Quotation Marks

Marjorie Garber

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780415937467
• eBook ISBN: 9781134955381
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria

Written with characteristic verve, Quotation Marks considers, among other subjects, how we depend upon the most quotable men and women in history, using great writers to bolster what we ourselves have to say. The entertaining turns and reversals of Marjorie Garber's arguments offer the rare pleasure of a true essayist.

1

“ ” (Quotation Marks)

“

If, for the sake of a crowded audience you do wish to hold a lecture, your ambition is no laudable one, and at least avoid all citations from the poets, for to quote them argues feeble industry.

—Hippocrates, Precepts

When Representative Henry Hyde addressed the U.S. Senate in January 1999 on the solemn occasion of President Bill Clinton’s impeachment hearings, he gave his remarks the requisite element of gravity by salting them with familiar quotations—or quotations that seemed as if they ought to be familiar. For example, he cited Sir Thomas More, whose conscience would not permit him to acquiesce in the tricky business of Henry VIII’s divorce and remarriage. But Hyde’s quotation from this Tudor statesman had an oddly contemporary ring. “As he told his daughter Margaret,” the congressman from Illinois informed the Senate, “‘when a man takes an oath, Meg, he’s holding his own self in his own hands. Like water. And if he opens his fingers then, he needn’t hope to find himself again.’” Here the voice of Thomas More comes through slightly muffled; it is in fact the character of More from Robert Bolt’s 1960 play A Man for All Seasons that is talking. ¹

The staffer who found this quotation apposite might have been inspired by Bolt’s ardent preface, which explained the playwright’s choice of hero: “A man takes an oath only when he wants to commit himself quite exceptionally to the statement, when he wants to make an identity between the truth of it and his own virtue; he offers himself as a guarantee. And it works. There is a special kind of shrug for a perjurer; we feel that the man has no self to commit, no guarantee to offer.” ² But quoting Robert Bolt lacks the force—historical, religious, canonical—of quoting Sir, later Saint, Thomas More. Perhaps mindful of Robert Burton’s famous declaration about quoting from the classics, “A dwarf standing on the shoulders of a giant may see farther than a giant himself,” ³ the tall, stooped Hyde craned across the ages, speaking to the future through a voice from the “past.”

That I elect to stress the spuriousness of this “past” by enclosing the word in quotation marks will indicate, at the outset, one of the curious properties of these typographical signifiers; for in their present condition of use, they may indicate either authenticity or doubt. (Make that “authenticity” or “doubt.”) This is a property to which we shall want to return. But let us continue, for a moment, with the impeachment hearings.

In quest of authority Hyde also, it is almost needless to say, quoted William Shakespeare in his opening remarks. And here the author was so familiar that he did not need to be named. “Our cherished system of justice will never be the same after this,” Hyde intoned. “Depending on what you decide, it will either be strengthened in its power to achieve justice, or it will go the way of so much of our moral infrastructure and become a mere convention full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” ⁴

It’s probably unsportsmanlike to fault Hyde for wrenching this quotation out of context; both “sound and fury” and “signifying nothing” have long ago passed into the general word hoard, having been borrowed by everyone from William Faulkner to Malcolm Evans. ⁵ But Macbeth’s famous cry of despair on the meaninglessness of (his) life, uttered in response to the news of his wife’s death, seems in a way singularly inappropriate for a political speech whose entire point is to mark the meaningfulness of the moment. “Life,” in Macbeth’s formulation, is

A poor player

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage

And then is heard no more: it is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.

Macbeth 5.5.24–28

The point of Hyde’s citation was to rouse the Senate to greatness by urging it to avoid reducing justice to “sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Nonetheless, the proximity of “poor player” (a bad, unskilled, or hammy actor) and “idiot” seem slightly risky in the context of an address to a group of U.S. senators. The New York Daily News found some amusement in the omission: “Hyde said a violated oath was ‘full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.’ But he left out the preceding line that life ‘is a tale told by an idiot.’” ⁶ Identifying these as “Shakespeare’s words from Macbeth,” the paper implied that this view of “life” was somehow Shakespeare’s rather than his character’s. But at least the Daily News got the play right. An article in Newsday, written by “an attorney specializing in intellectual property law,” blithely described Hyde as beginning his remarks with “a quote from Hamlet—‘full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.’” ⁷

A scholar once wrote of Shakespeare that “to cite him in a lecture or an essay was to give lustre and prestige to the words and ideas that surrounded his magic name.” ⁸ But does that “lustre” attach itself to the speaker as readily as to the writer? Or does the “poor player” syndrome kick in, reminding the audience all too clearly that the speaker is not Shakespeare, or, to cite another once-canonical text, “not Prince Hamlet,” but rather

an attendant lord, one that will do

To swell a progress, start a scene or two,

Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,

Deferential, glad to be of use,

Politic, cautious, and meticulous;

Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;

At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—

Almost, at times, the Fool. ⁹

By the end of the impeachment process even the New York Times had grown slightly restive. “Mr. Hyde,” the Times reported, “mustered a veritable Bartlett’s in offering his last impassioned plea for conviction. ‘We happy few,’ he said, turning in Shakespearean tribute to his fellow House Republicans.” And, “Quoting Gibbon, Mr. Hyde acidly denounced the President by comparing him to a corrupt Roman emperor, Septimius Severus: ‘Severus promised, only to betray; he flattered, only to rule; and however he might occasionally bind himself by oath and treaty, his conscience, obsequious to his interest, always released him from the inconvenient obligation.’” ¹⁰ A journalist writing for another newspaper had earlier dismissed the impeachment debate in the House as “blue suits quoting from Bartlett’s.” ¹¹ The implication was that they were doubly out of fashion; they were not, in any way, saying something new. Under these circumstances, was the quotation more authoritative and convincing than the speaker’s own voice, or less?

