating the modern composition authentically are naturally only of
importance when they are dead because by that time the modern composition having
become past is classified and the description of it is classical. That is the reason why the
creator of the new composition in the arts is an outlaw until he is a classic.” The change
is understated, not extreme; and it takes place without a radical break imposed by the
author or artist. Instead of taking place only in the creation of new art, it occurs just as
profoundly in its contemporary reception. The shift from the illegitimate to the classic
appraisal is hardly revolutionary: it occurs “almost without a pause;” it is “almost not an
interval” (408).
6
After its delivery to students in Cambridge and Oxford, “Composition as Explanation”
was published by Virginia and Leonard Woolf within the second series of the Hogarth
Essays. In the first series “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” had appeared two years earlier.
79
Similar to Woolf’s identifying December of 1910 as an approximate moment of
change, Stein proposes that the modern turning-point was “the period of the beginning of
1914,” several months prior to the start of the Great War. Although she sees the war
having profound cultural consequences particularly on the reception of art, locating the
rupture before the war’s outbreak certainly has an unexpectedly anticlimactic effect.
Years later she mocks the attempt to precisely date twentieth-century modernity when she
writes, “So the twentieth century had come it began with 1901” (Paris France 25). To
describe what “makes each and all of them then different from other generations”
(“Composition” 407), Stein draws a comparison between aesthetic change and the
emergence of modern warfare:
Lord Grey remarked that when the generals before the war talked about
the war they talked about it as a nineteenth century war although to be
fought with twentieth century weapons. That is because war is a thing that
decides how it is to be when it is to be done. It is prepared and to that
degree it is like all academies it is not a thing made by being made it is a
thing prepared.
The introduction of new technologies defined the Great War and set it apart from
previous conflicts. However, war was not invented in 1914, and it was not determined
only by its leadership. This foreshadows a passage in Aesthetic Theory to be discussed
shortly, in which a child sitting at a piano who desires to innovate an unprecedented
chord is still limited by the pre-established technology of the piano. The possibilities for
innovation are already limited by the instrument. More than anything, the technological
weapons with which the war was fought left it with little resemblance to its predecessors.
80
Stein proceeds to write that “Writing and painting and all that, is like that [war], for those
who occupy themselves with it and don’t make it as it is made.” The analogy
acknowledges the existing military-aesthetic association of the vanguard, but it is not
pursued further. She offers no indication that new art assaults its audience, or that it arises
in opposition to enemy movements in order to overthrow them. On the contrary, she
proposes that a society under threat is more likely to become aware of its era and
therefore also of the art produced in it. In this respect Gertude Stein sees the Great War
having had an impact: it influenced the reception of new art because people were aware
that times had changed:
[. . .] because of the academic thing known as war having been forced to
become contemporary made every one not only contemporary in act not
only contemporary in thought but contemporary in self-consciousness
made every one contemporary with the modern composition. [. . .]. And so
war may be said to have advanced a general recognition of the expression
of the contemporary composition by almost thirty years. (411)
The particularity of modernism, she proposes, is how the temporal lapse between a work
and its appreciation collapsed with the war. The war produced a widespread cognizance
of now being very new. As a consequence, Stein postulates, modernism is recognized by
its contemporaries instead of only by its future audiences. The war reduces the distance
between the vanguard and its contemporary society and therefore allows new art a more
perceptible impact on its audience of the time.
The paradoxical result of defining “modern art” according to its interest in the
new is that the rigid laws of form that modernism was supposed to undo may be merely
81
replaced by a new universal law based on novelty rather than critique. Yet from another
point of view, Gertrude Stein writes, “Beginning again and again is a natural thing even
when there is a series./ Beginning again and again and again explaining composition and
time is a natural thing” (408). The sparse punctuation, opposed to the Expressionist
exclamation mark that will be discussed shortly, implies an absence of rupture; and what
would be the break of a new “beginning” is offset by its repetition and pairing with
“again.” With this tautology, Stein celebrates the endless repetitions of new beginnings
without critique. Indeed the repetition is presented as natural law (“a natural thing”).
Along these lines, novelty itself belongs to a structural narrative that purports to repeat
itself unproblematically ad infinitum. For Theodor Adorno, by virtue of this recurrence,
modernism actually embodies the opposite of its initially intended purpose. The resulting
stasis, Oleg Gelikman holds in his commentary on the dilemma, provides the dialectical
“counterpart to the velocity of modernist innovation” (156). Yet as Martin Jay writes in
response, few modernists were ever interested in “abstractly negating tradition” (173). In
fact, authorial intentions aside, the modernist break was always situated in a nexus of
forces extending beyond the isolated domains of new and old. The indexicality of the
new or its repeated sequence of beginnings actually necessitates its expanded appraisal.
Recognizing this, Adorno turns the paradox implicit in newness into a generative
dialectic: “Der Wahrheitsgehalt der Kunstwerke ist fusioniert mit ihrem kritischen.
Darum üben sie Kritik auch aneinander. [. . .] die Einheit der Geschichte von Kunst ist
die dialektische Figur bestimmter Negation” (59-60). (The truth content of artworks is
fused with their critical content. That is why works are also critics of one another; […];
the unity of the history of art is the dialectical figure of determinate negation”;
82
Ästhetische Theorie 59-60; 35) Unlike the fluid model displayed in Gertrude Stein’s
sentences, for Adorno the new and the tradition or contemporary historical context are
mutually modified through reciprocal negative reactions. Thus, the new is a “blind spot”
‘ein blinder Fleck’, as he at one point calls it (20; 38), only when it is reified and isolated
from the tradition that directly or indirectly brought it about, or when it is successful in an
absolute sense. Even unintentional innovation is determined by the materials in which it
takes place, as Adorno later describes,
Das Verhältnis zum Neuen hat sein Modell an dem Kind, das auf dem
Klavier nach einem noch nie gehörten, unberührten Akkord betastet. Aber
es gab den Akkord immer schon, die Möglichkeiten der Kombination sind
beschränkt, eigentlich steckt alles schon in der Klaviatur. Das Neue ist die
Sehnsucht nach dem Neuen, kaum es selbst, daran krankt alles Neue. Was
als Utopie sich fühlt, bleibt ein Negatives gegen das Bestehende, und
diesem hörig. (55)
a child at the piano searching for a chord never previously heard. This
chord, however, was always there; the possible combinations are limited
and actually everything that can be played on it is implicitly given in the
keyboard. The new is the longing for the new, not the new itself: That is
what everything new suffers from. What takes itself to be utopia remains
the negation of what exists and is obedient to it. (32)
In Adorno’s model, the new is not pure invention or the erasure of the old to which it
responds; that response is itself determining. Rather, “Die Spuren im Material und
Verfahrungsweisen, an die jedes qualitativ neue Werk sich heftet, sind Narben, die
83
Stellen, an denen die voraufgegangenen Werke mißlangen” (“The traces to be found in
the material and the technical procedures, from which every qualitatively new work takes
its lead, are scars: They are the loci at which the preceding works misfired”; 59; 35). This
simultaneous subjection to the old and avant-gardist desire for the new characterizes the
manner in which this project understands modernism.
84
In ihr hat der Expressionismus sich verbrannt; mit den
Ausrufungszeichen hat er die eigene Wirkung sich
gutgeschrieben, und darum ist sie in ihnen verpufft. Sie
gleichen, in expressionistischen Texten, heute den
Millionenziffern auf Banknoten der deutschen Inflation.
—Theodor Adorno
In his brief and underattended essay on punctuation marks, “Satzzeichen,”
Adorno offers the example of the exclamation mark to illustrate the historical variability
of aesthetic convention and meaning. In terms of its syntactical function, it acts as a
variation on the period, marks a statement’s closure more emphatically, and suggests the
speaker’s voice and voicing, whether by acoustic volume or individual affect. For
Adorno, its excessive use breaks the rules of literature too drastically and reflects the
tendency of the subject to dominate his or her artistic material. The innovative treatment
of punctuation in writing can only be meaningful in view of the convention and material
it engages and critiques, and it by definition can not be perpetually new. Consequently,
the use of the exclamation mark became as outdated as the tradition its users had worked
to overthrow. He writes, “Das geschichtliche Wesen der Satzzeichen kommt daran
zutage, daß an ihnen genau das veraltet, was einmal modern war. Aufrufungszeichen sind
unerträglich geworden als Gebärde der Autorität, mit der der Schriftsteller von außen her
einen Nachdruck zu setzen versucht, den die Sache nicht selbst ausübt” (“That what was
once modern about punctuation marks becomes obsolete brings to light their historical
nature. Exclamation points have become unbearable as gestures of authority, with which
the writer attempts to make an emphasis from outside in, an effect which the thing can
not perform alone”; 107-08). What was first a novel feature in Expressionist writing and
a visible mark of the exuberant and spontaneous individual soon became a practically
obligatory staple of Expressionist style. In 1956, when the essay was written, the
85
reference to the “gestures of authority” recalls that in German the exclamation point is
used to punctuate the imperative mode. This is highlighted in the essay when the mark is
compared to a “menacingly raised index finger” (106). Although Expressionism shared
no association with National Socialism, its exclamation marks evoke their recent use in
the forbidding signs of the Third Reich.
This association is also implied through Adorno’s likening of the exclamation
mark to the inflated currency of Weimar Germany, which preceded—and is frequently
attributed as facilitating the emergence of—the Third Reich. Sequences of them appeared
in as much inflated profusion as the zeros on bank notes and likewise gained no
additional purchase. Rather than acting as the symbols of authority they were intended to
be, they therefore appear “helpless” and desperate.
In ihr hat der Expressionismus sich verbrannt; mit den Ausrufungszeichen
hat er die eigene Wirkung sich gutgeschrieben, und darum ist sie in ihnen
verpufft. Sie gleichen, in expressionistischen Texten, heute den
Millionenziffern auf Banknoten der deutschen Inflation. (108)
In this [gesture] Expressionism burned itself; with exclamation points
[Expressionism] credited itself for its own effect, and therefore through
them [the gesture] disappeared into smoke. They resemble today, in
Expressionist texts, the one million numeral mark on bank notes of the
German inflation.
By tracing reciprocal stages of the symbol’s use and reception, the essay underscores the
historically-determined social meaning of punctuation marks. Adorno goes on to draw a
contrast between it and what he identifies as its counterpart in music, the sforzato, which
86
“heute noch so unentbehrlich ist wie zu Beethovens Zeiten, als es den Einbruch
subjektiven Willens ins musikalische Gewebe markierte” (“is today still as indispensable
as it was in Beethoven’s times, when it marked an irruption of the subjective will into the
musical fabric”; 107-08). Both devices voice the role of the expressive subject’s
disruption of compositional norms in the musical and literary work. In contrast to his
depiction of the textual symbol, Adorno praises Beethoven’s use of the compositional
device elsewhere for producing immanent “moments of form and expression” (Beethoven
54). Though the sforzato and exclamation point appear to create the same formal
inflection, their diverging significances illustrate the historical contingency of formal
meaning.
In contrast to the inflated use of the exclamation mark, Adorno praises formal
developments in music and writing that proceed carefully and in response to individual
contexts rather than by principle. He advises writers to follow the example of musical
composers who tread lightly on existing rules as they introduce new sounds or
compositional moves:
Zu raten wäre allenfalls, man solle mit den Satzzeichen umgehen wie
Musiker mit verbotenen Fortschreitungen der Harmonien und Stimmen.
Einer jeden Interpunktion, wie einer jeden solchen Fortschreitung, läßt
sich anmerken, ob sie eine Intention trägt oder bloß schlampt; und,
subtiler, ob der subjektive Wille die Regel brutal durchbricht oder ob das
wägende Gefühl sie behutsam mitdenkt und mitschwingen läßt, wo er sie
suspendiert. (112)
87
The best recommendation would be that one should treat punctuation the
way musicians treat the forbidden progressions of chords and registers.
Just like each progression, each punctuation reveals whether it carries an
intention or just does so sloppily; and more subtly, whether the subjective
will brutally breaks the rule into two when it suspends it, or whether the
weighing feeling lets itself carefully follow the rule’s logic and swing
along with it when it suspends it.
In order to be such, the new acquires a tension between itself and its context; and for
Adorno it ideally represents a balanced collaboration between the artistic subject, his or
her material, and the conventions of composition. It “shocks” its audience with
“unfamiliarity and strangeness” (“Der Schock [. . .] ist nicht bloß, wie die gutartige
Apologie es möchte, dem Ungewöhnten und Befremdenden als solchem zuzuschreiben,
sonder einem Aufstörenden und selber Verstörten”; “The Aging” 181;143). The new art
achieves this effect by “revealing in its isolation, the very cracks that reality would like to
cover over in order to exist in safety” (“Why is the New Art” 131). Expressive
punctuation also calls attention to the reality of textual mediation, by emphasizing the
lines and points on the page’s surface, and destabilizes conventional logic through its
rearrangement. Crucially, punctuation’s embeddedness in convention associates it both
with the normative and with rebellions aimed against norms. As an indirect consequence,
its style signifies its relation to historically-specific artistic trends. This surely is the case
with Dada and Expressionism.
88
“the name was not new but the thing being alive was always new”
—Gertrude Stein
By 1934, when she conducted a lecture tour of the U.S., Gertrude Stein had
become a household name, whose style of writing was playfully and mockingly imitated
even in popular newspapers.7 By this time, she had already been included as the only
female author in Edmund Wilson’s 1931 study of French, Irish/British, and American
modernist—or “imaginative”— literature, Axel’s Castle. The Autobiography of Alice B.
Toklas, which Stein published in 1933, enjoyed huge popularity, but her place in the
landscape of modernism had been long established, beginning with the publication of
Three Lives in 1909, Tender Buttons in 1914, the lesser-known and experimental
Geography and Plays (1922), The Making of Americans (1925), and How to Write
(1931), as well as the famed status of her Paris salon as a site visited by other cultural
figures, including F. T. Marinetti.
Despite the continuous vision of aesthetic history expressed in the passages in the
last section, Gertrude Stein’s writing is as formally experimental as any. As such, her
work has been understood according to a vocabulary of rupture. Indeed, Marjorie Perloff
compares Stein’s treatment of language with Marinetti’s when she points out that “[t]he
‘destruction of syntax’” of Futurism “was, of course, also Stein’s project,” but achieved
differently (Wittgenstein’s Ladder 89). Jonathan Levin describes her work as a “leading
example of what might be called modernist anti-modernism: a protomodern sensibility
struggling against modernist aestheticism and pointing the way beyond modernist
impasses” (146)—a description attributed by Peter Bürger and Andreas Huyssen to the
7
See “Reporter Tells in Stein Style the Stein Style.” Chicago Daily Tribune. Oct 25
1934: 17 or “But Stein is a Stein is a Stein.” New York Times Nov. 18 1934 BR10.
89
avant-garde rejection of High Modernist aestheticism. Following their reading of avantgardism as an anticipation of post-modernism, many scholars of the last decades have
called Stein’s writing a postmodernist poetics “ahead of its time” and have concentrated
their appreciation of her work around the signature influence it had on the
L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E movement, for example.8 Stein was perceived by her
contemporaries according to a similar vocabulary. One most likely pen-named
8
In 1985 Wendy Steiner calls Lectures in America “a veritable index to the leading
aesthetic ideas of our day. Indeed, the training in paradoxical thinking that pop art and
deconstruction recently have provided tends to normalize Stein’s writing to a striking
extent” (xi). Other notable examples include Marjorie Perloff’s inclusion of Stein in 21st
Century Modernism and Marianne DeKoven’s comparison of Stein’s resistance to
phallogo- and logocentrism to the work of Derrida, Irigaray, and Kristeva (A Different).
Others have resisted this comparison by pointing out aspects of Stein’s linguistic
philosophy that conflict with postmodern linguistic theories: Jennifer Ashton argues
instead that Stein’s view of words, and the name in particular, is “absolutely devoted to [.
. .] the determinacy it entails” (Ashton 582). But scholars like Jonathan Levin show that
what has been perceived as a “prescient commitment […] to postmodern values,” as
Jennifer Ashton skeptically describes it, descends from “a distinct history in American
writing, not only in pragmatism’s general embrace of open-ended experience but even
more specifically in Emerson’s conception of self-reliance as a form of abandonment, the
more marginal the better” (146). Stein found in the novels of Henry James “the beginning
of an abstract method which would foreground the nonrepresentational dimensions of
language” (147) and “recognized in James’s peculiar obscurity, and especially in his
habit of endlessly delaying and qualifying his subject through the course of a paragraph, a
form of abstraction that detached and broke down the continuities of social and cultural
life” (149). Of equal importance was the influence of William James’s Principles of
Psychology, which demonstrates through abstract word games that “[the reader] will soon
begin to wonder if it can possibly be the word he has been using all his life with that
meaning. [. . .] It is reduced, by this new way of attending to it, to its sensational nudity”
(James qtd. 151). Her attention to the nonsignifying aspects of words, their material
appearance and sound, though especially resonant for poetic experiments later in the
century, were not at all ahead of their time, but as Norman Weinstein and Marjorie
Perloff have also pointed out, they were deeply entrenched in the science and philosophy
of the turn of the century. Norman Weinstein has observed that the inadequacy of
traditional views of language embedded in Aristotelian logic was evident especially to
Gertrude Stein: “A linguistic logic based upon laws of direct causality and linear time
cannot authentically correspond to a universe of possibilities such as James describes”
(5).
90
contemporary noted of her in 1934, “She has managed [. . .] to make many writers look
upon the English language as something that has unlimited possibilities, as something
malleable” (Schriftgiesser B5). And “she deliberately and definitely showed how to get
rid of the old-fashioned, Victorian sentence. She constructed a new framework for a
world that was beginning to have new thoughts.” The possibilities opened by Stein
remain unelaborated by this observer; her work is celebrated for no other quality than its
being so “previously unforeseeable” (Adorno, Aesthetic Theory 1) and its paving the way
for more innovations. However, even if Stein created this revolutionary opening in
English literature, her experiments are hardly severed from its past.
On the contrary, Stein cites Shakespeare and other authors of the “great works”
without a trace of contempt, because she appreciates how they revolutionized the English
language in their own eras. She, herself, aspires to the same achievement when she states,
“I want to be historical” (qtd. in Stendhal 31). Rather than rejecting cultural heritage per
se, Stein’s works appear to target methods of instruction that labor to maintain the
grammatical and linguistic status quo. In this sense, it is worth briefly considering the
connection between forms of writing, institutional authority, and education, as well as the
role this connection plays in Stein’s approach to writing. As implied in a half-page
Washington Post article subheaded with the line “People Who Educate People Might as
Well Be Stopped, Decides Stylists; Finds a Lot of Education in New England” (“The
Pity”), teachers are seen to enforce a rigid structure of either right or wrong, and logical
or irrational, an approach to learning which violently stunts the free and creative impulse
of youth, itself, as we have seen, a meaningful symbolic category for modernists.
Education not only stunts individual genius, she suggests in the article, but also
91
generational genius through its conformity to institutional norms over the demands of a
new age. The site of this restraint is often the composition notebook, where the thoughts
of students would be formulated and recorded in writing, the very type of notebook in
which Stein handwrote her work before it was typed by her partner Alice B. Toklas.
Thus in her 1931 book How to Write, Stein cites and dramatically revises the
writing primer’s language of instruction in order to ironize it. 9 Taking the title and
keywords that mark the conventional form of such books, Stein replaces and inverts its
contents. Writing is reduced to letters and lettering, it seems, which produces a different
level of meaning entirely. In fact, just as Tender Buttons has been described as a poetic
revision of the English dictionary (Kaufmann), Sharon Kirsch has suggested that How to
Write is a revision of Edwin A. Abbott’s How to Write Clearly, a standard handbook used
at Harvard during the time Stein studied there. In keeping with standard usage, the title of
the volume reads as an imperative statement (write in this way!), yet as Jacques Lezra
notes, it could also read as an interrogative pleading (how is one to write at all?) (117).
Such subtle ambiguity would be clarified by the use of conventional punctuation marks,
as suggested by the parenthetical supplements above. The ambivalence voiced through
the title’s unpunctuated close is essential to its significance. Commenting on this aspect
of Stein’s writing, Jonathan Levin writes, “to understand this writing too well would be to
miss its meaning, or perhaps more accurately, to miss the way in which it stages the
production of meaning. [. . .] The challenge of reading Stein’s poetry and prose is in
9
As Sharon Kirsch has argued in her study of Stein’s college compositions, “Stein
certainly experienced the ‘red pencil of the section man,’ particulary when she received
comments from her instructor focused solely on the mechanics of her writing: ‘You are
careless too about punctuation . . . the quotation marks . . . should be single—not double.’
Her professor continued, ‘It will pay you to review those parts of the textbook which treat
of sentences and paragraphs” (293).
92
attending to the movements of words as they enact the transitional processes that make
meanings” (166). Although what Adorno envisions in his remarks on the semi-colon
scarcely resembles the sentences produced by Gertrude Stein, his comments on
“Ideologien wie die der Luzidität, der sachlichen Härte, der gedrängten Präzision
(“ideologies like lucidity, uncompromising facts, condensed precision”; “Satzzeichen”
112) nonetheless illustrate how writing conventions hinder certain ways of thinking and
the extent to which clarity can in fact obscure.10 In place of a strict definition of
comprehension, Stein offers “enjoyment” as a type of understanding. In a radio interview
she declared, “If you enjoy something you understand it, and if you understand it you
enjoy it” (Hall). Similarly, a journalist who had asked her to clarify the sentence
“Supposing no one asked a question, what would be the answer?,” reported her as
responding, “‘It’s very simple,’ said the authoress. ‘Don’t you see? It’s right there—that
girl understands.’ And Miss Stein pointed to a young woman who was giggling”
(“Gertrude Stein Arrives”). By leaving a pleasurable set of impressions that might
otherwise be considered inarticulable, Stein’s sentences operate differently from those
espoused in grammar handbooks. In this way their expression is often likened to that of
nonverbal arts; Stein’s texts still convey meaning, even if that significance is not
predetermined.11
10
See pages 7-8 of introduction and Adorno, “Skoteinos.”
Edmund Wilson observed in his chapter on Gertrude Stein that “she seems to be
groping for the instinctive movements of the mind which underlie the factitious
conventional logic of ordinary intercourse, and to be trying to convey their rhythms and
reflexes through a language divested of its ordinary meaning” (241). Marianne DeKoven
attributes a feminist resistance to logocentrism to this aspect of Stein’s writing: “This
linearity is not innocent. It has been instituted at the expense of repressing what Derrida
calls ‘pluridimensionality,’ which is, as we have seen, the central feature of Steinian
experimental writing” (“Gertrude Stein” 88). Many readers have found comparisons
11
93
The effect of passages like the following from “In Narrative” cannot be
paraphrased: “He first added fed and way and weighed and followed from and first and
first added weighed and wait and first added followed he first added followed first and
wait weighed and first he first added followed first and weighed and wait and wait” (How
to 233). Although some might find this passage an example of material writing divorced
from any significative function,12 Stein insists more than once that it is “impossible to
avoid meaning” (71). The eyes of the reader might not only scan the sentence once from
left to right, but might also jump between the repeated words, leading the reader to
compare how words like “first” change or remain the same in each contextual instance.
The reader may note near-homonyms like “wait” and “weighed” and ponder the potential
relations of meaning between them. The ways in which arrangement and signification
interact inspire a nonlinear mode of reading. Stein repeats the word “first” with playful
irony as it in fact always “follows” other words. If the repeated use of “added” and “and”
between Stein’s writing and other arts like music and painting to be a useful tool in
explaining, relating to, or understanding her nonlinear work, particularly in regards to the
“sensational nudity” exposed by her Jamesian word games, that is, precisely those
material aspects of language of which her experimental writing makes use. However, the
comparison so frequently made between her writing and cubist painting treats her writing
as a merely imitative art and directs attention away from the “expanded possibilities of
literature” Stein’s linguistic experiments actually invite (82). “[T]he danger of calling
Stein’s experimental writing literary cubism,” Marianne DeKoven reminds us, is that it
confuses words with images. William Gass, in directing attention to a sentence in The
Making of Americans where “[t]he sound shifts throughout follow and reinforce the
sense” (viii), holds on the other hand that “[i]f we look at this line (not merely read it), we
shall find out how important looking as well as listening are to the understanding and
appreciation of prose” (vii). Gass’s comments remind us that these musical and visual
features are not external to and superficially adopted by the written medium, but rather an
aspect of it conventionally neglected by readers and writers. These features are not in
conflict with sense or understanding, but, as Marianne DeKoven writes, form and content
can be in “sympathy” with one another “in the sense that both arise from and express the
same essential vision” (“Landscape” 223) in Stein’s work.
12
See Pladott.
94
in this passage recalls the “+” of Marinetti’s new punctuation in asyntactical poetry, one
can see how differently the relations of words operate when placed in an open grammar
and how consistent this grammar is with Stein’s overall view of literary history.
During her lecture tour in the U.S. then, Stein addresses the challenge modern
writers and artists encounter in the face of tradition. By extension she distinguishes her
writing from the similarly radical and widely-known “destruction of syntax” of the
militant avant-garde. Among these lectures, which shortly afterward appeared together in
the volume Lectures in America, was the essay “Poetry and Grammar.” Like other
explanations for the need for new art, Stein rejects traditional literary form in order to
recapture what those forms no longer express. For her the modern challenge is not only a
matter of syntax and genre, but moreover of the linguistic medium. When a language is
still young and new, its very first poets, she writes, are “drunk with nouns,” and their
poetry is consequently the “state of knowing and feeling a name” (233). Yet by the
nineteenth century (241), nouns had begun to grow stale in a new era, because they have
“been the name of something for such a very long time” (214). Although the reciprocal
relations surrounding an object and lending it meaning change, its name does not, which
falsely implies that its condition and the perception of it have persisted.
If prose, as Stein writes in “Poetry and Grammar,” has the task of expressing
motion in space, nouns merely denote static objects. What objects do and how they
change over time, she claims, makes them interesting in prose. She begins the lecture
with the question, “A noun is a name of anything, why after a thing is named write about
it. A name is adequate or it is not. If it is adequate then why go on calling it, if it is not
then calling it by its name does no good” (209-210). Because it identifies objects that are
95
merely there, the work of naming is redundant and has fixing and determining qualities
for Stein. Similar to the emphasis on vehicles mentioned already, her opposition to nouns
at this stage of the lecture is related to her interest in writing’s involvement with action,
whereas writing concerned with naming does not act, modify, or “do.” As she reiterates,
“generally speaking, things once they are named the name does not go on doing anything
to them and so why write in nouns” (210). If a historically stable and deterministic
language poses an unavoidable obstacle to the new writer, its syntax and punctuation
provide a manner of reinvigorating it with fresh expressive power. In the context of this
frustration, punctuation takes on added significance in new writing, because it offers the
possibility of simultaneously retaining and transforming language.
The name and the noun therefore represent particular ways of using language that,
according to Stein, inventory: “just naming names is alright when you want to call a roll
but is it any good for anything else. To be sure in many places in Europe as in America
they do like to call rolls” (210). Stein does not elaborate, but roll calls, generally, are
tools used in institutional settings that comprise a daily inventory, especially of students
or soldiers subordinate to the authority of the roll-caller. Instead of serving a generative
purpose, it uses record-keeping language to ensure stability and account for loss: that
everyone and everything is where it ought to be at an appointed time and, especially
during wartime, deduce a count of casualties based on those who do not arrive. Instead of
creating, altering, or giving form to the immaterial workings of the mind as she demands
of language, roll-called names amount to a tally of bodies. It represents the militarism of
the avant-garde without its ideal of forceful advancement.
96
Despite her impatience or dissatisfaction with names, Stein has no intention of
inventing a new language as Marinetti or the zaumnie poets did. Marjorie Perloff
indicates that instead Stein, consistent with Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophy of
language, used its syntactical context to playfully produce meaning. Perloff suggests that
Stein “may well be thinking of a particular example of roll calling: namely, the parole in
libertà of F. T. Marinetti and his Futurist cénacle” (Wittgenstein’s 89). Stein’s
unpublished 1917 poem “Marry Nettie,” postulates Perloff, parodies the listing of nouns
and their isolation from their “specific context” (98). Marinetti’s poem, “Balance of
Analogies,” for instance, is composed of four “sums” and consists at times of asyntactical
series of nouns, which is to say there is no determined sequence or “grammar.” The
following is exemplary of his refusal to relate nouns to one another linguistically:
“around Adrianople + bombardment + orchestra + colossus-walk + factory widening
concentric circles of reflections plagiarisms echoes laughs little girls flowers whistles-ofsteam waiting feathers perfumes” (435-36).
In the same essay, Stein writes that proper nouns introduced or individually
bestowed onto individual, living, temporal beings evoke on the other hand how “lively”
nouns can be: “the name is only given to that person when they are born, there is at least
the element of choice even the element of change and anybody can be pretty well able to
do what they like” (214). By celebrating this relative freedom (relative because one’s
name is bestowed by the previous generation, after all), Stein exhibits sympathy with
Futurist and Expressionist experiments in word-invention. Yet she also underscores the
impossibility or futility of the linguistic rupture introduced by the onomatopoetic
extremes of Marinetti’s “Zang Tumb Tumb” or the transrational language of Russian
97
experiments. She stresses that such coinages have “nothing to do with language” (238),
because they lack history. In contrast, “[l]anguage as a real thing is not imitation either of
sounds or colors or emotions it is an intellectual recreation” (238). Instead of inventing an
entirely new language, she emphasizes the importance of historical as well as syntactical
contexts, “every one must stay with the language their language that has come to be
spoken and written and which has in it all the history of its intellectual recreation.”
The first section of the lecture on “Poetry and Grammar” shows how, from one
perspective, tradition can be oppressive and deterministic. Literary art is held in place by
the obstinate hold of an aged, even prohibitive, language on poetic expression, she
implies when she writes, “They the names that is the nouns cannot please, because after
all you know well after all that is what Shakespeare meant when he talked about a rose by
any other name” (212-13). This allusion to the words of Juliet in William Shakespeare’s
Romeo and Juliet recalls the lines, “What's in a name? that which we call a rose/ By any
other name would smell as sweet.” Comparing the name of the rose with the object of the
rose itself, Juliet refers to the insignificance of the name, its inability to influence the rose
or to capture the sensory impressions its scent, color, and touch make on the observer.
She then asks what Romeo’s character has to do with the Montague name, as she laments
the fate their family names have dictated to them.13 In spite of the family feud, that is, the
13
JULIET:
'Tis but thy name that is my enemy;
Thou art thyself, though not a Montague.
What's Montague? it is nor hand, nor foot,
Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part
Belonging to a man. O, be some other name!
What's in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet;
So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call'd,
98
inherited hatred of each for the other’s bequeathed name, they have fallen in love. The
couple is of course not successful in casting off their names to live and love in freedom.
Their example insists that love, brought up a number of times in the lecture, is not
predetermined by language, even if the material outcome of the couple’s relationship is.
On the contrary, as Stein’s discussion of the form of poetry in the same essay reveals, the
feeling of love resists forms of literary expression as well as the reverse in the case of her
own relationship with Alice B. Toklas (where there is no established language for
romantic love between women).14
Just as Juliet sought to find a new word for the object of her love that would
release it from its name in order to possess it fully, Stein writes that modern poetry “is
concerned with using with abusing, with losing with wanting, with denying with avoiding
with adoring with replacing the noun” (231; my italics). Her poetry seeks to find a name
for an object as new as her passion for it and asks how it is possible to “mean names
without naming,” to make a thing “named without using its name” (236), because “the
name was not new but the thing being alive was always new” (237). The motion,
Retain that dear perfection which he owes
Without that title. Romeo, doff thy name,
And for that name which is no part of thee
Take all myself. (II.2 ll. 42-53)
14
Her discussion of the apostrophe is erotically suggestive and again relates the essay to
the theme of love. It “has a gentle tender insinuation that makes it very difficult to
definitely decide to do without it” (216) and “from time to time I feel myself having
regrets and from time to time I put it in to make the possessive case.” Yet she only has
this feeling if it is “put in” between the word and its “s” and never on the end after the
plural form: “but inside a word and its s well perhaps, perhaps it does appeal by its
weakness to your weakness. At least at any rate from time to time I do find myself letting
it alone if it has come in and sometimes it has come in. I cannot positively deny but that I
do from time to time let it come in.”
99
progress, and dynamism of Futurism become, for Stein, a characteristic of a continuous
temporality, of the ongoing history of an active, living language. Although Stein did not
endorse the term “automatic writing,”15 she in fact conducted significant research on
continuous writing as an undergraduate at Radcliffe.16 The “going on” of writing not only
refers to physical movement, but also to stream of consciousness, a phrase first coined as
such by her Harvard professor William James in Principles of Psychology (1890) to
describe a mindful awareness of the unceasing activity of the human mind. This
consciousness, of course, is made aware of itself through the act of writing.
Her view of the advent of modern art pronounces a desire for change without
rupture. Instead of positing a break between her experiments and the literary precedents
with which her work differs, she locates both concurrently. The move forward is also a
reversal. Marjorie Perloff warns that this history of poetry should be “taken with a grain
of salt” (Wittgenstein’s 90), and it is in many ways unconvincing. Whether Stein actually
believed what she wrote or whether her writing’s humorous nature discounts its validity
is impossible to say and in any case less important than the writing itself. More
significant is that she writes this history to begin with. Her account exhibits that unlike
the typical avant-garde stance toward the past, Stein situates her experiments in a
genealogy, made up of the attitudes of authors to their languages over the course of
history.
15
“Writing for the normal person is too complicated an activity to be indulged in
automatically” (Stein qtd. in Meyer 221).
16
Together with Leon Mendez Solomons she published “Normal Motor Automatism.”
Psychological Review 3.5 (September 1896): 492-512 and “Cultivated Motor
Automatism: A Study of Character in Relation to Attention.” Psychological Review 5.3
(May 1898): 295-306.
100
Periods have a life of their own a necessity of their own a
feeling of their own a time of their own. And that feeling
that life that necessity that time can express itself in an
infinite variety that is the reason that I have always
remained true to periods so much so that as I say recently I
have felt that one could need them more than one had ever
needed them.—Gertrude Stein
In the same lecture, Stein identifies a similarly problematic schema for some
marks of punctuation. Like names that signify instead of modify, she considers the
question mark to be superfluous:
It is evident that if you ask a question you ask a question but anybody who
can read at all knows when a question is a question as it is written in
writing. Therefore I ask you therefore wherefore should one use it the
question mark. Beside it does not in its form go with ordinary printing and
so it pleases neither the eye nor the ear and it is therefore like a noun, just
an unnecessary name of something. A question is a question, anybody can
know that a question is a question and so why add to it the question mark
when it is already there when the question is already there in the writing.
(214-15)
Rather than opening an inquiry, the question mark produces closure. Nor does it modify
the sentence it punctuates but like a name identifies that which is already there. Her
objection is not to its redundancy with the grammatical mode it formalizes per se,
because she is hardly an economic writer, but to the way in which the question mark
leaves the impression that it is required for the question to be such. The interrogative
mode in writing is represented already in its word arrangement, she suggests, and
attentive readers and writers can recognize and create a question from words and their
101
arrangement alone. She implies that punctuation is a supportive element that is external
and alien to language, and she demands that prose writing itself “do” and not merely
represent the action of objects in space or of thought. Writing does not only signify the
speed of planes and cars, it seeks to perform and act out its own moving presence.
Depending on the mark, she implies, punctuation can still this motion or perform it
independently.
Stein offers a counterpart in “Poetry and Grammar” to Marinetti’s crashing
automobile, his dictating plane, and even to Woolf’s railway coach (to be discussed
shortly) when she describes an exchange between a group of people standing near a rail
and the driver of a train passing on it. Drawing from the established symbolic role of
modern transportation technologies to represent the freedom for which she aims in her
writing, she compares her sentences to the American locomotive: “when a train was
going by at a terrific pace [a foreign observer had told her] and we waved a hat the engine
driver could make a bell quite carelessly go ting ting ting, the way anybody playing at a
thing could do” (225). She proceeds, “Perhaps you see the connection with that and my
sentences.” According to this analogy, her sentences do more than execute the purpose
she intends for them, as they spontaneously respond to the greetings of their readers
while remaining on track. They take on, she writes, “a new balance that had to do with a
sense of movement of time included in a given space which as I have already said is a
definitely American thing” (224). Emphasizing the sentence over the isolated noun, she
suggests that her writing performs independently of her own authorial command. This
offers a dramatic contrast to the “disinterested” model of the “observer” and, on the other
hand, the work of art criticized by Adorno, in which “the beholder disappeared into the
102
material; [. . .] in modern works that shoot toward the viewer as on occasion a locomotive
does in a film” (“umgekehrt verschwand der Betrachter in der Sache; erst recht ist das der
Fall in modernen Gebilden, die auf jenen zufahren wie zuweilen Lokomotiven im Film”;
Aesthetic Theory 13; 27). Instead it foregrounds the reader’s process of making meaning.
Many readers have commented on the significance of punctuation for Stein,
particularly concerning its absent role in her writing. Isabelle Alfandary, for example,
points out how the punctuation mark interferes with the Steinian imperative “to go on.”17
For her the power of punctuation is inversely exhibited by Stein’s avoidance of it: it “is
considered to be that much more powerful in that it finds itself dismissed” (70). Fredric
Jameson observes that the absence of punctuation “has the effect of excluding skimming
or speed reading, reading for the ‘ideas’ rather than the words, or if you like, reading for
content” (343).18 Both emphasize the role of form in Stein’s sparing use of punctuation
and its impact on content. Surprisingly, even though periods posit stops and closures in
writing that is meant to “go on,” Stein nonetheless accepts and appreciates them in
17
“Les difficultés qu’éprouve Gertrude Stein avec al ponctuation tiennent à la scansion. [.
. .] La ponctuation freine par définition le défilé du signifiant sous la plume, ralentit le
cours de la parole en instituant des pauses plus ou moins définitives, des inflexions plus
ou moins marquées. À l’exception du point qui trouve grâce à les autres marques de
ponctuation marques de ponctuation ne lui inspirent que défiance. Accessoire de la
langue en écriture, la ponctuation est jugée contraire au désir steinien d’une parole sans
fin et sans interférence. Loin d’être sous-estimé, le pouvoir d’impression de la
ponctuation est jugé si puissant que celle-ci s’en trouve révoquée” (“The difficulties that
test Gertrude Stein with punctuation are due to scansion. [. . .] Punctuation by definition
impedes the stream of signifiers under the pen, slows the flow of speech by instituting
more or less definitive pauses, more or less marked inflections. With the exception of the
period, which finds grace in the poet’s eyes, the other marks of punctuation only inspire
her distrust. Incidental to the language of writing, punctuation is judged to be contrary to
the Steinian desire for a speech without end and without interference. Far from being
underestimated, punctuation’s power of impression is considered to be that much more
powerful in that it finds itself dismissed”; 69-70)
18
See also Cordingley.
103
“Poetry and Grammar” on another basis. They escape the problems of other marks,
because they are what she calls independent “happenings” in the text. She considers their
visual appearance pleasing, and despite her desire that writing go on endlessly, the period
marks the pauses that she acknowledges one necessarily has to make on occasion. In this
sense they resemble her own historical treatment of modernism as an event.
Inevitably no matter how completely I had to have writing go on,
physically one had to again and again stop sometime and if one had to
again and again stop sometime then periods had to exist. Beside I had
always liked the look of periods and I liked what they did. Stopping
sometime did not really keep one from going on, it was nothing that
interfered, it was only something that happened, and as it happened as a
perfectly natural happening. I did not believe in periods and I used them. I
really never stopped using them. (217)
Embedded in Stein’s fluid, undialectical manner of writing are underlying tensions
between her use of words such as “begin” and “again” or “stopping” to use the full-stop.
Because the stop, the “breaking up [of] things,” marked by a period is “arbitrary,” not
prescribed by a grammar, and one instead uses it as one wants, it does not burden writing.
Its interest lies in that it “acts” and “thinks” on its own. They both use and are used. They
“happen” as temporal events. In other words they periodize, are periodic, are formal
points and historical transitions. Acknowledging the look of the marks, she refuses to
demote print to a merely transparent medium and carrier of significance. Instead she
treats it as an expressive component of writing. The autonomy of periods from the rules
104
of writing and needs of writers gives them a multiplicity of uses and expressive
possibilities:
periods had come to have for me completely a life of their own. They
could begin to act as they thought best and one might interrupt one’s
writing with them that is not really interrupt one’s writing with them but
one could come to stop arbitrarily stop at times in one’s writing and so
they could be used and you could use them.
Periods have a life of their own a necessity of their own a feeling of their
own a time of their own. And that feeling that life that necessity that time
can express itself in an infinite variety that is the reason that I have always
remained true to periods so much so that as I say recently I have felt that
one could need them more than one had ever needed them. (218)
The division between individual theses or the conclusion of a “complete” thought
traditionally marked by the period becomes arbitrary for Stein, because for her no thought
ever is complete. Instead of using it to fix authorial intent and close the production of
meaning as scholars of literary punctuation often observe of it, Stein celebrates the period
as a symbol of freedom and independence. In this way one can see how even the stops of
the period have a self-propelling movement and “an infinite variety” of their own.
While periods are independent and enfranchised and have a “necessity of their
own,” Stein calls commas “servile” with “no life of their own.” They are “dependent
upon use and convenience” (218-19) and aligned with the oppressive pedagogical red ink
105
of her student years at Harvard.19 Commas, which execute the commands of writing
manuals, neither inspire nor express feeling, but serve “practical purposes” instead. Like
the newspaper editors whom Adorno describes as rejecting complex, semi-coloned
sentences,20 Stein thinks that commas weaken writing by increasing the reader’s ease and
passivity. They simplify the potential meaning carried by combinations and sequences of
words:
As I say commas are servile and they have no life of their own, and their
use is not a use, it is a way of replacing one’s own interest and I do
decidedly like to like my own interest my own interest in what I am doing.
A comma by helping you along holding your coat for you and putting on
your shoes keeps you from living your life as actively as you should lead
and to me for many years and I still do feel that way about it only I do not
pay as much attention to them, the use of them was positively degrading.
(219-20)
Commas “enfeeble” language and impose unnecessary “care” and “help” onto a
syntactical form that would be otherwise characterized by its “force” (221). They
interfere with the knowledge that “you ought to know yourself that you want to take a
breath.” In stating this she negates the accepted historical service of punctuation marks to
aid the orator-reader by dictating when to breathe for rhetorical effect and also implicates
19
See p. 122, footnote 10. The instructors’ comments on Stein’s college compositions,
which are housed at the Beinecke Library and were kept by Stein among her papers until
her death, foreshadow the phrasing of Stein’s concerns in her texts on writing. Stein
recognized that “rules of usage—just like any usage itself—carry with them an
ideological framework that empowers some to invent and others to follow rules” (Kirsch
287).
20
See pages 7-8.
106
the reader in the power relations of producing meaning. To illustrate the problem with
commas, she refers to the long sentences in her 925-page experimental novel The Making
of Americans, where the powerful effect of words repeatedly piled upon one another
would have been compromised by conventional punctuation. Regarding these sentences,
she “felt the passionate need of their taking care of themselves by themselves and not
helping them, and thereby enfeebling them by putting in a comma” (221). More
precisely, the insertion of commas limits the potential connections between words and
clauses that a reader might make:
I have liked dependent adverbial clauses because of their variety of
dependence and independence. You can see how loving the intensity of
complication of these things that commas would be degrading. Why if you
want the pleasure of concentrating on the final simplicity of excessive
complication would you want any artificial aid to bring about that
simplicity. (220)
Commas degrade this flexibility and make sentences artificially simple instead of letting
sentences communicate the simple truth of the complicated relation of stream of
consciousness. They ossify and fix meaning, when that meaning could remain free and
flexible for both the author and reader, in which case the writing itself would hold a
variety of performative possibilities. In this way, we are reminded again of the earliest
punctuators, who inserted marks into scriptura continua as a method of (sensical and
oratorical) interpretation. In fact, Stein’s approach to punctuation is very like that of
Marcus Tellius Cicero, who was rather outspoken about scribal interference. As Malcolm
Parkes notes, “Cicero was scornful about readers who relied on punctuation, asserting
107
that the end of a sentence ‘ought to be determined not by the speaker’s pausing for
breath, or by a stroke interposed by a copyist, but by the constraint of the rhythm’” (12).21
This scribal division, as we have seen in the last chapter, is itself called “composition.”
The explanatory nature of composition, to allude to the former lecture discussed above,
moves in both directions between the interpreting reader and the writer. In fact, if I may
follow my own train of thought for a moment, Stein’s famous “Rose is a rose is a rose is
a rose” poem (1913), if viewed in scriptura continua, could also be interpreted
phonetically as “Ro Cicero cicero cicero c,” whose bust she rather resembles in Francis
Picabia’s rendering of her (Portrait of Gertrude Stein, 1930), hanging in the reading
room of the Beinecke Library. The insertion of commas would eliminate precisely this
class of interpretive process. Commas are in this view at odds with something
fundamental to Stein’s conception of writing: its movement, its vital rhythm, the
spontaneity of its operation, and the interactivity it enables between writer, text, and
reader. She asks, “And what does a comma do, a comma does nothing but make easy a
thing that if you like it enough is easy enough without the comma” (221). Yet there are
commas in the very sentences in which Stein opposes their use. In the latter passage, the
comma therefore confuses meaning; that is, it does the opposite of what Stein’s words
attribute to it. Its mark acts out against the sentence’s content and the names it uses,
rather than clarifying and assisting them. The difficulty posed by the text’s status as a
21
An important difference between Stein’s unpunctuated sentences and scriptura
continua is that her writing is not intended as a record of spoken language, as the
continous flow of scriptura continua is meant to be to speech. In the case of this essay, it
is the opposite: a script from which she read, as she lectured to audiences.
108
lecture plays no role here.22 This comma, like most of the others, is in the same hand and
ink as the rest of the text. Its silent placement demonstrates again how Stein’s texts are
capable of operating in actively complex and unfixed ways that engage or return the hail
of the active reader, who must reckon with the forceful sentence on his or her own.
The feeble are tempted to outrage, and the strong are led to
destroy the very foundations and rules of literary society.
Signs of this are everywhere apparent. Grammar is
violated; syntax disintegrated; as a boy staying with an
aunt for the week-end rolls in the geranium bed out of
sheer desperation as the solemnities of the sabbath wear
on.—Virginia Woolf
In differentiating modern writers from their predecessors, Virginia Woolf offers
the image of a speeding train rapidly arriving at modernity in her essay “Mr. Bennett and
Mrs. Brown,” which she had first prepared as an invited talk “about modern fiction”
(“Character in Fiction”) in 1924 to the Cambridge Heretics Society (“Mr. Bennett” 94).23
The metaphor of the train recalls both Marinetti’s plane and Adorno’s ship, as it
transposes a temporal schema onto a spatial one. What changes with modern literature,
for Woolf, is that author-passengers begin to notice that they are in the company of the
mousey Mrs. Brown, who is probably of the same age as, if not older than, Woolf’s
chosen representative of the older generation of writers, Arnold Bennett. Mrs. Brown, it
appears to Woolf, demands a method of characterization other than the realistic
conventions offered by Bennett’s generation of novelists: “There she sits in the corner of
22
“Poetry and Grammar” was not a transcript of a talk but prepared in writing before
being delivered. Moreover, the notebooks in which the lecture was hand-written exhibit
that the text underwent little change between the time it was first written, its many
deliveries, and its publication. Not only this, but it was evident from the outset that they
would be published in print form.
23
See Rachel Bowlby for a brilliant thematization of this essay.
109
the carriage—that carriage which is travelling, not from Richmond to Waterloo, but from
one age of English literature to the next, [. . .], it is the novelists who get in and out—
there she sits and not one of the Edwardian writers has so much as looked at her” (10910). Instead of being spatially or temporally divided, the generations are brought into
contact through the shared space of a train compartment. While not all generations sit in
the carriage at once, Mrs. Brown’s presence is constant, and this contact as well as the
ride itself provide them with a common experience. As the train makes “stops” at stations
and authors enter and exit the car, its trip promotes a more complex view of literary
history, punctuated in its own manner. Despite the snobbish tone of some of the essay’s
passages, the speeding vehicle of the train, which takes on a value symbolic of the
progress of English literature, offers a less isolated and class-privileged vehicle than the
airplane or personal auto of Marinetti. Structurally, the train is segmented into a series of
linked cars; and instead of setting apart and dividing, complete strangers suddenly come
into close contact with one another within its coaches. In this case the strangers include
the many novelists of English literature and the character of “Mrs. Brown,” who
represents the dramatically changed human character of 1910.
Instead of emphasizing departure, Woolf expresses a sense of urgency imposed by
the threat of the train’s arrival, implying that literature is running out of time:
“Meanwhile the train was rushing to that station where we must all get out. Such, I think,
was the predicament in which the young Georgians found themselves about the year
1910.” She continues hyperbolically,
At whatever cost of life, limb, and damage to valuable property Mrs.
Brown must be rescued, expressed, and set in her high relations to the
110
world before the train stopped and she disappeared for ever. And so the
smashing and the crashing began. Thus it is that we hear all round us, in
poems and novels and biographies, even in newspaper articles and essays,
the sound of breaking and falling, crashing and destruction. (114)
This “smashing” and “crashing” allude to the more extreme experiments of early
twentieth century avant-gardism. In England this may be a reference to the Futuristinfluenced movement of Vorticism, its publication Blast, or even Marinetti’s own visits
to London (the first of which took place in December, 1910). In addition to
differentiating her style from her predecessors, Woolf distinguishes her writing from
peers of her own generation. Yet, she reflects, the violence of the train’s arrival was less
important than it perhaps seemed at the time. It turns out that the radical rejection of
certain conventions had been a measure not only of the new generation’s dislike for the
Edwardian tools and conventions available to them, but of their immaturity as well:
The literary convention of the time is so artificial—you have to talk about
the weather and nothing but the weather throughout the entire visit—that,
naturally, the feeble are tempted to outrage, and the strong are led to
destroy the very foundations and rules of literary society. Signs of this are
everywhere apparent. Grammar is violated; syntax disintegrated; as a boy
staying with an aunt for the week-end rolls in the geranium bed out of
sheer desperation as the solemnities of the sabbath wear on. The more
adult writers do not, of course, indulge in such wanton exhibitions of
spleen. (115-16)
111
If these radical modernists’ innovations amounted to infantile tantrums for the sake of
merely seeing what would happen and drawing attention to themselves, Woolf shows
there were still more mature modernists like herself who were equally frustrated with
“the method that was in use at the moment” (113). Nonetheless, to “violate,” “outrage,”
or “destroy” was an undesirable and unnecessary extreme from her point of view. The
essay ironically describes the “breaking and falling, crashing and destruction” of such
rupture as “the prevailing sound of the Georgian age” and compares the English language
under this age’s treatment as an “eagle [held] captive, bald, and croaking” (114-15)—that
is to say, not set free from its “wires” as the Futurists would hold.
Nonetheless, the statement that “on or about December, 1910, human character
changed” (“Mr. Bennett” 96) has been interpreted according to the codes of the avantgarde manifesto, which, like the essay in which the phrase appears, differentiates
generations of artists from one another. Galia Yanoshevsky, in a survey of scholarship on
the genre, concludes that it invariably belongs to a class of “polemical and critical”
writing, involves a rhetoric of “rupture and crisis” (263) and “aspires to change reality
with words” (264). Deriving especially from the revolutionary discourse of the
Communist Manifesto, “[t]he conception of knowledge that is at stake is that of
foundational, even epiphanic knowledge” (Millot translated and qtd. in Yanoshevsky
265). Many readings of “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” emphasize the essay’s polemical
nature and its place in Woolf’s written feud with Arnold Bennett, who had recently
dismissed her Jacob’s Room in a book review.24 Paul Goetsch describes December, 1910
24
Mitchell Leaska therefore introduces the essay as a “controversial” defense, a “kind of
literary manifesto” (192) that announces its independence from the outdated standards of
her reviewer, which is seconded by Eve Sorum, who also calls it, in her bibliographic
112
as “[t]he date which she chose to regard as a turning-point in the history of the novel,”
and identifies the opening of the London art exhibition organized by Roger Fry, Manet
and the Post-Impressionists, one month prior as the stimulus. He continues: “the
revolution in the visual arts encouraged her to think that a similar revolution ‘would as
effectively take place in the literary world’” (188). Yet as Martin Puchner points out in a
different context, Three Guineas arose out of Woolf’s decision not to sign her name at the
bottom of an anti-war manifesto. Instead, “Woolf subjects the context of the manifesto,
the culture and society that gave rise to it and enabled its political intervention, to critical
scrutiny” (Puchner, Poetry 277). In fact “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” differentiates
itself from the Futurist manifesto and its revolutionary logic by critically commenting on
the notion of rupture rather than essaying to incite, mark, and validate it. It should
consequently be understood as a negotiation with the manifesto genre resembling what
Puchner attributes to Three Guineas. Like that later pacifist work, “Mr. Bennett and Mrs.
Brown” inverts typical forms and discourses of the manifesto and the militarist aspect of
avant-gardism. By extension, it offers an alternate view of modernism’s relation to the
event of modernity and aesthetic experiment.
Still, Woolf invites and complicates the idea that she would be making a “boldly
asserted” “thesis” about 1910. Whereas many references omit how the “thesis” is
study of the many appearances of the essay in its various forms and contexts, a “literarypolitical manifesto” (155). Robert Scholes calls it a manifesto of “High, Experimental,
and Hard” Modernism against the “Low, Conventional, and Soft” (275). These
interpretations are supported by the similar reception of other works by Woolf. Julian
Hanna for instance describes “the Virginia Woolf of Three Guineas” as a “produce[r of]
numerous individual manifestos on art” (124). Stevens Russell Amidon draws a direct
comparison between Woolf’s and Marinetti’s writing when he writes that the exhibit and
Woolf’s 1938 manifesto Three Guineas were as much shots against British tradition as
Marinetti’s 1909 manifesto was against the Italian tradition” (133).
113
prefaced, the full sentence, “[a]nd now I will hazard a second assertion, which is more
disputable perhaps, to the effect that on or about December, 1910, human character
changed,” has a decidedly less provocative effect (“Mr. Bennett” 96). It remains a selfdescribed “assertion,” but a “disputable” one, which is merely “hazard[ed],” and
approximated as being simply “to the effect that.” The proceeding sentence continues to
lessen the proposition’s boldness, “[t]he change was not sudden and definite like that. But
a change there was, nonetheless; and, since one must be arbitrary, let us date it about the
year 1910.” Then, of course, she is also making her 1910 speech fourteen years after the
said moment.25 An added element of Woolf’s engagement with the manifesto genre lies
in how she critically inverts its temporality. The essay is belated and retrospective, not
inciting; and its attempt at locating a punctuated turn in history is ironically obscured
again and again. Whereas Marinetti’s manifestary view of modernity and modern writing
is aggressive and dramatic and Stein’s fluid and repetitive, Woolf repeatedly undermines
the view of modernity she has summoned by complicating the radical moment of rupture
that manifestos by definition would emphasize. Were we to associate the periodic style of
each author with a mark or two of punctuation, we might see Marinetti’s as an
interruptive— followed by ! , Stein’s as a misplaced . , and Woolf’s perhaps as an ironic
reversal of the .  . . ..
25
Were she performing a belated manifesto on modern literature to the Heretics, she
would have, after describing the two camps of authors—the modern Georgians (Forster,
Lawrence, Strachey, Joyce, and Eliot) and the Edwardians (Wells, Bennett, Galsworthy),
attributed to that date the publication of a radically new and influential work by one of
the new generation. She also would have included herself as a speaker for the new camp,
or at least a member. Also unorthodox is that the year has no direct significance for the
new generation, but rather for the Edwardians, all of whom had novels appear in 1910.
The first signs of the “1910” change, she writes, appear in the works of writers who fall
into neither camp: Samuel Butler and Bernard Shaw.
