The punctuation in Yevgeny Zamyatin’s novel “We”: The dash

Stella Frančišković

dr. sc. Rafaela Božić

Dystopia and Language

6 September 2017

The punctuation in Yevgeny Zamyatin’s novel “We”: The dash

In this paper we will discuss the style and poetics of minimalism in Yevgeny Zamyatin's dystopian novel We. We will put emphasis on the language itself, especially the sentence and interpunction. The dash is defenitely one of the most prominent features of Zamyatin's sentence and language. Therefore, the most of this work will be dedicated to its analysis, importance and meaning in the text. We will explore how Zamyatin revolutionized the usage and the position of language in literature, used unexplored techniques in the characterization of the protagonists and the description of their emotional state. My goal in this paper is to show how the dash has to be considered one of the most important characteristics of Zamyatin’s style. Also, I want to demonstrate how it plays a crucial role in the characterization of the protagonist D-503.

1. Zamyatin and the language

Yevgeny Zamyatin is, alongside George Orwell and Andalous Huxley, one of the greatest writers of dystopian novels and one of the pioneers of this genre. His famous novel We, whose language and poetics is discussed in this paper, is one of the most important dystopian works and a symbol of the genre. It was written in the beginning of the 20th century, in 1920, when the outlook and the attitude towards language and its place in literature changed drastically. The words stopped being just a medium of communication and a bearer of the meaning. (Rister 1995, 8) They now obtained their own place in the realm of art and the language became not only the means by which we create literature, but the art and literature itself was created within it. Words became the worlds for themselves and therefore created an individual and original reality within each novel. Consequently, the role of the reader changed and he now became the “co-creator” of the literary reality and an active participant in the creation of the work. (Rister 1995) His role became crucial to the understanding and interpretation of the novel. These very important avant-garde ideas of Russian formalists are prominent in Zamyatin’s famous novel. Its incomplete sentences and original punctuation draw the attention to the text and make the reading more difficult and demanding. Therefore, the reader must be aware of the language and its suggestiveness. He has to be active, present and sensible. Zamyatin himself said that the sentence of the 20th century has to be similar to a landscape that we can see from a car and not to the one we could see from the 19th century carriage. (Božić 2013, 23) It has to be fragmentary without many details or information, so that it can require reader’s participation and interpretation. We can see the echo of this idea in the text of We. In his novel, Zamyatin uses the elliptic, incomplete sentences to draw a unique “picture of words” and an original design of the novel. He truly creates the separate “reality of the work” not only in a philosophical sense and on the level of content, but also in a linguistic sense and in the language that becomes the reflection of its reality.

1. The dash - a curiosity of Zamyatin’s style

The original “design” of We’s linguistic portrait is mostly made out of unusual punctuation. Right form the first glance, the frequent usage of the dash and three dots gives an interesting layout of the text. The dash is definitely the most unconventional and the most common sign found in the novel. We can freely say that it has a linguistic and even more so a special stylistic role in Zamyatin’s masterpiece.

It’s frequency in the novel, especially in comparison to other works of prose, is quite astonishing. According to the analysis that was done by professor R.Božić, Zamyatin used 3271 dashes when it comes to We. (Božić 2013, 23) This makes it approximately 17 dashes per page. Naturally, the dashes are not evenly distributed. We find 185 dashes from page 137 to page 147. (Božić 2013, 23) This is where the dashes are most frequent. Other parts of the novel are not that filled with the dash but its number per page never goes below four and varies from four to forty dashes per page.

In her further analysis professor R.Božić compares We to other novels and works of literature from different time periods, differing also in style and the subject of work. Zamyatin and his novel remain the champions of the dash. When we speak of Lermontov’s The Hero of Our Time an average number of dashes per page goes from zero to four. Platonov’s Chevengur counts from zero to seven dashes per page from page 120 to page 131. If we take a sample of 9000 signs and analyze the number of dashes in various novels Zamyatin’s We counts 54 dashes, Lermontov’s The Hero of Our Time 4 dashes, Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina 4 dashes and Platonov’s Chevengur has 36 dashes in 9000 signs. (Božić, Academiaedu n.d.) Even without analyzing the usage and the meaning of every dash in the sentence we can easily conclude that the dash in Zamyatin’s We has to have a stylistic significance and plays a great role in the poetics of the novel. It is not just a linguistic sign used when necessary in the sentence. According to R.Božić, its role in the syntax of the sentence can be put in four categories (Božić 2013, 23-26):

a) Dash instead of comma - used in the case of enumeration and the division within the sentence

…всякий из нумеров имеет право -- как на сексуальный продукт -- на любой нумеp (Замятин 2013)

 И дальше -- я опять не помню, очень возможно потому, что... (Замятин 2013)

b) Dash instead of three dots, at the end of the sentence

Ответить он не успел; сверху -- по ступеням -- топот -- (Замятин 2013)

 c) Dash instead of a pause

Вы должны -- вы должны мне ответить: а там, где кончается ваша конечная Вселенная? Что там -- дальше? (Замятин 2013)

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