Among writers who play with punctuation, take Emily Dickinson and her idiosyncratic dashes, or Sally Rooney and her subversion of speech marks, there are none who use it so chillingly as Hilary Mantel. Punctuation was certainly crucial to her process, once proclaiming: “I’ve always been addicted to something or other, […] semicolons for instance.” Yet there is another punctuation mark of interest: the comma. In her short story ‘Comma,’ she takes it to new, terrifying places.
In the story, we follow Kitty who, over the summer, has made friends with wild outcast Mary. Every evening, they venture to a large house set apart from the rest of the town, which Mary claims houses ‘“something you couldn’t put a name to.” It is suggested the woman of the house has mothered a sort of half-human creature: a child gone wrong. When pressed by Kitty, Mary can only describe its appearance as “a comma, you know, what you see in a book?”
There is a certain shock upon reading this line for the first time. How can something, by definition two-dimensional, refer to a living, fleshy form? The word “comma” is immediately succeeded by a comma itself, forcing the reader to confront this incompatibility of word, symbol, and body. From here on, one is hyper-aware of punctuation, which seems to creep off the page and take on faint figural shapes.
Later in the story, Kitty sees the “comma” child for herself. As it turns in their direction, she finds it has no face: “and we saw- nothing; we saw something not yet become.” Although initially strange, the comparison between creature and comma here begins to make sense. When used as punctuation, a comma is a pause, a moment of breath, an absence. It signifies the unfinished and liminal, coming before a sentence is fully formed. Mantel continues: “it was without meaning.” Just like the “comma” child, a comma is nothing in itself. Signifying neither sound nor image, it relies entirely on its context.
By the close of ‘Comma,’ punctuation becomes the language of the story. Later in life, Kitty spots Mary when visiting their childhood town, who gives her “a single nod, a full stop…” Yet Mantel disobeys her own writing, ending with an ellipsis. It seems as though the girls’ encounter with the “comma” child has broken down all grammatical order.
Illustration by Katya Roberts for The Student