An Irishman's Diary

DURING my days as a struggling writer in Paris – and there have been several of them down the years – some of the worst difficulties I faced arose from not having brought my own laptop on the trip. When filing copy for the newspaper on such occasions, I was forced instead to head for the nearest internet cafe. And there, along with the usual deadline stress and lack of elbow room, I also had to struggle with the idiosyncrasies of the French keyboard.

It wasn’t the different arrangement of letters – the so-called AZERTY layout – that bothered me. The really disconcerting thing about the French keyboard is the placement of the full stop. Not only does it share a key with the semi-colon. But get this, the semi-colon is the key’s primary function. Whereas to access the full-stop, you have to hit the “shift” button as well.

The implication, clearly, is that in French writing, the semi-colon is more important, or at least more popular, than the full stop. Which instead of having a one-stroke key, as it does just about everywhere else in the western world, is relegated to a secondary position in the AZERTY system, along with such marginalised characters as the question mark and the forward slash.

It’s a moot point whether the keyboard evolved from the French literary style or the other way around. Possibly it’s a circular relationship, and a bit of both. But in any case, the prominence afforded the semi-colon on computers explains a lot: including many Le Monde editorials and all of Proust.

Never mind the latter’s madeleine – that was only what set him off. The key (no pun intended) to the Proustian oeuvre is the semi-colon. Thus, for example, the fairly typical sentence in Remembrance of Things Past where, contesting William Morris’s idea that beauty should also be useful, Proust describes his childhood bedroom.

It begins as follows: “Those high white curtains which hid from the eyes the bed placed as if in the rear of a sanctuary;”. But I won’t quote the rest of the sentence because, although life may not be too short, this column certainly is. Suffice to say that the semi-colon after “sanctuary” is only one of seven deployed during a verbal marathon that clocks in, finally, at 600 words.

Even that is a fairly pithy sentence compared with another in the same book, wherein he considers the historic plight of homosexuals. This includes no fewer than nine semi-colons and amasses a whopping 942 words (more than that in some translations) by the time a full stop at last intervenes.

Proust is an extreme case, obviously. But there’s no question that serious French writers in general are inordinately fond of semi-colons, vis-a-vis more permanent punctuation marks. It’s as if, in literary matters at least, they prefer to travel hopefully than to arrive. The serial semi-colon thereby serves like a succession of auberges on the route to Compostela: temporary resting places on an epic pilgrimage to meaning.

WHATEVER about Proust, Friedrich Nietzsche was an example of how the mechanics of writing affect how you think, sooner or later.

When his eyesight began to fail in later life, the great German philosopher bought a special typewriter: one that allowed him to write with his eyes closed. Whereupon critics noticed that his already terse style became even terser. Arguments turned into aphorisms, rhetoric into telegraphese. When a friend commented on the change, Nietzsche agreed. “Our writing equipment plays a part in the forming of our thoughts,” he said.

Perhaps crucially, Nietzsche’s was a Danish typewriter, not a French one. Or maybe national keyboard differentials weren’t as pronounced back then. But as early as the 1920s, Hemingway was taking no chances. He brought his American Corona No 3 with him to Paris. If he hadn’t, who knows where the typically-spare opening sentence of The Sun also Rises (“Robert Cohn was once middleweight boxing champion of Princeton.”) might have ended up.

I’ve never been a struggling writer in Germany, as it happens. So I can’t comment on the QWERTZ layout used there and in much of eastern Europe. No doubt it has its own eccentricities although, unlike the French system, it gives the full stop the same prominence accorded to it on the QWERTY keyboard.

In fact, the last overseas internet cafe I had to use was in Athens, where keyboards are a mixture of Roman and Greek letters. And perhaps the most interesting thing about Greek keyboards, it struck me, is that the semi-colon shares a key with the letter Q. Why is this interesting? Because the semi-colon is what Greeks use for a question mark, that’s why.

Which means that it must be enjoying almost French levels of overuse at the moment, as Greece faces more questions than Proust’s editors faced sub-clauses.

But on the plus side, I also noticed while in Athens that at least the “euro” symbol shares the same key (E) there as it does as on both the AZERTY and QWERTZ lay-outs. Yes, I’ve heard talk of a new German-designed keyboard, aimed at the Greek market, on which the euro symbol will be accessible only via “Control-Shift-E” followed by several more “Controls”. As far as I know, though, that’s still only a rumour.

fmcnally@irishtimes.com