William Faulkner meticulously beat commas into The Sound and the Fury. E.E. Cummings radically experimented with punctuation and typography in his contributions to The Dial and his poetry collection is 5 (1925). Gertrude Stein placed periods mid-sentence in her narrative poem Winning His Way (Ashbery 1957).
Colon: Period. [Bracket]
Authors have been decisively dotting colons into prose, deliberating over the dash, the ellipsis, brewing over brackets and hyphens, for many years. Punctuation, that ostensible minutia, has the power to uncap a character’s mind or to intimate something of great importance by placing that weighty tidbit—at the end of a long, dramatic dash.
The great Soviet author Isaac Babel wrote in his story Guy de Maupassant, "No iron spike can pierce a human heart as icily as a period in the right place."
Parentheses Defined
Parentheses are the oft-ignored offspring of punctuation. The 1996 Oxford Dictionary defines a parenthesis as, “a word, clause, or sentence inserted as an explanation or afterthought into a passage which is grammatically complete without it, and usually marked off by brackets or dashes or commas.” Parentheses “enclose less important or explanatory” information (Venolia 78).
Parentheses Redefined
This poor split O, separated at birth, a sentence castaway, has been slighted. Parentheses are indispensable. They tie the reader and narrator with ropey asides or character insight. Parentheses pack exposition into a tidy box or visually decorate the page. Parentheses boast a host of applications, far more developed from this Oxford Dictionary definition. In no other text than Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita is this argument so easily illustrated.
Nabokov Used 450 Parentheses in Lolita
Nabokov peppered Lolita with an astounding 450 bracketed-parentheses (White 48). He used parentheses for summary, to set the stage, costume a character, allow the nymphet-crazed narrator, Humbert Humbert, parenthetical asides and exposition. Nabokov used parentheses as a literary device. The editorial board of the Random House Library ranked Lolita the “fourth-best English-language novel of the twentieth century,” (Johnson & Coates 4) so I’d say he used parentheses as a literary device quite well.
Try It With Your Own Writing
Take out a poem, short story or a page from your novel and pay strict attention to your use of punctuation. Could a parenthetical aside placed in the right spot give insight into your character’s frame of mind? Could a paragraph on setting become a three word parenthetical summary without sacrificing the story? Try using the parentheses as Nabokov did and see what new complexity begins to emerge.
Lolita artfully contests the Oxford Dictionary’s pallid parenthesis demarcation. It repossesses the paring knife and the pruning shears, replaces the rind, and plants the seed of parentheses anew. It is an argument for rebirth. Like the Madeleinea lolita and the Pseudolucia humbert, Latin American Blue butterflies (Johnson & Coates 28), parentheses must spread their wings if they are to truly fly.
References:
Ashbery, John. “Stanzas in Meditation.” Poetry Magazine. July 1957, pp. 250-54.
Connolly, Julian. “Welcome to the Block: Priglashenie na kazn’ / Invitation to a Beheading, A Documentary Record.” Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading: A Critical Companion. Evanston, 1997. 141-79.
Johnson, Kurt & Coates, Steve. Nabokov’s Blues: The Scientific Odyssey of a Literary Genius. Zoland Books, 1999.
Venolia, Jan. Write Right: A Desktop Digest of Punctuation, Grammar, and Style. Ten Speed Press, 2001. 4th Edition.
White, Duncan. Lolita’s Pregnant Parentheses. Nabokov Studies 9. 2005.
Heather Gawronski-Salerno - Heather Gawronski-Salerno works as a research administrator at Northwestern University. In her spare time, she writes fiction and creates ...