114
CHAPTER THREE: JOYCE, ADORNO, AND THE “PERVERTED COMMAS” OF UNREALITY
Set in the Freeman’s Journal Ltd. building, the seventh episode of Ulysses
recounts the workings of the company’s presses, doings of its workers, and banter of the
various men assembled in the editor’s office. Thus the rhetorical use and reproduction of
language, in both its written and spoken forms, are among the chapter’s foremost
concerns. It opens to the busy noontime commerce of city trams, sacks of outgoing mail,
and shipments of beer kegs in the area of Dublin surrounding Nelson’s Pillar, before
entering the narrative’s primary location: the building housing the offices of both the
Freeman’s Journal and the Evening Telegraph newspapers. Here Leopold Bloom
discusses the design and placement of a tea and coffee merchant’s advertisement in the
Freeman’s Journal with Red Murray and then meets the reporter Hynes near the printing
machines, the operation of which he observes in some detail. Nearby he finds Nannetti,
the business manager of the Freeman, with whom he likewise discusses the ad amidst the
deafening noise of the press. The setting and tone shift slightly when Bloom stops in the
Evening Telegraph office to place a phone call and speak with Myles Crawford, the
editor, about the ad. As he enters, Ned Lambert is mockingly reading to Simon Dedalus
and the professor from the paper, which has printed a nationalist speech delivered the day
115
before. Throughout the rest of the episode, men enter and leave an ongoing discussion
united by its commentary on Irish law and politics, the quality of various pieces of
journalism and oratory, and the clever rounds of exchange among the men themselves,
which form the bulk of the “encyclopedia of rhetorical devices” that “Aeolus” has been
called (Gifford 635). Midway through the scene of narration, Bloom departs to consult
with the merchant; Stephen Dedalus, who is delivering an article by a superior at the
school where he teaches, replaces Bloom among the remaining Lenehan, MacHugh, and
the editor. The men finally leave to join Simon Dedalus and Ned Lambert, who were
already at the pub. On the way, Stephen describes a work of fiction he is writing, and
Bloom returns to ask the editor if the merchant’s terms are acceptable. He is seemingly
refused. This is the first chapter of the novel to share its time between both characters.
Not only is the content of “Aeolus” concerned with language, but its textual
history is itself also evidence of the involved linguistic revisions Joyce made to the novel
between its serial and bound publications. The author had meanwhile devised a system
that assigned a unique set of symbolic motifs to each episode of the volume. According to
the schema he supplied to Stuart Gilbert, each episode is associated with its own organ,
art, color, symbol, and technique, as well as a set of correspondences between the episode
and its eponymous book of the Odyssey. “Aeolus”’ symbolic structure consequently
incorporates the lungs, the art of rhetoric, the color red, and the symbol of the editor—
each associated with language as well. Its technique, furthermore, is enthymemic, a
logical construction that relies on an implicit assumption instead of overt proposition.
The schema also draws correspondences between the Odyssean character Aeolus and the
editor Myles Crawford; his home, Floating Island, and the press; and his children’s
116
incestuous marriages and journalism. These schematic interests, together with the direct
content of the chapter, work to incorporate the accidental or material aspects of both
spoken and written language into the essential substance of the novel.
In terms of the episode’s central “art,” at least 119 instances and 113 types of
rhetorical figure have been identified in “Aeolus” (Gifford 635). As such, rhetoric has
traditionally emphasized vocal delivery, which explains the particular attention paid to
orality in the section of the chapter set in the Evening Telegraph. In addition to the clever
turns of phrase, riddles, and limericks pronounced by the men assembled, three speeches
are also repeated within the narrative. Ned Lambert reads aloud from the newspaper to
repeat Dan Dawson’s nationalist speech. Later J. J. O’ Molloy recalls that “one of the
most polished periods I think I ever listened to in my life fell from the lips of Seymour
Bushe,” who had years before invoked the difference between Mosaic and Roman
systems of law for his defense of a client accused of murder (7: 747-748). Before
O’Molloy begins to cite a few lines, Lenehan, in a manner that resembles the silence
imposed by the overwhelming noise of the press from earlier in the chapter, demands
“Silence” of the group (759). In a memorable passage—the only one from Ulysses that
Joyce allowed himself to be recorded reading—Professor MacHugh repeats from
memory John F. Taylor’s speech in favor of “reviv[ing] the Irish tongue,” in which
Taylor had invoked Exodus and Moses’ receiving and engraving of God’s
commandments.1 The scene from the Old Testament is alluded to earlier in the chapter
with Bloom’s recollection of his father’s yearly reading of the Haggadah. Further, the
lungs, the only of the bodily organs listed in the novel’s schema to relate to language,
1
See pages 101-102 of Chapter Two regarding the same scene in Marinetti’s “Technical
Manifestos.”
117
reinforce the art of rhetoric, through their instrumental role in oral delivery. Just as the
Aeolian harp is played by the wind to produce music, the storyteller’s voice is produced
by the lung’s forcing of breath across vocal chords. In each of the cases above the
relation between inscription and speech is rendered mutually contingent, with neither
taking precedence over the other. Certainly rhetoric concerns linguistic figuration and
device in writing as well as in speech, and as Giovanni Cianci has argued, when it comes
to writing, Joyce may have believed that the “art” of rhetoric also included the visual art
of typography and page layout.2
The editor appears twice in the schema: first by his personal name, Myles
Crawford, as the counterpart to the Odyssean character Aeolus, and second, as the
symbolic “editor,” with the emphasis on the occupation. In addition, the episode’s ruling
color red may be the color of correction used by the editor and Nannetti to pen their
instructions to the typesetters. On a symbolic level the editor’s hand guides and amends
the authorial voice that would otherwise, in the case of speech, remain simultaneous and
embodied. The editor is a silent partner in the production of printed text and a gateway
granting the author access to a readership. His is supposed to be an anonymous and
unidentifiable voice that intervenes only in the accidentals, which are supposed not to
carry meaning, aesthetic or otherwise. Editorial work is done with the aim of making the
author’s content-based intentions more clear and forceful for the readers, rather than of
interfering with them.3 Myles Crawford, editor of the Evening Telegraph, has, on the
2
See pages 159-162 and footnotes 7-9 for more on Cianci’s argument.
Joyce was certainly familiar with the effects of intervening editors, typists, and
compositors on the final printed form of his own literary work by the time he was writing
Ulysses. His correspondences together with accompanying correction lists reveal how
dissatisfied he was with nearly every printed product of his work. And yet the difference
3
118
contrary, a very distinctive voice and forceful presence: he opens his office door
“violently” to show his “scarlet beaked face crested by a comb of feathery hair” (344345). “The bold blue eyes stared about them and the harsh voice asked: —What is it?”
(346-347). In the first pages following his entrance, his statements are consistently
concluded with exclamation marks as he “crie[s],” “shout[s],” and “crow[s].” Like the
figure of Aeolus, he is kind to Bloom, lets him make his call, and sends him off with the
command, “Begone! [. . .] The world is before you” (435). To Stephen, he says “You can
do it!,” earning his phrase a heading and two of the only quotation marks in the novel, as
he invites him to write a piece for the paper. The irony perhaps is that Stephen does not
desire to join the “pressgang” (625) but to become an artist. His story of the two sisters
atop the tower is not meant for the Evening Telegraph as the professor implies when he
introduces Stephen’s story to Crawford as “Something for you” (1004).
Though no attention is paid directly to the accuracy and clarity of journalism in
this episode (the details the paper gets wrong emerge in “Eumaeus”), this is the implicit
and primary factor in news reporting. That accuracy remains an unspoken concern should
hardly divert attention from it, recalling the role of enthymeme in the chapter. Thus the
newsroom’s occupation with realistic reporting is positioned within the fictional
between “authorial commissions” and “scribal ommissions” (Gabler 1867) is in his case
often far from clear. His endless changes imply an editorial dimension of the author and
authorial dimension of the role of editor, leaving the two positions far from distinct.
“There are mistakes in the current printings of Ulysses that originated with Joyce himself,
words that he did write, but, in the light of Gabler’s research, did not intend to write. [. . .]
the corruption that occurred in the process of Joyce’s handcopying his text from one draft
to the next, the corruption that asks for critical judgement as to its nature more than other
kinds of errors, the corruption that puts into doubt the very notion of ‘error’” (Bollettieri
8). See also Creasey, Gabler, Groden, Sandulescu and Hart, Senn.
119
framework of Ulysses’ already most self-reflexive episode. The nesting of the one within
the other brings to the novel’s surface questions about art and reality, or fiction and
accuracy, that form the basis of so many theories of aesthetics. More specifically, the
tensions’ emergence in relation to the newsroom, where writing is characterized by its
factual depiction as well as its factitiousness, lies at the heart of many theories of modern
art, perhaps most prominently that of Theodor Adorno. In his writings on Joyce and other
twentieth-century authors, Adorno investigates the modernist novel’s relation to scientific
knowledge and the reportage and realist fiction that seek to communicate it. In fact, he
calls the tension between realist reportage and modernist experiment the defining feature
of the modern novel as a category.
In addition, the implicit concern with textual materiality and the accidentals of
writing within Adorno’s work is brought out through its association in the present chapter
with “Aeolus.” By taking the news building as its setting and featuring details of the
mechanical printing press, type-setters, and editor who work there, the episode gives
voice to the nameless co-creators of any published text. Interestingly, those machines and
human workers with a hand in the publishing process remind the reader of their presence
and involvement through error, distortion, and misprint. All four—the editor, the lungs,
the correcting color of red, and rhetoric—share marginal support-roles that aid or
interfere with meaning, but are supposed not to produce it independently. In its
simultaneous positioning of reportage vis-à-vis fiction writing, and of oratory vis-à-vis
print, Ulysses investigates the mimetic nature of writing that plays such a defining role in
these genres. Hence it queries truth and fiction at the same time that it asks what is new,
authentic, or original and what is copied.
120
Set against the backdrop of journalistic production, interestingly, is the first
dramatic instance of linguistic experiment in Ulysses. In fact “Aeolus” creates a turning
point, an experimental crossroads between the relatively realist nature of the first six
chapters and the increasingly experimental ones that follow it. Its abrupt stylistic
transformation, this chapter shows, performs the emergence of the aesthetic changes
associated with modernism within the narrative framework of the novel. Typifying what
is described as Joyce’s “initial style,” the prose leading up to “Aeolus” maintains
“character, verisimilitude, and a continuing human story” as its primary concern (Groden
16) and is characterized by a consistent style comprising a combination of past-tense,
third-person narration and first-person, present-tense monologue. With the seventh
episode, the novel begins to broaden its repertoire: an encyclopedic range of rhetorical
figures are built into the chapter’s narrative, as it is broken up with headlines in
capitalized, bold-faced typeface. At this point, as Karen Lawrence writes, “language
begins a kind of insurrection, as style becomes increasingly opaque and self-dramatizing”
(12). The following episodes become increasingly experimental, disorienting, or even
nonrepresentational. The writing becomes propelled by interweaving patterns working
within and between the different episodes rather than according to the logic of traditional
narrative. 4
4
Michael Groden observed that Joyce “passed through three distinct stages (rather than
two, as has been thought)” between 1914 and 1922, “with the middle stage serving as a
bridge between his early interest in character and story and his late concern with
schematic correspondences” (4). During the first stage he wrote “Telemachus” through
“Scylla and Charybdis,” the first versions of which were characterized by his style of
interior monologue. The tenth through the fourteenth episodes (“Wandering Rocks”—
“Oxen of the Sun”) were written in the second stage. At this point, he began
experimenting with the monologue before substituting “it for a series of parody styles
that act as ‘translations’ of the story.” The final stage brought the final episodes and the
121
In his references to Joyce’s novels between 1954 and 1960, Theodor Adorno
similarly explores the dynamic between realistic reportage and modernist experiment that
plays such an important role in “Aeolus.” It is surprising that more work has not been
done in joint treatment of the two writers, considering Adorno’s interest in Joyce and the
overlapping themes of their work.5 In his 1954 essay “Standort des Erzählers im
revision of those written already, including “Aeolus.” However, most recently, Eli
Lassmann’s study of notebooks related to “Aeolus” held at the National Library of
Ireland questions the exact process outlined by Groden. “The appearance, in ordered
groupings, of many of the headlines that Joyce entered on the first set of placards displays
how Joyce drafted them. Since many of the headlines are already in the order in which
Joyce entered them on the placards, it is likely that he drafted them on a document still
earlier than the notebook” (317). Specifically, notebooks which Groden had placed in the
late period “correspond to additions made to to the texts of ‘Proteus’ and ‘Aeolus’
relatively early in the composition process” (302).
5
Although Adorno cites the work of James Joyce alongside that of Arnold Schönberg,
Thomas Mann, Franz Kafka and others with whom scholars frequently link him, inquiry
into the relation between Adorno and Joyce’s writings to date consists of only a handful
of article- and chapter-length studies. Within Joyce studies the focus has been on
Adorno’s objections to the “culture industry.” For instance, Michael Walsh reads Joyce
and Adorno together as contemporaries in order to investigate the question of whether
“modernism is merely coincidental with mass culture or genuinely coterminous with it? If
we opt for the latter,” he concludes, “we can imagine a model that reckons with the way
in which modernism is both predicated on mass culture and yet polarized against it—at
least in the critical thinking of its own period” (40). R. B. Kershner establishes a common
ground between the two writers, not only as contemporaries but through the speculation
that Dialectic of Enlightenment’s use of the Odyssey as a structuring element was
influenced by Joyce’s novel. Nonetheless, he too dwells on the premise that “the popular
culture that makes up so much of the daily furniture of Ulysses” would receive “Adorno’s
indictment” (156), despite Adorno’s own statement in relation to Joyce that “these
products fall outside the controversy over committed art and l’art pour l’art, outside the
choice between the philistinism of art with a cause and the philistinism of art for
enjoyment” (“Position” 35-37) in the very essay Kershner bases part of his argument on.
Similarly, Martin Ryle and Kate Soper write of Adorno’s view of Ulysses as a
“relentlessly ‘horrified’ view of the world. Joyce was aware of the ‘nightmare’ that was
history, but his sense of how human lives might run their course within it was a good deal
more comic and less judgemental than the phrase ‘essential horror’ implies,” they write
(29). The passage they refer to, from “Erpreßte Versöhnungen,” reads as follows in the
original: “Er fingiert, trotz aller irischen Folklore, keine Mythologie jenseits der von ihm
dargestellten Welt, sondern trachtet deren Wesen oder Unwesen zu beschwören, indem er
122
zeitgenössischen Roman,” Adorno theorizes that the modernist novel is defined by its
narrative point of view, a reaction against the purported objectivity of realism and great
epic. In doing so, he draws from the early work of Georg Lukács, who had argued that
the historical conditions that had defined great epic were unattainable for the novel. Late
in his career, Lukács found these conditions to be accessible to the realist novel within
Soviet socialist society. During this period, he describes the ideal of a broad and
totalizing perspective as “Gestaltung,” which, balanced between the objective and
subjective extremes of “reportage” and “psychological inwardness,” produces an
aesthetically complete depiction of society in all of its interrelated complexity.
For Lukács, “modernist ideology” and the style it dictates resists social reality
through “psychological inwardness,” and it is epitomized in Joyce’s novels.6 Adorno on
sie selbst, kraft des vom heutigen Lukács gering geschätzten Stilisationsprinzips,
gewissermaßen mythisiert” (260). Their criticism solely relies on Shierry Weber
Nicholsen’s translation of “Wesen oder Unwesen” as “essence or its essential horror”
without any research into the original German terms. Nicholsen translates the same
phrase, also in relation to Joyce, in “Standort…” as “essence or its antithesis.”
“Unwesen” means at its most horrific “a dreadful state affairs,” and is otherwise simply
defined in English as “tricks” or “mischief” (“Unwesen” Oxford). The phrase is typical of
Adorno’s style of writing, which adopts contrapuntal inversion, repetition, and variation
that mirror the content it traces. Stuart Allen’s study of Adorno and Joyce appears
unaware of this feature of Adorno’s writing or of Adorno’s own writings on Joyce. It
argues that studies of music and the body in Sirens reinforce a division between
philosophy and art or language and music. Turning to Dialectic of Enlightenment to
understand this separation, he finds Adorno and Horkheimer to “argue that reason
gradually separates itself from ‘sensuous experience in order to dominate it’” (456). He
also argues that to oppose music and language along a binary between the sensual body
and the rational mind in readings of Sirens fails to acknowledge that musicality “is a kind
of thinking itself” (443). He does not pursue the extent to which this binary is
problematized in Dialectic, nor does he recognize the awareness and presence of musical
thinking in Adorno’s individual works. In regard to Joyce, in fact, Adorno writes that the
two extremes of the “novel today” and “literature as pure sound” are perfectly balanced
(“Presuppositions” 100).
6
Robert Scholes was the first to introduce to Joyce studies Lukács’ treatment of Joyce in
his critique of modernism. “For Lukács,” he summarizes, “Joyce acquired the proportions
123
the other hand understands the shift from realist to modernist depiction as a reaction to
the emergence of new media technologies. He attributes the modernist perspective and
style to the emergence of “reportage” and its instrumentalized “media of the culture
industry” (“Standort” 41), where reportage takes over the objective and epic tendencies in
literature. In contrast to reportage, the novel consequently turns to a more subjective and
interpretive view of its content. Integral to Adorno’s understanding of the literary
practices of modernism is the analogous practice within other arts and media. To
illustrate his claim, Adorno compares the changing relation of the new novel to the
depiction of reality on one hand with the new roles and interests painting took on in
response to the advent of photography on the other hand. Since the camera was purported
to be completely objective, a division of labor emerged in which photography served to
accurately represent reality, while painting intended to alter it through subjective—and as
he later describes, immanent and formal—techniques. Thus the specific virtues and
qualities of painting’s unique medium were drawn out, reflected upon, and emphasized as
the form became increasingly abstract and even nonrepresentional.
For Adorno, the modern novel invites an interrogation of its linguistic make-up, in
part through a consideration of its likenesses with other arts in terms of composition and
reception. Specifically, it rebels against the aspects of its medium that resemble factual
reportage by emphatically exploring those aspects that either resemble or diverge from
visual art and music. Put differently, its relation to accurate linguistic representations of
scientific knowledge finds its analogy in the difference between abstract painting and
of the archmodernist, whose works displayed an exaggerated concern with form, style,
and technique in general, along with an excessive attention to sense-data, combined with
a comparative neglect of ideas and emotions” ( “x/y” 176).
124
documentary photography. Hence, literature’s nonconceptual aesthetic features, which
are consequently integral to its identity as art, are perceived via comparisons to music and
painting. These correlations come together in “Aeolus’s” most striking experimental
feature: its division into brief headed sections.
By setting the experimentalism it ushers into the novel at the newspaper office,
“Aeolus” affirms the dynamic between realistic reportage, modernist experiment, and the
role of formal self-reflection in distinguishing the latter from the former. The narrative is
broken into short sections, each headed with a title of sorts, which is also set in bold-face,
capitalized print. These were introduced in revisions to the episode between its printing in
the avant-garde magazine The Little Review in 1918 and the first book edition of 1922.
The result evokes the layout of the newspaper page, thereby absorbing to a certain extent
the forms of its narrative setting.
Above all, the visual impact of the headings immediately distinguish the chapter
from those preceding it.7 Many scholars have observed that the page consequently
supersedes the voice of human speech. “The art of rhetoric” Joyce indicates in the Gilbert
7
It was often through the experimental use of accidentals that avant-garde movements
often broadcasted themselves. With Joyce also, Giovanni Cianci writes, “it is the visual
effect of the chapter, that is, the way in which it presents itself to the reader, that
announces its experimental structure” (16). Thus “Aeolus” draws attention to its
experimental effects in its featuring “not only of the deafening ‘language’ of the printing
press, but also of its iconicity, the non-verbal communication which results from handling
typographical characters and their spatial arrangement in the line and in the frame of the
page” (16-17). Cianci’s argument, like many others having to do with the accidentals of
Ulysses, was occasioned by the publication of the 1984 edition: “The Garland edition, by
toning down the showy effects, makes the page aseptic, compromising the scandal and
disruptive effects. [. . .]. It seems to me that this normalization betrays the essential
character of Aeolus which is bound up with the feverish and audacious temper of early
Modernism. The typographical experiment of Joyce, forming part of its time, to the point
of being a ‘period piece’, should have been respected” (19).
125
schema, Giovanni Cianci notes, “does not at all exclude those visually persuasive effects
achieved by the boldface of the headlines. In the newspapers, manifestos and avant-garde
reviews, the verbal devices of the old rhetoric are often updated and transformed into the
visual devices of experimental typography” (19). In other words, the classical art of
rhetoric, which includes vocal intonation and bodily gesture is visually and
typographically adapted into modernist literary text. Karen Lawrence also writes how
“the boldfaced print [of the first edition] [. . .] represents writing’s way of claiming its
authority when the power of the speaking voice has disappeared” (64). She points out, for
instance, how “Joyce plays with the distance between the written marks on the page and a
speaking voice in certain headings that could not possibly be produced by a human voice,
such as the series of question marks and the abbreviations. [. . .]. Joyce reminds us that
this is printed language representing vocal tone.” However, much of the time, the
headings’ visual likeness to newspaper headlines, supported by the chapter’s depiction of
a gang of street-vending newsboys, in fact summons the oral nature of the news headline.
In 1906, as in 1922, headlines served not only to entitle articles, but as advertisement for
each issue of the paper, as newsvendors loudly recited them to potential buyers who
passed in the street. The headings therefore are not strictly a typographic and visual
feature, but simultaneously imply orality. The headlines called out by the individual boys
throughout the streets of Dublin derive from the original of a text rather than the other
way around. Similarly, Ned Lambert reads aloud from the newspaper a speech delivered
by Dan Dawson the day prior. The speech recited by MacHugh alludes to Moses’
receiving and engraving of God’s spoken commandments. The same is evoked when
Bloom recalls the Passover ritual of reading and repeating the words of the Haggadah
126
generation after generation. In each case the relation between inscription and speech is
rendered mutually contingent. Words are reproduced orally as well as textually and
performed repeatedly by way of memory or inscription.
At the same time the literary-journalistic pairing extends to the more radical
experiments of modernism’s supposed other “other,” the avant-garde, as the headings
also evoke the contemporary use of newspaper aesthetics by avant-garde writers,
painters, and collagists.8 They thereby complicate the tension between experimental
modernism and realism or reportage, where the headline evokes factual reportage as well
as avant-garde writing and montage. As Cianci has argued, the typographic shift between
text and heading and the mediating presence of empty space, particularly in the first book
edition, evokes the important role played by typography and page layout in Futurist,
Dadaist, and Cubist manifestos and periodicals. He writes, “In Joyce’s decision to
fragment the narration into anonymous sections preceded by flashing headlines one feels
a continuity with the gusto and experimental charge of the typographical adventure of the
avant-garde” (18). Furthermore, the use of headlines, if we are to accept these headings
as such, to fragment the narrative also make allusion to the contemporary use of
newspaper text in collaged and mixed-media works of visual art within Dadaism
particularly.9 Of course, despite personal contacts, Joyce’s aesthetic aims and political
8
Archie Loss and Giovanni Cianci identify the European avant-garde as a possible
source of his use of headlines. Loss writes that their use of “headline-like materials” and
“experiments in capitalization, like the earlier typographical experiments of Mallarmé,
seem to correspond chiefly in appearance to what Joyce does in ‘Aeolus.” (Loss 175).
9
Loss sees the interspersed headlines as a style of collage art, which, he writes, “was
generally accepted as a standard technique among modern artists and, for some of them
(for example, Kurt Schwitters), the fundamental technique of artistic expression” (Loss
176). Cianci relates them to the “Cubist and Futurist canvases, from the papiers collés to
the collages etc.” (Cianci 19).
127
orientation have little in common with movements like Futurism or Dadaism, so it is
questionable that the relation between this episode and the avant-garde would be one of
“continuity,” as Cianci writes. Yet through that suggestive similarity, especially in the
context of “Aeolus” appearing as the literal avant-garde of experimentation within the
novel, Ulysses opens itself to inquiry in regard to Joyce’s own view on the nature of
modernist aesthetic change. Its use of textuality effectually stages what is, from the
reader’s perspective, a rupture in the novel’s narrative style. By evoking both the avantgarde method of montage and the newspaper layout equally, it complicates at the same
time that it summons the binary between modernist art and reportage proposed by
Adorno and Lukács both.
The introduction of headings into the revised version of “Aeolus” constitutes the
most prominent disruption of the novel’s until-then realist, if also impressionistic,
depiction. The approach to narrative it employs reflects a world in which the reliable and
objective narrator of the realist novel itself would be unrealistic. As Ulrich Schneider
writes, “We do not find ‘life on the raw’, as one of the headlines puts it, but life
mediatized through the printing press” (18-19). Instead of feeling absorbed into the mind
of Stephen, Bloom, or some other narrative authority, the interposition of headlines
within the seventh episode repeatedly reminds the reader that the story is mediated
through a narrative, editorial presence as well as a material and mechanical process.
Unlike the realist novel, which aims to absorb its readers into its world as though their
reading were not reading at all but immediate experience instead, Ulysses as a whole
128
exposes its complex set of relationships to reality by reflecting upon its genre, its
linguistic medium, and also its print materiality. In its exploration and depiction of the
printing press, “Aeolus” recalls the novel’s identity as a physically produced and bound
volume, that is as a real object in the world.
If the modernist novel questions realism it logically also interrogates the
corresponding use of language to achieve realist effect. James Joyce specifically, Adorno
writes, “associated the novel’s rebellion against realism with one against discursive
language” (“konsequent hat Joyce die Rebellion des Romans gegen den Realismus mit
einer gegen die diskursive Sprache verbunden”; “Standort” 41-42). Yet this poses the
question of whether a nondiscursive language would cease to be language. Despite
language’s sensual likenesses with music and visual art, Adorno continues, language is
always conceptual and significative no matter how much it embraces its expressive
aspect. It always remains, he writes, “als eines diskursiven, signifikativen Mittels—
primär der Kommunikation” (“a discursive, significative means—of communication first
and foremost”; “Voraussetzungen” 434). In “Standort” he explains that when literary
creation underwent this modernist reflection, it inevitably turned to its linguistic makeup, which was precisely where the analogy he makes between it and painting or music
must break down: “Nur sind ihm im Gegensatz zur Malerei in der Emanzipation vom
Gegenstand Grenzen gesetzt durch die Sprache, die ihn weithin zur Fiktion des Berichtes
nötigt” (“Yet in contrast to painting, language places limits on the novel’s emancipation
from the object and forces the novel to a great extent [in]to [becoming] the report’s
129
fiction”; “Standort” 41-42).10 Due to their shared medium, the novel cannot escape falling
into the same class of fiction as the report. Because the novel is composed of signifying
language, it always reports on something and refers to objects beyond itself. Hence he
highlights how the novel cannot escape the reality that reportage claims to reproduce:
even if the object has been fictionalized, aestheticized, or altered, it cannot be divorced
from the objective reality that inspired its creation. By acknowledging this relationship
self-reflectively, Adorno then claims that the novel also exposes the factitiousness of
factual reportage.
In this 1954 essay, Adorno differentiates Ulysses from the media that purport to
represent and communicate reality, but he goes further by implying that its
experimentalism opposes realist depiction by exposing what realism complicitly
obscures.
Nicht nur, daß alles Positive, Greifbare, auch die Faktizität des
Inwendigen von Informationen und Wissenschaft beschlagnahmt ist,
nötigt den Roman, damit zu brechen und der Darstellung des Wesens oder
Unwesens sich zu überantworten, sondern auch, daß je dichter und
lückenloser die Oberfläche des gesellschaftlichen Lebensprozesses sich
fügt, um so hermetischer diese als Schleier das Wesen verhüllt.
(“Standort” 43)
10
The phrase “ihn weithin zur Fiktion des Berichtes nötigt” is awkward to translate into
English. Shierry Weber Nicholsen translates it as “forces the novel to present the
semblance of a report,” which removes the literary nature of “fiction,” extracts the verb
“present” out of “zur,” and removes “weithin.”
130
It isn’t simply that everything positive, tangible, and even the facticity of
interiority has been appropriated by information and scientific knowledge
that necessitates the novel to break with these and give itself over to the
representation of essence or its antithesis, but also because the more
densely and uninterruptedly the surface of social processes conforms, the
more hermetically it shrouds essence like a veil.
The modern novel does not represent observable social processes as Lukács says the
realist novel should, nor is it merely a narration of the subjective and impressionistic
experience of these external events. Rather it devotes itself to the representation of
“Wesen oder Unwesen,” what Shierry Weber Nicholsen translates with some definitional
freedom as “essence or its antithesis” and whose phrase I adopt in my own translation.
The concept of essence has a long history within philosophy.11 For Aristotle, the essence
of a substance is the specific nature that is necessary to its existence as such. Its opposite,
the accident, is simply a secondary or incidental “property or quality not essential to a
substance or object” (“accident, n.”). The original Greek term for essence, to ti ên einai,
means what is intended to be, or literally “the what it was to be” (Cohen). Thus accidents
often oppose essence through disfigurement, mismeasurement, or any other unintended
deviation from the standard and expected. By describing the social processes as
accidental to the essence they cover in the above sentence, Adorno reverses Lukács’
stance that the essential component of the novel is its representation of the full social
world of its setting.
11
See Ross Hamilton.
131
Yet in the passage above, Adorno does not use the word accident (Akzidens,
Zufall), but Unwesen, which translates into English as “dreadful state of affairs,” “tricks,”
“mischief” (Oxford), or “bad activity” ‘schlimmes Treiben’ (Wahrig). In a different albeit
related context in “Erpreßte Versöhnung,” Nicholsen has translated the phrase “Wesen
oder Unwesen” as “essence or essential horror” instead.12 Both translations acknowledge
the significance of the lexical structure of Unwesen, which denotes a negation or reversal
(un-) of essence or Wesen, even if it does not literally mean “accident.” In this passage,
the “or” between the antithetical Wesen and Unwesen appears not as an either/or but is
inclusive and equating, where the antithesis of essence, the unessential, the aberration,
which is also the “monstrosity” or “trick” that obscures and “veils” essence, is what is in
fact essential. Both the essential and its inverse collapse. Exposing the modern world for
what it is is supposedly the novel’s essential task, but this involves engaging what
interferes with and veils essence.
Such exposure certainly takes place on the level of plot, as the first pages of this
chapter demonstrate in the case of Ulysses, but Adorno describes it in terms of a turn
from realist content to formal self-reflection within modernism. It is therefore relevant
that essence is considered to be the metaphysical foundation of a substance and, as such,
understood to be accessed cognitively through judgment. Accidents, on the other hand,
traditionally involve the variable material and physical qualities and conditions perceived
through the senses. These, which Aristotle describes as pertaining to quantity, quality,
relation, action, passion, time, place, disposition, or raiment (Metaphysics 4.4), are
considered incidental and secondary features. Whereas the essence of a substance exists
12
See footnote 5, page 156.
132
independently of its accidental attributes, the accident is predicated and dependent upon
the substance it modifies. It is merely the shape or form taken by the substance at a
particular time or place. As regards literature, for instance, the same essential narrative
may be told or written, making the means by which it is delivered secondary. By way of
illustration, the speech presented by Dan Dawson on June 15 is printed in the paper on
the 16th for those who missed the event. But in the narrated scene the same words are
sarcastically repeated by Ned Lambert as he reads aloud from the paper to the others in
the room. This third mediation illustrates, if it was required, how essential meaning varies
with its mode and agent of communication after all.
The opposition between essence and accident is very similar to that between
content and form. Yet paradoxically, the positive “Greifbark[keit]” (“Standort” 43) that
the novel turns away from resurfaces in the only tangible components of writing: its
textual form. The reaction Adorno traces of the modern novel to traditional content
implies that essence and accident become inverted and reversed (un), as in the relation
between Wesen and Unwesen, where the latter is associated with what is considered a
deceptive and accidental veil. The reflexivity of the story onto both also collapses the
hierarchized binary between the categories of the essential and the merely accidental. On
both a linguistic and a generic level, one can see how instead of obscuring its difference
from reality, its identity as a written medium, the novel can draw attention to its own
surface. In just this way Adorno suggestively italicizes his elaboration on the inverted
realist work of the modern novel: “Will der Roman seinem realistischen Erbe treu
bleiben und sagen, wie es wirklich ist, so muß er auf einen Realismus verzichten, der
indem er die Fassade reproduziert, nur dieser bei ihrem Täuschungsgeschäfte hilft”
133
(“Should the novel want to stay true to its realistic heritage and say how it really is, then
it must relinquish a realism, which insofar as it reproduces the façade, only assists its
operations of deception”; “Standort” 43). Once the supposedly superficial and unessential
qualities of a written work are emphasized, which are so often forgotten during the
engrossing experience of reading a novel, its realism vanishes for the reader: he or she
ceases to be deceived by the illusory experience. This distracting aspect of writing would
be classified as not essential to its narrative, or put differently, its written materiality by
definition would be among its accidental qualities. But in this sense the unessential, or
das Unwesentliche, becomes recognizable as the essential component, das Wesentliche,
of a style of writing that aims to reveal another level of reality by emphasizing its own
constructedness and the “trick” (Unwesen) of realism.
This approach to realism conflicts with Lukács’ in obvious ways. In his criticism
of Joyce’s literary overprivileging of, and Adorno’s critical emphasis on, “form” and
“technique,” Lukács also evokes the vocabulary of the essential and accidental qualities
of literature. For him Joyce’s method of stream-of-consciousness “dissolv[es] reality”
‘Auflösung der Wirklichkeit’ (“Weltanschauliche” 476) to such an extent that technique
takes center stage at reality’s expense. Even the setting of Dublin becomes “only a
secondary by-product, not an integral moment of the artistic essence” (“ein sekundäres
Nebenprodukt, nicht ein integrierendes Moment des künstlerisch Wesentlichen;” 472).
The modernist worldview (Weltanschauung) he sees motivating Joyce’s novels
determines from the outset that the novel’s environment will lack meaning, be hostile to
humanity, and that there will be no possibility of taking a developmental view of it. The
contact that takes place between individuals in avant-garde modernism as a result is
134
“superficial, accidental” ‘äußerlich und zufällig’ (470). The “lively interrelation”
‘lebendige[] Wechselbeziehung’ of the hero with his environment that drives his
development and that is so essential to Lukács’s ideal of the realist novel is, from this
point of view, perversely consigned by the subject- and form-obsessed modernist novel to
its accidental and inconsequential features.13
In “Erpreßte Versöhnungen” (1958), Adorno’s direct response to Lukács, he
critiques the subordination of form to content, again according to the conceptual
framework of essential and accidental qualities. Lukács, he writes, “mißdeutet willentlich
die formkonstitutiven Momente der neuen Kunst als Akzidenten, als zufällige Zutaten des
aufgeblähten Subjekts, anstatt ihre objective Funktion im ästhetischen Gehalt selber zu
erkennen” (“He willfully misinterprets the form-constitutive moments of the new art as
accidentia, as an inflated subject’s accidental additions, instead of recognizing their
objective function in the aesthetic substance himself”; 253). In “The Modernist
Ideology,” Lukács describes formal emphasis as an excessive stylistic flourish positioned
on the subjective end of the continuum between subjective and objective art.
Accordingly, style that draws attention to itself is not only superfluous, but also
coincidental and accidental, because it is based on the individual perspective and
expression of one idiosyncratic subject. In contrast, Adorno draws the same continuum
on a different axis, where art takes form in an objective manner, and its self-emphasis is
an inherently objective component of the aesthetic make-up, only minimally influenced
by the subject. In the passage above, Adorno links the term zufällig, which has surfaced
already in a number of quotes, with that of the Latinate term, Akzidens. Both derive from
13
See Scholes “x/y.”
135
the Latin term accidens, which means to happen or occur. It breaks down to ad-cadere, to
fall toward, or in German, zu-fallen. Akzidens is the term used in German translations of
works on the topic by Saint Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle to denote precisely those
“zufällige Zutaten,” those accidental ingredients or contingent additions that are not
considered essential qualities.
In this instance Adorno uses the term unquestioningly, without any reversal
between it and essence, but by the time he revisits the topic two years later in
“Voraussetzungen,” he suggests that the accidental characterizes not the overpresence of
the subject, but its momentary absence (as in the unintentional accident) and that
accidentality is the essential component of modern art. For the time being the connection
must be noted between Akzidens and its near homonym, Akzidenz, which is more than, or
meaningfully, coincidental. Akzidenz, like the noun accidental in English, refers to an
“especially effectively arranged print, usually hand set; for example, newspaper headings,
advertisements, private or business printed matter (“bes. Wirkungsvoll gestalteter meist
im Handsatz hergestellter Druck, z.B. Zeitungskopf, Werbeanzeige, Geschäfts- oder
Privatdrucksache”; “Akzidenz, n.”). Certainly, the accidentals of writing could be
subsumed under the philosophic category as its etymology invites. While Adorno is not
specifically referring to the textual accidentals each time he writes about accidentality (or
contingency, as it is usually translated) in modern writing, the suggestion emerges that
these, as elements of form, occupy a very central place in his use of the word Zufall.
Headings, advertisements and the creative realm of editors and compositors of course
occupy the setting and subject of Joyce’s “Aeolus” as well as the revisions he made to it.
In his own mind, Leopold Bloom reverses the relation between the accidentals and the
136
articles. He thinks, “It’s the ads and side features sell a weekly, not the stale news in the
official gazette” (7: 89-90), before recalling the types of advertisements, illustrations and
light entertainment segments that attract readers.
Yet the novel’s interest in the “sensory immediacy” of its own “contingent”
accidentals has been criticized as a descent into meaninglessness (Jameson, “Ulysses”
140). Following Lukács, Fredric Jameson calls this “textualization,” which he describes
as “autistic” and “depersonalized”: the story devolves to meaningless text, “simply [. . .]
printed sentences” (152).14 Adorno’s use of the term Zufall, on the other hand, reveals a
more complex approach to the philosophical binary of essence and accident.15 His work is
14
Jameson also connects “the increasing sense of the materiality of the medium itself”
within writing to modernist art and music. However, he writes:
It is paradoxical, of course, to evoke the materiality of language; and as
for the materiality of print or script, that particular material medium is
surely a good deal less satisfying or gratifying in a sensory, perceptual
way than the materials of oil paint or of orchestral coloration; nonetheless,
the role of the book itself is functionally analogous, in Joyce, to the
materialist dynamics of the other arts. ( “Ulysses” 146-47)
The intermedial comparison of writing with music and painting must be paradoxical, but
in a dialectical sense that was endlessly fascinating for Adorno, as he returned to it again
and again within his writings. Although both of Jameson’s essays on Ulysses (“Ulysses in
History” and “Joyce or Proust” appear to revive the very concerns Adorno brought to his
own readings of Joyce, Jameson departs from his predecessor on this point particularly.
Instead the point of view represented above carries on Lukács’ approach to accident and
contingency in Ulysses. Jameson applies Zufälligkeit to the accidentals of literary
modernism, yet from a perspective that considers them to be mechanical, meaningless,
and belonging to those antihuman products of human labor. The textuality Jameson
describes is simply what Adorno considers the nondiscursive aspect of language, which
Adorno distinguished from the extreme of automatic and fully objectivity-oriented art.
Joyce’s work clearly never extended into this latter realm for Adorno.
15
In the essay “Ulysses in History,” Fredric Jameson uses the term “contingency” to
describe what appears to be a critical concept similar to the Zufall dealt with by Lukács
and Adorno. This is indeed the very term Adorno’s translator Shierry Weber Nicholsen
provides in her English translations of the passages we’ve examined. For Jameson
contingency describes a state of existential and philosophic meaninglessness
characteristic of modernity.
137
less quick to announce where meaning does and does not lie. On this latter point rests one
of the key differences between translating Zufall or das Zufällige as contingency or as
accident. Both describe events and characteristics that are secondary, dependent upon
some other event or quality, or unnecessary. Yet only accident denotes the unintended—
either through the absence of directed intention or through an intervention between
intention and outcome. In its application to the materials of writing, the accidental is “any
scribal or typographical feature of a text that is not essential to the author’s meaning”
(“accidental,” n.). Traditionally the accidentals fall into the realm of the editor and
compositor, where the alterations made are supposed not to interfere with authorially
intended meaning, but to improve on its syntactical and typographical form. As Ross
Hamilton describes in relation to fate and chance in tragedy, determining what is
accidental is always a matter of interpretation. Indeed, in terms of the textual accidental,
it involves the questions of authorial intent, of what constitutes meaning, and of where it
lies. However, associational logic and word play, basic components of rhetorical artistry,
depend on a compromised intention: where the coincidental qualities of a word form or
its accessory meanings take on an agency of their own independently of intended
meaning. In relation to the interests of this study, these questions lie also at the heart of
Adorno’s intermedial comparisons and the associational dimension of Joyce’s language
in particular.
Joyce’s close friend, the painter Frank Budgen, comments in his early book about
Ulysses that “one of the most effective of Joyce’s inventions consists in exaggerating the
essential expression of a word and so stressing its descriptive gesture” (305). Adorno
similarly writes that these associations, or “descriptive gestures,” produce the defining
138
movement of art: “Gelingt es der Dichtung, in ihren Begriffen die Assoziationen zu
erwecken und mit ihnen das signifikative Moment zu korrigieren, so beginnen die
Begriffe, jener Konzeption zufolge, sich zu bewegen. Ihre Bewegung soll zur
immanenten des Kunstwerks werden” (“If literature succeeds in awakening associations
in its concepts and correcting for the significative moment with those associations, then
the concepts begin, according to that conception, to move. Their movement is to become
the immanent movement of the work of art”; 437) The word is freed from its strict
significative service to a static concept. Its release from conceptual signification is never
complete, however. As a result, its movement also sets the concept into motion. This
loose play defines art and certain works of philosophy,16 which differentiates it from the
documentation of facts and concepts.17 Implicit in such motion is the absence of closure
or conclusion, the absence of a punctuating full-stop.18 Furthermore, the figure of motion
likens writing to the nonconceptual medium of music. Adorno therefore turns to an
intermedial analogy in which the reader must listen closely to the associations embedded
in the words he or she encounters on a page. If one reads in the same way that one listens
to music, the work’s unique qualities as an artwork become perceptible.
Den ist mit so feinen Ohren nachzugehen, daß sie den Worten selbst sich
anschmiegen und nicht bloß dem zufälligen Individuum, das sie hantiert.
Der subkutane Zusammenhang der aus ihnen sich bildet, hat den Vorrang
16
See Adorno’s statements on this in relation to Hegel’s writing in “Skoteinos.” The same
essay includes variations of the subsequent quotes, thereby linking the practice of reading
modern prose to that of reading Hegel.
17
Adorno is not the only to describe this modern freedom in art as a motion. See F. T.
Marinetti and Gertrude Stein’s similar use of the trope in Chapter Two.
18
See Christian Benne for more on the period as the orthographic prerequisite for the
philosophical thesis as well as its excerptability and citability.
139
vor der Oberfläche des diskursiven Inhalts von Dichtung, ihrer kruden
Stoffschicht, ohne daß diese doch ganz verschwände. (437)
The associations must be followed with such fine ears that they cling to
the words themselves and not simply to the accidental/random individual
concerned with them. The subcutaneous coherence which forms out of
them takes precedence over the surface of literature’s discursive content,
of its crude material layer, but without this completely disappearing.
This quality is not merely projected by the subjective reading experience of individuals,
but is lodged in the words’ performative nature as well. The expressive, associational
movement of language comes from language, is attached to its concepts, but is capable of
dominating its discursive content and the discoursing subject. Although these features of
the work are not communicated through a traditional significative schema, they are
objective and meaningful features, particularly in regards to how Joyce treats language.
In Ulysses, Joyce’s attention to the full range of acoustic and textual linguistic
expression is exemplified in the advertisement Bloom works to place in the seventh
episode. The name of the tea and coffee vendor “Keyes,” whose business is advertised as
House of Keyes, operates as a triplicate and imperfect homonym comprising the noun key
(a recurring symbol in the novel), the proper name Keyes, and the governmental House of
Keys. The three are connected by an associational logic that capitalizes on their
coincidental phonetic form. This overlap is signified by the parenthetical brackets used in
the headline “HOUSE OF KEY(E)S,” where the parenthesis serves as a hinge or joint,
allowing the word to take on two orthographies at once. The association between the
three terms is marked by this liminal designation, which bridges the written difference
140
with the spoken likeness. In other words, the parentheses enable a release from
determinate meaning, as they mark the accidental and associational connection that
produces another class of meaning in art and advertisement alike. In this case they mark
the difference between sounded-out words and their orthographical forms. The marks
emphasize the meaningful associational freedom that serves as the operational basis for
the riddles and puns that fill the pages of “Aeolus.”
While associations attached to the word “key” are literally capitalized upon by the
orthographical and visual play in the advertisement, secondary meanings often call into
question the necessity of an intending linguistic subject. In this regard, Adorno suggests
that the individual author has only an accidental role in the work he produced when he
writes that in Joyce’s fiction “nicht stets wird die Assoziation als notwendig evident, oft
bleibt sie zufällig wie ihr Substrat, das psychologische Individuum” (“the association is
not always clearly necessary, often it remains accidental like its substrate, the
psychological individual”; 439). Both the nondiscursive associations and the individual
mind through which they are formed are to a certain extent matters of chance. He
reiterates, “Zufällig aber ist schließlich die konstitutive Subjektivität selbst, die dabei sein
will, und auf die das Kunstwerk notwendig sich zurücknimmt” (“ultimately even the
constitutive subjectivity—that wants to be present and from which the artwork
necessarily holds itself back—is accidental”; 442) In this sense it is recalled that the
terms Zufall and accident involve an unintentional outcome as well as an interpretive
ambiguity. They describe those expressive elements outside of authorial intent.
141
In a comparison of the arbitrary and accidental moment in Joyce’s novels with
free atonality in Schönberg, Adorno indicates that these elements exist in music just as
they do in writing, and that they are integral to the most modern features of both arts:
Ihre Selbstreflexion kontrolliert den Verlauf des Unwillkürlichen im Text,
um nur solches Zufällige zu tolerieren, dessen Notwendigkeit zugleich
einleuchtet. Nichts anders hat in der neuen Musik, auf der Höhe der freien
Atonalität, der Schönberg der ‘Erwartung’ dem Triebleben der Klänge
nachgehört und es dadurch vor dem behütet, womit die spätere Kunst sich
selbst kompromittierte, als die Parole des Automatischen beliebt ward.
(439)
Their self-reflection checks the progression of the arbitrary in the text in
order to accept only such accidentality whose necessity is immediately
clear. In new music, no differently did the Schönberg of “Erwartung” hear
the instinctual life of sounds, at the peak of free atonality, and thus
safeguarded it from that with which the later art compromised itself, when
the term ‘automatic’ became popular.
It is worth mentioning that both Akzidenz and Akzidens, like the English accidental,
designate the characters used in musical notation to mark sharps, flats, and natural notes.
Within western music these of course are the notes that stray from the diatonic key
signature and supply the central features of dissonant modern music. Both categories of
accidentals relate to the “instinctual life” of the medium with which they work. On one
hand they are related to the subjectivity of the modern novel—its randomness, chance,
and exposure to accident in opposition to the objective coherence of the epic. At the same
142
time, that which is accidental is that which merely happens or that which escapes
subjective intent. In relation to the associational logic that structures the stream of
consciousness as well as the language games for which Adorno especially values Joyce, it
is a feature immanent to the linguistic material. As he points out, “the moment of
accidentality ‘das Moment des Zufälligen’ [. . .] is inherent in Joyce’s associative
technique of linguistic construction (das [. . .] Assoziationstechnik des Sprachgefüges bei
innewohnt”; 441). In fact accidentality, coincidentality, or contingency turn out to be the
paradoxically essential and defining “shock” of modern art. Adorno claims that the
illusion and artifice of art has also always been the illusion of a present authorial subject
in control of the artwork’s meaning.
Jenes Moment der sich selbst hervorhebenenden Zufälligkeit, als des
nicht gänzlichen Dabeiseins des Subjekts im Werk, ist das eigentlich
Schokierende an den jüngsten Entwicklungen, im Tachismus nicht anders
als in der Musik und literarisch. Wie meist Schocks, zeugt auch dieser von
einer alten Wunde. Denn die Versöhntheit von Subjekt und Objekt, eben
das vollkommene Dabeisein des Subjekts im Kunstwerk, war immer auch
Schein, und wenig fehlt, daß man diesen Schein dem ästhetischen
schlechthin gleichsetzen möchte. (442)
That moment of accidentality that highlights itself, as the subject’s lack of
full presence in the work, is what is actually shocking in the youngest
developments, in Tachism no differently than in music and the literary.
Like most shocks, this one testifies to an old wound. Because the
reconciliation of subject and object, indeed the entire presence of the
143
subject in the artwork, was always also an illusion, and there is little from
keeping one from wanting simply to equate this illusion with that of the
aesthetic.
Hervorheben, to emphasize, is also a typographic term to indicate the physical
highlighting, underscoring, or italicizing of a textual passage. In effect, the subject’s
absence from the text is registered on a material level. The emboldened accident recalls
this as it acknowledges the illusory nature of all art. The illusion that the artwork existed
as an expression of the subject and that the subject’s intentions could be assimilated by
the work becomes as profound as the illusion of all aesthetics: that the work could ever be
more than the mere appearance of the object it symbolizes. In emphasizing its
mediatedness and in embracing the accidental qualities and processes that comprise it, the
text is considered to be more authentic and honest than the veil of illusion hung by the
realist novel: “Anstatt daß Zufälligkeit über den Kopf des Werkes hinweg triumphierte,
gesteht sie sich als unabdingbares Moment ein und hofft, damit etwas von der eigenen
Fehlbarkeit loszuwerden” (“Instead of triumphing ‘behind the work’s back’ [Nicholsen]
[as traditional art has forced it to do], accidentality admits to being an indispensible
moment and hopes in doing so to rid itself of some of its own fallibility”; 442-43) The
emphatic reflection reverses the status of the unintentional accident as an error. On the
contrary, its authenticity is certified by its italicization, because it directs attention to its
materiality and thus fictionality.
I think the inverted commas used in English dialogue are
most unsightly and give an impression of unreality.
—James Joyce
144
Lukács refuses Adorno’s concept of modern authenticity, who takes the exact
opposite stance. In contrast to the italics Adorno uses in “Standort des Erzählers” or the
figure of emphasis described above, Lukács makes rhetorical use of quotation marks to
characterize the modernist perspective on reality as constructed and aestheticized, which
Jameson echoes when he calls its method of storytelling “artificial” (Jameson “Joyce or”
172). Rather than acknowledging its construction as a material fact, textual emphasis in
Lukács’ writing only serves to highlight a subjective falsehood that stands in conflict
with the objective reality represented by the text’s dominant voice. In Lukács’s 1932
essay, “Reportage oder Gestaltung,” he describes literary modernism as narrating from a
subjective space of refuge against a reality it perceives to be “’mechanical,’” “’soulless,’”
“’unsubstantial’,” and “ruled by ‘alien’ laws” (“mechanisch,” “seelenlos,” von
“fremden” Gesetzen beherrscht […] “wesenlos”; “Reportage” 37). The strategy (which
he uses consistently in his writings throughout his career) of surrounding terms he does
not endorse himself with quotes does not only serve to cast those words in a different
voice or to preface them with short-hand for “so-called.” The diacritical marks also
highlight the problematic status of these terms: their inauthenticity in regard to the reality
in which Lukács believes. Yet they achieve this effect by drawing attention to the written
character, rather than the spoken, as quotes would do in fictional dialogue. For Lukács
modernist formalism falsely draws attention to its own accidental textual features at the
expense of the essence he thinks it ought to represent, and his use of ironic quotation
echoes this formalism through a specifically textual mode of emphasis. Generally, the
quotation mark has conflicting effects. On one hand it denotes authenticity, by identifying
the language it brackets as the actual words used in some other spoken or written original.
145
On the other hand, by announcing that this language originated elsewhere, the citation
inserts a distance between it and the rest of the text. This distance develops into an ironic
throwing of the authorial or narrative voice, where the word becomes deauthenticated,
unauthorized, and dissociated from its conventional meaning. This echoes the distinction
Lukács theorizes between great epic and the novel.
In the essay “Satzzeichen,” Adorno demonstrates his own caution with the
quotation mark and describes it as playing dumb or having cleverness in its stupidity
(dummschlau) (109). His word choice evokes the root of the German term for quotation,
Anführungszeichen, where anführen means not only to mention or quote, but in colloquial
terms, to dupe or trick. He advises, “Anführungszeichen soll man nur dort verwenden, wo
man etwas anführt, beim Zitat, allenfalls wo der Text von einem Wort, auf das er sich
bezieht, sich distanzieren” (“One should only use quotation marks in the place where one
quotes something, with a citation, at most where the text aims to distance itself from a
word to which it is referring”). The marks can be used to surround language being treated
as evidence or where specific language becomes the object of consideration in the
sentence, but “as a means of irony they are to be spurned” (“Als Mittel der Ironie sind sie
zu verschmähen”). Whereas irony ought to arise from an ambiguity detected in language,
ironic quotation marks
[. . .]das Urteil über diese als vorentschieden hinstellen. [. . .] Die
Gleichgültigkeit gegen den sprachlichen Ausdruck, die in der
mechanischen Überantwortung der Intention ans typographische Cliché
sich kundgibt, weckt den Verdacht, es sei eben die Dialektik stillgestellt,
146
die den Inhalt der Theorie ausmacht, und das Objekt werde ihr von oben
her, verhandlungslos, subsumiert. (109-110)
[. . .] present the judgment on it as predetermined. [. . .] The indifference
to linguistic expression, that announces itself in the mechanical
consignment of intention to the typographical cliché, arouses suspicion
that it might have silenced the dialectic that accounts for theory’s content,
and the object will be subsumed by it from above without negotiation.
Adorno, it appears, is critiquing the mimetic citational practice called to attention in texts
by Karl Marx and Walter Benjamin by Kevin McLaughlin: “By miming commodity
language Marx hopes to define it as a sign, to denaturalize it and subject it to a certain
kind of reading. The desire is, in short, for a reading that will prove lethal—a reading that
will destroy what has become a sign and mark a break with the social relations of which
it was a product” (17). Such citation is a “displacement” and a “mode of ironic or even
parodic quoting,” it “freeze[s]” and “holds up to critical scrutiny” (16), and it is opposed
to the approach of “simply denouncing and criticizing in a straightforward manner” (17)
represented in Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialektik der Aufklärung. The emphasis in
Adorno’s statement in “Satzzeichen,” however, is on the “typographic marks”
themselves, whereas the quotation marks in Marx’s Kapital and Benjamin’s Arkaden
remain “implicit” (16), but absent. Is Adorno criticizing the use of quotation marks as a
tool to fix and enforce authorial intent and to determine interpretation? Or the strategy of
using “mimetic disposition” as a form of “critique” altogether (19)? In this instance, it
appears that the material dimension of writing is at odds with the language to which it
gives form. It monopolizes and determines linguistic signification and eliminates the
147
dialectical nature of interpretation, the tension made implicit in language that has been
“displace[d].”
Punctuation marks are often approached according to the terms Adorno attributes
to scare quotes, that is, read as carrying out an authorial intent more forcefully and
leading the reader to a particular interpretation. But James Joyce’s practice of using or
not using punctuation marks tends not to have this effect. Interestingly, the most
distinctive and consistent typographic trait of James Joyce’s prose is the near absence of
quotation marks. Instead a dash is used to introduce but not conclude spoken discourse,19
which leaves an ambiguity between speech and narration or indirect discourse. As a
result, readers have difficulty distinguishing narration from dialogue. Peter De Voogd
comments that
The result is a text in flux, forcing the reader to decide which “voice” any
phrase in it has, whether it represents direct speech, free indirect discourse,
authorial comment, or objective description. The indeterminacy that
follows from this withholding of typographical help is deliberate, and
partly responsible for the bewilderment felt by the unsuspecting reader
who is suddenly confronted by a text that does not guide his responses in
ways determined from the eighteenth century onward. (205)
Like other scholars, he points out how Joyce’s treatment of punctuation produces an
ambiguity between the narrative voice and those of its individual characters and
19
This was only finally the case. Regarding the history of The Dubliners’ publication,
Robert Scholes has noted how Joyce used the dash to begin and end paragraphs
consisting “either in part or wholly direct discourse” (“Some Observations” 27). The
published product did not conform to his intention. Instead the compositors used the
concluding dash as though it were a quotation mark, that is, to surround speech and
demarcate it from the narrator’s voice.
148
consequently requires its readers to take an active stance in relation to it. In other words,
his use of the em-dash in place of the quotation is not motivated by a desire to
communicate his intended meaning to the reader more clearly, (even if it is out of
consideration for the reader’s eyes). This sparingness, the assumption that the reader will
fill in the gap to determine the shift in voice recalls the earliest practices of reading, when
the reader/orator inserted punctuation marks himself in those places in the text where he
would pause to breathe, or before that, to decipher the word units of scriptura continua.
