I am grateful to Sam Mattern-Parkes for technical assistance.
1When Hermione Roddice starts rumbling on about knowledge and education in the “Breadalby” chapter of Women in Love (1920), Rupert Birkin “look[s] at her in a white fury” (WL 85). Birkin’s violent response matches the look of loathing that Gudrun Brangwen directs at another guest, a “young, athletic-looking” Miss Bradley (83), who has made the mistake of assenting to Gerald Crich’s comparison of education with gymnastics (85). The text itself breaks out into a rash of dashes:
“Well—” rumbled Hermione, “I don’t know. To me the pleasure of knowing is so great, so wonderful—nothing has meant so much to me in all life, as certain knowledge—no, I am sure—nothing.”
“What knowledge, for example, Hermione?” asked [her brother] Alexander.
Hermione lifted her face and rumbled—
“m- m- m- I don’t know. — — — —But one thing was the stars, when I really understood something about the stars. One feels so uplifted, so unbounded— — — — — —” (85)
2The first of Hermione’s short speeches is punctuated by four long em-dashes; the second, by one sequence of short en-dashes followed by two extended sequences of em-dashes—the first of those consisting of four, the second of six. The printed page looks a bit like Morse code, or a nonsensical version of it.
3The effect is extraordinary, but it raises some tricky questions. Is it meant for a silent reading eye? Do the dashes indicate the lengths of different pauses in Hermione’s speech? Or does Lawrence expect his readers to sound out his dashes—and if so, how? The presence of some such expectation is indicated when, a few short paragraphs later, Lawrence mimics the way another Breadalby guest, the Italian contessa Palestra, mispronounces “Darien” as “Dariayn” (WL 86). As for sounding out his dashes, one hint is provided by several narratorial remarks on Hermione’s convulsiveness: of the twenty-seven times that forms of the word “convulsive” occur in Women in Love, thirteen refer to her. In which case, the last of the four paragraphs might go like this: “m- m- m- I don’t know.— — — —. But one thing was the stars, when I really understood something about the stars. One feels so uplifted, so unbounded— — — — — —” (85).1 But the stage-directions here are less clear than in other passages where dashes are employed, as in the later chapter titled “Gudrun in the Pompadour” when Halliday performs Birkin’s letter in a mock-clerical “sing-song” (WL 383). The directions are less clear, too, than the implicit guidance offered in passages that employ dashes more conventionally to evoke inarticulacy, or the hesitancies of speech, or the drift or indeterminacy of thought, all interpretative possibilities canvassed by Anne Toner and other scholars of punctuation, whose examples are often taken from the likes of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Charles Dickens, and Laurence Sterne. Sterne, pre-eminently, has been cited as an author who uses dashes to give his prose a conversational effect.2
- 3 See, for example, Lawrence and Comedy, a collection of essays assembled by Eggert and Worthen.
4What are the grounds for imagining that sequences of dashes in novels, a modern genre usually read in silence and alone, invite sounding out in a manner more often associated with dramatic speech and many (though not necessarily all) kinds of poetry? I will approach such questions by examining a few of the numerous instances in Women in Love where the narrative breaks out—or breaks down—into dashes. This novel is hardly alone among Lawrence’s works in experimenting with punctuation. The sequences of dashes in the angry marital correspondence that concludes the early, posthumously published story “New Eve and Old Adam” provide another striking example. But the punctuation of Women in Love remains unparalleled in Lawrence’s oeuvre. One result of attending to such a particular feature of this weighty text will be the emergence of some aspects of Lawrencian satire and comedy, especially awkward comedy, that have eluded critical attention.3 At the same time, I will make a case for considering Lawrence as an unjustly neglected modern master of dash-work.
5Lawrence enters the history of punctuation at a very late stage, when standardization was already quite advanced. The use of dashes had been standardized in the nineteenth century by grammarians, Anne Toner notes (120), resulting in the modern en- and em-dash rule. The adoption of Morse code for international use in 1851 also contributed to standardization, while the use of dashes was curbed further by telegrams and news journalism (Toner 131). These developments, accelerated by modern editing practices, have been lamented by the American author Nicholson Baker in a review of Malcolm Parkes’s indispensable history of punctuation, Pause and Effect (1993). “The nineteenth century didn’t think the dash on its own was nearly enough,” Baker writes, before surveying the widespread use by Victorian novelists of what he calls “dash-hybrids.” Baker coined three new terms —“the commash ,— , the semi-colash ;— , and the colash :—” — to designate the three “great dash-hybrids,” the “disappearance” of which was “the single most momentous change in twentieth-century punctuation” (82). Sadly, Baker’s terms haven’t caught on (none appears in the OED), but they should have done, and I shall proceed as if they had.
