things kevin hates

I know what you’re saying: “Kevin, not another article about quotation marks!” (Okay, probably four people are saying, “Ooh, another article about quotation marks!” But they’re in the minority.) My topic today concerns those authors who have decided they’re too good to use quotation marks. They have to come up with some novel concept for quoted material, but that non-standard invention never works quite as well as the tried-and-true.

I was first introduced to this abominable sin in 11th-grade English class, as we read Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country. He used a dash, presumably taking after James Joyce, who also used a dash for his quotations. Ultimately I don’t suppose it makes a ton of difference, but a quotation dash only shows where a quote begins, not where it ends. Sometimes a quote will end with “he said” or something similar, which clearly isn’t a part of the quoted speech, but isn’t set off by quotation marks. That’s just illogical. And it’s a whole bunch of “look at me” arrogance perpetrated by show-off writers who think the rules of English don’t apply to them. Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is one of my absolute favorite books of all time—probably #1, if I had to choose—but everywhere else he goes off the deep end of unintelligible showmanship. I made it through about 150 pages of Ulysses before giving up. And Finneganns Wake (note the lack of an apostrophe) is the most famously impenetrable work ever written in the English language.

But at least a quotation dash is something. I picked up a copy of Teacher Man, Frank McCourt’s account of his thirty years teaching English in New York City’s public schools. An entertaining read, to be sure, especially for anyone in the teaching profession, but he thinks he’s so fucking awesome he doesn’t have to use quotation marks or quotation dashes or anything. So you’re often left wondering whether he’s paraphrasing or directly quoting. I don’t know what the Pulitzer people are thinking giving prizes to people who pull shit like this. It’s one thing to break the rules when breaking them achieves an artistic purpose, but when it doesn’t do that, it just pisses me off.