Not only are the quotation marks gone, but there is no obliging tag such as “he reflected” or “he said to himself” inserted after the first interior sentence to help us keep track of where we are. “Oh, good,” said Joyce’s readers to themselves, brushing Hi Ho cracker crumbs from their laps, “now all the artificial barriers can come down, and interior and exterior reality can ooze together into one sense-perceptual fondue.”
But, again, did Mr. Bloom actually, literally think, “There’s a priest,” followed by, “Could ask him”? I can’t imagine that he did. Mr. Bloom’s eye lighted on a figure in clerical dress — a visual, not verbal, mind-event — and the possibility of asking the figure a question briefly arose and was dismissed within him. Joyce’s way looked new, but he was doing what the traditional novelists did: hanging out raw, wet harvestings of visual and emotive protoplasm to dry on grammatical clotheslines, the only difference being that there is in Ulysses a great deal more dried protoplasm. Bloom’s thought-residues are (once you get into the swing of the book) sometimes startling and beautiful, but they aren’t any less artificial than when, say, M. R. James has a character mentally scope out, within quotes, his evening plans. In fact, they’re more artificial. Here’s how M. R. James did it:
‘I might walk home tonight along the beach,’ he reflected—‘yes, and take a look — there will be light enough for that — at the ruins of which Disney was talking.’
Joyce would twist off the knobs of the quotation marks and render the passage something like this:
The beach way. Might walk home tonight. Disney said the ruins? Templars’ preceptory. Knights in Jerusalem, looters, really. Cries of the maidens. Having their way. Light enough for that.
And then, while the literary classes were still chewing over this development, Faulkner began an aggressive program of italicizing. Here’s a snip from Light in August:
That was two years ago, two years behind them now, thinking Perhaps that is where outrage lies. Perhaps I believe that I have been tricked, fooled.
What was a modernist to do? There was simply no way to reconcile Joyce’s austere depunctuation with the booming self-importance of Faulkner’s typography. Both were excitingly modern, and yet they pointed in opposite directions. Thought transcription was thrown into a state of uncertainty from which it has not yet recovered. Some went naked—
I too have done my share of social climbing, he thought, with hauteur to spare, defying the Wasps. (Bellow, Herzog)
To the gallows I go, she said to herself, and had another large drink. (Drabble, The Realms of Gold)
— while the post-Faulknerians, such as Tom Clancy, reached for italics, which are punchier:
Julio stood and shouldered his weapon. There was a slight but annoying tinkle from the metal parts as he did so — the ammo belt, Ding thought. Have to keep that in mind. (Clear and Present Danger)
Sometimes, though, those urgent forward diagonals turned out to have a little too much punch, forcing the reader to interpret a shy, fleeting brain-state as if it were roared out in a hoarse whisper:
He fumbled his latchkey into its slot, thinking: Now she’ll ask me why I lock my door and I’ll mumble and stumble around, looking for an answer, and seem like a fool.
In roman type, within quotation marks, this thought-quote could easily be Tolstoy; in italics, however, it is from Stephen King’s The Stand, page 516.
I suppose there’s no single correct method, but I sometimes wish that the old way would come back. I miss the clarity, the lack of fuss, the innocence. So here’s what I propose. Let’s use quotes for spoken dialogue, as usual, and — once in a while, if it makes sense, not excessively — let’s try using them for interior speech as well. Those who feel ambitious could experiment with double quotes for dialogue and single quotes for thought, since part of the problem is that double quotes sometimes look too heavy to fence off delicate interior states. But that distinction isn’t necessary and it may actually cause further confusion — so, no, skip that. If the words in the thought really do have force and punch, by all means use italics, but if they don’t, don’t. And if you would prefer to use only indirect thought-discourse, fine. Just don’t utterly rule out the blameless embrasure of those curlies. Here’s something I came across in Winnie-the-Pooh:
Sometimes he thought sadly to himself, “Why?” and sometimes he thought, “Wherefore?” and sometimes he thought, “Inasmuch as which?”—and sometimes he didn’t know what he was thinking about.
I’m with Eeyore.
(2002)
Defoe, Truthteller
I read Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year on a train from Boston to New York. That’s the truth. It’s not a very interesting truth, but it’s true. I could say that I read it sitting on a low green couch in the old smoking room of the Cincinnati Palladium, across from a rather glum-looking Henry Kissinger. Or that I found a beat-up Longman’s 1895 edition of Defoe’s Plague Year in a Dumpster near the Recycle-A-Bicycle shop on Pearl Street when I was high on Guinness and roxies, and I opened it and was drawn into its singular, fearful world, and I sat right down in my own vomit and read the book straight through. It would be easy for me to say these things. But if I did, I would be inventing — and, as John Hersey wrote, the sacred rule for the journalist (or the memoirist, or indeed for any nonfiction writer) is: Never Invent. That’s what makes Daniel Defoe, the founder of English journalism, such a thorny shrub. The hoaxers and the embellishers, the fake autobiographers, look on Defoe as a kind of patron saint. Defoe lied a lot. But he also hated his lying habit, at least sometimes. He said the lying made a hole in the heart. About certain events he wanted truth told. And one event he really cared about was the great plague of 1665, which happened when he was around five years old.
A Journal of the Plague Year begins quietly, without any apparatus of learnedness. It doesn’t try to connect this recent plague with past plagues. It draws no historical or classical or literary parallels. It just begins: “It was about the beginning of September, 1664, that I, among the rest of my neighbors, heard in ordinary discourse that the plague was returned again in Holland.” The “I” is not Defoe, but an older proxy, somebody mysteriously named H.F., who says he is a saddler. H.F. lives halfway between Aldgate Church and Whitechapel, “on the left hand or north side of the street.” That’s all we know about him.
H.F. watches the bills of mortality mount — he keeps track — and he debates with himself whether to stay in town or flee. His brother tells him to save himself, get away. But no, H.F. decides to stay. He listens. He walks around. He sees a man race out of an alley, apparently singing and making clownish gestures, pursued by women and children — surgeons had been at work on his plague sores. “By laying strong caustics on them, the surgeons had, it seems, hopes to break them, which caustics were then upon him, burning his flesh as with a hot iron.” H.F. hears screams — many different kinds of screams, and screeches, and shrieks. In an empty street in Lothbury, a window opens suddenly just over his head. “A woman gave three frightful screeches, and then cried, ‘Oh! death, death, death!’” There was no other movement. The street was still. “For people had no curiosity now in any case.”