Thus these rhetorical marks were developed to aid oratorical delivery to a religious
assembly and had no relation to the communication of authorial intent. Joyce’s use of
punctuation to open interpretive possibility through textual indeterminacy calls attention
to the mediated processes of writing and reading and thereby elevates also the latter from
its contingent and accidental relation to the work.20
From his first exchanges with publishers of his prose, Joyce expressed the desire
to control the typographic and editorial appearance of his work.21 In a 1906 letter to Grant
Richards (the would-be publisher of The Dubliners), he wrote: “On one point I would
wish you to be careful. I would like the printer to follow the manuscript accurately in
punctuation and arrangement. Inverted commas for instance, to enclose dialogue always
seemed to me a great eyesore” (Letters II: 130-131). In calling the marks “an eyesore”
and later “unsightly” (I: 75), Joyce assigns aesthetic significance to the visual appearance
20
See De Voogd, who notes the active stance Joyce expected of the reader: “he
consistently played down the structure of his book, and forced the reader to find his way
with difficulty on his own, without the helping hand of the typographer” (208). See also
Adorno’s “Skoteinos oder Wie zu lesen sei” (1962) for more reading.
21
Examining documents related to the destroyed 1910 Dublin edition of “The Dead,”
Scholes also notes that Joyce removed 300 commas and more than 30 hyphens between
the galley proofs and page proofs (“Some Observations” 25).
149
of the typographical line and emphasizes the sensual experience of reading, where both
descriptors imply optical discomfort for the reader. He repeats this message eight years
later when he corrects Richards’ assumption that the dashes were due to the
idiosyncracies of the printer: “As regards to the inverted commas the Irish compositors
are not to blame. I myself insisted on their abolition; to me they are an eyesore. I think
the page reads much better with the dialogue between the dashes” (I: 75). In briefly
expressing his position on the two symbols, Joyce takes responsibility for the dashes and
by extension corrects the assumption that the printer’s realm of accidentals would have
no aesthetic importance for the author.
In the same 1914 letter to Richards, Joyce wrote of the marks having an unreal
effect: “I think the inverted commas used in English dialogue are most unsightly and give
an impression of unreality.” And in a 1924 letter to Harriet S. Weaver he goes on to call
them “perverted commas” (III: 99). With these statements he assigns the marks with a
powerful degree of significance: the relationship of his writing to reality and to the realist
tradition takes place also on a diacritical and textual level. His preferred terminology is
not only based on the visual appearance of single quotes as upside-down commas, which
is common, but is also suggestive of how the marks connote perversion in place of
accurate quotation. In a 1928 letter to Valéry Larbaud, who was assisting Auguste
Morel’s translation of Ulysses into French, Joyce elaborates his view of the mark:
As regards your questions I think the fewer quotation marks the better. We
would not write the phrase—the best of all possible worlds—in English
between ‘ ’. Or in the French version ‘M. de la Palice was alive etc.’ And
when the words half quoted are from an obscure writer p.e. ‘orient and
150
immortal wheat’ (from Thomas Traherne) what does it help a French
reader to see ‘ ’ there. He will know early in the book that S.D.’s mind is
full like everyone else’s of borrowed words. The ‘ ’ are to be used only in
the case of a quotation in full dress, I think, i.e. when it is used to prove or
to contradict or to show etc. (263)
By asking that clichés, and other accepted and unoriginal expressions not be set off in
quotes, Joyce anticipates Bakhtin’s concept of heteroglossia. He understands and in fact
makes it his art of mining the shared, exchange-driven, or recycled nature of discourse. In
turn he sees the quotation as an unliterary tool, as a device for scientific, evidence-based
writing, that is, what Adorno would call scientific knowledge or reportage. Further, if
quotation purports to represent reality, the actual words spoken, the quotation mark has
an uneasy position in the work of fiction. As Anna Maria Marengo Vaglio writes in her
short study of Joyce’s italics, “No distance, no spaces, no formally binding characters are
allowed to nest within the work that interrogates itself endlessly. That is the reason why
inverted commas, as a way of distancing, of expressing a reserve, as a presumption of
quoting the ‘actual’ words, are not used” (112). Joyce suggests as much in Finnegans
Wake, where it is stated that to avoid being accused of misquotation, one might simply
avoid using quotation marks: “Being tantamount to inferring from the nonpresence of
inverted commas (sometimes called quotation marks) on any page that its author was
always constitutionally incapable of misappropriating the spoken words of others” (108.
33-36). If realism and its reliable narrative point of view are no longer realistic for the
modern novel that reflects upon itself, as Adorno writes, or if it would be untrue to
represent them as true reproductions of an original utterance, then the accuracy and
151
centralized objectivity implied by the quotation mark is as irrelevant and implausible as
an omniscient narrator.
One model of writing aspires to accurately represent or report on events and
scientific facts, or in the case of Moses’ inscription of the decalogue, to record the word
of God. The essence of literary art, Adorno argues on the other hand, lies in how it
reshapes its contents through subjective intention. In other words, art describes qualities
and circumstances instead of positing the existence of things:
Indem das Kunstwerk nicht unmittelbar Wirkliches zum Gegenstand hat,
sagt es nie, wie Erkenntnis sonst: das ist so, sondern: so ist es. Seine
Logizität ist nicht die des prädikativen Urteils, sondern der immanenten
Stimmigkeit: nur durch diese hindurch, das Verhältnis, in das es die
Element rückt, bezieht es Stellung. (“Erpreßte” 270)
Since the work of art does not have something immediately real as its
subject matter, it never says, as knowledge usually does: ‘this is so’ [‘es ist
so’]. Instead, it says, ‘this is how it is’ [‘so ist es’]. Its logicity is not that
of a statement with subject and predicate [predicative proposition] but that
of immanent coherence: only in and through that coherence, through the
relationship in which it places its elements, does it take a stance. (“Forced”
232; second bracket is mine)22
Suggestively, in the original German the logic is determined through assembly and
placement: whether the statement says “das ist so” or “so ist es.” The alternative to the
22
In her translation, Shierry Weber Nicholsen documents the original phrases to be “es
ist so” and “so ist es,” yet the Suhrkamp edition states “das ist so,” not “es ist so.” The
arrangement is still a chiasmus, even if it is not a perfect one.
152
predicative statement is a syntactical form that does not privilege an acting subject. In a
sense this syntactical and aesthetic approach is accidental, as its action is not predicated
of a masterful subject. In traditional terms, the accidental features of placement and
synonymity (es/das) cross over to make the essential difference. In re-ordering the words
into the mirror image of one another (das ist so/so ist es), Adorno brings form and content
together to perform his message. The emphasis on “how” instead of “what,” the crucial
difference in their meanings, emerges through a chiastic inversion of the word order, just
as text reverses the type of the press that imprints it. The relation of modern art to
empirical reality is suggested here as one of inversion or even mirroring, where the
mirror in fact reverses reality instead of reproducing it perfectly. The relation between the
two phrases echoes the formal structure of the reflection that is always an inversion. As a
rhetorical term chiasmus denotes
any structure in which elements are repeated in reverse, so giving the
pattern ABBA. […]. The c[hiasmus] may be manifested on any level of
the text or (often) on multiple levels at once: phonological (soundpatterning), lexical or morphological (word repetition), syntactic (phraseor clause construction), or semantic/thematic. (“chiasmus” Princeton 183)
In Greek it means “a placing crosswise” and coincides with the pictographic Greek
character, chi, X as well as the verb chiazein “to mark with the letter X” (“chiasmus”
Concise Oxford). Thus another way of translating chiasmus would be: a marking of the
letter X. The interest of the term lies in the arbitrary and accidental visual form of the
character and not the phonetic function it serves within a word structure. As a rhetorical
device it is fascinating that the term may derive from inscription, where the morphology
153
of the letter provides the figure of speech its basis of identification and articulation. The
“X” is a letter, an image, and a figurative signifier of other classes of crosses and
crossings. However, the mark of the “X” also reappears in the reader’s charting of
chiastic sentences and phrases. As several guides point out, when the two chiastic halves
are placed in vertical relation to one another, the reader can chart the inverted clauses
with an X:
154
Das ist so
So ist es
In charting this pattern, the reader repeats, transcribes, reinscribes, and translates the
rhetorical figure into the character X. By marking the X as an essential constituent of his
or her interpretive reading, the reader’s practice resembles the intermedial reading spoken
of by Adorno in “Voraussetzungen” discussed in Chapter One.23
To return to the self-emphasizing mediation described by Adorno in light of
Ulysses, one can see how with “Aeolus” the novel reflects on its own processes of
production by way of the printing press, where its assemblers must read the words (and
letters) that make-up the narrative as if they were inverted by a mirror. This reversed
relation is crucial to the chapter’s interest in print. In the section “AND IT WAS THE
FEAST OF PASSOVER,” Leopold Bloom observes a “typesetter neatly distributing
type. Reads it backwards first. Quickly he does it. Must require some practice that.
mangiD kcirtaP. Poor papa with his hagadah book, reading backwards with his finger to
me. Pessach. Next year in Jerusalem” (7: 101). Ulrich Schneider finds the inverted blocks
of type required to produce printed text to be symbolic of the textual medium’s “remove
from reality” (19). The reversal recalls how representation and imitation are mediated and
indirect processes. For Schneider errors associated with the process of print, such as the
23
See page 56.
155
misprinting of character’s names, call attention to and define the novel’s relationship to
the empirical world. He writes,
typesetting in reverse may be seen as part of the intricate pattern of mirror
images introduced into the novel with Stephen’s aphorism on the “cracked
lookingglass of a servant” as “a symbol of Irish art” (Ulysses 1: 146).
These mirror images [. . .] point in the opposite direction [of mimeticism],
towards the self-reflection of the modern novel. As Paul de Man claims,
such mirroring techniques assert the separation of a work of art from
empirical reality and free literature from the “fallacy of unmediated
expression.” (20).
Schneider understands this as a cracked mirror, a flawed mimeticism, but on a selfreflexive level this flaw negates itself. In the former passage, the backwards type,
“mangiD kcirtaP,” is itself imperfect, because only the orthographical order of the letters
are reversed and not their morphology. The blocks of type would be impossible to
represent textually without inversion, or without forging special typeset for these two
words only. The type and the print are not only reversed in order, but also in morphology.
It is as if the two were mediated by a mirror.
In traditional terms, the mirror provides a perfectly objective, accurate, and
complete picture of reality. But once text is introduced into the reflective frame, the
mirror’s own mediated nature is brought into relief. Its inversion of reality becomes
apparent as the reflected characters appear in reverse exactly as the blocks of type laid by
the typesetters do. That the mirror is acknowledged as a mirror (and mimeticism itself as
a mediation) is only registered through the asymmetric form of certain characters of the
156
English alphabet. On a schematic level, the mirror reveals its relation to the original to be
chiastic. In short, this treatment of type, its inversion in the print shop, and the
typesetters’ backwards reading all remain related to the realist project Joyce introduced
with The Dubliners when he described the volume to Grant Richards as a “nicely
polished looking glass” of “the Irish people” (Letters I: 64). Chiasmus describes the
difference between the work of art and the life outside of it that inspires it, and it does so
in a reflexive manner that is specifically literary and textual. In other words, it
characterizes the manner in which Ulysses reflects upon its genre, linguistic make-up, and
material form in contradistinction to conventional definitions of realism. We might say
that it adopts a realism that requires a wider frame, which accounts for the novel’s
constructed involvement. Hence, through “the crystalization of its own law of form, not
in the passive acceptance of objects,” “art intersects with the real” (“Nur in der
Kristallisation des eigenen Formgesetzes, nicht in der passiven Hinnahme der Objekte
konvergiert Kunst mit dem Wirklichen”; “Erpreßte” 261). We can see this repeated on a
narrative level: the newspaper, as the supposed antithesis of literary art, supplies the
novel with an inverted image of itself in which it reflects on its own materiality and its
own relation to reality as a work of fiction.
Among the many rhetorical figures used by Joyce in his revised version of
“Aeolus,” the only instance of chiasmus emerged from what is presumed to be a
typographical error in the Little Review Ulysses (October, 1918):
“GROSSBOOTED draymen rolled barrels dullhudding out of Prince’s stores
and bumped them up on the brewery float.
157
Grossbooted draymen rolled barrels dullthudding out of Prince’s
stores and bumped them up on the brewery float” (26).
The repetition as well as its inexactitude appear to be accidents committed by the
printers: firstly, the “t” is missing from “dullhudding” in the first sentence, but is present
in the second. Secondly, the sentence’s second instance is generally accepted as an entry
error unintended by Joyce.24 Yet the error becomes more interesting when we see how
Joyce handles it by the time the novel appears in its first book edition in 1922. In this
edition, the two sentences no longer introduce the narrative, but instead appear further
down the page under the heading, “GENTLEMEN OF THE PRESS.” More significantly they
are revised as: “Grossbooted draymen rolled barrels dullthudding out of Prince’s stores
and bumped them up on the brewery float. On the brewery float bumped dullthudding
barrels rolled by grossbooted draymen out of Prince’s stores” (Ulysses 7.21-24). Joyce
corrects the misspelled of “dullhudding,” but instead of removing the repeated sentence,
he absorbs it into the first paragraph together with the original (each stood alone in their
own paragraphs before as reproduced above) and revised its sentence structure. The result
was a chiastic inversion of the clauses of the first sentence, one of countless changes
Joyce made to the episode to register at least 113 types of rhetorical figures within its
24
Because the typescripts used in the Little Review publication have been lost, it is not
possible to say that the repetition was an error with absolute certainty. Most recently,
Ferrer writes that the chiasmus was “inserted as a holograph addition on the typescript.
This seems to be derived directly from a typographical error in the Little Review
publication of the episode, where the sentence is repeated twice, verbatim (see Groden
70). “The chiastic structure was simply superimposed on the mechanic echo” (Ferrer
196).
158
narrative. By transforming “what was unintended” into “what it was to be,” Joyce turns
the accident into a central motif in the episode.
Chiasmus approached in its broadest sense helps one to recall that it is in this
episode that the young artist and the ad-man coincidentally cross paths for a second time,
a crossing with no instrumental impact on the narrative.25 The change in direction of the
Odyssey’s Aeolian wind in that inspires the episode also follows a chiastic motion. If the
X of chiasmus is divided into two mirrored halves, it appears as > <, that is, as two
opposing arrows, signifying the opposing directions of the winds that blow Ulysses’ ship,
as well as the inhalation and exhalation produced by the episode’s ruling organ, the lungs.
In fact the entire episode is saturated with thematic and semantic chiasmi.26 The revised
book version opens at the intersection of O’Connell and Henry Streets—before Nelson’s
Pillar, which coincidentally is marked with an X in the map provided in Gifford’s
annotations to the novel. At this crossroad we encounter intersecting railcars changing
course and adopting a new electrical current before they follow tracks heading outside of
the city. Analogously, in the next segment letters and packages are prepared for departure
and the reader is told twice, in the chiasmus quoted above, how the barrels of Guinness
are loaded for shipment. All of these actions represent Xs, that is, intersections, crossings,
and networks that link together the motions of communication, transportation, and
commerce. Although contingency has been less apt of a term to describe the accidental
relationships traced in this chapter, it does overlap with my usage of accident, particularly
25
The first crossing takes place an episode earlier in Hades, in which Bloom catches sight
of Stephen from the coach in which Bloom is riding with Stephen’s father.
26
Lexical and syntactical chiasmi abound in the episodes that follow.
159
in its Latin root as con-tangential, as coming into contact, that is, where two lines or
tangents intersect.
The episode continues with a series of images that perpetuate the pattern. The pair
of scissors used by Red Murray to cut out the advertisement are described as opening
and closing, evoking the X-shape they form when open. Bloom’s comment, “scissors and
paste,” echoes the same relation of simultaneous contact and disconnection that the X
depicts. This phrase, being “proverbially referred to as the instruments used by the
newspaper sub-editor or the mere mechanical compiler” (“scissors, n.” Oxford) and by
extension “a compilation rather than an effort of original and independent investigation”
(“scissors-and-paste, adj.” Merriam-Webster), is used by Joyce in 1931 to describe his
own authorial role in a letter to George Antheil. He writes, “I am quite content to go
down to posterity as a scissors and paste man for that seems to me a harsh but not unjust
description” (Letters I: 297). Thus, for him it also involves an overlap between the
journalistic and the literary that takes place in the episode, and on a broader level, a selfview of modernist innovation characterized by unoriginality and repetition. Lines later,
the image of the holy cross is summoned by Red Murray’s ambiguous statement, “Don’t
you think his face is like Our Saviour?” (7: 49). Even the keys of the Keyes’
advertisement Bloom is working to place are intended to appear crossed. He says to
Murray, “He wants it changed. Keyes, you see. He wants two keys at the top” (26-27).
Bloom continues, “Like that, [. . .] crossing his forefingers at the top.” He crosses his
index fingers, using his body to performatively signify the textual image he wants
created. Towards the conclusion of the episode, as Stephen tells the story of the two
sisters Anne Kearns and Florence MacCabe, he describes how the latter drinks “a bottle
160
of double X for supper every Saturday” (951). Because the first sister uses Lourdes water
for her back pain, the professor responds “Antithesis” (952). These Xs mark the spot
where antitheses meet: Bloom and Stephen, the editor and the creative genius, journalism
and poetry, realism and modernism, body and text, the (material) signifier and the (real)
signified, accident and essence, repetition and originality.
Reflecting in the printingshop, Bloom links the backwards assembly of type to a
reverse chronology and genealogy. He thinks back in time to his own father’s “reading
backwards” of the Torah, as he performed the Passover ritual, just as every generation of
his family had done to commemorate their ancestors’ exodus from Egypt to the homeland
promised to them by their God. Here, the repeated ritual of reading segments of text
aloud conjoins and perpetuates this genealogy as it points back with nostalgia to another
era and to the hope of returning to that premodern home. It follows the same structural
pattern as the textual scissors-and-pasting, where a repetition recalls the past and extends
it into the present and perhaps future. The Jewish diaspora of course also evokes the
sense of homelessness that Lukács, Adorno, and Walter Benjamin find manifest in
modern literature. A shared condition, solitude is the common experience of all modern
individuals, an idea Lukács himself had once described as “universal homelessness,” but
had since disavowed. This isolation occurs on an aesthetic level as well:
Genau das ist an den wahrhaft avantgardistischen Werken evident. Sie
objektivieren sich in rückhaltloser, monadologischer Versenkung ins je
eigene Formgesetzt, ästhetisch und vermittelt dadurch auch ihrem
gesellschaftlichen Substrat nach. Das allein verleiht Kafka, Joyce, Beckett,
der großen neuen Musik ihre Gewalt. In ihren Monologen hallt die Stunde,
161
die der Welt geschlagen hat: darum erregen sie so viel mehr, als was
mitteilsam die Welt schildert. (“Erpreßte” 268-69)
That is exactly what is evident in the truly avant-garde works. They
objectify themselves in unreserved monadological immersion into their
own law of form, aesthetically and thereby also mediated in their social
substratum. That alone lends Kafka, Joyce, Beckett, and the great new
music their force. In their monologues resounds the hour (of the world)
that struck (in the world): for that reason they are so much more
provocative than that which portrays the world communicatively.
Time and historical place are not described or narrated, but their traces are sensorily
encountered as if through the vibrations and tolls of a clock bell.27 The scheme of this
encounter involves an acoustical mirror, an echo that spans lonely distances to connect.
Only heard, sensed in the vibrations of the eardrum, or felt beneath the feet, the vibrations
supply a common and shared experience among individuals and between music and
writing. Most significant in the passage is the model of temporality and the “truly” avantgarde’s relation to history as it is described by Adorno: instead of positing a rupture in
time, it registers the shift indirectly but unmistakably.
In terms of historical progression, the concept of the accident, as Ross Hamilton
has so usefully investigated, is typically thought of as a rupturing, unnatural, and
unintended event. If “Aeolus” represents the beginning of experimental Joyce, its
experimental change is one of retroactivity and revision (“scissors-and-paste”) instead of
an avant-garde breakthrough. Joyce’s stages of writing are not distinct in a punctuated
27
This model of historical modernity and shared isolation strongly resembles the
operation of Big Ben in Virginia Woolf Mrs. Dalloway.
162
sense, rather “he retained the results of each stage he passed through, even after he had
progressed into the next, so that he presented Ulysses as a palimpsest of his development
from 1914 to 1922” (Groden 23). In other words, one style does not overthrow the other:
realism is never absolutely discarded, but is overlaid and combined with the new writing
introduced in Joyce’s revisions. If the shift from realism to modernism is historical in
nature, as the “modern” of modernism implies, Joyce draws up a new genealogy, through
which, like the father-son exchanges of Stephen’s thesis on Hamlet and Shakespeare or
his own relationship to Bloom, the old gives way to the new and the new gives way to the
old according to a chiastic causal sequence. Indeed “Aeolus”’ narrative arrives where it
begins, with the central tram stop, but in the final instance (HELLO THERE, CENTRAL!) they
remain motionless in contrast to the busy horsedrawn vehicles that continue to travel (7:
1042-1049). The pivotal position “Aeolus” occupies in the genetic transformation of the
novel means that its study “cannot be isolated from the history of the whole book”
(Groden 195). Yet even the exact dating of the experimental phase of Joyce’s writing is
now under scrutiny since new notebooks have surfaced, suggesting that the revisions to
the earlier episodes involved a more gradual and developmental process than previously
believed. These layers of correction and revision imply a temporally indistinct set of
authorial subjectivities and intentions, a distributed authorial agency that was perpetually
shifting and “in-progress” over the novel’s eight-year composition.
The introduction of the new within the novel’s narrative and within its
compositional history is both rupturing and made up of retrospective tracings, revisions,
or as Joyce describes his revision of “Aeolus” to Harriet Weaver, a “recasting.”
Interestingly enough, the term describes the formation of metal blocks of type as well as
163
literary revision and reorganization. Yet it is also one of the standard ways of
understanding the difference between substance and accident. In sculpture, the essential
substance remains as it is melted and recast into a different shape. In theatre, the same
dramatic work is recast with new actors. If Joyce’s vision of aesthetic and historical
change is composed of revision and recasting, one can see that this shift is one that hinges
on verbs attached to the essence-accident distinction, where the same substance is recast
into a new form. Yet the hierarchy implicit in these standard examples must be
problematized if it has not been done clearly enough already. Joyce’s example of
modernist change is characterized by accident, contingency, and form, where these are
recuperated to the same level of significance as intention and content.
In the section of “Aeolus” entitled “ORTHOGRAPHICAL,” Joyce represents phonetic
symbols as words, thereby literally transforming the accidental characters into essential
content. Writing is given voice as its sound is depicted in the spelled out portions of the
words “embarassment,” “unparalleled,” “gauging,” and “symmetry”: “the unpar one ar
alleled embara two ars is it? Double ess ment of a harassed pedlar while gauging au the
symmetry with a y of a peeled pear under a cemetery wall” (167-169). The characters are
sounded out, producing a speech determined by inscription, where the “ar” and “ess”
represent the names of the digits r and s phonetically. At the same time that it absorbs the
material form of the words’ orthography into the narrative it underscores the high risk of
error in spelling them correctly. Similarly, instead of simply printing out or reproducing
the text of a letter found among other objects in a drawer in Bloom’s kitchen, the
narrative voice of “Ithaca” describes it as “an infantile epistle, dated, small em Monday,
164
reading: capital pee Papli comma capital aitch How are you note of interrogation capital
eye I am very well full stop new paragraph signature with flourishes capital em Milly no
stop” (17: 1791-95). Writing out the marks of punctuation once again converts them from
accidentals into significative language, constituting the essential content of the passage.
In line with the inventoried nature of “Ithaca,” the textual details provided are excessive,
particularly because they do not represent any error or idiosyncrasy in the writing’s form.
The accident is defined not only by its lack of intent and necessity, but at times
also by its interference with what is intended or deemed correct. In language, all
mediation is capable of interfering with the speaker’s intended message. In writing, the
processes of editing, typesetting, and reading each has the potential to obstruct meaning
at the same time that it is necessary to its production. In traditional terms, if the accidental
could be linked to a subjective intention, it would be the editor’s, whose hand guides and
amends the authorial delivery as a silent partner in the production of print, and who acts
as a gateway granting access to the press. His or her work in the text is done with the aim
of making the author’s content more clear and forceful, rather than altering its meaning.
Whereas the literary author’s voice is traditionally considered singular and unique,
“Aeolus”’ central symbol, the editorial occupation, represents an anonymous, collective,
and convention-driven voice that emerges most tangibly in the headlines that structure
and interrupt the episode’s ongoing narrative. As Karen Lawrence notes, “the headings
represent a discourse generated in the text that advertises the fact that it is ‘written,’
anonymous, and public—that is, cut off from any single originating consciousness” (62).
Joyce makes use of these aspects of his art instead of seeking only to suppress them. Yet
his treatment of them comprises another category of intention, which at times produces a
165
deliberate ambiguity that makes productive use of the intervening effects of print,
editorial alteration, typographic choice, printing errata, and misinterpretation.
The question of multiple categories of authorial intention drew a good deal
attention with the first publication of the Gabler edition of Ulysses in 1984, where editors
differentiated between Joyce’s dual role as an “author” and as a “scribe.” They
accordingly corrected what they judged to be errors even when written in the author’s
own hand.28 It is well documented that Joyce made endless alterations or corrections to
the proofs of his first three volumes of fiction, and many of these were concerned with
what he hesitated to call “misprints” (Letters I: 187). On one hand this together with his
idiosyncratic requirements regarding the hyphenation or spacing of compound words and
his removal of commas are evidence of an author obsessed with maintaining control over
every detail of his production. From another view, the endless changes reveal varying
intents. A number of changes involve his approval and (in the case of the chiastic pair of
sentences) recuperation of error. Crucially, these changes were not motivated by a strictly
communicative aim and by no means ease the interpretive experience of the reader.
Authorial intent directed at the category of writing described as its accidentals
paradoxically uncovers another level of intention unconcerned with signification.29
Through our reading of Adorno, we have also seen how modernism breaks from
realism not through an inflated subjective depiction of an otherwise objective reality, as
Lukács holds, but through the momentary failure or absence of the subject’s intention,
sometimes itself intentionalized, which produces the essential accident. Ulysses
29
166
experiments with this through its depiction of the editorial and compositorial elements
involved in the production of texts, which both aid and disrupt the dominance of a
singularly determined set of meanings. We discover this productive tension at work in
Joyce’s treatment of the quotation mark, which, I argue, is influenced by his attitudes
toward the concept of modernist originality, the tension between speech and print, and
the role of authenticity and fictitiousness in modernist fiction.
167
CHAPTER FOUR: KEEPING TIME IN THE SPACE OF TO THE LIGHTHOUSE
Der Tod ist die Sanktion von allem, was der Erzähler
berichten kann. Vom Tode hat er seine Autorität
geliehen.—Walter Benjamin
In one of the last entries to her diary, Virginia Woolf recorded what she imagined
would be the experience of being struck by an explosive, the passing from life to death,
and then death itself. “Then a swoon; a drain; two or three gulps attempting
consciousness—and then dot dot dot” (A Writer’s Diary 354). The first two events,
“Then a swoon; a drain;” are movements involving mind and body alike. The body
collapses at the moment of lost consciousness before it drains of blood and life. But the
last response, which leads into the state of death, are the “two or three” bodily “gulps” for
air that “attempt consciousness.” Following a dash, these two or three gulps are finally
echoed and answered with the tripled “dot.” This repetition is particularly appropriate
since, as we have seen in previous chapters, the dot or period has, in its historical
development, been conceived of as the textual signifier for breath in public reading.
Woolf’s refusal of the mark in this case evokes the last unsuccessful gasps for breath. The
symbolic word involves an even more profound absence or remove from the living body.
Punctuation, a term signifying the insertion of material points on the page as well
as the marks themselves, derives from the act of “distinguish[ing] by pointing”
(“punctuation”), a phrase that encompasses both the materiality of the inked points on a
page and the pointing motion of the index finger, and through the latter the indexical. In
168
this way, the term itself categorically gestures back to the individual body and away from
it at the same time (insofar as the finger points elsewhere). Historically, punctuation is a
symptom first of written language, then of silent reading, and its implicit purpose has
been to compensate, so to say, for the bodily and verbal gesture lost in the shift from
speech to writing. Rhetorically, in languages like English, many marks indicate the
rhythmic pauses a public reader should place between words, for rhetorical effect and to
pronounce transitions between units of sense. In its early use the period marked when the
reader should take a breath, which emphasizes the rhetorical dependence of the text on
the live body of its orator. Here (and, as I will show, not only here) Woolf draws from
this history in her written representation of human death. By representing the final
moment of death not with the wordless and open mark of the ellipsis, but words
signifying the mark, Woolf’s sentence reverses the conventional relationship between
words and their textual mediation. In doing so she puts both the mind and the body, or
both literary form and textual mediation, to work in a passage that is representational as
well as self-reflexively performative.
