Semicolon

by Cecelia Watson

  On the other hand, Henry’s famous older brother not only allowed for vagueness, he celebrated it. “It is in short, the reinstatement of the vague and inarticulate to its proper place in our mental life which I am so anxious to press on the attention,” he wrote in his magnum opus, The Principles of Psychology. So often we think it is the business of science always to be exact, but William James had rather the opposite idea when he set about founding the Psychology Department at Harvard. “The boundary line of the mental is certainly vague,” he urged.

  It is better not to be pedantic, but to let the science be as vague as its subject, and include such phenomena as these if by so doing we can throw any light on the main business at hand. . . . At a certain stage in the development of every science a degree of vagueness is what best consists with fertility.

  William searched for ways to unfold possibility in his writing. “Use the word ‘field’ here for ‘datum’—it is conveniently ambiguous,” he corrected himself in the margins of lecture notes. He used “vague” as a compliment when evaluating psychological terminology like “idea.” William’s revisions opened windows; Henry’s revisions slammed doors.

  The semicolon, as the first version of Isabel Archer and Caspar Goodwood’s kiss shows, can certainly support vagueness. Indeed, that’s one of the charges leveled at it by semicolon hater Professor Paul Robinson. The semicolon, Robinson contends, is frequently “used to gloss over an imprecise thought.” Semicolons, he goes on, “place two clauses in some kind of relation to one another but relieve the writer of saying exactly what that relation is.”*

  Poetic omissions of the type Henry James produced at his best would certainly fall into the category of “imprecise thoughts.” A lot of people, not just Robinson, find an imprecise thought uncomfortable: to these types, it looks like a leak to plug rather than an opportunity to let thoughts flow. Some of those leak-pluggers end up clogging up the works professionally, by becoming analytic philosophers. The analytic philosopher (there are other types of philosophers—or, as I usually think of them, other lunch-table cliques in philosophy) thinks of himself as clear, objective, and precise, and loves to start sentences with phrases like It is obvious . . . or It is clear that. . . . Vagueness, especially deliberate vagueness, is apt to cause these types to hyperventilate. In spite of this, analytic philosophers consider a master of strategic vaguery, Ludwig Wittgenstein, one of their founding fathers. Wittgenstein sometimes wrote in aphorisms, and even those who claim him as part of the analytic camp admit he was “exotic” and had a writing style that “transcends the limits of academic philosophy.” Occasionally, the temptation to try to iron out Wittgenstein’s ambiguities and bring him in line with more status-quo philosophical writing became overwhelming for his translators, many of whom were coming from the analytic camp themselves. Check out what G. E. M. Anscombe perpetrates when she translates this fantastically vague semicolon from Wittgenstein’s German into English. Here’s the original:

  Der Philosoph behandelt eine Frage; wie eine Krankheit.

  Which you could translate so as to preserve the ambiguity in it:

  The philosopher treats a question; like an illness.

  But Anscombe renders it:

  The philosopher’s treatment of a question is like the treatment of an illness.

  What a different sentence that is. Gone is what German Philosophy expert Erich Heller called a “profound” semicolon, a semicolon that “marks a frontier between a thought and a triviality.” Could Anscombe just not stand the uncertainty in it, and the multiple possible meanings that that uncertainty permits? I guess the analytic philosopher treats ambiguity; like an illness.*

  Henry James, at his best, could stand uncertainties. So often his early writing explored what is only imagined or hinted at between two people. Of the first version of Portrait of a Lady, one of James’s reviewers wrote, “As a rule Mr. James rejects symphonies, and attempts no harmonizing conclusions. He leaves us usually tantalized, half angry with an end which is left to our imagination.” That was precisely his strength. Of the Tartarean options, I definitely prefer Tantalizing ambiguities to Sisyphean semicolons.

  But that reviewer of James is correct that uncertainty, ambiguity, and vagueness do put a certain burden on the reader. Or maybe it’s better to say: they highlight the fact that writing is an exchange between at least two people: writer and reader, or sometimes writer and the writer’s own future self. There is nothing wrong with trying to be as precise as possible in your writing, or with trying to be clear; those goals are often productive and have their place. But I don’t think it’s such a bad thing sometimes to be engaged in the practice of working things out in words, of having a conversation. Ambiguity can be useful and productive, and it can make some room for new ideas. It can help the reader create something out of the materials the writer provides. As we’ve seen in Chapters Four and Five, even writing meant to be crystal-clear contains points that can be argued, so it’s worth thinking constructively about what productive possibilities ambiguity allows and how we can tell when an ambiguity is useful rather than just pretending we can eliminate it if we only try hard enough.

