30 June 2018
Some cautious notes on ellipses. They are pleasing. They’re like stepping stones, the sort that stick out of the water and are a risky pleasure to jump on when you want to cross a stream without getting wet. Today, especially in emails and texts, they have such power of suggestion that we distribute them by the handful. The canonical three dots are no longer enough; there are four, five, even six. “I’m here… I’m in anguish…. I wonder where you are….. I’m thinking of you…… I would like to see you again but…….”
They’re very communicative and indicate many things: anxiety, embarrassment, timidity, uncertainty, the mischief of saying and not saying, a moment when we were about to exaggerate and then let it go, or even just a pause.
I used to use them freely; now I don’t use them at all. And yet I like them: in other people’s writing they don’t bother me, even if instead of three dots I find ten in a row. But at a certain point, my eyes started to fly over those dots, moving on to grab hold of the words as quickly as possible. And in my own writing I began to feel they were flirtatious, like someone batting her eyelashes, mouth slightly open in feigned wonder. Too many graceful winking suspensions, in short.
I stopped using them definitively when, as a result of personal experience, I became convinced that no discourse, once begun, should ever be suspended. I’m talking about oral communication: if you take on the responsibility of starting a sentence, you should bring it to an end—even if you’re being shouted at, even if you’re being insulted, and you regret that you started to speak, and you flounder, lose confidence, the words no longer come to you.
My decision didn’t have anything to do with writing, and maybe not even with ellipses; it had to do with the very idea of suspension. Sometimes we’re silent to keep the peace, sometimes out of self-interest, knowing we shouldn’t speak or everything will be ruined. But more often we’re silent out of fear, out of complicity. Silence can be criticised, but it has the virtue of being a clear choice. It’s when we decide to break it, to speak, that we have to get to the end without slipping away, without the convenience of ellipses.
An old inclination for the fade-out has changed over the years into an aversion to prevaricating, to the secretive signal. If you have to speak, then speak, I say to myself, and get to the end. Even when dialogue imposes an ellipsis—in novels, they get out of hand—I do everything to avoid it. If I can’t, I prefer to reduce them from three to one, an abrupt interruption—so instead of “I’d like to see you again but…” I prefer “I’d like to see you again but.” You have to pay the price in a cut-off sentence, note its ugliness, and rectify it by learning to get, at least when it comes to words, to the point.