The mark of the ellipsis, though expressive on its own terms, marks a lapse in
language, a failure of words. Theodor Adorno relates the mark to Impressionism when he
describes it as being used to “leave sentences meaningfully open” (“Sätze bedeutungsvoll
offen zu lassen”) and to “suggest the neverendingness of thoughts and associations”
(“suggieren die Unendlichkeit der Gedanken und Assoziationen”; “Satzzeichen” 109). In
her reading of that mark in Woolf’s Three Guineas, Shari Benstock describes the symbol
as an “incessant turning and re-turning” indicating an “open[ness] to revision and
rethinking” (138). In using written language to substitute for and signify the mark of the
169
ellipsis, Woolf refuses the unarticulated provisionality or the opening into an infinite
afterlife that may have been suggested by the mark. In this instance she rejects the mark
not in favor of its proper grammatical name (the ellipsis), but in favor of a thrice-repeated
word emphasizing its materiality, “dot dot dot,” and not its conventional use.1
What divides and bridges the gulps from the dots, the body from the text, is the
mark of the dash. For Adorno, unity appears in literary form through the device of the
caesura, which is represented by the dash. He concludes, “An ihm wird der Gedanke
seines Fragmentcharakters inne” (“In the dash, thought becomes conscious of its
fragmentary character”; “Satzzeichen” 108). Suggestively, in Adorno’s formulation the
writing subject is absent. Instead the marks, language, and thought take on a life of their
own. In Woolf’s diary, the writing “I” records her own death, which is to say that with
the dash the writer ceases to be the one writing. The parataxis or caesura the dash
performs is the death as well as the loss it leaves behind. By the time the reader arrives at
the “dot dot dot, ” the agency has shifted from the “I” to a new entity, language itself.
Subject (the writing “I”) has transformed to object (the written “it”), and signifying
language, not the materiality of a mark, best represents this result. Written selfrepresentations of subjectivity are always disembodied, first in their symbolic nature, and
second in the writing’s travel away from the writing subject through space and time. Yet
punctuation is not symbolic in the same way. Its materiality and historical service as a
1
In her chapter on Woolf, Shari Benstock does an intertextual reading of Three Guineas
and Sophocles Antigone, where she notes that Antigone’s suicide “is marked by ellipsis,
which leaves the violence itself as something to be understood, available only by its
effects, a figure of incompletion or ‘falling short’—the action of suicide by hanging”
(133). Woolf, who refers to Antigone’s relation to the law, also uses the mark as “both a
threshold and a place of trespass. It announces a barrier of transgression, a moment of
trauma and falling away, and it constructs a space where writing exceeds cultural limits
to lift, momentarily, the veil of social (and linguistic) repression” (Benstock 139).
170
bridge between disembodied texts and the vocal gesture of living orators returns our
attention to the presence and absence of human bodies. Woolf’s compact passage
dramatizes these tensions, as she considers punctuation as word (“dot dot dot”) and
material mark (. . .) in order to perform the self-negation of writing one’s death. The diary
has a particular status in this discussion because it provides a medium in which the author
does not intentionally address an outside reader. Instead the writing self addresses its
temporally distinct reading self in a mode of writing committed to the author’s private
relationship with language and its experiments.
I hold that this is just one instance of the way such play with the associative,
structural, and nonsignifying features of writing informs Woolf’s model of narrative and
of authorial subjectivity. In the following I argue that in cultivating the expressive
nonverbal elements of writing, which do not operate as significative language does,
Woolf establishes a narrative voice in writing and authorial relation to writing that
demands the reader’s active involvement more than it dictates predetermined meaning.
This stance resembles the compositorial interpretation invited by Gertrude Stein (Chapter
Two) and Adorno’s proposal of intermedial reading (Chapter One) and their attendant
versions of the concept of understanding. This is not to say that Woolf did not desire to
convey meaning in her writing or even to convey a particular meaning, but her approach
to narrative (opposed to her essays and criticism) registers few if any traces of the
persuasive rhetoric meant to elicit particular responses from readers (aside from
admiration, which caused her great anxiety). Instead, as Chapter Two explored, Woolf
consciously introduces modern formal strategies into the novel genre, which has a
confusing and disorienting effect on readers accustomed to the conventional novelistic
171
techniques. As the next section will explore, attending to writing in this way on one hand
connects it to modern developments in other media, but equally interesting is how
Woolf’s consciousness of the reader’s disorientation is thematized and formalized as a
shift—a death or passing as I showed in the brief passage from her diary above, a rupture,
a loss, or difference—which reflects on the generational, temporal, and formal difference
connected to modernism that this dissertation has been examining.
Je weniger die Satzzeichen, isoliert genommen, Bedeutung
oder Ausdruck tragen, je mehr sie in der Sprache den
Gegenpol zu den Namen ausmachen, desto entschiedener
gewinnt ein jegliches unter ihnen seinen physiognomischen
Stellenwert, seinen eigenen Ausdruck, der zwar nicht zu
trennen ist von der syntaktischen Funktion, aber doch
keineswegs in ihr sich erschöpft.—Theodor Adorno
The following passage from “The Window,” the first book of To the Lighthouse,
uses punctuation to represent surrounding patterns of sounds, others’ voices, and their
interruption of Mrs. Ramsay’s train of thought:
The gruff murmur, irregularly broken by the taking out of pipes and the
putting in of pipes which had kept on assuring her, though she could not
hear what was said (as she sat in the window which opened on the
terrace), that the men were happily talking; this sound, which had lasted
now half an hour and taken its place soothingly in the scale of sounds
pressing on top of her, such as the tap of balls upon bats, the sharp, sudden
bark now and then, ‘How’s that? How’s that?’ of the children playing
cricket, had ceased; so that the monotonous fall of the waves on the beach,
which for the most part beat a measured and soothing tattoo to her
thoughts and seemed consolingly to repeat over and over again as she sat
172
with the children the words of some old cradle song, murmured by nature,
‘I am guarding you—I am your support,’ but at other times suddenly and
unexpectedly, especially when her mind raised itself slightly from the task
actually in hand, had no such kindly meaning, but like a ghostly roll of
drums remorselessly beat the measure of life, made one think of the
destruction of the island and its engulfment in the sea, and warned her
whose day had slipped past in one quick doing after another that it was all
ephemeral as a rainbow—this sound which had been obscured and
concealed under the other sounds suddenly thundered hollow in her ears
and made her look up with an impulse of terror. (6)
This long sentence represents Mrs. Ramsey’s unfiltered subjective experience, and it
dramatizes this experience with its punctuation. In an article studying translations of this
novel, Rachel May comments on the English punctuation of this passage: “The theme of
Woolf’s sentence is not the sound itself,” she writes, “but the vulnerability of Mrs.
Ramsay’s mind to conflicting and overwhelming influences in the world around her, the
ebb and flow of connection and detachment. The confused syntax and its complex
punctuation aid in explaining—even depicting—her state of mind” (10). As we can see,
in emphasizing the significance of form as well as content in modernist translation, May
subordinates the pattern of musical figures to the punctuation itself. Yet the two are
linked together in this passage in an important way, and even more so in their use to
gather the “ephemeral[]” events of a life in a “measure,” from “cradle songs,” to sounds
of children’s play, men’s conversation, “ghostly roll of drums,” and finally the
“destruction of the island” (To the Lighthouse 6). These are not narrated in the
173
chronological sequence of a single life, but we can discern from these sounds—which are
conjoined with Mrs. Ramsey’s own thoughts by the punctuation May observes—the
trajectory of life, from its “soothing” security to the fright of its passing. Mrs. Ramsay’s
character, whose generation and perspective on life is associated with the Victorian past,
is not in perfect harmony with this modern depiction of the world, and the “clash” and
“confusion” surrounding her in fact serves Woolf’s practice of characterization (May 5).
However, the relation between her and her surroundings does not fully typify a state of
alienation or a direct conflict between the modern hero and its environment. The musical
metaphor, which is associated with these stages of natural life, also produces an
integrated dissonance that resists delineating stable borders between the subject’s
interiority and its external surroundings.
Unlike May, I hold that the complex perspective depicted in the passage is
structured and thematized by sound, rhythm, and musical metaphor and is facilitated by
innovative punctuation, itself producing rhythmic units of prose. Rhythm is underscored
in the musical figures of the “monotonous fall of the waves,” the “ghostly roll of drums,”
“the measure of life,” and the patterned light signals sent forth from the lighthouse—
participates in the form and content of the novel (To the Lighthouse 6; my italics). In
other works such as Roger Fry: A Biography2 and The Waves,3 scholars have identified
the intermedial figure of discordant music as an integral narrative and stylistic device to
Woolf’s writings. Furthermore, in The Waves and Between the Acts, musicality is used as
a structuring element of community, which groups rather than harmonizes disparate and
2
3
See Jacobs.
See Schulze, Clements.
174
dissonant parts into a symphonic whole.4 Regina Schulze, comparing Woolf’s structuring
of the six perspectives in The Waves to Arnold Schoenberg’s twelve-tone system, calls
Woolf’s narrative “atonal,” which “allows for, as Schoenberg has put it, ‘the
emancipation of the dissonance’” (19). This lends the novel a nonlinear form, a “design
in motion” (13), just as Schoenberg’s atonal music did within the western musical
tradition.5 To extract from the readings of Schoenberg by Theodor Adorno that were
examined in previous chapters, it is clear how crucial the introduction of dissonant
atonality is to modern critiques of conventional genre and the models of thinking
implicitly embedded in their structures.
In Woolf’s work the modern human consciousness is often connected to its social
and environmental surroundings through patterns of fragmentation and dissonance, which
we see performed both in the rhythmical syntax and the visual form of the dashes,
parentheses, semi-colons, commas, and single quotation marks segmenting the passage
above. Yet its setting is natural, communal, insular, and protected. Mrs. Ramsay’s
relation to the stimuli surrounding her is spatial and simultaneous, but we see from the
sounds her mind registers and their nonlinear association with different stages of life that
4
Though Schulze points out that the narrative form of To the Lighthouse “has a definite
beginning and a definite end” and “struggles against the abstract experimental
possibilities posed by Lily’s picture” (9), the middle section of the “Time Passes,” she
writes, is a “stab in the direction of Woolf’s perfect book.” Yet whether the novel attains
the full equivalent of musical atonality to the extent that we can trace musical movements
in the narrative composition is beside the point in the present examination.
5
See Clements, who has argued in two different articles for the influence of Beethoven’s
Opus 130 on The Waves and the influence on Between the Acts of Woolf’s friendship
with the composer Ethel Smyth. In both cases, Clements finds that music acts as a social
force, as a structure beneath a model of community including harmony and cacophony
alike.
175
the integral dissonance we have been discussing characterizes a temporal relationship as
well.
During the time she was writing To the Lighthouse, she described her writing
“style” as “all rhythm” in a letter to Vita Sackville-West (The Letters III: 247). She
elaborated,
Style is a very simple matter; it is all rhythm. Once you get that, you can’t
use the wrong words. But on the other hand here I am sitting after half the
morning crammed with ideas, and visions, and so on, and can’t dislodge
them, for lack of the right rhythm. Now this is very profound, what rhythm
is, and goes far deeper than words. A sight, an emotion, creates this wave
in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it; and in writing (such is my
present belief) one has to recapture this, and set this working (which has
nothing apparently to do with words) and then, as it breaks and tumbles in
the mind, it makes words to fit it: But no doubt I shall think differently
next year.
This flow of images and rhythms, she writes, gives way to the words. A notable aspect of
this writing process is the suspension of authorial control it seems to involve: she
positions herself not as the directing force behind the writing, but the one who must
“recapture” and guide it or “set this working.” That is, the rhythm, “as it breaks and
tumbles in the mind” and “makes words to fit” (247), directs the writer. Woolf threatens
with sarcasm that she will probably abandon this philosophy of writing, but she does not.6
The comparison serves her throughout her career and is often used to reflect on her
6
See The Letters IV: 204, IV: 303.
176
personal experience of writing. Also the painter Lily Briscoe, the novelist’s analog in To
the Lighthouse, is carried away by what J. Hillis Miller calls “an impersonal transcendent
rhythm which is beyond her yet in which she nevertheless participates” (153), as seen in
the following:
but it [her brush] was now heavier and went slower, as if it had fallen in
with some rhythm which was dictated to her (she kept looking at the
hedge, at the canvas) by what she saw, so that while her hand quivered
with life, this rhythm was strong enough to bear her along with it on its
current. Certainly she was losing consciousness of outer things. And as
she lost consciousness of outer things, and her name and her personality
and her appearance, and whether Mr. Carmichael was there or not, her
mind kept throwing up from its depths, scenes, and names, and sayings,
and memories and ideas, like a fountain spurting over that glaring,
hideously difficult white space, while she modeled it with greens and
blues. (To the Lighthouse 159)
Instead of delving into the possible gender identities associated with different rhythms, or
the formalist impersonality subject to this commanding beat, which has been done with
success already,7 it is worth dwelling on the intermedial nature of this scene. The
7
Randi Koppen argues that “For all its body rhetoric, Hillis Miller’s radical perspective
on Woolf can only be understood as a continuation of modernist readings in which the
body/life is always subordinate or suspended, and ultimately transformed out of
existence” (382). Instead, Koppen suggests, “this passage is […] about the close
connection that exists between the artistic act, the rhythms of bodily movement, and the
physical world—in other words, that what this passage performs is a much more direct
translation of the body onto the canvas than Hillis Miller is prepared to consider.” It will
emerge in this chapter that this is not an either/or dilemma.
177
rhythmic painter is positioned, not as a foil, but as a displaced figure of Woolf engaged in
the same writing process. One aspect of the comparison lies in that artistic intentions
regarding music and abstract visual art are directed more often towards the medium itself
than towards communicating an end-oriented message to be received by the work’s
audience. Woolf acknowledges precisely this in another letter expressing her concern that
readers might not be carried along by her rhythmic narrative style: “I think that my
difficulty is that I am writing to a rhythm and not to a plot. Does this convey anything?
And thus thought the rhythmical is more natural to me than the narrative, it is completely
opposed to the tradition of fiction and I am casting about all the time for a rope to throw
the reader” (The Letters IV: 204). This passage demonstrates on one hand that her
rhythmical writing style is at risk of not “convey[ing]” anything at all. Though she is
concerned with her readers’ experiences of the text, she desires only “a rope to throw,”
not to “control,” “alert,” or even “encourage” (Parkes 95) particular interpretations with
punctuation. The opposition of this rhythmical approach to “plot” and “tradition(al)
fiction” amounts to a formal critique of literary convention, itself inseparable from the
political and social ideologies which Woolf rejected. Her rhythmic critique alienates her
work from an audience whose tastes and expectations were formed by those
conventions.8 8
Yet scholars like Malcome Parkes have seen Woolf’s use of punctuation marks as a
formally conservative response to the alienating effect of her stream of consciousness
style. For him, punctuation does not participate in the rhythmic critique, but serves to
strengthen the communicative line between author and reader.
178
Intermedial tropes appear in a countless number of letters and diary entries, and
they have been the source of many scholarly chapters on the influence of other arts,
especially the visual art of the Bloomsbury group, on her writing. When it comes to To
the Lighthouse, the focus has been exclusively on the role of painting in the novel and
with good reason.9 Lily Briscoe’s attempt to capture the abstract image of Mrs. Ramsay
in life and death seems to represent, especially from an autobiographical point of view,
the work of mourning for her mother that Woolf records having done in her writing of the
novel.10 In view of Roger Fry’s influence on Woolf, many have observed a literary
adaptation of the aesthetic tenets of the Bloomsbury painters in the detailed imagery of
the writing itself together with the abstract narrative structure. Though musicality plays a
more pronounced thematic and structural role in Woolf’s later novels such as The Waves
and Between the Acts, its role in To the Lighthouse, I argue, is involved in an intermedial
complex between vision and listening, motion and stillness, and presence and absence. In
9
Tammy Clewell argues that Lily’s painting demonstrates how art cannot replace or
memorialize loss to the point of erasing it. The line Lily draws at the center of the
painting
recalls the way “Time Passes” separates the novel’s own prewar and
postwar sections. At once a thematic and structural feature, this division
highlights Lily’s awareness that past and present cannot be seamlessly
joined together. Put differently, the painting’s central line distinguishes a
time characterized by Mrs. Ramsay’s presence and another by her
absence, inviting us to read Lily’s final gesture as a sign of the
impossibility of fully assimilating the past in the name of a redeemed
present. (218)
The line that interrupts the unity of the canvas and the middle section of the novel, “Time
Passes,” enacts a transition between absence or the past and the present.
10
“I used to think of him and mother daily; but writing The Lighthouse laid them in my
mind” (Moments 81). Critics like Spilka and Showalter, for example, argue that if the
novel’s writing was therapeutic, its oblique representation of loss and mourning suggests
the process was unsuccessful or incomplete.
179
my use of the term intermediality here, I do not mean to exclude the traditional
interartistic comparisons and adaptations that cross between distinct genres and arts.
However, my focus concerns the view of media that the interarts have given way to: as
W. J. T. Mitchell writes, “all media are mixed media” already (Picture Theory 6). Woolf
does not draw labored connections between writing and music, but as was revealed in her
letter to Bell, musical rhythm occasions and sets the language that flows from her pen in
motion.
In her 1937 “Words Fail Me” radio series, Woolf also suggests that writing
contains within itself the possibility of its own critique by intermedial methods. In “On
Craftsmanship,” which is surely an overt response to Gertrude Stein’s U.S. lecture tour
on writing and the English language, she takes as an example the end-oriented and
straightforward message on the sign in a railway car, which states “Do not lean out of the
window.” Despite its clarity, its message becomes overturned by its reader:
At the first reading the useful meaning, the surface meaning, is conveyed;
but soon, as we sit looking at the words, they shuffle, they change; and we
begin saying, “Windows, yes windows—casements opening on the foam
of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn.” And before we know what we are
doing, we have leant out of the window; we are looking for Ruth in tears
amid the alien corn. The penalty for that is twenty pounds or a broken
neck.
This proves, if it needs proving, how very little natural gift words have for
being useful. If we insist on forcing them against their nature to be useful,
we see to our cost how they mislead us, how they fool us, how they land
180
us a crack on the head. We have been so often fooled in this way by
words, they have so often proved that they hate being useful, that it is their
nature not to express one simple statement but a thousand possibilities—
they have done this so often that at last, happily, we are beginning to face
the fact. (“On Craftsmanship”)
Here Woolf reflects how even when used very carefully and directly, the reader’s
imagination rebels and transforms the assigned messages of verbal signifiers. The reader
in this scenario expands the practice of reading to a contemplative “looking” that undoes
the knot tied between signifier and signified. The placard is treated like visual art by its
reader: it is viewed, but no longer read in a linear, deciphering fashion. Its words arouse
new words and more new words, until the first message is productively perverted.
Intermedial critique of the political and social control embedded in verbal language
emerges from the reception of writing as well as its formation. Looking as well as reading
text brings out the stillness of the pauses, silences in the midst of the rhythmic motion of
the train. These dimensions direct attention outside of the signifying and communicating
utility of such notices. Woolf’s contemplation of them is instrumental in her
configuration of authorship that collaborates with, rather than dictates to, its materials and
its active readers.
From the first sentence of his essay “Punctuation Marks,” Theodor Adorno calls
attention to how punctuation carries its own meaning when isolated from the language it
usually modifies and supports. The fact of this expression implicitly threatens the
autonomy and primacy of verbal language by suspending the logic that determines it. In
181
such cases it serves no syntactical or clarifying function, but communicates meaning
through its visual and material character. Regarding the figurative comparison of music
to literature, Susan Bernstein has written that the nonreferential system of music is used
as a “critique of language’s binarisms: subject and predicate, inside and outside, origin
and expression, center and extension,” in part because its “own theme comes forth
contiguously with its movement, not in a propositional relationship that divides subject
and object” (2). In this view, music as a figure for writing destabilizes not only binary
views of language, but also the autonomy of the performing and composing I: “because
music has no words, it is not structured by the orientational point of the word I. The
constitutive iterability of the first-person pronoun, its availability for general use,
obstructs its ability to ‘express’; because it is detachable from its user, it can never be
unique” (44). I argue that like wordless music the rhythmic and intermedial nature of
punctuation marks is implicated in the model of authorship suggested by Woolf. It recalls
the workings of gesture, rhythm, and punctuation in embodied subjectivities that underlie
the linguistic self. It is precisely this aspect of subjectivity that is lost in verbal mediations
of the self.
In this regard, the materiality of punctuation plays a significant role in achieving a
literary form characterized by disconnection, as Woolf evokes sound and corporeality in
a text that must inherently lack them. As I will demonstrate in the final section of this
chapter, Woolf uses punctuation to depict bodily experiences of loss and temporal shift in
To the Lighthouse. Like the marks and lines of Lily Briscoe’s paintings, punctuation
marks are involved in reconstructing the past on the space of the page. Insofar as time
and the progression of history are posited most powerfully in the musical rhythm and
182
punctuation of the novel, the marks keep time in To the Lighthouse literally and
figuratively. It will become evident that this is one of the ways in which Woolf uses
writing to confront and represent the era in which she lived, itself chiefly characterized
by loss and disconnection. Thus punctuation marks become intermedial tools, whether
literally by breaking language into rhythms, structurally by opening meaningful spaces,
disjoints, and caesuras, or visually in the connotations of their graphic form. As in her
depiction of abstract painting and rhythm, expressive punctuation’s bypassing of
proposition poses an implicit critique of propositional language.
Walled Unity: Integral Parenthesis
Through the shared differentiation of walls and boundaries within the structure of
To the Lighthouse, parenthesis marks use disconnection as a unifying structure and
question the boundary between center and margin at the same time that they appear to
enforce it. This stitching action does not impose a “spurious harmony” as Adorno would
call it, but one that allows for disconnection and differentiation. Parenthetical walls both
divide and provide the structure of the greater work: in her 1922-25 plans for the novel,
she articulates its narrative form as “two blocks joined by a corridor” (“Notes for
Writing” 48). A simple illustration follows below the phrase, itself a fragment (Figure 1):
183
According to Woolf’s plan, the structure of the novel is multidimensional and formed by
both horizontal and vertical lines fully enclosing the private interior space of the
narrative. The block and corridor metaphor establishes the novel as an architectural form
with each of the three books constituting distinct spaces.11 If we see the middle book or
passageway of “Time Passes” as the parenthesis to the novel as a whole, we will find that
this pattern is carried through to the novel’s syntax. As many scholars have established,
the inner life and daydream provide the main clauses of the novel’s sentences, and
orienting or situating events or details are inserted as digressions as they interrupt the
ongoing thoughts. Interruption is an important stylistic device and motif deeply involved
in the thematic concerns of Woolf’s novel. Parenthetical insertions surrounded in
11
As its title suggests, the novel is loosely organized around a trip to the lighthouse. The
setting of all of the books takes place in the Ramsay’s Isle of Skye holiday home,
whether bustling with life or vacant. The first pre-war book or block of the structure,
“The Window,” covers the space of one day, in which Lily Briscoe begins a canvas
painting of Mrs. Ramsay and the yard, and a trip to the lighthouse is discussed and
thwarted by the threat of poor weather. The “corridor,” the second and shortest book,
“Time Passes,” opens with the night following the day narrated in “The Window,” but in
its twenty pages accounts for about a decade, including the passing of the catastrophic
First World War. This book itself is interrupted by bracketed insertions reporting the
most important events taking place. The insertions introduce loss into the novel as the
main character of “The Window” and her two oldest children are killed off without
ceremony or sentiment. Here the to the lighthouse theme is interrupted, since, though the
lighthouse remains, the characters interested in traveling there are not. The house stands
silent and vacant for years, and the human characters we encounter most are Mrs. McNab
and Mrs. Bast, women commissioned to clean the house (and the remnants of the first
book) in preparation for the third. It ends with the characters’ return the night before the
day narrated in the third book. The final post-war block to which the corridor leads, “The
Lighthouse,” returns to the form of the first book: it also takes place over the course of a
day, beginning the night before (in mirrored symmetry to the first book). The surviving
family members and friends return, the past narrated in “The Window” is reconstructed,
the losses reflected upon, the painting finished even without its subject, and the trip to the
lighthouse made as a “rite” (165) in memory of Mrs. Ramsay, this time perfunctorily
without the joy or hope invested in it by her children years earlier.
184
parenthesis marks or dashes interrupt sentences. Chapter-breaks interrupt dialogues.
Thoughts trail off into silent ellipses.
Parenthetical marks do not create space for a pause, but disrupt language with
more language. If the caesura-imposing dash inserts a pause between “placed-together
events” (angezogenen Ereignissen) as Adorno calls them, the parenthesis literally places
events to the side of one another. The very word parenthesis invokes the Greek roots of
the word “para” and “thesis,” meaning place (thesis) alongside of (para) and not as part
of or together with. The rest of the sentence or narrative is syntactically complete without
the parenthesis. From a certain point of view, the reader pressed for time could easily
skip over it with no practical loss. For Adorno, it is the mark itself that isolates and
transforms the material it encloses: “die Klammer nimmt die Parenthese aus dem Satz
ganz heraus, schafft gleichsam Enklaven, während doch nichts, was in guter Prosa
vorkommt, dem Gesamtbau entbehrlich sein sollte“ (“the parenthesis mark or bracket
completely removes the parenthetical clause from the sentence, establishes enclaves as it
were, whereas, what we encounter in good prose should be indispensable to the structure
as a whole”; “Satzzeichen 111). Style manuals contemporary to Woolf substantiate
Adorno’s aversion; they warn authors against using round brackets unless the content it
envelops is “very remote from” (Manly 120) or “wholly irrelevant to” (Chicago 101) the
rest of the sentence. The threat of dispensability introduced by the conventional use of the
marginalizing parenthesis disturbs Adorno. For him, it ignores the rule of prose form and
“silently give[s] up linguistic form’s claim to integrity” (“geben die Klammern
stillschweigend den Ausspruch auf die Integrität der sprachlichen Gestalt auf”; 111) by
including that which it marks as unnecessary and marginal. But of course in a literary
185
context, this is never what happens. Parenthetical interruptions, like the corridor of “Time
Passes,” become necessary to the narrative they rupture.
It is puzzling that Adorno does not discriminate between round parenthesis marks
and square brackets; instead he uses a blanket term (not unusual in German or British
English for that matter) Klammern, to discuss both. His treatment of them here is
especially harsh, and it seems noteworthy that he omits them from his earlier discussions
of the musical quality, physiognomic, linguistic, or syntactical expression of punctuation
marks. Instead, he prefers that the Parenthese, the parenthetical insertion itself, be set off
by dashes. The crucial difference, Adorno finds, is the visual aspect of the parenthesis
mark, whose vertical lines offend his aesthetic sensibility. Though the horizontal dash
divides, it bridges and connects the sentences it has “torn open” in visual continuity with
the typographical line. For him, though the dash divides, its horizontal line is still an
image of connectedness, and provides a negative evocation of an ideal harmony. It is
puzzling that, while focusing in such detail on the visual character of other punctuation
marks, Adorno does not consider the mixed message sent by the round parenthesis
marks’ outward bulging curves. Its content visibly presses outward, confuses its
demarcation, and resists its supposed containment and marginalization. By threatening to
pour outward into the syntactically and coherently complete main sentence, or main
narrative, its supplementary purpose often inverts itself. The indispensability of such
supplementarity raises questions of the independence of the main sentence. After a
parenthetical interruption takes place, the sentence is transformed, and we find the
isolated enclave Adorno sees is, in fact, purely theoretical.
186
If Adorno calls the vertical walls of both square brackets and round parenthesis
marks imprisoning, we might also see them as creating intimate enclosure. Certainly,
their presence in To the Lighthouse would be well explained in these terms. In a novel
whose subject is already very much concerned with enclosure, with the protective shells
that separate humans from one another, and with the “division” of domestic life from
public, brackets offer their vertical enclosure as an apt architectural instrument. Rather
than creating an opening a moment of silent exposure, they appear to enclose and protect.
Woolf’s round and square brackets both participate in the dialectic between unity and
fragmentation in a manner quite distinct from the caesura-enacting dash. They divide,
interrupt, and territorialize not merely through the presence of their vertical image but by
enabling language to disrupt language. In fact, to recall the first long passage discussed
above in which Mrs. Ramsay is overwhelmed with sensations of safety and of doom, the
round brackets in particular insulate, or establish an insular space, in the secure time of
now, on the intimate island on which the holiday house is situated. The square brackets,
as we will see below, are associated instead with a temporal disjunction and the intrusion
of an annihilating force of time onto the life of the island.