  Ambiguity can be so unsettling in part because when it comes down to it, all writing is an act of trust. As a reader, you trust a writer to give you some payoff for your efforts. You trust the writer to be telling you the truth, or trying. In turn, as a writer—of an email, a letter, a tweet, a book—you hope that your reader will be generous in interpreting your words. You hope you’ll be taken seriously when you want to be. You hope to be understood. Trying to eliminate ambiguity (however doomed a task that is) can at least soothe that anxiety a bit. But art that allows the imagination to participate in it—the kind of art Henry James’s early novels displayed—is a beautiful testament to the value that can lie in ambiguity. Uncertainty, after all, is very human, and can call forth our best human virtues. “If you only trust me, how little you’ll be disappointed!” Goodwood says to Isabel, a line that James left unrevised in Portrait of a Lady. If only you’d trust us readers, Henry, how little you might be disappointed too.

  THE LINE AND THE DASH: WHY USE THE SEMICOLON NOW?

  Perhaps because of the persistent criticism his novels faced, Henry James did not give interviews. His reticence was well-known, and so it was a surprise and delight for a journalist for The New York Times to be granted the opportunity to conduct James’s very first interview in 1915, when he was seventy-two years old. James was prodded out of his silence by his desire to make public the charitable work of the American Volunteer Motor Ambulance Corps. Anxious to make certain his thoughts were represented properly, James spoke “with much consideration” and asked that “his punctuation as well as his words should be noted.” Perhaps emboldened by James’s having raised the topic himself, the interviewer broke from the designated topic of the discussion mid-interview. “Are you not famous, Mr. James,” he asked, “for the use of dashes?” The response was sharp and swift.

  “Dash my fame!” he impatiently replied. “And remember, please, that dogmatizing about punctuation is exactly as foolish as dogmatizing about any other form of communication with the reader. All such forms depend on the kind of thing one is doing and the kind of effect one intends to produce. Dashes, it seems almost platitudinous to say, have their particular representative virtue, their quickening face, and, to put it roughly, strike both the familiar and the empathic note, when those are the notes required, with a felicity beyond either the comma or the semicolon; although indeed a fine sense of the semicolon, like any sort of sense at all for the pluperfect tense and the subjunctive mood, on which the whole perspective in a sentence may depend, seems anything but common.”

  Today it’s hard to imagine an author being famous for dashes, as Henry James was. In his work, the dash—cutting a path through most any page you turn to—is like a vector arrow charting the swift forward trajectory of a character’s thoughts, or sometimes just the opposite—an arm outstretched as a barrier to keep
one thought from tumbling into the next, so quickly do they spill out on the page. In his private letters, the dash was conscripted to signal a change of topic the way we might use a paragraph indent.—James’s multipurpose use of the dash now looks remarkably modern, but he certainly didn’t use it reflexively out of lack of thinking through the options, the way many of us are guilty of deploying it today. It’s too bad, really: the dash can be brilliant. The electrifying German Romantic writer Heinrich von Kleist used the dash in his 1808 short story “Die Marquise von O . . .” to capture the forgotten space of time during which the unconscious Marquise is raped. It is a masterpiece of mimesis and ironic understatement. Nearly every line of Emily Dickinson’s later poetry is sliced with a dash or two. Nicholson Baker was fond of a dash followed by a comma, a hybrid mark he dubbed “the dashtard.” All these uses of the dash represented deliberation and careful choice.

  But the dash nowadays is the Punctuation Mark of First Resort, able to take the place of commas, colons, semicolons, and periods. We now live in the Era of the Dash. Dashes are dashed off right and left by millions of thumbs sweeping fleetly across millions of mobile phones. A couple years ago I gave up using the dash for Lent* when I noticed a page of my writing was downright staticky with horizontal lines. I wore out my backspace key sticking to my resolution. The dash is so easy, so quick, and—when deployed in the way we often do now—so conveniently empty of meaning.

  It’s easy enough to blame all of this on the evils of technology, and to act as though the world is fundamentally changing, fracturing, and getting worse; in that reading of reality, the homogenizing force of the dash is a symptom of this larger decline. In convincing ourselves of this, we march backwards in the footsteps of our ancestors. Thoreau built his cabin alone on Walden Pond to “live deep” away from the buzzing city over 150 years ago. The world has always seemed too noisy and too quick. It’s worth remembering that for all the things that have capsized in the wake of technological progress, there are new pleasures too: long-lost friends rediscovered through a Google search; online communities coalescing around every obscure interest imaginable; the ability to read books in completely new ways solely through having the tools to search them efficiently; devices with which to call an ambulance or look up the Heimlich maneuver quickly.

  Still, technology takes even while it gives, and it’s not unreasonable to feel that one of the things it is taking is our ability to stop occasionally, or at least to slow down. We bob along feeling helpless on a frantic current of light and noise, always on the move, our predicament best depicted in the linear leap forwards of the dash. The semicolon represents a way to slow down, to stop,* and to think; it measures time more meditatively than the catchall dash, and it can’t be chucked thoughtlessly into just any sentence in place of just any other mark. Even a semicolon that creates a quickness in prose, like the type Rebecca Solnit often uses, requires time and thought to orchestrate. Semicoloned sentences cannot be dashed off.

