What’s ‘Scary’ About Scare Quotes

Over on Harvard University Press’s blog, they’re serializing a talk given by Greil Marcus about A New Literary History of America, the 1,000-plus page essay collection, published last year, that Marcus co-edited with Werner Sollors. The book offers the kind of high/low mash-up you’d expect from the author of Lipstick Traces and Mystery Train—which is either a treat or a travesty, depending on whether you think Linda Lovelace belongs between the same covers as Edith Wharton.

All that aside, Marcus’s talk is about the behind-the-scenes challenges of putting together such an ambitious collection (220 essays!) and he takes aim at a punctuation mark beloved by academics everywhere:

When we looked at all the essays together, we found a narrative disease. Somehow, through the writing of each piece, its editing by the member of the editorial board who had assigned it and reeled it in, then editing by a heroic copy editor, then by Werner, or myself, and finally by both of us, we found piece after piece littered with little typographical markings that like insect tracks were bleeding the life out of description, argument, dramatization. It was like a horror movie, when the demons that have previously appeared only in dreams and glimpses by a child that her parents ignored are suddenly everywhere, everywhere you look, and you can’t escape. Scare quotes.

You know how it works in lectures. The slow, sententious double double, accompanied by an expression of as we all know disdain—a way of saying, none of us are fooled—unlike those fools, not gathered here with us, who are fooled. Cooler still—the single double. In a sentence, any word can be in doubt, except maybe verbs like “is” or “are”—but really, it’s like trying to tell a story according to Mary McCarthy’s judgment on Lillian Hellman: “Every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the.’”

He goes on to say that scare quotes “kill story-telling” and they are a “writer’s assault on his or her own words.” The blog promises that it will reprint more of the talk in days to come. I’m bracing for a tirade against the em dash.

By the way, here’s epistolary debate about the book that ran in The Chronicle Review. And here’s a two-hour discussion of the book on C-Span. The Amazon customer reviews are interesting, too.