Abstract
This article investigates the textual embedding of epigraphs in the first decades of the nineteenth century. While it had long been customary to use a Latin or Greek quote on title pages, many British and French Romantics went further, placing one or several mottoes at the beginning of each chapter or poem. From an intertextual perspective, these quotes are indexical traces of absent texts. The paratextual dialogue, this article’s main focus, rather involves equally present elements (motto and title, motto and chapter, motto and motto). As a form of commentary, epigraphs shed light on the text they accompany, thus operating in a convergent manner, but their divergent potential should not be underestimated: instead of helping us plod through the plot, mottoes can lead us astray, much like unreliable narrators. Taken as a whole, they form a parallel text, an alternative narrative, where writers sometimes allow themselves to develop a different, paradoxical, poetics. The above-mentioned issues are illustrated with examples from Stendhal, whose Red and Black, arguably the most playful and ironic example of “motto-mania” in French Romantic literature, is reread in light of Roland Barthes’ S/Z.
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Notes
Primo Levi echoes these last words when he asks us, at the very outset of his Auschwitz-memoir, Se questo è un uomo, to reflect upon the fate of those who suffered and died at the hands of the Nazis: “You who live safe/In your warm houses”, “Voi che vivete sicuri/Nelle vostre tiepide case” (Levi 1967, p. 9; 1996, p. 11). He wants his words to be carved “in [o]ur hearts” (ibid.), just as the camp’s infamously ironic motto (“Arbeit Macht Frei”: Work Sets Free) had branded all those who had passed through its gates: “This is hell. Today, in our times, hell must be like this,” (1967, p. 23; 1996, p. 22) Levi’s narrator says, shortly after quoting Dante’s Charon: “Guai a voi, anime prave!” (Inf. 3.84, qtd. in Levi 1967, p. 22, but not rendered in the American edition); Cary translates: “Woe to you, wicked spirits!”
Genette (1987, 1997) studies the many fringes of a text that act as boundaries and as “thresholds of interpretation”: titles, dedications, prefaces, footnotes, mottoes, etc. They are all part of what he terms the textual periphery or peritext. Together with the so-called epitext (elements that are relevant to a text yet lie outside of it, such as reviews, interviews, letters, etc.), they make up the paratext. Of his three terms, the last is by far the most commonly used in criticism.
To use a word coined by Lovelace, in letter 169 of Richardson’s Clarissa Harlowe (1749).
Scott sometimes made them up as he went along (see his own testimony in the 1831 “General Introduction” to The Chronicles of the Canongate, as well as that of his first biographer, John Lockhart [Berger 1982]), hence their posthumous inclusion in his Poetical Works.
The same can be said for some shorter texts of the 1830s, be it Pétrus Borel’s “immoral tales” in Champavert (29 mottoes) or Aloysius Bertrand’s prose poems in Gaspard de la nuit (56 mottoes).
The Danish text is available on the Website of the Arkiv for Dansk Litteratur: http://www.adl.dk/adl_pub/vaerker/cv/e_vaerk/e_vaerk.xsql?ff_id=22&id=7014&hist=fmK&nnoc=adl_pub (accessed on June 15, 2009).
There are exceptions, as always, the most noteworthy being Jules Janin’s novel La confession (1830), as previously mentioned. Similarly, the extremely short texts adorning each of Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly’s six Diaboliques (1874) are probably of his own invention. Both writers intended to poke fun at serious motto-maniacs: in this respect, it is worth noticing how the motto of Barbey’s “Rideau cramoisi,” “Really,” echoes Janin’s “Vraiment!” (Chap. 17).
Images of both can be found in the Wikipedia articles on the “Flag of Canada” and the “Canadian Red Ensign”.
This seems indeed to be a generally applied principle in the study of narrative: in her classic textbook, Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan (2002, p. 101) similarly interprets another peritextual element, the footnote, as proof of narratorial presence and intervention.
Barthes (1970, p. 25; 1974, p. 18) borrows this admittedly abstruse term form Aristotle, who linked praxis, “action,” to proairesis, “choice,” or rather a combination of deliberation and decision-making: “At any rate,” we read in the Nichomachean Ethics (3.2), “choice involves a rational principle and thought. Even the name [“pro”] seems to suggest that it is what is chosen before other things.”
In an often-cited journal entry from May 1830, Stendhal writes: «L’épigraphe doit augmenter la sensation, l’émotion du lecteur, si émotion il peut y avoir et non plus présenter un jugement plus ou moins philosophique sur la situation» (1982, p. 129). The shift signalled by his use of “non plus” is a move away from the motto’s heraldic heritage, its link to the pithy sayings on aristocratic devices, a link still very tangible in Samuel Johnson’s day, as we saw before.
John Polidori’s 1819 tale was hugely successful, among other things because it had been erroneously ascribed to Byron. The first French editions of Byron’s Oeuvres, translated by Amédée Pichot, included “Le vampire,” which might explain Stendhal’s choice to attribute a made-up quote to Polidori: it is yet another way of obliquely inscribing Byron in his text.
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The research leading up to this paper was funded by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
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Grutman, R. How to do things with mottoes: recipes from the romantic era (with special reference to Stendhal). Neohelicon 37, 139–153 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11059-010-0042-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11059-010-0042-0