"Tuck in your blank!": Antiaposiopetic Joyce

Punctuation is generally supposed to be a silent guide to the pronunciation of written words, but as this essay argues, Joyce shows how misleading this supposition is: rather than assisting the reader of a text to "hear" its words, punctuation can obstruct or even prohibit pronunciation. Joyce's understanding of how discreetly placed ellipses and dashes can conceal and silence words, thereby leaving the reader uncertain as to what the text "says," and how to perform it aloud, is part of a larger strategy to expose and overturn the normative and restrictive functions of punctuation. In examining a variety of instances in Joyce's works where pronunciation is indeterminable, this essay posits that punctuation is a strikingly contradictory and inexact system that Joyce reveals is fundamentally ideological.