No quotation marks

I'm another who generally puts down novels with nonstandard punctuation. It pulls me out of the story. I did slog my way through The Road and Cold Mountain, but I kept noticing the punctuation. Never did adjust. So yes, it is a risky move, but anything is doable if you can do it well.

It is a style thing-- dialogue written without quotation marks has a different feel than dialogue written with them, and sometimes that's effective. I read McCarthy's The Road and I thought it worked well there (some other stylistic stuff annoyed me, but the quotation marks were fine), and in a few other books I've read. In The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood some scenes don't have them and others do, depending on context, and I think it works brilliantly there. Occasionally in my writing I have a few lines of dialogue without them-- I personally use it when someone is thinking about a conversation in the past in the midst of a present scene. (I don't know if that sentence makes sense, I just woke up and also got distracted by Meet the Press in the middle of writing it). Sometimes though it seems to me that writers scrap them just to look more "literary" and it doesn't add anything at all-- that is a huge turn off.

Night of the Hunter, the southern gothic novel by Davis Grubb. The idiom gives the story an eery feel, which Charles Laughton captured masterfully in the film.

Not one of my Roddy Doyle books has quotation marks.

That said, this thread is interesting in that we are talking a lot about the WRITER not using quotation marks and how it's annoying/not annoying/confusing etc, but every single one of those books has gone through an editor, or several, and none of them have made that change either.

Kinda curious to see how editors and publishers feel about this and whether they would change it?

Ken said:

... managed to recall it.
"The Body," by William Sansom.
(I don't know if it was ever reprinted. I got an original, 1949 copy through my library.)

Amazon has got a used copy for $30.
http://www.amazon.com/dp/0571271111/?tag=absowrit-20

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$30? Ouch. Don't think I'd enjoy that much....

But thanks for letting me know. I'll keep an eye out for it.

Shaldna, if an author presented a book to Me The Editor, and hadn't used quotation marks, I'd have to honour that. It's their name on the cover, after all.

Old Hack said:

Shaldna, if an author presented a book to Me The Editor, and hadn't used quotation marks, I'd have to honour that. It's their name on the cover, after all.

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Interesting.

How does that work with in-house styles though? Is there an occassion when it would be changed?

Far from the first book with no quotation marks. Good for him. Many read the novel and loved it. I read a few pages, and threw the book away.

The only book I've made it through that did this was Angela's Ashes, and then only because I'd listened to McCourt speak, and really wanted to know his story. Some of the choices he made bugged me to death, but the story was worth the effort.

James Joyce didn't use quotation marks. I suspect that's where McCourt and McCarthy got it from.

I found this page that says quotation marks were not common until the 19th century, which I do not think is true (I've read plenty of 18th-century literature that used quotation marks in the correct manner).

rhymegirl said:

Since we've all learned to follow the rules when writing, why is it that an author was allowed to break the rules?

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Unlearn that particular lesson. There are no rules in the writing of fiction; there's only what works and what doesn't. Cormac McCarthy can do what he likes, and so can you.

Mags said:

James Joyce didn't use quotation marks. I suspect that's where McCourt and McCarthy got it from.

I found this page that says quotation marks were not common until the 19th century, which I do not think is true (I've read plenty of 18th-century literature that used quotation marks in the correct manner).

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May have been a later reprint?

Another book like this is the infamous "A Million Little Pieces" by the infamous James Frey. I did have a bit of a hard time reading it, but I don't think the unconventional dialog use and tagging had anything to do with it.

bearilou said:

I am now given license to break the rules. WEEEE!

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No, you need at least 10,000 posts before you get a license to break the rules.

...











/that was a joke

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Oh. Never mind.

mirandashell said:

$30? Ouch. Don't think I'd enjoy that much....

But thanks for letting me know. I'll keep an eye out for it.