6According to another historian of the subject, Edward A. Levenston, punctuation has typically been used in three ways in the West: phonological, grammatical, and semantic. “The first two,” Levenston explains, “relate, directly or indirectly, to aspects of the flow of speech. The last relates to meanings in the text unavailable to the listener” (65). Although the “primary purpose of punctuation is to compensate for the deficiencies of writing systems” (63), it “overcompensates for the inability of writing systems to provide the same range of information as speech.” Consequently, its “secondary function is to provide additional information not directly available from the flow of speech” (65). From the time of the ancient Greeks to the Renaissance, Levenston observes, punctuation was “basically rhetorical, a guide to reading aloud”; in England, Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights used it to establish and vary “the pace of dramatic utterance” (66). But even as punctuation began to be used more logically, as a “guide to sense,” English literature persisted in using it rhetorically, “as a guide to performance” (71). Victorian novels “continue[d] to be punctuated for rhetorical effect,” Levenston adds, quoting a passage in Jane Eyre (1847) that “seems designed to be read aloud” (70; original italics). Rhetorical and semantic approaches to punctuation “have been interacting throughout the centuries,” Levenston notes. “The date of composition may help you to understand which trend is dominant. But you must be sensitive to both” (71-72).
- 4 “Of course—panted Gerald” (playlist).
- 5 “Wha—a—ah-h-h—” (playlist).
7Sometimes it seems clear enough that Lawrence is using long dashes rhetorically in Women Love, as in a narratorial comment on the “long spaces between their words” as Birkin and Gerald Crich wrestle in the library at Shortlands (WL 272). In fact, the comment is somewhat redundant, since Lawrence has written on the previous page: “‘Of course—‘panted Gerald, ‘I didn’t have to be rough—with you—I had to keep back—my force—’” (271).4 Similarly, when a “horrible choking rattle” issues from the throat of Gerald’s father, Thomas Crich, in “Death and Love,” it’s plain that the combination of long and short dashes is meant to guide readers in imagining what this last effort at speech, or expression of pain, sounds like: “Wha—a—ah-h-h—” (333).5 In a comic interlude featuring Gerald asking a tipsy collier the way to the Beldover family home of his beloved Gudrun, Lawrence works differences of class, speech, and lucidity in a manner that only he could pull off:
“Somerset Drive!—I’ve heerd o’ such a place, but I couldn’t for my life say wheer it is.—Who might you be wanting?”
“Mr Brangwen—William Brangwen.”
“William Brangwen—?—?”
“Who teaches at the Grammar School, at Willey Green—his daughter teaches there too.”
“OO—O—O—Oh, Brangwen! Now I’ve got you. Of course, William Brangwen! […]” (339)
8The repeated sequence of an em-dash followed by a question mark may signify not only the collier’s confusion but also the sound-effects of his inebriation (hiccups, perhaps). A quite different, distinctly moving episode employs long dashes to convey Birkin’s attempt to articulate his unprecedented feelings for Ursula: “I know you don’t want physical things by themselves.—But, I want you to give me—to give your spirit to me—that golden light which is you—which you don’t know—give it me—” (249). The difficulty, too, of winning her assent: “‘You don’t even love me,’ she cried. ‘I do,’ he said angrily. ‘But I want—’” (250).