In his discussion of Proust, however, Adorno finds that the author’s relationship
to the content of his sentences sometimes call for parentheses. These leave a trace of the
text’s production, and the authorial intent they mark is more complex than the readings
provided by theorists who see punctuation as a direct imprint of authorial presence in the
text: “Seine eingeklammerten Parenthesen, die wie das Schriftbild so den Vortrag
unterbrechen, sind Denkmäler der Augenblicke, da der Autor, müde des ästhetischen
Scheins und mißtrauisch gegen die Selbstgenügsamkeit der Vorgänge, die er doch
187
ohnehin nur aus sich hervorspinnt, offen die Zügel ergreift” (“[Proust’s] bracketed
parentheses, which interrupt the typographical image as well as the narrative, are
memorials of moments, during which the author, tired of aesthetic appearance and
distrustful of the self-reliance of events that he produces from within himself, openly
grasps hold of the reins”; 111-12). Hardly the “master,” Proust, as Adorno has it, uneasily
tries with his parentheses to “rein” in a narrative that has taken on a life of its own. The
marks denote Proust’s struggle with a narrative almost out of his control. Though the
parenthetical insertion provides a trace of authorial presence and of the text’s production,
its most interesting qualities do not derive from its function as a communicative tool. In
this case, Adorno admits the parenthesis mark is neither dispensable nor imprisoning.
Virginia Woolf surrounds identifying and clarifying phrases in parentheses, and it
seems—as M.B. Parkes has noted—that these interruptions compensate for Woolf’s
disorienting multiperspectival narrative. The majority of parentheses in To the Lighthouse
do not mark temporal interludes or oblique parabasis as Proust’s do, but attribute speech
or thought to a particular character: “(as Nancy put it)” (6) in the voice of the therefore
marginalized narrator. Or even more interestingly, they insert simultaneous gesture or
physical presence into the sentence: “Oh no—the most sincere of men, the truest (here he
was), the best;” (46). This type of parenthetical insertion recalls the materiality of the
writing subject and represents in an abstract manner the fictional bodies of the novel’s
characters. Thus Chapter XIV of “The Window,” surrounded entirely in a set of
parentheses, recounts the kiss between Paul and Minta that seals their engagement on the
beach, the only instance of physical intimacy in the novel. Furthermore the direct address
parentheses often contain carries privacy and intimacy. It intrudes upon the fictional
188
scene with an interjection of purported truth, like the aside to the audience in theater, and
it reveals privileged information from an omniscient point of view: “But why show it so
plainly, Mrs. Ramsay demanded (they looked at each other down the long table sending
these questions and answers across, each knowing exactly what the other felt). Everybody
could see, Mrs. Ramsay thought” (96). The point of view exposed here belongs to neither
character alone, but reveals something of both as it marks itself off from Mrs. Ramsay’s
thought. Each of the parenthesis marks designates an intimate space, in gestural terms,
something like the curve of a hand directing a whisper. They unify the varied points of
view though the voice of a knowing, detached narrator’s address to the reader. Woolf
uses round brackets to integrate disparate voices and events into a whole, all the while
allowing them disconnection from one another and their surroundings. This collective
stream of consciousness is formally consistent with the dynamic of the characters, who
are constantly approaching one another, repelling one another, attempting to merge with
one another, but never removing the shell or wall that protects them from one another. In
her commentary on Woolf’s writing and revision process, Susan Dick, editor of the To
the Lighthouse holograph print, attributes a unifying, stitching, “oblique[ly] connect[ing]”
function to Woolf’s parentheses; thus we might say these dividing walls are the only
point of contact or connection the characters have to one another just as the structure of
the novel is composed and united by walls and corridors. Woolf also achieves narrative
coherence by suggestively juxtaposing unrelated observations, daydreams, dialogues, and
outer events. This is not a method of forced integration, but of surprising intimacy. In fact
its model of relationship anticipates the social groupings of individuals that she later
narrates in The Waves.
189
Bracketing Out: Presenting War’s Excision12
It has been important to clearly establish what parenthesis marks do in To the
Lighthouse in order to demonstrate how square brackets function in a nearly opposite
manner, particularly because the two marks’ functions have generally been confused. An
article from as early as 1927 notes what must have been a common contemporary reading
of them: that they serve to marginalize the content they surround. Frank M. Patterson
writes in the English Record, “Each of the isolated statements [set off by brackets] deals
with such earthly concerns as birth, marriage, death, booksellers, and fishing trips. This
ordinary stuff of life had been the primary subject matter of novelists preceding Virginia
Woolf, but it was to play a small part in this highly symbolic and psychological novel”
(28). Patterson here describes them as performing a straightforwardly parenthetical
function. On the other hand, modern scholars agree that Woolf places the important
matter in the brackets, but they understand that move as an oblique reversal of center and
margin. Tucked into “throwaway asides,” square brackets present death and historical
trauma by what Marianne Dekoven calls “veiled representation” (“History” 149). More
recently, Michele Barrett notes that brackets present their importance “obliquely,”
“cautiou[sly],” and with “deliberate buri[al].” Woolf’s use of them dramatizes her
“disposition to regard the marginal as central, by placing that which is crucial in the
position of heavy parenthesis” (195). This scholarship still commits the same error as
Patterson by conflating the purpose of square brackets with curved parenthesis marks and
12
An earlier version of this section appears in Woolf Editing/Editing Woolf: Selected
Papers from the Eighteenth Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf (Clemson UP, 2009)
as “Editorial Deletion: Presenting Absence in To the Lighthouse.”
190
overlooking the distinction between the two according to their editorial functions and
uses in the novel.
Theodor Adorno’s view of curved brackets as imprisoning applies much better to
the more institutional and prison-like square brackets, whose sharp corners and straight
lines straightforwardly box away and fail to exert outward pressure on the surrounding
text. Whereas both square brackets and parenthesis marks participate in the fragmentation
that characterizes Woolf’s prose, and both impose a vertical line in the horizontal textual
line, square brackets always enclose sentence-length passages and never interrupt the
sentence-level construction as the parenthesis marks often do. Instead, they set off entire
paragraphs and in one case an entire chapter. Here the enclave that troubles Adorno when
positioned around a clause fails to threaten the coherence of a sentence. It interrupts
narrative, not syntax, and establishes autonomy for its enclosed language. The material
enclosed in brackets is not dependent on the context surrounding it, though the context
can certainly enrich its interpretation. Reading Woolf’s bracketing as ironic
understatement, as many scholars have, is unnecessary if we look not only at the way it is
used in the novel, but also at its institutional purpose, of which—as an editor and
professional writer—Woolf was certainly aware. Style manuals contemporary to Woolf
agree that the square bracket or square parenthesis is used for three main purposes: as
providing explanation, as an editorial rather than an authorial interpolation, and as
marking a correction or omission.13 That is to say, in contrast to parentheses, brackets
13
The British Eric Partridge calls the term bracket, common in the U.S. and
Commonwealth, “something of a misnomer,” and prefers the term “square parentheses.”
These “tell that writer that here is matter belonging not the writer of the letter, the
memorandum, the newspaper article, the book, but to an outsider: matter that, in short,
forms an interpolation” (68). They may also be used when the writer “interrupts himself
191
enclose the straightforwardly—in Adorno’s terms—“indispensable” insertion. In the case
of translation, brackets often supply the original language as that which is already
replaced and rendered readable. Editors bracket language they want removed. When the
writer brackets the language he adds to a quote, he designates precisely what is not
quoted. In contrast to the disruptively superfluous presence enacted in parentheses,
brackets present and memorialize the part of the sentence that is not really there, that has
been inserted by another hand and at a different time. This is crucial to understanding
Woolf’s square brackets, since the content of her novel is so engaged with empty space,
loss, and temporal advancement.
In contrast to the countless examples of round parenthesis marks, there are only
seven instances of the square use in To the Lighthouse—six of which are located in the
middle book, “Time Passes.” In “Time Passes,” the following details about the characters
from the first book are inserted in brackets: at the conclusion of the second chapter, we
are told of the last light in the house to be turned off. It is the writer Mr. Carmichael’s.
At the conclusion of the third chapter, Mrs. Ramsay’s death is announced. Prue Ramsey’s
marriage, her death in childbirth, Andrew’s death in battle, and the success of Mr.
Carmichael’s poetry during wartime are all individually bracketed in chapter six. Finally
the two-sentence chapter six of the third postwar book, called “The Lighthouse,” is
entirely in brackets. It narrates part of the boat trip to the lighthouse. None of these
instances involve elaboration, illustration, or modification as parentheses do. Read
with matter too extraneous or remote, or too violently discrepant, for ordinary
parentheses fittingly to contain.” George Summey points out that the marks were rarely
even found on a typewriters and that they were almost “invariably editorial points,
enclosing matter interpolated in an extract by way of substitution, explanation, or
comment” (239).
192
collectively, I conclude, the symbol publicizes the parenthetical round bracket and
extends the import of events beyond the domestic space as it changes the voice from the
whisper of a parenthetical address to the metallic tone of a loudspeaker.
Rather than an emblem of authorial control, these insertions dramatize in a
manner similar to Proust’s parentheses, the struggle of the author to control her material.
In Woolf’s case the presence of another hand is marked—the transformative editorial
hand of history. The use of the bracket as an editorial, not authorial tool is noteworthy
even as it is used by an author, because it distances the content within it from authorial
intent and responsibility. The language takes on a different tone of voice—mechanical,
public, and journalistic—resembling the loudspeaker of Between the Acts. Within these
brackets, Woolf displaces authorship to the institutional authority of the state and
military, whose hand has intruded upon and corrupted the domestic space of the novel. It
is more than coincidental that the revision of the section “Time Passes,” from its (1926)
version as a short story involved removing many of the references to the “ghostly
presences,” which have generally been understood to represent the war, and inserted
instead these bracketed passages. The war’s symbolic force in the house is literally
excised in this editing process, and the isolated events, left unintegrated into the
narratives they rupture, remain as memorials of the ghosts’ presence in an earlier version
of the book.14 Even within the work’s compositional history, history becomes a force that
inserts itself with the brackets and edits out the characters whose deaths they enclose.
The sixth chapter of the third book, “The Lighthouse,” is entirely bracketed. It
interrupts the fifth and sixth chapters, in which Lily Briscoe discovers how intense her
14
See Haule.
193
grief for Mrs. Ramsay has remained: “For how could one express in words these
emotions of the body? express that emptiness there? (She was looking at the drawingroom steps; they looked extraordinarily empty.) It was one’s body feeling, not one’s
mind” (178). Lily, as she struggles with representing on the canvas the space of Mrs.
Ramsay’s world without Mrs. Ramsay, battles also with a bodily grief that extends
beyond words. This struggle recalls the passage from the Writer’s Diary discussed at the
opening of this chapter, as well as Mr. Ramsay’s stumbling from the empty embrace after
Mrs. Ramsay’s death, which will be discussed shortly. At the close of the chapter Lily is
still occupied with the empty space on the drawing room steps, the place where a living
Mrs. Ramsay would be sitting. She thinks to herself, “the space would fill; those empty
flourishes would form into shape; if they shouted loud enough Mrs. Ramsay would
return. ‘Mrs. Ramsay!’ she said aloud, ‘Mrs. Ramsay!’ The tears ran down her face”
(180). This mirrors, of course, precisely the author’s dilemma in the novel: words do not
summon absent bodies to life; words, like other representational media, are inadequate to
loss, even if loss occasions this writing, as in the elegiac tradition. After the interruption
of chapter six, which will be looked at in a moment, chapter seven opens with her
continued cries: “’Mrs. Ramsay!’ Lily cried, ‘Mrs. Ramsay!’ But nothing happened. The
pain increased” (180). The pain she struggles to articulate comes through in the shape of
the brackets that surround the interrupting chapter: “[Macalister’s boy took one of the
fish and cut a square out of its side to bait his hook with. The mutilated body (it was still
alive) was thrown back into the sea.]” (180). The visual continuity between the squareshaped wound in the fish’s body and the pair of brackets suggests that the cut figuratively
reenacts the work of the bracket on the novel. Macalister’s boy cuts into the body of the
194
fish, just as Woolf cuts into the narrative with brackets to represent in a manner that
words cannot, the empty space left behind by the bodies of the dead. In this passage,
brackets are interrupted with parenthesis marks, which enclose the literally vital
information: despite the mutilation, the fish remains painfully alive and the text moves
on. The living body is located in the parentheses, and its parts removed and mutilated
with the square brackets. Here the events of the novel fall into conversation with their
own formal vehicle. If writing borrows from other media in To the Lighthouse, it also
improves upon them through its capacity to represent time and space in a way neither
painting nor music could do alone.
In this way brackets perform the editorial excision style handbooks attribute to
them when used to announce Mrs. Ramsay’s death: “[Mr. Ramsay, stumbling along a
passage one dark morning, stretched his arms out, but Mrs. Ramsay having died rather
suddenly the night before, his arms, though stretched out, remained empty.]” The next
sentence, following in the fourth chapter, returns to the vacation home: “So with the
house empty and the doors locked [. . .]” (128-9). The graphic form of the brackets,
which are involved in the architecture of narrative and textual construction, represents the
emptiness housed by the walls of the vacation home as well as the faraway, outstretched
and empty arms of Mr. Ramsay. The spatial articulation of loss invites the reader to take
notice of the visual character of the brackets on the space of the page. James Krasner
calls Mr. Ramsay’s stumbling feet and empty arms an embodied grief—a grief
experienced in bodily and spatial terms, most clearly exhibited in amputees’ experience
of phantom pain. There is no sentimental discussion of Mr. Ramsay’s mourning process;
instead, his grief is displaced onto and articulated by means of this spatial description.
195
The box, like the fact of death, is composed of uncompromising lines, which sever away
the life and body of Mrs. Ramsay. Unlike brackets, the curved shape of parenthesis marks
has a bodily quality. Woolf interrupts dialogue and thought with their enclosed
descriptions of the material world of the characters or the movements of their bodies.
How then can brackets be used to represent the kind of grief that Lily calls “one’s body
feeling, not one’s mind” (178)? Rather than representing the body itself, the bracket
presents its absence, which other bodies still feel. The bracket does not evoke for us the
extended and empty arms of Mr. Ramsay. Rather it reminds us of the round parenthesis
marks that would so suitably represent them were they embracing a living body. The
sharp square angles of the square bracket do not represent bodily presence. Rather, by
means of their institutional excising purpose, they represent its absence.
Like Mr. Ramsay’s encounter with the absence and space left empty by his wife’s
death, the reader must navigate this strange marked-off space on the page. He or she
stumbles over the narrative loss and spatial rupture of this passage. Thus, embodied grief
might be enacted not only through the narration of the scene, but also through the
materiality of the brackets on the printed page, which incite a textual phantom pain for
the reader.15 Its physicality supplements verbal modes of signification as it communicates
“body, not mind feeling.” Like music, in which performance and expression are one and
15
In a published conversation with Jane Goldman, Randall Stevenson makes a related
claim for this passage, by calling it “one of the most disturbing moments in twentiethcentury fiction, for reasons aesthetic as well as emotional” (174). Readers, he writes, “are
bound to register painfully the implications of those square brackets—the
inconsequentiality of even the richest life. And what the brackets contain is disturbing in
form as well as meaning.” This argument still hinges on the ironic effect of such
marginalization.
196
the same, the bracket’s meaning is posited not “propositionally,” but “contiguously with
its own movement” (Bernstein 2). This is to say, the bracket acts on its own
simultaneously as both subject and verb without the agency of a distinct speaking or
writing “I.” This subjectless action aligns the bracket with an anonymous editorial voice.
It also points to the method by which Woolf registers the historical event of World War
One in the narrative. War is not represented in a subject-verb relationship, rather it
appears in the textual replication of its performed effect.
In this manner, brackets represent the lost bodies and lives of Prue and Andrew as
they enclose the information of their deaths a few pages later: “[Prue Ramsay died that
summer in some illness connected with childbirth, which was indeed a tragedy, people
said, everything, they said, had promised so well.]” (132). On the facing page is: “[A
shell exploded. Twenty or thirty young men were blown up in France, among them
Andrew Ramsay, whose death, mercifully, was instantaneous.]” (133).16 These brackets
ominously present the absence left by the two children’s deaths by invoking the editorial
use of brackets to mark words and the bodies they represent for removal from the page
and narrative. The idea of marking for editorial deletion takes on a disturbing resonance
when it is read in conjunction with the military use of the word. The term bracket also
refers to “the (specified) distance between a pair of shots fired, one beyond the target and
one short of it, in order to find the range for artillery; chiefly in the phrase to establish a
bracket” (“bracket,” n.). The graphic enclosure of this information repeats Andrew’s
bracketing by the enemy shooter. The grouping of Andrew and Prue’s deaths so close to
one another links the private and intimate mourning of one spouse for another, or of a
16
In the definitive American imprint, suggestively, the two children’s deaths directly
oppose one another in visual symmetry on facing pages.
197
parent for a child together with the public military death, with the almost anonymous
death of Andrew Ramsey, who dies in a group of twenty or thirty. To bracket also means
to classify or group. Thus the siblings’ deaths are bracketed interchangeably by the
circumstances: during World War One motherhood was widely celebrated as the
feminine form of military service.17 Thus, all of the bracketed passages are bracketed, in
the term’s classifying sense, together. Mr. Ramsay’s loss, grouped with the passing of
time that included the war, is bound to public losses experienced over that stretch of time.
All of the passages have been bracketed by the passing of time. Like the square window
of the novel’s first section, brackets provide a threshold between public and private
worlds, losses, conflicts, and actions. All are conflated and equated by the leveling work
of time. In this way the bracket unifies and harmonizes disparate events scattered
throughout the novel and seeks to take measure of the damage done.
In this sense it is necessary to forgive the British naming of brackets as
“parentheses,” as the term “parenthesis” is used figuratively to indicate “an interval, an
interlude, a hiatus” (“parenthesis, n.”) or a temporal gap characterized by its difference
from the adjacent materials. In such cases, it is positioned or inserted not only “aside” in
terms of its content-matter, but of its temporal distinction. This certainly relates to the
Proustian digression, which enacts a chronological disruption, a flashback in memory or a
flash-forward to the time of remembering in the narrative. In Susan Suleiman’s article on
Proust’s A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, she finds that his narrator’s digressions achieve
two purposes: they “distract the reader from the moment being narrated, thus acting not
only as retarding elements in a sentence but also as a means of fragmenting the text—and
17
See Grayzel.
198
the reader’s attention; on the other hand they establish connections between widely
separated sections of the novel, thus constituting ‘joints’ in the composition” (459). That
is to say, they simultaneously break apart and bridge the reader’s temporal experience of
the narrative and create continuity through the narrator’s digressive memories that
loosely tie together disparate historical periods of his life. She writes further of the
compositional joints, “The essential mechanism [of parentheses] is of rapprochement
[bringing closer]: between two objects in the metaphor, between two moments in
involuntary memory, between two textual elements in the parenthesis. […] the
parenthetical association links two textual fragments that remain, for all that, apart”
(Suleiman 468; my emphasis). The rapprochement is momentary, and lasts only as long
as the digression. Nor is the bringing together of the rapprochement an action that can be
carried through to completion. Despite the link, full unification can never be achieved,
because the objects and memories remain unequivocally “different” and “separate.”
Instead of being brought together as one, she describes it as “la parenthèse, la transversale
de la multiplicité textuelle” (468). Or, the parenthesis is the diagonal line traversing
textual multiplicity. It does not eliminate multiplicity by unifying into narrative
singularity. In her Writer’s Diary, Woolf reflected on whether she would conclude the
novel with both Ramsay’s “climbing on to the rock” and with Lily and “Carmichael
looking at the picture” (98). If the painting scene “intervenes between R. and the
lighthouse,” she considered, “there’s too much chop and change, I think. Could I do it in
a parenthesis? So that one had the sense of reading the two things at the same time?”
(98). Whether she meant this to mean a square or rounded parenthesis is impossible to
say with certainty, but the pattern established suggests that square enclosures would be
199
used to achieve this temporal experiment. The bracketed events serve as joints in the
narrative. They rupture the sequential basis of conventional narrative to form a plot
structured by patterned repetitions of formal motifs. This temporal arrangement
foreshadows Woolf’s later experiments, which work to adapt principles of musical
composition into narrative form.
The bracket not only marks loss in a material way, but also performs a translation
between public and private spaces and establishes a level of interchangeability among
bracketed passages. Having this established, the first bracketed passage in the novel can
now be read differently. It takes place early in “Time Passes,” in which Mr. Carmichael is
the last person to fall asleep after the long and busy day in the vacation home.
Chronologically and thematically, it belongs equally to the world of the “The Window.”
The scene leading into the brackets depicts vague united forces of time, which, having
just entered the structure, are disrupted and forced to a halt. Then the entranceway to
another passage of the house is defensively closed off: “At length, desisting, all ceased
together, gathered together, all sighed together; all together gave off an aimless gust of
lamentation to which some door in the kitchen replied; swung wide; admitted nothing;
and slammed to.” With this the chapter closes with the bracketed sentences: “[Here Mr.
Carmichael, who was reading Virgil, blew out his candle. It was midnight.]” (127). At the
stroke of midnight, the day concludes, together with the world of “The Window,” a world
prior to the loss, disruption, and war to follow in the next chapter. The kitchen door shuts
itself, which is followed by the closed passage of the bracket, in which the lights are
likewise extinguished. Mr. Carmichael’s book is presumably closed, and the space
enclosed in darkness. The visual aspect of the bracket echoes and repeats the content of
200
the passage it frames. As the passage of the novel is formally closed off, the various
objects in the house are also shut. Because it is grouped together with the other bracketed
passages in the novel, this closing off must be recognized in more momentous, historical
terms. The private, individual action becomes emblematic of an historical and narrative
turning point. In view of the novel’s structure, it is the end of the prewar era, the end of
life for several characters, and a suspension of life in the house as it is shut down and
uninhabited for the following ten years in the next chapter, until the matronly Mrs. Bast
returns to mend and prepare for the remaining characters’ returns.
The bracketing, attaching, detaching, and silencing work of punctuation marks
represents the alienating loss of modernity in historical and aesthetic terms without
adopting the forms of ideological unity. Inconspicuously positioned in this short, but
pivotal passage is the detail that Mr. Carmichael is reading Virgil. John Lennard has
argued, eccentrically, that we ought to consider the book-form itself as punctuation. If
punctuation could be understood by its fundamental “interrupting” function, he holds, we
might see the book-object as “a complete object punctuating space” (“Mark” 5-6). Mr.
Carmichael’s book, whose physical closing is replicated in the closing doors of the
hallway and the closing brackets, becomes bracketed with his own book of war poetry,
Woolf’s novel, and the work of punctuation in it. The presence of Virgil in this
momentous shift in the narrative extends the significance of brackets from their role as
threshold between the public and private in the novel’s content to that between the
historical and the aesthetic in its literary form. Virgil’s Aeneid is one of the founding
stories of western civilization and a standard alluded to in most stories of battle. Its epic
form is the literary model, as Georg Lukács famously argues in Theory of the Novel, of a
201
world in which the protagonist is fully integrated into the culture and environment of his
natural home. The displacement from this prelapsarian form produces the state of
homelessness that supposedly defines the modern novel. The failed embrace of Mr.
Ramsay—dramatized and materialized in the square bracket—reenacts the initial
alienation of Aeneas’ failed or empty embraces for the ghost of his wife Creusa in the
Second Book of The Aeneid.18 The encounter takes place in his return to the ruined Troy
in search for her. She inspires him to take the sea voyage to his destined home, to rebuild,
remarry, and provide for their son’s rich future there. With this promised fate, he embarks
on his exile. In To the Lighthouse, no founding of New Troy or Rome will follow the
destruction of “Time Passes.” Nonetheless, the novel’s relationship to epic and to epic
depictions of battle and loss is posited in its punctuation marks. Though the alienation of
and from modernity persists, the Woolf’s “rhythmic” prose style integrates public and
private worlds of modernity through punctuation, and it provides a critique of both the
formal principles and the materials of the novel form. Her response to and incorporation
of past tradition is performed in her choice of not naming the loss of modernity, but
marking the loss and letting it unfold on its own.
18
Aeneas repeats the attempted embrace when visiting his father in the Underworld in
Book Six, but the embrace with Creusa after the fall of Troy is more relevant to Woolf’s
novel.
202
WORKS CITED
Abbt, Christine and Tim Kammasch, Eds. Punkt, Punkt, Komma, Strich? Geste, Gestalt
und Bedeutung philosophischer Zeichensetzung. Bielefeld: transcript, 2009.
"accident, n." OED Online. March 2013. Oxford University Press. 19 April 2013
<http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/1051?rskey=YJjtAE&result=1&isAdvanced=fa
lse>.
"accidental, adj., n., and adv." OED Online. March 2013. Oxford University Press. 19
April 2013 <http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/1054>.
Adorno, Theodor. Aesthetic Theory. Trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor. Theory and History of
Literature 88. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997.
---. Ästhetische Theorie. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970.
---. Beethoven: The Philosophy of Music. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Stanford: Stanford
UP, 1998.
---. “Das Altern der Neuen Musik.” Dissonanzen. Gesammelte Schriften: 14. Frankfurt:
Suhrkamp, 1973. 143-168.
---. “Erpreßte Versöhnung.” Noten II 251-280.
---. Essays on Music. Ed, Richard Leppert. Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 2002.
---. “Fragment über Musik und Sprache.” Quasi una fantasia. Musikalische Schriften II
251-258.
---. “Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft.” Prismen. Berlin-Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,
1955.
203
---. “Musik, Sprache und ihr Verhältnis im gegenwärtigen Komponieren.” Musikalische
Schriften III 649-664.
---. Musikalische Schriften:I-III. Gesammelte Schriften: 16. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1978.
---. Noten zur Literatur: I-IV. Gesammelte Schriften: 11. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1974.
---. “Parataxis.” Noten III 447-494.
---. “Rede über Lyrik und Gesellschaft.” Noten: I 49-68.
---. “Satzzeichen.” Noten: I 106-113.
---. “Skoteinos oder Wie zu lesen sei.” Drei Studien zu Hegel. Gesammelte Schriften: 5.
Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970. 326-375.
---. “Standort des Erzählers im Zeitgenossischen Roman.” Noten: I 41-47.
---. “The Aging of the New Music.” Trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor and Frederic Will. in
Leppert 181-202.
---. “Titel.” Noten: III 325-334.
---. “Über einige Relationen zwischen Musik und Malerei” Musikalische Schriften III
628-644.
---. “Versuch Endspiel zu verstehen.” Noten: II 281-324.
---. “Voraussetzungen.” Noten III 431-446.
---. “Why is the New Art So Hard to Understand?” Trans. Susan Gillespie. in Leppert
127-134.
Akhapkin, Denis. “Aleksei Eliseevich Kruchenykh.” Trans. J. Alexander Ogden.
Dictionary of Literary Biography. Vol. 295 “Russian Writers of the Silver Age,
1890-1925.” Ed. Judith E. Kalb and J. Alexander Ogden. Detroit: Thomson Gale,
2004. 239-245.
204
“Akzidenz, n.” Wahrig Deutsches Wörterbuch. Bertelsmann Lexikon Institut, 2008.
Alfandary, Isabelle. Le risque de la lettre: lectures de la poésie moderniste américaine.
Lyon: ENS-Edition, 2011.
Allen, Stuart. “’Thinking Strictly Prohibited’: Music, Language, and Thought in
‘Sirens.’” Twentieth-Century Literature 53.4 (Winter 2007): 442-459.
Amidon, Stevens Russell. "Manifestoes: A study in genre" (2003). Dissertations and
Master's Theses. Paper AAI3103696.
<http://digitalcommons.uri.edu/dissertations/AAI3103696>
Ashton, Jennifer. “’Rose is a Rose’: Gertrude Stein and the Critique of Indeterminacy.”
Modernism/modernity 9.4 (November 2002): 581-604.
"avant-garde, n." OED Online. March 2013. Oxford University Press. 19 April 2013
<http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/13610?redirectedFrom=avant-garde>.
---. Columbia Dictionary of Modern Literary and Cultural Criticism. Eds. Joseph
Childers and Gary Hentzi. New York: Columbia UP, 1995. Literature Online.
