Today I found an epigraph for my new novel. It is a quotation from Arundhati Roy’s, The God of Small Things: “Little events, ordinary things, smashed and reconstituted. Imbued with new meaning. Suddenly they become the bleached bones of a story.”
If that is a true epigraph, you should be able to deduce from it that my novel is at least partly about the way we make stories out of people and events we experience and observe: we take a character from one place, place her in a scene from another place, add some assumptions we make about both, and thread them together to make a (we hope) coherent narrative. Human beings have always done that. We observed that the Sun travelled across the sky at the same time and in the same direction every day, and we made up a story about how that could be. We may have got the facts wrong, but it is the story that matters, not the facts. For centuries we told the story of Helios hauling the Sun across the sky in his chariot, and lived quite happily in a universe run by an absentee group of enigmatic divinities.
A novel is made of small things. As Arundhati Roy writes later in the novel, “at times like these, only the Small Things are ever said. The Big Things lurk unsaid inside.” In a novel, the Big Things lurk behind the scenes, like invisible Helios and his chariot.
Epigraphs are among the Small Things. They are pithy quotations from other authors that appear at the beginnings of books as a kind of hint at the Big Things. They are to be distinguished from epigrams. Epigrams, or maxims, are witty sayings that usually end with an ironic, often cynical, twist. Many writers have written them. Le Rochefoucauld wrote a whole book of them: “Everyone blames his memory, no one his judgement,” for example, and, “Gratitude is merely the secret hope of future favours.” Which reminds me of another pithy line by Albert Einstein: “Common sense is the deposit of prejudices laid down in the mind before the age of eighteen.”
Late in his life, W.H. Auden wrote epigrams. He called them Shorts, because he meant them to be read as short poems, but they are epigrams. Here’s one: “Only bad rhetoric / Can improve the world; / To true Speech it is deaf.”
When epigraphs work, they express a book’s intent, so that readers read on with some notion of what they will encounter in subsequent pages. For Part I of my novel The Good Father, I chose two lines from “The Hurt Child,” a harrowing poem by Margaret Atwood – “And its blood will seep into the water / and you will drink it every day” – that sum up in fifteen words what the father in my novel fears his entire life. For one of the chapters of Pandexicon, my book about Covid, I took a line from the aptly named Maxim Gorky: “Without science, democracy has no future.” In that chapter of my book, I noted that we are living in an anti-science age (and have been since George W. Bush in the U.S., and Stephen Harper in Canada), which translated during the pandemic as anti-mask and anti-vaccination, and that by basing our personal policies on superstition and conspiracy theories –Einstein’s “common sense” – we risk unravelling the very fabric of our society.
Some writers worry that, once readers read an epigraph, they will think they know what the book is about and feel they won’t need to read any further. It may also appear, as Merilyn Simonds, my partner in life and a novelist and memoirist, holds, that “quotations at the beginning of a story, especially if they are long, may indicate that the author is not confident in what they are saying and so are borrowing the words of other writers.” True, but, if well chosen, they may also indicate that the author is so confident about their work that they comfortably place it up there with that of the writer of the epigraph. I agree with her about length, though. An epigraph, like an epigram, only works when it is short.
Ideally, an epigraph puts a reader in the right frame of mind for what the writer is going to say. It also informs the reader that other minds have addressed themselves to this topic, and their work supports the current writer’s. It makes us part of a community of like-minded people. Stephen Marche’s short book, On Writing and Failure, which warns would-be writers that rejection is an inevitable but endurable part of the writing life, has for an epigraph a line by George Orwell, who should know: “Any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.” A little dour, perhaps, but it does suggest that the writing life isn’t much different from any other kind of life.
An epigraph can help to expand the scope of a book, to hint at the Big Things that lurk behind the Small Things. Naomi Klein’s absorbing new book, Doppelganger, takes as its launching pad the discomfort she feels at being mistaken for that “Other Naomi,” Naomi Wolf. Naomi Klein is well known and admired for her stance against big business taking over our lives, and when Naomi Wolf appears on Steve Bannon’s podcast, War Room, extolling the virtues of Donald Trump and the Big Reset, Naomi Klein gets emails from friends wanting to know when she switched over to the Dark Side. She hasn’t; her doppelganger has. One of the epigrams she chose for her book is from Dostoyevsky’s novel, The Double: “A terrible multitude of duplicates had spring into being.” The quote is a perfect set-up for Doppelganger because a major tenet in the book is that, just as Naomi Klein is beset by her evil twin Naomi Wolf, so are we all surrounded by “a terrible multitude of duplicates” every day, from the avatars we choose for ourselves on social media to the far-rightists who mouth their defense of Free Speech using the same arguments, even the same words, that liberals have been using to defend Free Speech for decades.
Which takes me back to Arundhati Roy. In a speech (Auden’s “true Speech”) she delivered in Sweden last year, Roy addressed this problem of duplication. At times like these, she said, we are witnessing “the phenomenon of democracies transmuting into something unrecognizable but with unnervingly recognizable resonances, and the escalating policing of speech in ways that are very old, as well as very new, to the point where the air itself has turned into a sort of punitive heresy-hunting machine.”
Naomi Klein could have used that as an epigraph.
Wonderful, Wayne. I am wondering, if we write them ourselves, as headers and footers, are they still epigraphs? jmbridgeman, onelonelywriter.substack.com RECONCILE THIS!