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I read Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon last year, and there was some comma usage I’ve been curious about ever since.

For instance, I’ve just opened up a couple pages of it and saw that he has this sentence:

They move slowly, but without resistance.

Now this is interesting to me, because I thought you use a comma before a coordinating conjunction to link two independent clauses. To me, it seems like the comma might be unnecessary. Maybe it’s supposed to be a nonessential phrase, but I would think there wouldn’t be a but there.

So I guess to ask that question as well, I've also seen him do something similar that would be like:

They move slowly, without resistance.

Would that now be an example of a nonessential phrase?

I’ve also seen him do things like—and I’m just throwing in words here as an example—this:

They move slowly, coldly, without resistance, toward Mittelwerk.

I got used to this pretty quickly, and I know that these aren’t the best examples, but I was pretty confused by some of his comma usages when I first started reading his stuff, and so I was wondering whether anyone here had any explanation for what he has done here.

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    With an author of the stature of Pynchon, it’s what you can learn, not trying to apply some supposedly standard rules.
    – Xanne
    Jan 29, 2021 at 23:36
  • @Xanne Hey, that’s what ℐ said!. :)
    – tchrist ♦
    Jan 30, 2021 at 1:48
  • @tchrist Indeed you did. Thus +1, and ny apologies for not seeing it sooner.
    – Xanne
    Jan 30, 2021 at 8:40
  • Just as an aside, Pynchon cut his teeth as a tech writer for Boeing, which had at that time, an obsessive, draconian operation enforcing document standards run by Orcs. Lists are a big part of tech writing, and they garnered special attention from the Orcs. In an attempt to granularize listicles, commas proliferated and Orcan pressure rewired the brain to the path of least resistance. It's hard to deBoeingize your writing. It's like picking up an accent. Naturally enough, this results in other, over-the-top, efforts to personalize ones writing. And Pynchon was perfectly equipped to do that.
    – Phil Sweet
    Jan 30, 2021 at 12:57
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    Does this answer your question? Should I use a comma before "but"? The example is not identical, but Hot Licks explains the overarching principles (in particular, 'rules' are almost always just generally advisable guidelines for perhaps the majority of examples'. Here, in (1) comma usage is optional and essentially a guide to prosody rather than a parsing aid.
    – Edwin Ashworth
    Jan 30, 2021 at 17:53

2 Answers 2

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Given that this is a literary example, we can defensibly presume each word and punctuation mark is intentional. The original sentence and the two alternative versions you give would also be acceptable constructions, so we can assume there's a reason to use one over the others.

As for the comma, it's likely doing something more than telling the reader how to pronounce the sentence, unless we're looking at an instance of a character speaking. Typically (though there are of course many exceptions), the narrator isn't a character and so the narrator's "voice," including features like pronunciation or prosody, isn't what's coming through by way of punctuation. In narration, as opposed to characters' speech, punctuation (along with all linguistic and orthographical features) is presumably intended to affect the reader's interpretation; in cases of ambiguity, an intended effect could be to evoke in the reader one interpretation over and above other possible interpretations.

So, if we take the alternative examples you give, we could ask whether there are different possibilities for interpreting the three versions, and this might suggest why the author made certain punctuation or lexical choices. Of course we can't really know why the author did one thing as opposed to another, and below are just my own offerings of possible alternative interpretations, but they demonstrate my overall answer, which is that literary usage of punctuation is related to authorial intention and the (always present) possibility of differences in reader interpretation.

They move slowly, without resistance.

This is essentially a serial comma. We might interpret this as: "They move slowly and [they move] without resistance."

They move slowly but without resistance.

Without the comma, this feels similar to the above. "They move slowly yet they also move without resistance."

They move slowly, but without resistance.

The work the comma does here is subtle, but my suggestion is that it makes explicit the relationship between slowness and resistance, and specifies that the relationship isn't causal, as in: "They move slowly but their movement isn't slow because of resistance."

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    Your first sentence is of absolutely paramount importance, for it is not our place to doubt the choices made by the giants of literature. Rather, it is our place to appreciate the deft touches adorning their subtle art—and, perhaps, on such rare occasion as luck may especially bless us, even to understand some small portion of it. ❡ But alas! your second sentence has turned from the path of wisdom to tread instead the path of error, confusing grammar for mere orthography. So long as the same words occur in the same order, their grammar is identical, as grammar is a thing heard, not seen.
    – tchrist ♦
    Jan 30, 2021 at 1:47
  • Well, yes...although while we certainly may question the choices of giants, as we should question things in general, that needn't prevent us from also marveling at their brilliance and savoring their works. But I'm not sure there's anything "mere" about orthography (if we bracket its connotation of propriety). Isn't convention the very thing that allows a mark to mean? How would we "hear" grammar on the page, were it not for the orthographical marks that accompany the script, which separate, with varying effects, the particular marks we call "words"?
    – cpit
    Jan 30, 2021 at 2:34
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    As punctuation is never grammar, all possible placements of punctuation that leave the original words in the original order are grammatical if the original sentence was grammatical. Grammar comprises but two domains: morphology, which arranges sub-lexical units of meaning (graphemes) into words; and syntax, which recursively arranges lexical units of meaning (words) into larger syntactic constituents such as phrases, clauses, and sentences. Punctuation, spelling, spacing, typography, capitalization, and the medium upon which these are written do not, being technology, pertain to grammar.
    – tchrist ♦
    Jan 30, 2021 at 2:49
  • That would imply that because I go there. is a grammatical sentence, I. Go there. and I, go, there. are also grammatical "sentences." But note that as readers (i.e. a particular kind of addressee), we only refer to the first as "a sentence" because of its period; without that, we might call it a clause or phrase--syntactic elements, thus in the domain of grammar as defined--but we wouldn't typically call it a sentence. My use of "grammatical" was imprecise. Changed to "acceptable," denoting that a reader is likely to consider it valid according to current conventions.
    – cpit
    Jan 30, 2021 at 7:32
  • But if referring to a presumed "deep" structure of language, then yes, grammaticality is independent of punctuation. Yet once we start talking about "the sentence" or "the word" as units of analysis (and analysts of deep structure rarely fail to utter the word "sentence") we've presumed the existence of punctuation--the division of language into units, whether effected by a pause, the end of one phoneme and the beginning of another, a space, a period, etc. There's no such thing as "a word" or "a sentence" that isn't to some extent arbitrarily cut off, perforated, or punctured from its context.
    – cpit
    Jan 30, 2021 at 7:38
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"They move slowly, without resistance."

has nothing to do with "non-essential phrases". The comma you see is a "pause comma", the author is showing you how to say the sentence.

They move slowly, coldly, without resistance, toward Mittelwerk.

These are "list commas" the adverbs qualify the verb individually, rather than each other.

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    This. "The comma might be unnecessary" is misguided. If an author wrote it with intention then it's necessary (for the author, and thus for intended readers) - for whatever reason.
    – Drew
    Jan 30, 2021 at 0:24

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