The other day my friend Sebastian Castillo was puzzled by a bit of punctuation in Wuthering Heights. “He had a terror of Earnshaw’s reputation, and shrunk from encountering him; and yet he was always received with our best attempts at civility: the master himself avoided offending him, knowing why he came; and if he could not be gracious, kept out of the way.” Why is that last semicolon there instead of a comma? I couldn’t tell you, but it reminded me of how much I love the chaotic, idiosyncratic punctuation of literature in the 18th and 19th centuries. The German writers I’ve translated from that era—Kleist, Jean Paul, and Johann Peter Hebel—all divide their sentences up in different but similarly unexpected ways. Here is an example from “The Night-Thoughts of Obstetrician Walther Vierneissel on His Lost Fetus-Ideal” by Jean Paul, selected more or less at random:
As I said, I had other hopes, namely for the best of earthly life. And why not? —A fetus such as myself or the reader—living in the single healthy tropical climate, with no change in season or time of day—nourished by his environs like a village beggar—taking part in everything his lady sovereign enjoys—embraced by love in the truest sense of the word, health and wealth attached to that of a stranger’s—free of worry as to his nourishment, other than becoming too fat, since the fetus resides in an edible bird’s nest and devours it by necessity, so that the subsequent christening feast wouldn’t equal a last meal before the gallows— — —a fetus, undergoing this prosperous prespringtide of life, having already arrived at a most careless and fiery age (because fifteen years later, of course, calm reason reigns) is certainly not one to dream of the earthly tumult in his future.
Again, I’m unsure what old JP meant by putting three dashes in the middle of the sentence. My guess is that, like in Tristram Shandy, they create a sense of interruption in the flow of the sentence. Beneath the digressive comic veneer of both Sterne and Jean Paul, there is a horrified fascination with the passage of time—beneath as in foundational. “Night Thoughts” concerns a deranged obstetrician who, believing in the transmigration of souls, sets about doing his job in the worst way possible, hoping to spare the fetuses from suffering by ending their lives as soon as possible. The erratic demarcations on the page mimic the slapdash way in which Vierneissel tries to manipulate existence. Gallows — — — fetus, death — — — rebirth. It’s practically schematic. The broken line represents the arcane and tentative line a soul takes from body to body, life to life.
I’ve noticed an unfortunate tendency: to regard this kind of freedom and expressiveness as a mistake, as if a novel, especially an old one, has to obey the same rules as a resume or a term paper. A while back, a YA author posted something on Twitter about how Herman Melville “didn’t even write grammatically” or something to that effect. Obviously Melville, especially late Melville, could bend the American tongue into some very strange positions, but she wasn’t referring to errors like subject-verb agreement. Attacks against the literary often take the form of schoolroom lectures. What can’t be understood or appreciated has to be marked up in red. Melville would, I’m certain, take those pedantic corrections to his prose in the manner of Bartleby: he’d prefer not to.