9In extended descriptions of his characters’ thoughts, Lawrence’s intent to use punctuation as semantic guidance seems equally plain. When Gerald realizes, late in the novel, that “Gudrun was sufficient unto herself, closed round and completed, like a thing in a case,” he is thrown into “a terrible chaos”:
And his brain turned to nought at the idea. It was a state of nothingness.—On the other hand, he might give in, and fawn to her.—Or, finally, he might kill her.—Or he might become just indifferent, purposeless, dissipated, momentaneous.—But his nature was too serious, not gay enough or subtle enough for mocking licentiousness. (WL 445)
10Here, the sequence of full-stops conjoined to em-dashes looks a little like Morse code to a reading eye, but it also conveys how Gerald’s mind zig-zags in distress. The punctuation certainly shapes the way the passage is read aloud, but the effect on performance doesn’t conflict with the semantic effect (or shouldn’t do so). Rather, the performative and semantic should agree quite happily. This is a very simple case, of course, because the character himself isn’t speaking his thoughts, he’s just thinking them.
11Other cases are less obvious. On the first page of the novel, Lawrence punctuates Gudrun’s second contribution to this famous sisterly discussion of marriage with dashes that communicate both rhetorically and semantically but not necessarily in the same way: “Well,’ she said, ironically, ‘it usually means one thing!—But don’t you think, anyhow, you’d be—’ she darkened slightly—‘in a better position that you are in now?’” (WL 7). The commas, between “said” and “ironically” in the narratorial commentary, for example, or between “think” and “anyhow” in Gudrun’s speech, seem designed to heighten a reader’s attention to the relation between pause and effect, so as to convey not only how the character says what she says but also the hesitations or contrary thoughts at work between or under her words—the sense of a “struggle for verbal consciousness,” perhaps, combined with another struggle simultaneously not to say what she’s thinking (“Foreword,” WL 486). Lawrence’s combination of an exclamation mark with one of his dashes (let’s call it, in the spirit of Nicholson Baker, an exclamash!) clearly introduces a note of performative emphasis. But the dashes framing Gudrun’s next sentence —itself broken by another narratorial comment describing a change in facial expression— reintroduce the note of hesitation.
12Another challenging case presents itself when Gudrun talks to herself in an extended passage late in the novel. The primary subject of her reflections is Gerald. But over the next two pages her mind drifts onto—or lurches toward—other subjects: Birkin, Loerke, the allure of Dresden, the shared dismalness of the mining-town of Beldover (from which Gerald’s family derives its wealth) and the great house of Shortlands (where they live).
- 6 “Shortlands!” (playlist).
“Shortlands!—Heavens! Think of living there, one week, then the next, and then the third— —
“No, I won’t think of it—it is too much— —” (WL 464)6
13A glancing comparison with Morse code seems apt here, because as the character experiences intimations of monotony, the author seems to want readers to measure out the pauses indicated by two identical sequences of dashes (one dash followed by two) in a mechanical manner fitting the mechanical matter: “The thought of the mechanical succession of day following day, day following day, ad infinitum, was one of the things that made her heart palpitate with a real approach of madness” (464). What lets readers and Gudrun herself know that she’s close to “madness” is the way her palpitating heart resists the pace-making effect induced by syntactical repetition. In the next two paragraphs, Lawrence increases the pressure:
- 7 “Oh, how she suffered” (playlist).
Oh, how she suffered, lying there alone, confronted by the terrible clock, with its eternal tick-tack. All life, all life resolved itself into this: tick-tack, tick-tack, tick-tack; then the striking of the hour; then the tick-tack, tick-tack, and the twitching of the clock-fingers.
Gerald could not save her from it. He, his body, his motion, his life—it was the same ticking, the same twitching across the dial, a horrible, mechanical twitching forward over the face of the hours. What were his kisses, his embraces. She could hear their tick-tack, tick-tack.
Ha—ha—she laughed to herself, so frightened that she was trying to laugh it off—ha—ha, how maddening it was, to be sure, to be sure! (464-465)7
14Represented on the printed page as typographically identical, Gudrun’s silent laughs feel forced: “Ha—ha—[…] ha—ha—”. They are signs of the mental strain experienced by a character whose desire to rebel is quelled by a sense of the inevitable: the inevitability of mechanical time, of the increasing mechanization of modern life, of inevitability itself. Hermione’s extravagantly punctuated pauses look positively anarchic by comparison—except that, even there, the narratorial references to her convulsiveness suggest that something equally mechanical is afoot. Mechanism, to be sure, is the name of the game: the next turn taken by Gudrun’s mind is to wonder “with a fleeting self-conscious motion” whether she would be “surprised, on rising in the morning, to realise that her hair had turned white” (465).
