ON SPANISH SPEECH MARKS AND CHIMERA SENTENCES
These past months I’ve received a number of question about speech marks — the punctuation that denotes direct speech. One writer was struggling to preserve an English / Spanish speech mark style in an about-to-be-published French translation of their book. Another writer was using the Spanish raya to mark dialogue in an English story, and facing push-back from their editor, was trying to decide what they should do. This was my response, mostly, to the second question …
When it comes to speech marks, whether a writer should use quotation marks or Spanish rayas or guillemets or none at all — in an ideal world, the writer should decide.
— You want Spanish speech marks for your book?
— Use Spanish speech marks for your book.
But most of us live in less-than-ideal worlds in which editors and publishers will have their say, too. Some editors ain’t trying to introduce anything that they think will discourage a reader, will want writers to stick to the local convention. Other editors are more experimental. Classic example: the early drafts of Cynan Jones’ novel THE DIG had traditional speech marks but when editor John Freeman wanted to run an excerpt of the work in GRANTA, he took the speech marks out “hoping to make it 'more immediate, more with it.'” Turned out Freeman was right, the work gained something when it lost the speech marks and Jones ended up dropping all of them throughout the book.
So: if you feel strongly about Spanish speech marks in your English-language fiction, leave them in. Within the bounds of reason, one should do what feels right for the integrity of the work. Though I will admit I’m one of those writers who think if you’re going to alter the speech mark formula (or any other standard formula) you should be getting something interesting out of that change, something that adds to the fiction — otherwise, why bother?
Personal example: I don’t use any speech marks in my fiction — which is very Cormac McCarthy of me — and while McCarthy and I surely have different reasons for our choices I suspect both of us did it for what that lack produced. McCarthy has always structured his fictions to unsettle readers and to create profound readerly and even ontological uncertainty. The lack of speech marks is one tactic to this end, and another is the ‘double-deixis’ that McCarthy often deploys to “induce hesitation between…reference to entities… internal to the storyworld and reference to entities…external to the storyworld.’1
I myself ditched speech marks for three reasons: