Frankissstein (2019) by Jeanette Winterson and The Passenger (2023) by Cormac McCarthy don’t have much in common, except that they’re both entirely devoid of speech marks. Better literary scholars probably have deeper things to say about these two very sophisticated meditations on love, life and death, but having to teach literature to students who sometimes struggle to understand basic sentences has led me to become more dully prosaic in the face of some books. Dialogues without speech marks further complicate my students’ reading experience.

As I was teaching Frankissstein a few weeks ago, I ventured to explain that its lack of inverted commas and of he-saids and she-saids reflects a post-modernist take on intertextuality: Winterson doesn’t bother to put any limits to the dialogues within the book because the entire book is a dialogue with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and the feral horde of rewritings and adaptations it has so far produced. My students aren’t fond of post-modernism, and they weren’t the least bit convinced by this fancy interpretation.

On my ride home, I cracked open The Passenger and immediately felt woe seep through my sorry fingers as I remembered: oh, right. It’s not just Winterson. Much of contemporary literature has let go of speech marks. (In my defense, I’m a specialist of nineteenth-century literature). Why?

A friend suggested that McCarthy wants to keep the reader confused, in a constant state of intellectual blur. It would be desirable for the reader not to be certain which line belongs to which character. There are, after all, many characters, and some of them are somewhat forgettable. The novel also delves into liminal states of consciousness and ponders the cognitive limits of the brain. Yet, McCarthy, like Winterson, is a skilled writer, and each of his speaking characters has a distinct voice, a distinct way of putting things and arranging words. A few chapters in, a proficient reader has no difficulties identifying who is speaking. I like the idea of confusion, but I’m not sure it holds up.

Post-modernism likely has something to do with the disappearance of speech marks. The blurring of lines is one of its most famous trademarks. Maybe folding descriptions into speech or speech into descriptions provides a critique of one or the other or both. It’s too early in the day (at time of writing) for me to think through such complex circumvolutions.

Have readers become so sophisticated that speech marks are no longer necessary? Is that compatible with the increase in literacy I hear constantly reported? Or have readers instead become allergic to signs of the written word? The way McCarthy and Winterson frame dialogues imitates almost exactly what we hear when people talk. Our ears don’t get speech marks or he-askeds and she-yawneds. This minimalism of Frankissstein and The Passenger makes the two texts more superficially lifelike; they feel a bit less like crafted works of fiction. After all, the written word and oral speech have long waged a winner-takes-all battle over truth and authenticity.

What is it like to write after the “linguistic turn,” when everything is already text? This might be why post-modernism is written with a sense of psychotic self-referentiality.

In Mrs Dalloway already, Woolf punctually drops purely grammatical words from her sentences to figure life more directly, more animalistically. She forsakes what belongs exclusively to the realm of linguistics, what doesn’t correspond to a specific “signified” in the outside world, so as to manifest life with minimal mediation from the trickster that is language. Words are extracted from a system with its own internal logic, to become totems of the world.

In the end, this is what disappearing speech marks lead me to think about: how strange it must be to write when the world starts distrusting words.