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Punctuation: Art, Politics, and Play is not likely to be a best-seller of the Lynne
Truss variety, being firmly in the academic mode and differentiating itself
from prescriptive grammar, even of the populist kind. It is a pity, though,
that its readership may be in the relatively specialist fields of cultural and
performance studies, because it is dazzling in its inter-disciplinarity and
most delightful to read. Jennifer DeVere Brody has produced a study on
performance art which is itself a performance, a play on punctuation which
defamiliarizes the mundane accompaniment to communication which is
punctuation, and reinvents its components as significant cultural markers.
She argues that punctuation provides much of the ‘affect’ of post-
enlightenment Western print culture and, indeed, produces ‘excessive’
meaning: performance ‘affects effectively and vice versa’. The book traces
the ‘handmaid’s tale’ of punctuation from an aid to prose writing, relatively
unexamined or theorized, to a regulator of decorous discourse and draws on
Coleridge and critical influences from the ‘close-reading’ of literary texts to
postcolonial and queer theory. However, this is not a systematic study.
Quoting in justification Stein’s ‘some punctuation is interesting, some is
not’, it is a partial and eclectic series of discontinuous performance medita-
tions, emphasizing the ludic and lewd.
Play is evident from Chapter 1 when the punctuation mark, the dot, is
transformed into the polka dot, representing in its multiplicity a resistance to
congealing, to narrative, and to closure. The book’s second chapter hangs
on the elaborated point, the ellipsis, the fragmentary . . .. It is a highly
ambivalent marker, especially in the interpretation of playscripts and, for
DeVere Brody, it exemplifies the elusive and visceral quality of invisible
blackness and the premise of Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), read here as a
‘performance’ of blackness, a kind of visible jazz rhythm. The chapter dedi-
cated to the hyphen is, likewise, about performance and identity.
186 BOOK REVIEWS
Occupying ‘impossible’ positions, the hyphen both links and divides and
thereby problematizes. The exemplar is, again, racial identity, and the mar-
ginal position of people inhabiting double cultures and facing pressures of
incorporation and homogeneity.
Quotation marks are ‘queer’, both denoting authority and authenticity,
and questioning the status of what passes for natural. They mark perform-
ance, although post-structuralism has exploded such distinctions as natural
and performed. Most of this section is a study of the lyric and danced
memory routines of Bill Jones, whose poses are the physical equivalent of
quotations which trouble the distinction between first and third persons and