Reading time: 5-15 minutes
The Tell-Tale Heart is a lesson, if nothing else, in voice. The build is the excitement, not necessarily to the action within, but the ending and impending consequence. It’s the narrative voice, therefore, that takes centre stage. It is all about the feel of the book; it’s about being so far embedded into the mind of a mad man – or is he not so mad? – that compels one to the end. It is the insight into the mindset of a murderous soul that is interesting, not any murder that might occur. It’s very Dostoyevskian in its exploration of consequences (or is Crime and Punishment more Poeish given the publication dates?) and is well worth a read. Worst comes to worst, you read this and you hate it, you lose 15 minutes of your life at most.
The punctuation use in this story is absolutely bonkers. As someone who thinks punctuation not as a boring means to end but yet another fundamental and creative layer in the assemblage of a piece of literature, I love what this book has to offer. The Tell-Tale Heart is most certainly one for the dash abusers (en- if you’re UK based, em- if you’re US – and that’s a whole other conversation). It might be worth mentioning here that I love an en-dash – adore them! – and while as an editor I look to avoid excessive use of anything, I will always allow for punctuation freedom, the celebration of the dashes, if only to an extent. But the star of the show in The Tell-Tale Heart is the hybrid punctuation. I can’t speak much for its specific purpose, as a small amount of research has proven wildly insufficient (I will have to delve deeper), but I can speak for effect and my first impressions of usage in this short story. So, without further ado, let’s look at the compound dash.
What are compound dashes? they look a little something like this:
, –
; –
(and the dreaded) : –
I believe an em-dash (though I would be much more tempted to use the en-dash as in The Tell-Tale Heart, being a Briton and all) preceded by a comma, has been coined a ‘comash’. Which, as I’m sure you will agree, is a completely daft name.
‘I went down to open it with a light heart, – for what had I now to fear?’
If your questions now are, as mine were, ‘What is the rule of the comash? and how exactly does one use it correctly?’, I think the answer will either liberate or frustrate you. I think the farcicality of hybrid punctuation is due to their absolute non-essential nature, and it’s likely why they have been so vehemently shunned. Let’s look at The Tell-Tale Heart. The comash, as shown above, certainly achieves more than the use of a humble comma, as the comash adds emphasis the comma alone wouldn’t provide:
‘I went down to open it with a light heart, for what had I now to fear?’
This certainly feels a little eerier, as though drama is absent from what is otherwise quite an absurd thought on the narrator’s part! However, one might argue that it isn’t really achieving anything that the dash alone wouldn’t.
‘I went down to open it with a light heart – for what had I now to fear?’
Or do you disagree?
Honestly, I think I do: I think it adds…something.
And that’s what I love about this hybrid usage, its roots seem to exist in creativity rather than rule; – rather, it all comes down to preference. It’s use has an almost intuitive basis. It’s a use of punctuation that is infinitely more volitional (and as such more artistic by nature) and less necessary. This is how I view things, at least. The compound hyphen seems at its core to give another layer of emphasis, and the more I read it, the more I think it succeeds.
‘No doubt I now grew very pale; – but I talked more fluently, and with a heightened voice.’
The semi-colash – yes, the semi-colash – has proven more of a riddle to me. I’m still unpacking it. I think the conjunction is key. Without ‘but’ you would surely use a semi-colon, but this would entirely change meaning. So why not use a comma? Because, my friend, you will accidentally summon bracketing commas where they do not belong. It seems the compound dash in this instance is drawing from both the semi-colon and the dash to both establish a connection between the two sentences and add emphasis while it’s at it…
I will think more on the semi-colash.
If nothing else, it really goes to show that while punctuation usage has hard and fast rules, the rules over time are governed by style and preference. Where once these compound dashes thrived, they are now considered not simply ugly but flat out wrong; – but what is wrong, really, in art? The artistic freedom, in a rather bombastic sense, has died.
I’m sure my lot did it, demanding standardised procedures, – style guide in hand.
I will end that there lest we get lost in a sea of non-sensical and outdated punctuation hybrids.
Read, read, read!
