Introduction : observing the ellipsis

This is a book about . . . . It is a history of hesitations, interruptions and omissions in literary texts. More specifically, it is about the marks that make manifest literature’s lapses into silence. Silence has been defined as the nonsymbolic. This book demonstrates nonetheless writers’ persistent need for routine symbols that express communicative dependence on the non-verbal. The subject of this book is the evolution of these symbols. It traces the emergence of a punctuation that displays linguistic curtailment and imprecision. Or to look at it another way, it examines how authors have used such signs to reach towards greater precision in the recording of speech and experience on the page. Bound up with the representation of speech is the representation of person, and ellipsis marks have long served as a means of promoting access to emotional or psychological states. More generally, these seemingly insignificant marks, in their variant graphic forms, in their waxing and waning and in their accruing and diminishing connotations, reflect trends and philosophies that have shaped literary practice. ‘Ellipsis marks’ as a term covers a range of symbols that have served comparable purposes and in many respects have been used interchangeably. These are dots, dashes, series of hyphens and asterisks. This study begins in the late sixteenth century when interruptions begin to develop a specific notation in dramatic texts and it culminates in the first half of the twentieth century with the standardization of dot, dot, dot. While we distinguish today between the trailing away of these ellipsis points . . . and the more abrupt interruption signalled by a dash, such specific tonal and durational cues have emerged slowly. This book seeks to trace the ways in which associations of this sort develop over time and to investigate, as far as is possible, the thinking behind elliptical markings.