How to Travel With a Salmon and Other Essays

How to Use Suspension Points

In "How to Recognize a Porn Movie" we will see that to distinguish a pornographic film from a film that merely depicts erotic events, it is sufficient to discover whether, to go from one place to another by car, the characters take more time than the spectator would like or the story would require. A similar scientific criterion can be applied to distinguish the professional writer from the Sunday, or non-writer (who can still be famous). This is the use of suspension points in the middle of a sentence.

Writers use suspension points only at the end of a sentence, to indicate that more could be written on the subject ("and this point could be further elaborated, but..."), or, in the middle of a sentence or between two sentences, to underline the fragmentary nature of a quotation ("Friends ... I come to bury Caesar..."). Non-writers use these dots to crave indulgence for a rhetorical figure that they consider perhaps too bold: "He was raging like a ... bull."

A writer is someone determined to extend language beyond its boundaries, and he therefore assumes full responsibility for a metaphor, even a daring one: "The moving waters at their priestlike task / Of pure ablution round earth's human shores." Everyone agrees that Keats has allowed his fancy to soar, but at least he makes no apology for that. The non-writer, on the other hand, would have written: "The moving waters at their ... priestlike ... task/ Of pure ... ablution." As if to say: don't mind me, I'm only joking.

A writer writes for writers, a non-writer writes for his next-door neighbor or for the manager of the local bank branch, and he fears (often mistakenly) that they would not understand or, in any case, would not forgive his boldness. He uses the dots as a visa: he wants to make a revolution, but with police permission.

The following little list of variations may serve to indicate the ghastliness of these dots, suggesting what might have happened to literature if our writers had lacked self-confidence:

"A ... rose by any other name"

"Never send to know ... for whom the bell ... tolls."

"A man's a ... man for a' that."

"Call me ... Ishmael."

"The widow Douglas she took me for her ... son, and allowed she would sivilize me."

"Who's afraid of ... Virginia Woolf?"

"April is the cruellest ... month"

"I am a camera with its ... shutter open"

And so, down to: "riverrun, past Eve and ... Adam's"

Not that it matters if the Great would have looked foolish. But, as you see, these dots, suggesting the writer's fear of using bold, figured speech, can also be used to suggest his suspicion that the rhetorical figure, by itself, will seem literal and flat. An example. The Communist Manifesto of 1848 begins, as everyone knows, with the words "A specter is haunting Europe," and you must admit this is a great incipit. It would still be pretty good if Marx and Engels had written "A ... specter is haunting Europe"; they would merely have suggested, perhaps, that communism might not be such a terrible and elusive thing, and the Russian revolution might have taken place fifty years earlier, maybe with the Czar's consent, and Mazzini would have taken part in it, too.

But what if they had written "A specter is ... haunting Europe"? Is there some doubt about its haunting? Is it stable? Or do specters, per se, appear and disappear in a flash, suddenly, with no real time for haunting? But that isn't all. What if they had written "A specter is haunting ... Europe"? Would they have implied that they were really exaggerating, that the specter at most might be haunting Trier, and people everywhere else needn't worry? Or would they be suggesting that the specter of communism was already haunting also the Americas and—who could say?—maybe even Australia?

"To be or ... not to be, that is the question." "To be or not to be, that is the ... question." "To be or not ... to be, that is the question." You can see how much work Shakespearean scholarship would have to do, plumbing the Bard's meanings.

All men are created equal.

All ... men are created equal.

All men are ... created equal.

All men are created ... equal.

All men are created equally entitled to use suspension points.

1991