  Back in the city, writing up the lessons he had learned away from “civilization,” Thoreau praised a life lived in the present:

  In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line.

  As we learn to contend with the technologies of the present moment and look for space in which to feel we, too, are really present, not pitched helplessly into the future or anchored to the past, we might find it good to look more often to a much older technology, the semicolon, notched into our sentences; to toe that line.

  VIII.

  Persuasion and Pretension

  Are Semicolons for Snobs?

  The claim that the semicolon harbors nefarious ambiguities isn’t the only accusation to dog that punctuation mark. People also think semicolons are for highfalutin snobs. Paul Robinson calls them “pretentious.” June Casagrande, who writes on language for the Los Angeles Times, declares that semicolons are “favored by writers who are so proud they know how to use semicolons that they’ll happily shortchange readers to show off their knowledge.”

  Allegations that the semicolon is pretentious have grown increasingly common in the last few decades, but they date back at least to the late nineteenth century, when one commentator celebrated the “elitist” character of the semicolon that so disgusts Robinson and galls Casagrande:

  It seems paradoxical to assert that the simplest method of isolating the masters of modern English literature is carefully to observe the frequency and propriety of their semicolons; and yet, like the Oxford college where the fellows were chosen by the grace with which they were able to dispose of the stones from the plum tart, the semicolon test may prove the final one to determine the author’s fitness to rank with august society.

  I would no more argue for measuring the intelligence of a person with their use of semicolons than with their ability to finesse plum pits out of tarts; but neither do I hold with obliterating the semicolon, any more than I would refuse to eat a slice of plum tart just because someone somewhere associates them with snobbery. There is no need to hate semicolons without let, or love commas unequivocally: you can react passionately towards individual instances of their usage without having to swear allegiance to, or vendettas against, the marks themselves.

  The semicolon has sometimes been associated with elitism, but it certainly doesn’t need to be that way. We’ve already seen Irvine Welsh use it in Scots dialect in the previous chapter, and not because he’s trying to make his characters sound like they went to Eton and are internationally ranked in dressage. And a whole host of other writers who venture outside the confines of formal English use semicolons too. They are everywhere in Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao, told from the point of view of the title character’s friend Yunior in his Dominican-American patois. Charles Chesnutt’s “Po’ Sandy” captures ex-slave Uncle Julius’s speech rhythms with semicolons. It seems to me it’s not justifiable either to praise or to punish the semicolon as a snob’s mark.

  The semicolon has, furthermore, been drafted in the fight for equality. The finest deployment of semicolons I’ve ever come across, in fact, is in Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” which King wrote longhand in the margins of a newspaper while imprisoned in Alabama for civil disobedience. The letter defends King’s agitation for civil rights against fellow clergymen who felt he should show more patience. The passage from the letter that contains the remarkable semicolons is a long one, and I suggest reading it out loud to really feel their effects.

  Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, “Wait.” But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six year old daughter why she can’t go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five year old son who is asking: “Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?”; when you take a cross country drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading “white” and “colored”; when your first name becomes “nigger,” your middle name becomes “boy” (however old you are) and your last name becomes �
��John,” and your wife and mother are never given the respected title “Mrs.”; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of “nobodiness”—then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait.

  As King was waiting, frustrated, for change, so must the reader wait a full page, held in suspension by those semicolons, while King lists agony after agony, indignity after indignity, before he alights on his final clause, delivered emphatically with an em dash. The experience of reading the sentence is one of waiting breathless and uncomfortable, which amplifies the force of King’s description of the misery of waiting for change. This is mimesis at its finest. And this experience of waiting could be created only with the semicolons, which are doing much more here than just separating items in a list or putting some distance between independent clauses. The semicolon is used to open a window on the lived experience of blacks in America in 1963. It’s about the furthest thing from an elitist sentiment that I can think of.

  Nonetheless, you could say there is certainly something “elite” about this passage, even as it argues for equal rights. Martin Luther King spoke and wrote in a way that lets his work seamlessly slot into Western scholarly tradition and norms. In the rest of the “Letter” and in his writings more generally, he cites the classics of the Western canon—Plato, Aquinas, the Bible, Martin Luther, Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, Martin Buber, T. S. Eliot, the Declaration of Independence. His writing is elegant and formal. Although it would be a mistake to chalk up to mere performance King’s stylistic choices and his careful cultivation of a distinguished intellectual family tree, it is certainly true that, as a deft rhetorician, King is in full control of the register in which he’s writing. The putative audience for his letter, after all, was a group of eight white Southern clergymen. In a sense, everything in the “Letter,” from the invocation of St. Augustine to the semicolons, is a coded message that says, “You can take me seriously; I’m Dr. King; I know the same things you know.”