15Filling another two closely-packed pages, Gudrun’s thoughts alight on the image of the wheel-barrow to describe the essential instrumentality of Gerald’s character: “The wheel-barrow—the one humble wheel—the unit of the firm” (466). Long dashes bind together—or do they push apart?—three discrete phrases composing one sentence-fragment—or are they three separate fragments?—printed on the same line of text as they appear in the Cambridge edition. Or is a reader to imagine these words and dashes as forming the circle of a wheel, or the words as a wheel with the dashes as axles? After rounding out the paragraph with a second fragment of seventy-five words that explicates in proto-Beckettian style the permutations of the wheel-barrow metaphor, Lawrence closes Gudrun’s meditations in the next paragraph with another comparison of man with machine, this time a chronometer:
Poor Gerald, such a lot of little wheels to his make-up! He was more intricate than a chronometer-watch. But oh heavens, what weariness! What weariness, God above! A chronometer-watch—a beetle—her soul fainted with utter ennui, from the thought. So many wheels to count and consider and calculate! Enough, enough—there was an end to man’s capacity for complications, even. Or perhaps there was no end. (466)
16As Gudrun’s mind glimpses an “end” to the incessant complication upon complication of mechanical modernity only to check back (“Or perhaps there was no end”), the author feels close to the character in her indictment of Gerald. As with Hermione’s convulsiveness, the long dashes here communicate something to do with the connection between the natural and the artificial: “A chronometer-watch—a beetle—[…]” As the ticking of the watch is likened to the taps of an insect, nature itself is imagined as reduced to a simple mechanical function.
17As for Gerald himself, the next paragraph begins: “Meanwhile Gerald sat in his room, reading” (466). What has he been reading—Gudrun’s thoughts? Women in Love? Initially “stupefied with arrested desire” when Gudrun leaves him alone in his bedroom at their Alpine inn, then “horrified” by the prospect of sleeplessness “confronting” him, Gerald keeps “terror” at bay by reading “in a state of rigid unconsciousness” through the lonely night until, “weary and disgusted in spirit, disgusted most of all with himself, he slept for two hours” and then “got up, hard and full of energy” (466-467). Mon semblable, mon frère: have you been reading Women in Love? But if so, which Women in Love would it be?
18The edition, of course, makes a difference—and, again, Lawrence hints strongly at the need to attend to such details later in the scene with which this essay began when Hermione’s guests start chattering about a translation of Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons (1862): “An old American edition,” Birkin chimes in (WL 87). Presumably the translation concerned is that published in 1867 by Eugene Schuyler, Turgenev’s first American translator, not Constance Garnett’s version, published as Fathers and Children in 1895; certainly it isn’t Gustave Charpentier’s Pères et Fils of 1863. The details matter, because they sharpen the sting of the satire that Lawrence, with Ursula Brangwen’s help, aims at Alexander Roddice. Hearing the contessa read the famous sentence, “Bazarov came to the door and threw his eyes hurriedly down the street,” this flower of hereditary-cum-intellectual aristocracy mistranslates from the wrong language:
“Ha! of course—translated from the French,” said Alexander, with a fine declamatory voice. “Bazarov ouvra la porte et jeta les yeux dans la rue.”
He looked brightly round the company.
“I wonder what the ‘hurriedly’ was,” said Ursula. (WL 87)
19Satire’s sting sizzles sometimes.
- 8 Edited by John Worthen and Lindeth Vasey and based on the typescript Lawrence sent to his agent J.B (...)
- 9 Edited by David Farmer, John Worthen and Lindeth Vasey, and based on the corrected final typescript (...)
20In the Cambridge volume titled The First “Women in Love” (based on Lawrence’s 1916 typescript),8 the punctuation of the specific excerpt with which I started is identical to that given in the text from which I have been quoting, the Cambridge edition published as Women in Love (based on the 1917 typescript that Lawrence revised in 1919).9 But the text looks quite different here in, for example, the Modern Library edition published in New York in 1922, which derived from the 1920 Seltzer edition used as the base-text for later editions by Charles L. Ross (Penguin, 1982) and David Bradshaw (Oxford World’s Classics, 1998):
- 10 “Well—rumbled Hermione” (playlist). The “Textual Apparatus” of the Cambridge Women in Love records (...)
“Well—” rumbled Hermione, “I don’t know. To me the pleasure of knowing is so great, so wonderful—nothing has meant so much to me in all life, as certain knowledge—no, I am sure—nothing.”
“What knowledge, for example, Hermione?” asked Alexander.
Hermione lifted her face and rumbled—
“M—m—m—I don’t know..... But one thing was the stars, when I really understood something about the stars. One feels so uplifted, so unbounded ......” (96 [1922])10
21The text looks different and, by implication, sounds different, even if only to a silently reading eye or a quietly mumbling eye, but also to a listening ear when the passage is read aloud. The first and third paragraphs look identical to the text in the Cambridge editions; so does the second paragraph, which in any case is punctuated more simply by quotation marks, two commas, a question mark, and a full stop. It’s the fourth paragraph that deviates from the Cambridge versions. The first letter of the little rumbling with which it begins (“M—m—m—”) is capitalized, suggesting the start of a new thought, and suppressing the sense of continuation of previous thought signalled by the lower-case “m” of the Cambridge texts. The upper-case “M” also feels louder, so that the dashes and lower-case letters that follow imply the musical effect of diminuendo. And the dashes are all long em-dashes, which, to my reading ear, calls up something more like an audible murmur than a mumble poised between audibility and inaudibility. Visual variety is lost, too, although the substitution of two rows of dots (one of five, the other of six) for the sequences of four and six long dashes introduces variety in another way that again evokes Morse code, up to a point.
22Or, if not Morse, then the prose of one of Anne Toner’s exemplary practitioners of creative punctuation, and Lawrence’s early sponsor, Ford Madox Ford (Hueffer), who used ellipses to conjure various effects including those of drift, incompletion, fragmentation in thought, speech, or experience; cacophonies of voices, cacophonies of literal sound on the battlefield or figurative sound in the private chamber of a tortured mind, surprising connection, lost connection—gaps, holes, craters, voids—but also freedom from all that; new possibility. The Ford effect is strengthened in the Ross and Bradshaw editions, which standardize these two ellipses as three series of dots:
“M—m—m—I don’t know … But one thing was the stars, when I really understood something about the stars. One feels so uplifted, so unbounded […]” (OWL 88; PWL 141)
- 11 In the Penguin paperback edition of Parade’s End, the Contents page gives the title of the third no (...)
23According to the Textual Apparatus provided by the editors of the Cambridge Women in Love (WL 598), the first American edition renders the first ellipsis as four dots and the second as three dots, with the first English edition rendering the second ellipsis as six dots, all variations that weaken the Ford connection. Weaken it, though, without breaking it: editions of Ford’s novels aren’t always entirely consistent either.11
24In The Stuff of Literature, Levenston celebrates Tristram Shandy (1759) as the “most typographic of all novels,” in part because Sterne discovers how dashes may be “invaluable for enacting the drama of inhibited impulse, of the sudden interruptions and oscillations of thought and feeling” (73). The “iconic” punctuation of the “Eumaeus” episode in Joyce’s Ulysses and the “absence of punctuation” in “Penelope” also earn Levenston’s praise (74-77). And in Pause and Effect, Parkes—excellent on this as on so many things—praises the “mimetic” uses to which the dash and other graphic features have been put by English novelists from Samuel Richardson to Virginia Woolf. Lawrence, as I noted earlier, has been absent from these erudite histories of punctuation. But the uniquely generative dash-work of Women in Love suggests that Lawrence deserves his own place in this experimental pantheon.
25Punctuation not only affects the size of thoughts in Lawrence’s fiction. It moulds their shape, their texture. It gives thoughts their relative volatility, elasticity, mass, volume. Lawrence’s dashes affect how a text looks to his readers, and how it sounds—how it sounds to reading eyes, or to minds imagining reading the words aloud or imagining listening to them, as well as to the physical ears of a reader who actually speaks them and a listener who actually hears them. His dashes let readers hear silence, feel it, see it. Lawrence makes it possible to listen for the sounds and silences under sounds and silences—the thoughts under words, words under thoughts, voices under voices, or inside, beside, behind them.