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I see several copies under $10:
http://www.bookfinder.com/search/?author=Sansom,+William&title=The+Body&lang=en&st=xl&ac=qr

Mags said:

James Joyce didn't use quotation marks. I suspect that's where McCourt and McCarthy got it from.

I found this page that says quotation marks were not common until the 19th century, which I do not think is true (I've read plenty of 18th-century literature that used quotation marks in the correct manner).

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I think "correct manner" might better be "currently accepted manner." The use of quotemarks might (ahem) "change" again, maybe sooner than you think.

Ah thanks Ben. I shall take a look

shaldna said:

Not one of my Roddy Doyle books has quotation marks.

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One of mine does - Wilderness, but that's a YA novel. I wonder if that made the difference? (I did meet the man a few years ago when he was the guest of the Guardian Book Club, but I didn't ask him this.)

As pointed out above, James Joyce hated "perverted commas" and used en dashes instead. I did once see a public-domain copy of Portrait of the Artist back in the 90s (when Joyce went out of copyright and back in again, due to the limit being extended from fifty years after death to seventy) which did have quote marks. A Joyce fan of my acquaintance thought that was close to blasphemy.

The SF writer Hal Duncan (an avowed Joyce devotee) uses en dashes in Vellum and Ink.

Two YAs I read recently don't have quotes - Moira Young's Blood Red Road and Annabel Pitcher's My Sister Lives on the Mantelpiece. The latter sets the dialogue in italics, the former doesn't.

Apart from that, using en-dashes for dialogue can be a special-effect technique that some authors use occasionally - including me, in at least one published story.

eyeblink said:

One of mine does - Wilderness, but that's a YA novel. I wonder if that made the difference?

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Very probably. Hang on let me go ask a YA editor. BRB.

Yep. She said, instantly, "Not for kids" and then she looked pained and said, "but oh, Patrick Ness doesn't use them," and cited a few other examples, and she basically wouldn't dismiss the idea out of hand but her expression said she was visualising our Sales Director.

Torgo said:

Very probably. Hang on let me go ask a YA editor. BRB.

Yep. She said, instantly, "Not for kids" and then she looked pained and said, "but oh, Patrick Ness doesn't use them," and cited a few other examples, and she basically wouldn't dismiss the idea out of hand but her expression said she was visualising our Sales Director.

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That's odd, Patrick Ness certainly uses them in the Chaos Walking trilogy and in A Monster Calls. What else could she be thinking of?

Becky Black said:

That's odd, Patrick Ness certainly uses them in the Chaos Walking trilogy and in A Monster Calls. What else could she be thinking of?

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You make a good point!

Jamesaritchie said:

Far from the first book with no quotation marks. Good for him. Many read the novel and loved it. I read a few pages, and threw the book away.

.

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all very valid points. To the OP, I have not read anything by McCarthy, and won't be, or at least won't be paying to. I may borrow one of his books to check out as an academic exercise, but when I sit to pleasure-read, I fully expect the writer to be facilitating my entry into their world. In McCarthy's defense, I suspect he personally believes he's doing just that, and the lack of quotation marks gives his book a special sense of immediacy or intimacy. To me it just looks pretentious and self-indulgent...and worse, makes MY job harder. I'm all for a challenging book--I thoroughly enjoyed reading and re-reading Lord Henry's pithy, ironic lines in Dorian Gray, but at the same time, I'm not all for being challenged simply because someone decided they were above a very fundamental tool for indicating dialogue.

All this means I won't read McCarthy either. You DO stand to lose readers. AND, I recall hearing McCarthy's first couple books actually had quotation marks....before he had enough of a reputation he could push the envelope.

quicklime said:

You DO stand to lose readers

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Yes, but the readers you lose are those who can't see beyond quotation marks. Fuck 'em, you're writing for a different audience.

What a lovely attitude to the people who buy books......

As an editor, I'd honor the no quotation marks, as well, but I would question the writer about it, and make it clear that I thought it would harm the book with many readers.

But I believe the writer gets the final say.