‘…’ or – ?

A report from the Hay:

Overheard at the Blue Boar pub was an earnest discussion that began: “Are you still using conventional speech marks or are you moving over to the dash?” At which point three of the assembled company leaned eagerly forward, while a fourth looked slightly bemused. The outsider turned out to be the brother of the poet Owen Sheers, who was discussing the writing life over a pint or two with fellow novelist Tristan Hughes and children’s writer Francesca Simon.

The issue of inverted commas versus dashes is clearly a vexed one for today’s young novelists. They blame Roddy Doyle for letting the dash into fiction in the first place, but report that it has recently been spotted in the novels of Niall Griffiths.

At the risk of sounding like Private Eye’s Pedant’s Corner, this is an interesting and ignored topic. In his study of Irvine Welsh, Aaron Kelly puts his case for the dash over the quotation mark:

Welsh – as with James Kelman before him – refuses to place the speech of his characters in quotation marks. Where working-class characters are permitted to speak in the conventional novel the quotation marks around their words helps cordon them off from the authoritative Standard English of the main narrative and its reflective, interpretative power. Welsh, like Kelman, dissolves this narrative hierarchy by placing the speech of his characters on an equal register with that of the narrative itself to produce a democracy of voice.

I agree with Kelly – up to a point. The portrayal of working-class speech in conventional fiction sometimes seems designed to get across the authorial message that you just shouldn’t take these people seriously. Often the working-class characters’ dialogue is an embarrassment of dropped Hs, randomly sprinkled apostrophes and 1950s-era colloquialisms – whereas other characters will speak in fantastically correct received pronunciation, often indistinguishable from the main prose style. Ben Elton’s a particular offender here: he seems to think that everyone north of Watford says ‘fook’ instead of ‘fuck’. (That’s ‘fuck,’ Ben, as in: sort out your fucking dialogue).

It’s understandable that writers want to collapse this hierarchy – Alan Warner, for example, does not even use a dash. And very few people, of any class, speak Standard English as it is written – regional and social variations make the idea of pure language a laughable dream.

Yet on balance, I have to stick with the quotemark, for the practical reason that the dash doesn’t always provide the separation of speech from narrative, and even in Irvine Welsh’s skillful hands it can get messy.

For more on Irvine Welsh’s dialect see John Mullan.