Punctuation: Art, Politics, and Play (review)

The opening “For(e)thought” to Jennifer DeVere Brody’s Punctuation: Art, Politics, and Play includes a note of regret. “I regret,” Brody writes, “that my coursework for the doctorate degree in literature did not require courses on the history of language, let alone classes in linguistics, paleography, typography, or printing” (23–24). As disciplinary as it is intellectual, this sense of disappointment, of an opportunity lost, offers a way into Brody’s wide-ranging argument about punctuation, its variable contexts and significations, its mundane operations, and whimsical performances. For in her attention to a host of punctuation marks—dots as periods and ellipses, colons and semicolons, question, exclamation, and quotation marks, even the unremarkable hyphen—Brody insists that punctuation matters, that these marks on (and off) the page are not only readable, but necessarily so if one is to account for the meaning-making that takes place in and around language.

Brody’s statement of regret suggests an investment in what Jerome McGann has, since the publication of The Textual Condition, called the bibliographic. A term ripe with bookish resonance, McGann’s bibliographic describes those features that comprise the material conditions of textuality. Writing in 1991, McGann declares that

We must turn our attention to much more than the formal and linguistic features of poems or other imaginative fictions. We must attend to textual materials which are not regularly studied by those interested in “poetry”: to typefaces, bindings, book prices, page format, and all those textual phenomena usually regarded as (at best) peripheral to “poetry” or “the text as such.”

(13)

The physical facts of textuality: these demand illumination precisely because their contributions to textual meaning are significant. If McGann’s point was to begin to provide such illumination, or to suggest how that illumination might occur, Brody seeks to demonstrate that punctuation, so often invisible—and incidental—to the reading eye, is no less crucial to the material life of language. When she observes of punctuation that “it may be neither here nor there and yet somehow . . . is everywhere,” Brody’s turn to location for the (omni)presence that goes unmarked is not surprising. The air of revolution that suffuses McGann’s claims underlies Brody’s rhetoric as well. To mark punctuation is to demystify the naturalization of print that punctuation has all along afforded.

The scope of this demystification is apparent in the diversity of Brody’s analyses. Methodologically, Brody claims cultural, literary, performance, and visual studies as the purview in which Punctuation works. For her, the “body shows” of Yayoi Kusama, whose works feature human bodies painted with dots, and the three-dimensional sculptures of Richard Artschwager, whose pieces include stand-alone question marks, have counterparts in the poetry of Harryette Mullen and the performances of Victor Borge. To the extent that the punctuation marks displayed on full-page spreads in Adbusters magazine recall advertising and the practice of texting, they perform the significance of global connectivity. A moment from a Samuel Taylor Coleridge essay embodies the insight that emoticons now suggest: affect resides in punctuation. Or, as Brody puts it, “human ‘being’ leaps off the page when we see a question mark, a period, or exclamation mark” (6). Meanwhile, Truman Capote’s comment that stylists obsess over “the placement [sic] of a comma, the weight of a semicolon” (5) weighs quite differently in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee, where literalized punctuation—marks are rendered as words—captures “the struggle for speech” that Cha’s displaced protagonist must undergo (16). And Ralph Ellison, whose repeated ellipses in Invisible Man index the uncertainty of time and identity, becomes a dissenting voice to the “assimilationist” stance Strunk and White take in predicting the “steady evolution” of hyphenates into unified words (89).¹

And yet Punctuation is not only a treatise, a subversive guide to the propriety endorsed by manuals like Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style. As her subtitle suggests, Brody is as invested in play as she is in politics, and...