Barrett, Michele. “Virginia Woolf Meets Michel Foucault.” Chapter 11. Imagination in
Theory: Essays on Writing and Culture. Cambridge: Polity P, 1999. 186-204.
Beaujour, Elizabeth Klosty. “Zaum.” Dada Realism 1972. 13-18.
Beja, Morris and David Norris, Eds. Joyce in the Hibernian Metropolis: Essays.
Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1996.
Bely, Andrei. Petersburg. Trans. Robert A. Maguire and John E. Malmstad.
Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1978.
---. Петербург. Москва: Художественная литература, 1978.
205
---. “Symbolism and Contemporary Russian Art.” The Russian Symbolists: An Anthology
of Critical and Theoretical Writings. Ed. and Trans. Ronald E. Peterson. Ann
Arbor: Ardis, 1986. 97-106.
---. “The Forms of Art.” The Dramatic Symphony and The Forms of Art. Trans. Roger
and Angela Keys and John Elsworth. New York: Grove Press, 1986. 161-183.
---. “Формы Искусства.” Символизм Как Миропонимание. Москва: Республика,
1994. 90-105.
Benjamin, Walter. “Über Sprache überhaupt und über die Sprache des Menschen.”
Gesammelte Schriften II. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1991. 140-157.
---. “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man.” Reflections 314-332.
---. “On the Mimetic Faculty.” Reflections 333-336.
---. Reflections. Ed. Peter Demetz. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. New York and London:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovic, 1978.
---. “Über das mimetische Vermögen” Gesammelte Schriften II. Frankfurt a.M.:
Suhrkamp, 1991. 204-213.
---. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Trans. Harry Zohn.
Illuminations. New York: Schocken Books, 1969.
---. “Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit.” Illuminationen
148-184.
---. “Der Erzähler.” Illuminationen 409-438.
---. Illuminationen: Ausgewählte Schriften. Suhrkamp Verlag, 1961.
206
Benne, Christian. “Der Punkt. Vom Sinn des reinen Fürsichseins.” Punkt, Punkt, Komma,
Strich? Geste, Gestalt und Bedeutung philosophischer Zeichensetzung. Eds.
Christine Abbt and Tim Kammasch. Bielefeld: transcript, 2009. 41-60.
Benstock, Shari. Textualizing the Feminine. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1991.
Berberova, Nina. “A Memoir and a Comment: The ‘Circle’ of Petersburg.” in Andrey
Bely, A Critical Review 115-120.
Bernstein, Susan. Virtuosity of the Nineteenth Century. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1998.
---. “Characterization, Animation and Physiognomy: Adorno’s Method and Script.”
Unpublished manuscript. August, 1985.
Bollettieri Bosinelli, Rosa Maria. “Joyce the Scribe and the Right Hand Reader.” Hart
and Sandulescu 7-15.
Bowlby, Rachel. Virginia Woolf: Feminist Destinations. Oxford: Blackwell, 1988.
“Bracket, n.” Oxford English Dictionary Online. 2nd ed. 1989. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007.
“Bracket, v.” Oxford English Dictionary Online. 2nd ed. 1989. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007.
Bray, Joe, Miriam Handley, and Anne C. Henry. Ma(r)king the Text: The Presentation of
Meaning on the Literary Page. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000.
Brody, Jennifer DeVere. Punctuation: Art, Politics, and Play. Durham: Duke UP, 2008
Chicago Manual of Style. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1929.
Buck-Morss, Susan. The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter
Benjamin, and the Frankfurt Institute. New York: The Free Press, 1977.
Budgen, Frank. James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1961.
Bürger, Peter. Theory of the Avant-Garde. Trans. Michael Shaw. Theory and History of
Literature 4. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984.
207
Burliuk, David and Velimir Khlebnikov, Vassily Kamensky, Alexsei Kruchenykh,
Benedikt Livshits, and Vladimir Mayakovsky. “Пощечына общественному
вкусу.” 1917.
---. “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste.” Trans. Catriona Kelly. Utopias: Russian
Modernist Texts, 1904-1940. London: Penguin, 1999: 120-121.
“But Stein is a Stein is a Stein.” New York Times Nov. 18 1934 BR10.
E.V. Calin, “From Ellipsis into Silence in Contemporary Literature.” Expression,
Communication and Experience in Literature and language: proceedings of the
XII Congress of the IFMLL. Ed. Ronald D. Popperwell. London: Modern
Humanities Research Association, 1973.
“caesura.” The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. Eds. Alex Priminger
and T. V. F. Brogan. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1993. 159.
“chiasmus.” Oxford Concise Dictionary. www.oxforddictionaries.com
---. The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. Eds. Alex Priminger and T.
V. F. Brogan. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. 183.
Cianci, Giovanni. “Typography Underrated: A Note on Aeolus.” Hart and Sandulsecu 1621.
Clements, Elicia. “Transforming Musical Sounds into Words: Narrative Method in
Virginia Woolf’s The Waves.” Narrative 13.2 (2005): 160-181.
---. “Virginia Woolf, Ethel Smyth, and Music: Listening as a Productive Mode of Social
Interaction.” College Literature 32.3 (2005): 51-71.
Clewell, Tammy. “Consolation Refused: Virginia Woolf, the Great War, and Modernist
Mourning.” Modern Fiction Studies 50.1 (2004): 197-223.
208
Cohen, S. Marc. “Aristotle's Metaphysics.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
(Summer 2012), Edward N. Zalta (ed.)
<http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2012/entries/aristotle-metaphysics/>.
“composition, n.” OED Online. March 2013. Oxford University Press. 19 April 2013
<http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/37795?redirectedFrom=composition>. Cordingley, Anthony. “The reading eye from scriptura continua to modernism: orality
and punctuation between Beckett’s L’image and Comment c’est/How It is.”
Journal of the Short Story in English 47 (Autumn 2006)
<http://jsse.revues.org/index800.html>.
Creasy, Matthew. “Manuscripts and Misquotations: Ulysses and Genetic Criticism” Joyce
Studies Annual (2007): 44-66.
Dayan, Peter. Music Writing Literature, from Sand via Debussy to Derrida Hampshire:
Ashgate, 2006.
DeKoven, Marianne. A Different Language: Gertrude Stein’s Experimental Writing.
Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1983.
---. “Gertrude Stein and Modern Painting: Beyond Literary Cubism.” Contemporary
Literature 22.1 (1981): 81-95.
---. “History as Suppressed Referent in Modernist Fiction.” ELH 51.1 (1984): 137-152.
---. “Gertrude Stein’s Landscape Writing.” Women’s Studies 9 (1982): 221-239.
Deppermann, Arnulf and Angelika Linke. Sprache Intermedial: Stimme und Schrift, Bild
und Ton. Institut für deutsche Sprache Jahrbuch 208. Berlin: DeGruyter, 2009.
Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore and
London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1974.
209
“Der Sieg der Fraktur.” Monatsheft für deutsche Sprache und Pädogogik 13.1 (1912): 1416.
De Voogd, Peter. “Joycean Typeface.” in van Boheemen 203-218.
Dick, Susan. “Introduction.” Woolf, To the Lighthouse: The Original Holograph Draft
11-35.
Dietrich, Dorothea. The Collages of Kurt Schwitters: Tradition and Innovation.
Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995.
Ferrer, Daniel. “Between Inventio and Memoria: Locations of ‘Aeolus’” in Beja and
Norris 190-196.
Ferris, David S. “Politics and the Enigma of Art: The Meaning of Modernism for
Adorno.” Modernist Cultures 1.2 (2005): 192-208.
Gabler, Hans Walter. “Afterword.” In Ulysses: A Critical and Synoptic Edition III. New
York: Garland Publishing, 1984. 1859-1907.
Gass, William H. “Foreword.” The Making of Americans. London: Dalkey Archive Press,
1995. vii-xi.
“Gertrude Stein Arrives, Still Speaking Enigmas.” Los Angeles Times Oct 25, 1934: 10.
Gelikman, Oleg. “’This new evolution of art’: Adorno’s modernism as a re-orientation of
aesthetics.” in Ross 156-170.
Genette, Gérard. Paratexts: Threshholds of Interpretation. New York: Cambridge UP,
1997.
Gifford, Don. Ulysses Annotated. Berkeley: U of California P, 1988.
Gillespie, Diane F. The Multiple Muses of Virginia Woolf. Columbia: U of Missouri P,
1993.
210
Gillespie, Susan. “Translating Adorno: Language, Music, and Performance.” The Musical
Quarterly 79.1 (1995): 55-65.
Goetsch, Paul. “A Source of Virginia Woolf’s Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown.” English
Literature in Transition, 1880-1920. 7.3 (1964): 188-89.
Goldman, Jane and Randall Stevenson. “‘But what? Elegy?’: Modernist Reading and the
Death of Mrs Ramsay.” The Yearbook of English Studies 26 (1996): 173-186.
Grayzel, Susan. Women’s Identities at War: Gender, Motherhood, and Poliltics in Britain
and France during the First World War. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P,
1999.
Groden, Michael. Ulysses in Progress. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1977.
Hall, Theodore. “No End of Books: Quips and Quiddities, or How Gertrude Stein Has
Mark Twain Backed off the Map.” The Washington Post Nov 15, 1934: 9.
Hamilton, Ross. Accident: A Philosophical and Literary History. University of Chicago
Press, 2007.
Hanna, Julian. “Blasting after Blast: Wyndham Lewis’s Late Manifestos.” Journal of
Modern Literature 31.1 (2007): 124-135.
Harris, R. The Origins of Writing. London: Duckworth, 1986.
---. Signs of Writing. London: Routledge, 1995.
Hart, Clive and C. George Sandulescu, Eds. Assessing the 1984 Ulysses. Gerards Cross,
Bucks: Colin Smythe, 1986.
211
Hartmann, Silvia. Fraktur oder Antiqua: der Schriftstreit von 1881 bis 1941. Frankfurt
a.M.: Lang, 1998.
Haule, James M. “’Le Temps Passe’ and the Original Typescript: An Early Version of the
“Time Passes” Section of To the Lighthouse.” Twentieth Century Literature 29.3
(1983): 267-278.
Henry, Anne C. “The re-mark-able rise of ‘…’: reading ellipsis marks in literary texts.”
Bray, Handley, Henry 120-142.
Hirotani, Masako, Lyn Frazier, and Keith Rayner. “Punctuation and intonation effects on
clause and sentence wrap-up: Evidence from Eye Movements.” Journal of
Memory and Language 54 (2006): 425-443.
Hitler, Adolf. Völkischer Beobachter Nr. 250 vom 7. September 1934.
Holschuh, Albrecht. “Poetische Zeichensetzung.” The German Quarterly 75.1 (2002):
51-70.
Howes, Justin and Pauline Paucker. “German Jews and the Graphic Arts.” Leo Baeck
Institute Yearbook 34 (1989): 443-473.
Hullot-Kentor, Robert. “Translator’s Introduction.” Aesthetic Theory. Theory and History
of Literature 88. U of Minnesota Press, 1997. xi-xxi.
Huyssen, Andreas. After the Great Divide. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1987.
Hyer, Brian. “Tonality.” Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online.
Ivanov-Razumnik, R. I. “Petersburg.” Vershiny Petrograd: Kolos, 1923.
Jacobs, Peter. “’The Second Violin Tuning in the Ante-room’: Virginia Woolf and
Music.” Gillespie 227-260.
212
Jameson, Fredric. “Gertrude Stein and Parts of Speech.” Chapter 17. The Modernist
Papers. New York: Verso, 2007. 342-358.
---. “Joyce or Proust?” Modernist Papers 170-203.
---. “Ulysses in History.” Modernist Papers 137-151.
Janacek, Gerald, ed. Andrey Bely, A Critical Review. Lexington: The UP of Kentucky,
1975.
---. “Rhythm in Prose: The Special Case of Andrei Bely” in Andrei Bely: A Critical
Review 1-17.
---. Zaum: The Transrational Poetry of Russian Futurism. San Diego UP, 1996.
Jarvis, Simon. Adorno: A Critical Introduction. New York: Routledge, 1998.
Jay, Martin. “What’s New? On Adorno and the Modernist Aesthetics of Novelty:
Response to Oleg Gelikman” in Ross 171-175.
Jennings, Lee B. “The Model of the Self in Gottfried Keller’s Prose.” German Quarterly
56.2 (1983): 196-230.
Joyce, James. Finnegans Wake. London: Penguin, 1992.
---. Letters, Vol. I. Ed. Stuart Gilbert. New York: The Viking Press, 1957.
---. Letters, Vols. II-III. Ed. Richard Ellmann. New York: The Viking Press, 1966.
---. Ulysses. Eds. Hans Walter Gabler et al. NY: Vintage Books, 1986.
---. Ulysses. VII. Little Review. 5.6 (Oct., 1918): 26-51.
Kahnweiler, Daniel. Confessions esthétiques. Paris: Gallimard, 1963.
Kapr, Albert. Fraktur, Form und Geschichte der gebrochenen Schriften. Verlag Hermann
Schmidt, Mainz 1993
213
Kaufmann, Michael. Textual Bodies: Modernism, Postmodernism, and Print. Lewisburg:
Bucknell UP, 1994.
Keller, Gottfried. Der Grüne Heinrich. 1879. 2. Fassung. München: Winkler, 1991.
<http://gutenberg.speigel.de/index.php?id=1379&kapitel=5&cHash=242b7b9d20
2>
---. Green Henry. Trans. A.M. Holt. New York: Grove Press, 1960.
Kershner, R.B. “The Culture of Ulysses.” Joycean cultures, culturing Joyces. Eds.
Cheng, Devlin and Norris. Newark: U of Delaware P, 1998. 149-162.
Killius, Christina. Die Antiqua-Fraktur Debatte um 1800 und ihre historische Herleitung.
Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 1999.
Kirsch, Sharon J. “Suppose a Grammar Uses Invention”: Gertrude Stein’s Theory of
Rhetorical Grammar.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 38.3 (2010): 283-310.
Koppen, Randi. “Embodied Form: Art and Life in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse.”
New Literary History 32 (2001): 375-89.
Krasner, James. “Doubtful Arms and Phantom Limbs: Literary Portayals of Embodied
Grief.” PMLA 119.2 (2004): 218-232.
Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe. “The Caesura of the Speculative.” Typography: Mimesis,
Philosophy, Politics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1989. 208-235.
Lansky, Paul et al. "Atonality." Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online. Oxford
University Press. Web. 19 Apr. 2013.
<http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/47354>.
Lassman, Eli Z. “’Scribbled Words’: The Usage of the Ulysses Notebooks in ‘Proteus’
and ‘Aeolus.’” JJQ 45.2 (Winter 2008): 301-322.
214
Lawrence, Karen. The Odyssey of Style in Ulysses. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1986.
Leaska, Mitchell. Virginia Woolf’s “Lighthouse”: A Study in Critical Method. New
York: Columbia UP, 1970.
Lennard, John. But I Digress: The Exploitation of Parentheses in English Printed Verse.
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991.
---. “Mark, space, axis, function: towards a (new) theory of punctuation on historical
principles.” Bray, Handley, Henry 1-11.
Leppert, Richard. “Introduction.” Essays on Music 1-82.
---. “Commentary.” Essays on Music 85-112.
---, Ed. Essays on Music. Theodor Adorno. Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 2002.
Levin, Jonathan. “Gertrude Stein and the Movement of Words.” Chapter 6. The Poetics
of Transition: Emerson, Pragmatism, and American Literary Modernism.
Durham: Duke UP, 1999.
Lezra, Jacques. “How to Read How to Write.” Modernism/modernity 5.1 (1998): 117129.
Litvak, Joseph. “Adorno Now.” Victorian Studies 44.1 (2001): 34-39.
Loss, Archie K. “Joyce’s Use of Collage in ‘Aeolus.’” Journal of Modern Literature 9.2
(May 1982): 175-182.
Lukács, Georg. Essays über Realismus. Probleme der Realismus I. Berlien: Luchterhand,
1971.
---. “Reportage oder Gestaltung.” Essays über Realismus 35-68.
215
---. “Die weltanschauliche Grundlagen des Avantgardismus.” Ch. 1. Die
Gegenwartsbedeutung des kritischen Realismus. in Essays über Realismus 467499.
Lupton, Ellen, ed. Period Styles: A History of Punctuation. New York: Herb Lubalin
Study Center, The Cooper Union, 1988;
Maguire, Robert A. and John E. Malmstad. “Translator’s Introduction.” Bely Petersburg
viii-xxvii.
Mallarmé, Stéphane. “The Impressionists and Edouard Manet.” (1876) The New
Painting:Impressionism 1874-1886, exh. Cat. Seattle: U of Washington P, 1986.
27-35.
Manly, John Matthews. Writer’s Index. New York: H. Holt and Co., 1923.
Marengo Vaglio, Carla. “Italics in Ulysses.” Hart and Sandulescu 111-121.
Marinetti, F. T.. “Balance of Analogies.” Trans. Laura Wittman. Rainey et al. Futurism
435-36.
---. “Destruction of Syntax—Wireless Imagination—Words-in-Freedom.” Trans.
Lawrence Rainey. Rainey et al Futurism 143-151.
---. “Le manifeste du Futurisme.” Le Figaro (February 20, 1909): 1.
---. “Technical Manifesto.” 1912. Trans. Lawrence Rainey. Rainey et al Futurism 119125.
---. “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism.” 1909. Trans. Lawrence Rainey. Rainey
et al Futurism 49-53.
May, Rachel. “Sensible Elocution: How Translation Works in and upon Punctuation.”
The Translator 3.1 (1997): 1-20.
216
McGann, Jerome J. Black Riders: The Visible Language of Modernism. Princeton:
Princeton UP, 1993.
McBride, Patrizia C. "The Game Of Meaning: Collage, Montage, And Parody In Kurt
Schwitters' Merz." Modernism/Modernity 14.2 (2007): 249-272
McLaughlin, Kevin. Writing in Parts: Imitation and Exchange in Nineteenth-Century
Literature. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1995.
Meyer, Steven. “’The Physiognomy of the Thing’: Sentences and Paragraphs in Stein and
Wittgenstein.” Modernism/modernity 5.1 (1998): 99-116.
Miller, J. Hillis. “Mr. Carmichael and Lily Briscoe: The Rhythm of Creativity in To the
Lighthouse.” Tropes, Parables, Performatives: Essays on Twentieth-Century
Literature. Durham: Duke UP, 1991. 151-170.
Mitchell, W. J. T. Picture Theory: Essays on Visual and Verbal Representation. Chicago:
U of Chicago P, 1994.
---. “Word and Image.” Chapter 4. Critical Terms for Art History. 2nd ed. Eds. Robert S.
Nelson and Richard Shiff. Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 2003. 51-61.
Nebrig, Alexander and Carlos Spoerhase. Die Poesie der Zeichensetzung: Studien zur
Stilistik der Interpunktion. Bern: Peter Lang, 2012.
Nicholson, Shierry Weber. “Translator’s Preface.” Theodor W. Adorno. Notes to
Literature. Vol. 1. Trans. Shierry Weber Nicholson. New York: Columbia UP,
1991. ix-xii.
Nilsson, Nils Ake. “Krucenych’s Poem ‘Dyr bul scyl.” Scando-Slavica-Tomus 24 (1978):
139-148.
217
Ong, Walter. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London: Routledge,
1982.
Paddison, Max. “The Language-Character of Music: Some Motifs in Adorno.” Journal of
the Royal Music Association. 116.2 (1991): 267-279.
"parenthesis, n.". OED Online. March 2013. Oxford University Press. 19 April 2013
<http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/137834?redirectedFrom=parenthesis>.
Parkes, M.B. Pause and Effect: An Introduction to the History of Punctuation in the
West. Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1992.
Partridge, Eric. You Have Point There: A New and Complete Guide to Punctuation.
London: Routledge, 1953.
Patterson, Frank M. “The Brackets in To the Lighthouse.” The English Record. 16
(1927): 28-29.
“period, n.” The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. Eds. Alex Priminger
and T. V. F. Brogan. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1993. 896.
Perloff, Marjorie. “’Grammar in Use’: Wittgenstein/Gertrude Stein/Marinetti.”
Wittgenstein’s Ladder: Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary.
Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996. 83-112.
---. 21st Century Modernism: The “New” Poetics. Malden, Mass. : Blackwell Publishers,
2002
Picabia, Frances. Portrait of Gertrude Stein. 1930. Oil. Beinecke Library, Yale
University, New Haven, CT.
218
Pladott, Dinnah. “The Semiotics of Post-modern Theatre: Gertrude Stein.” Approches de
l’Opéra. Proceedings of the IASPA seminar. Collection Langages, Discours et
Sociétés. Paris: Didier Érudition, 1986: 303-314.
Poe, Edgar Allen. “The Poetic Principle.” Poems and Essays on Poetry. Ed. C.H. Sisson.
Mancester: Fyfield Books, 1995. 88-95.
Pound, Ezra. Canto 53. The Cantos of Ezra Pound. New York: New Directions, 1996.
262-274.
Puchner, Martin. “The Aftershocks of Blast: Manifestos, Satire, and the Rear-Guard of
Modernism.” Bad Modernisms. Eds. Rebecca Walkowitz and X. Place, publisher,
2006. 44-67.
---. Poetry of the Revolution: Marx, Manifestos, and the Avant-Gardes. Princeton:
Princeton UP, 2006.
"punctuation, n.". OED Online. March 2013. Oxford University Press. 14 April 2013
<http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/154629>.
---. The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. Eds. Alex Priminger and T.
V. F. Brogan. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1993. 1006-1007.
Rainey, Lawrence. “Introduction.” Futurism 1-39.
---, Christine Poggi, and Laura Wittman, Eds. Futurism: An Anthology. New Haven, CT:
Yale UP, 2009.
Rasula, Jed. “Make It New.” Modernism/modernity 17.4 (November 2010): 713-733.
Reé, Jonathan. “Funny Voices: Stories, Punctuation, and Personal Identity.” New Literary
History 21 (1990): 1039-1058.
“Reporter Tells in Stein Style the Stein Style.” Chicago Daily Tribune. Oct 25 1934: 17.
219
Rosar, William H. “Film Music and Heinz Werner’s Theory of Physiognomic
Perception.” Psychomusicology 13 (1994): 154-165.
Ross, Stephen, Ed. Modernism and Theory. London: Routledge, 2009.
Rössler, Paul. “satz:zeichen—syntax:design.” Andersschreiben: Formen, Funktionen,
Traditionen. Eds. Britt-Marie Schuster and Doris Tophinke. Philologische Studien
und Quellen. Heft 236. Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag. 381-396.
Saenger, P. Space between Words: The Origins of Silent Reading. Stanford: Stanford UP,
1997.
Schneider, Ulrich. “Mediatization in ‘Aeolus’ and ‘Oxen of the Sun.’ in van Boheemen
15-22.
Scholes, Robert. “Some Observations of the Text of Dubliners: ‘The Dead.’” In Search
of James Joyce. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1992. 17-34.
---. Paradoxy of Modernism. New Haven: Yale UP, 2006.
---. “x/y Joyce and Modernist Ideology.” In Search of James Joyce. Urbana: U of Illinois
P, 1992. 161-177.
Schriftgiesser, Karl. “Gibberish of Gertrude Stein Seen As Attempt To Freshen
Language.” The Washington Post (Dec 23 1943): B5.
Schulte-Schulte-Sasse, Jochen. “Theory of Modernism versus Theory of the AvantGarde.” Foreword. Bürger Theory of the Avant-Garde vii-xlvii.
Schulze, Robin Gail. “Design in Motion: Words, Music, and the Search for Coherence in
the Works of Virginia Woolf and Arnold Schoenberg.” Studies in the Literary
Imagination 25.2 (1992): 5-22.
220
Schwitters, Kurt. “Die Zwiebel.” Prosa des Expressionismus. Ed. Fritz Martini.
Stuttgart: Reclam, 1970.
---. “The Onion Merz Poem 8.” Trans. Harriet Watts Assemblage 1 (1986): 84-89.
<http://www.jstor.org/stable/3171056>.
“Scissors-and-paste.” in "scissors, n.". OED Online. March 2013. Oxford University
Press. 19 April 2013
<http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/172777?redirectedFrom=scissors+and+paste>.
“Scissors-and-paste.” Merriam-Webster. www.merriam-webster.com
Senn, Fritz. “The Potency of Error (exemplified in Joyce’s Ulysses).” Variants: the
Journal of the European Society for Textual Scholarship Amsterdam: Rodopi,
2005. 241- (14).
Senner, Wayne M., Ed. The Origins of Writing. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1989.
Serça, Isabelle. Esthétique de la Ponctuation. Paris: Gallimard, 2012.
Shakespeare, William. Romeo and Juliet. Global media, 2007.
Showalter, Elaine. The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 18301980. New York: Penguin, 1987.
Sorum, Eve. “Taking Note: Text and Context in Virginia Woolf’s ‘Mr. Bennett and Mrs.
Brown.’” Woolf Studies Annual 13 (2007): 137-158.
Spilka, Mark. Virginia Woolf’s Quarrel with Grieving. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1980.
Stein, Gertrude. “Composition as Explanation.” Writings, 1903-1932. New York: Library
of America, 1998.
---. How to Write. 1931. New York: Dover, 1975.
---. Paris France. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1940.
221
---. “Poetry and Grammar.” Lectures in America. 1935. Boston: Beacon, 1985.
---. “’The Pity of Schools,’ Says Gertrude Stein.” The Washington Post Mar 17 1935: 13.
Steiner, Wendy. “Introduction.” In Stein Lectures in America. ix-xxvii.
Suleiman, Susan. “The Parenthetical Function in Á la recherche du temps perdu.” PMLA
92.3 (1977): 458-470.
Summey, George. Modern Punctuation. New York: Oxford University Press, 1919.
Szendy, Peter., A coups de points. La ponctuation comme expérience. Paris: Editions de
Minuit, 2013.
Thorndike, E.L. “The Psychology of Punctuation.” American Journal of Psychology 61
(1948).
Tiedemann, Rolf. “Editorische Nachbemerkung.” In Adorno Musikalische Schriften 673681.
Trotsky, Leon. 1905. New York: Random House, 1971.
“Unwesen.” Oxford German Dictionary. Third Edition. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008.
---. Wahrig Deutsches Wörterbuch. Bertelsmann Lexikon Institut, 2008.
van Boheemen, Christine, Ed. Joyce, Modernity, and its Mediation. European Joyce
Studies 1. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1989.
Van den Berg, Sara. “Marking His Place: Ben Jonson’s Punctuation.” Early Modern
Literary Studies 1.3 (1995): 1-25. <http://www.library.ubc.ca/emls/013/bergjons.html>
Virgil. The Aeneid. Trans. Robert Fitzgerald. New York: Vintage Books, 1983.
222
Walsh, Michael. “A(dorno) to Z(izek): From the Culture Industry to the Joyce Industry,
and Beyond.” Joyce and Popular Culture. Ed. R. B. Kershner. Gainesville: U of
Florida P, 1996. 39-48.
Watson, Cecilia. “Points of Contention: Rethinking the Past, Present, and Future of
Punctuation.” Critical Inquiry 38 (Spring 2012): 649-672.
Weber, Samuel. Institution and Interpretation. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2001.
Weinstein, Norman. Gertrude Stein and the Literature of the Modern Consciousness.
New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing, 1970.
Wilson, Edmund. Axel’s Castle: A Study in the Imaginative Literature of 1870-1930.
New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1953.
Woolf, Virginia. A Writer’s Diary. Ed. Leonard Woolf. London: Hogarth Press, 1972.
---. “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown.” The Captain’s Death Bed and Other Essays. New
York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1950.
---. Moments of Being: Unpublished Autobiographical Writings. Ed. Jeanne Shulkind.
London: Publisher, 1976.
---. “Notes for Writing.” To the Lighthouse: The Original Holograph Draft.
---. “On Craftsmanship.” BBC April 29, 1937.
---. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Vols. III and IV. Eds. Nigel Nicholson and Joanne
Trautmann. New York-London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977-1979.
---. To the Lighthouse. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1990.
---. To the Lighthouse: The Original Holograph Draft. Ed. Susan Dick. Toronto and
Buffalo: U of Toronto P, 1982.
223
Yanoshevsky, Galia. “Three Decades of Writing on Manifesto: The Making of Genre.”
Poetics Today 30.2 (Summer 2009): 257-286.
Ziegler, Rosemarie. “Aleksej Krucenych als Sprachkritiker.” Wiener Slavistisches
Jahrbuch Ljubjana, 1978.