Free The Way the World Works: Essays by Nicholson Baker Page A

defined against the yellow sky, and saw that it had horns and wings?’
    Note the punctuation in these passages: they have quotation marks. These writers evidently felt that, as with real speech, psychic speech needs visible delimiters to set it off from its surroundings. (In the original Russian, Tolstoy used little «French-style brackets,» but the effect of enclosure is the same.) I have spent some hours recently foraging around in paperbacks, and I can report that practically all the big-name writers through 1930 or so—people, I mean, like Henry James, Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, Willa Cather, Theodore Dreiser, Joseph Conrad, Sherwood Anderson, and Sinclair Lewis—felt the need to put their characters’ thoughts within quotes from time to time. (Sinclair Lewis: “She said to herself, ‘As though I cared whether I’m seen with this fat phonograph!’ ” Willa Cather: “She remembered him and said to herself: ‘I don’t think I ever heard a nicer voice than that boy had.’ ”)
    Now writers don’t do this. I asked a copy-editor friendhow the literary world was punctuating its thoughts these days, and he polled some copy-editor friends of his. One wrote back: “I haven’t seen quotation marks on thoughts in at least five years.”
    Why did they die out? Joyce and Faulkner—they’re at the root of it. Ulysses has great blobs of transcribed thought, but the quotation marks themselves are lacking:
    Mr Bloom moved forward raising his troubled eyes. Think no more about that. After one. Timeball on the ballast office is down. Dunsink time. Fascinating little book that is of sir Robert Ball’s Parallax. I never exactly understood. There’s a priest. Could ask him. Par it’s Greek: parallel, parallax.
    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