Oh, Peter,
I knew someone was going to mention the dead white males problem. I sort of believe in the existing canon in part simply because it is the existing canon, as you suggest in your note. I mean, if everyone went and gazed in wonder at the Sistine ceiling for generations, then the influence exerted by the Sistine ceiling came to have a defining role in our culture, and quite apart from any inherent greatness of the Sistine ceiling, its position as the precursor original to what followed it makes it worth studying. I guess my literary tastes are somewhat conservative–I’m an admirer of Shakespeare and Tolstoy, though also of Jane Austen, George Eliot, and Virginia Woolf, who all have the advantage of being dead white females. I love Su Shi, who is a dead Chinese male, so I guess that counts for something. I think I’m going to stop doing the categories here, especially because this is getting to be far too much about me, even for a breakfast chat.
“Eyeless in Gaza” seems much more interesting than “Eyeless, in Gaza.” Any old blind person can go be “Eyeless, in Gaza” for the price of a plane ticket, but “Eyeless in Gaza” seems to have a holy particularity to it, as though to be eyeless in Gaza were not the same as being eyeless elsewhere, as though this were a punishment greater and stranger than all other punishments of the world, perhaps stranger than all other punishments of the world put together. “He was eyeless in Gaza,” she told me, and then said no more, and it seemed the world lay in her expression. “He was eyeless, in Gaza,” and I’d assume he was near the site of a terrorist bombing.
You know that Yeats would issue whole new editions of his poems in which nothing was changed but punctuation.
And what about Emily Dickinson? I hate the way people “clean up” her poems for us, as though she had no idea what punctuation was and used her funny dashes for the same reason that she wore odd shoes. Perhaps she did; but it’s what she did, and they give to the poems some of that peculiar angular New Englandness.
My cousin Mary used to say when I was little that she was going to take away my box of commas because I used so many of them. I am a great fan of punctuation. I always had a fantasy about making up more punctuation marks, different ones in different shapes, with different meanings, to convey tone of voice or inflection, instead of just showing an exclamation or a question or simply a pause. A kind of musical notation of speech, something to send the voice up or down, to put tonality into English. Wouldn’t it be fun if they let you do it? Your own system of punctuation? A little guide offered at the front? But while you’re allowed to invent the occasional word, for the length of a work of fiction or in the context of radical science, you are never allowed to invent punctuation these days. Who invented which marks? Did parentheses come in before or after quotation marks? Who did first use an exclamation point, and is it the most recent bit of punctuation? And does one count an ampersand as punctuation?
@#$%^&*\
Andrew