Who is speaking when we speak in quotation? In the case of Henry Hyde’s address to the Senate, was it Hyde, More, or Robert Bolt? Hyde, Macbeth, Shakespeare—or J. Alfred Prufrock?

II

“Quotation is a constant reminder that writing is a form of displacement,” suggests Edward Said. “As a rhetorical device, quotation can serve to accommodate, to incorporate, to falsify (when wrongly or even rightly paraphrased), to accumulate, to defend, or to conquer—but always, even when in the form of a passing allusion, it is a reminder that other writing serves to displace present writing.” ¹²

Quotation reminds us that writing is displacement. What does it tell us about speech? How does one indicate that one is speaking in quotation? Or, “in quotation”? At scholarly conferences it has become conventional for a speaker to raise his or her hands above the shoulders and rapidly flex the first two fingers of each hand, miming the look of (American-style, double) quotation marks on the page. The effect is rather retro Rogers and Hammerstein; as one friend commented, this gesture always makes him think the speaker is auditioning for “Happy Talk.” Do speakers from the British Isles, or others whose primary publication venue is Britain, gesture with single-finger quotation marks? (Nursery habitués might then be reminded not of South Pacific but of “The Itsy-Bitsy Spider.”) In fact, the two-finger flex has become conventional rather than strictly mimetic, a sign of quoting rather than a quote-sign. For some divas of the podium the gesture involves the shoulders as well as the hands and offers an opportunity to express not only the activity of quotation, but also a certain attitude—often of wry skepticism—about the authority of both the quotation and the quotee. Some users call these protestation marks, indicating that they are the performed equivalent of what Jacques Derrida, following Martin Heidegger, has termed being “under erasure”—a word with a horizontal line drawn through it to indicate that it demarcates a nodal idea for which the present word is inappropriate or insufficient: man; freedom; justice. Others who employ the finger-waggling gesture refer to these airy points as “scare quotes”—both the word being framed, and the witchy gesture, contributing presumably to the currency of the term.

It was not always thus. Conferencegoers with longer memories or grayer hair may recall the days when a sotto voce “quote… unquote” demarcated the boundaries of a cited phrase. (Without these oral punctuation marks the quoted passage often melted into the speaker’s own text with no perceptible boundary, especially when the quotation was lengthy and unmemorable.) On the other hand, the necessity could itself invite dramatic improvisation. The rabbi of the temple of my youth, a Russian émigré with a grandiloquent flair for performance, used to wind up to a sonorous “and I am qvoting” before delivering whatever words of wisdom he had quarried for his sermon. Senators and other public figures, as we have seen in the case of Henry Hyde, often footnote their learned quotations in the text, lest the audience fail to register either the quotation or the erudition: “As Abraham Lincoln so wisely said”; “In the immortal words of John F. Kennedy”; “The Book of Isaiah tells us.”

This practice works well when the figure being quoted is eminent, recognizable, and honored; in fact, all three attributes then seem to attach themselves, in a rather ghostly fashion, to the present speaker, who appears in the act of quoting to have virtually incorporated the predecessor and to speak from the vantage point of the ages, as if the speaker were a Russian doll who had somehow swallowed up these articulate authorities and was therefore able to ventriloquize them from within. When the figure being quoted is less eminent or reputable, however, the old-style “quote-unquote” is deployed, but with a lawyerly edge, casting doubt on the veracity of the person quoted or underscoring the suspicious significance of the utterance. The effect is one of distancing rather than incorporation.

Thus, to return yet again to the House managers’ presentation to the Senate, the words of principals in the case against President Clinton were cited in deliberate, and exaggerated, oral quotation marks: “Ms. Lewinsky testified, quote, ‘No one ever told me to lie,’ unquote. When considered alone, this statement would seem exculpatory. In the context of other evidence, however, we see that this one statement gives a misleading inference. Of course, no one said, ‘Now, Monica, you go down there and lie.’ They didn’t have to. Based on their previous spoken and even unspoken words, Ms. Lewinsky knew what was expected of her.” ¹³ Or, again: “According to Ms. Lewinsky, Mr. Jordan told her that he has spoken with the president, that she came highly recommended, and that, quote, ‘We’re in business,’ unquote. However, the evidence reflects that Mr. Jordan took no steps to help Ms. Lewinsky until early December of that year, after she appeared on the witness list in the Jones case.”

“Quote-unquote” often functions in this manner; thus a character in crime fiction can report of another that “he did have quote, a jolly good reason for bumping off one special person, unquote,” ¹⁴ while in Peter Ustinov’s Loser we are told that someone “expre...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Plates
• Figures
• Preface
• 1. “ ” (Quotation Marks)
• 2. Fashionable
• 3. Try-Works
• 4. Make-Work
• 5. Sequels
• 6. Vegetable Love
• 7. A Case of Mstaken Identity
• 8. Moniker
• 9. MacGuffin Shakespeare
• 10. Historical Correctness
• 11. The Jane Austen Syndrome
• 12. Fatal Cleopatra
• 13. Compassion
• 14. Who Owns “Human Nature”?
• Notes
• Index