A Reader on Reading

The need to indicate the end of a written phrase is probably as old as writing itself, but the solution, brief and wonderful, was not set down until the Italian Renaissance. For ages, punctuation had been a desperately erratic affair. Already in the first century a.d., the Spanish author Quintilian (who had not read Henry James) had argued that a sentence, as well as expressing a complete idea, had to be capable of being delivered in a single breath. How that sentence should be ended was a matter of personal taste, and for a long time scribes punctuated their texts with all manner of signs and symbols, from a simple blank space to a variety of dots and slashes. In the early fifth century, Saint Jerome, translator of the Bible, devised a system, known as per cola et commata, in which each unity of sense would be signaled by a letter jutting out of the margin, as if beginning a new paragraph. Three centuries later, the punctus, or dot, was used to indicate both a pause within the sentence and the sentence’s conclusion. Following such muddled conventions, authors could hardly expect their public to read a text in the sense they had intended.

Then, in 1566, Aldus Manutius the Younger, grandson of the great Venetian printer to whom we owe the invention of the pocket book, defined the full stop in his punctuation handbook, the Interpungendi ratio. Here, in clear and unequivocal Latin, Manutius described for the first time its ultimate role and aspect. He thought that he was offering a manual for typographers; he couldn’t know that he was granting us, future readers, the gifts of sense and music in all the literature to come: Hemingway and his staccatos, Beckett and his recitativos, Proust and his largo sostenuto.

“No iron,” wrote Isaac Babel, “can stab the heart with such force as a full stop put just at the right place.” As an acknowledgement of both the power and the helplessness of the word, nothing else has served us better than this faithful and final speck.

In Praise of Words

“Speak English!” said the Eaglet. “I don’t know the meaning of half

those long words, and, what’s more, I don’t believe you do either.”

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Chapter 3

RENÉ DESCARTES BELIEVED THAT monkeys could speak but preferred to remain silent in order not to be forced to work. The intellectual process of granting reality to an invention and then applying to that invention the rigid rules of reality is nowhere more splendidly demonstrated than in our relationship to language. Long ago in a faraway desert, a man of whom we know nothing decided that the words he had scratched onto clay were not conventional accounting signs numbering legal decrees or heads of cattle but the terrible manifestations of a willful god, and that therefore the very order of these words, the number of letters they contained, and even their physical appearance must have a sense and a meaning, since the utterance of a god cannot hold anything superfluous or arbitrary. The Kabbalists took this faith in the literary act even further. Since (as the book of Genesis recorded) God had said “Let there be light” and there was light, they argued that the very word light possessed creative powers, and that if they knew the mot juste and its true intonation, they too would be able to become as creative as their Creator. The history of literature is, in some sense, the history of this hope.

Less interested in imitating the Almighty, less confident in the magical powers of the word, but equally concerned with discovering the secret rules that govern a system of signs and symbols, wordplay enthusiasts, like the ancient Kabbalists, permutate, count, rearrange, divide, and reassemble letters for the sheer delight of drawing order out of chaos. Behind the passion of crossword-puzzle solvers, punsters, anagrammatists, palindrome makers, dictionary scourers, Scrabble players, and code breakers lies a kind of mad faith in the ultimate rationality of language.

Word games are very ancient. There are examples of acrostics among the Mesopotamians, anagrams among the Hebrews, pangrams among the Greeks, palindromes among the Romans. Puns (which reveal behind their at times doubtful humor the weblike coherence of the cosmos) are, of course, universal. At least according to Saint Jerome’s translation of the Bible, the founding of the Catholic Church was based upon a pun made by Jesus when he said, pointing to Peter (Petrus in Latin), “Upon this rock (petram) I will build my church.”