Epigraphs

       . . . should be avoided. There is something hokey about an epigraph, even a straightforward epigraph: a posture of awe before some palimpsestic Other Text; a kind of rhetorical attitudinizing. Poshlost. It may be true, as the critic Wayne C. Booth has observed, that epigraphs and titles assume a particular importance in modernist writing, where ". . . they are often the only explicit commentary the reader is given. . ." All the same, they are hokey: one more bit of window-dressing before we get to the goods.

       Hokier yet are cornier ironic epigraphs. If you must lay on an epigraph, take it from some neutral text of a sort entirely different from your own. To quote other writers in the course of a lecture, an essay, a story -- even writers better than yourself -- is properly to give credit where credit is due and to marshal authority in defense of your argument. But to preface your text with an epigraph from a superior author in the same genre is to remind the reader that he might better spend his time with that author than with you. Such epigraphs are tails that wag their dogs, but from in front, like an awkward figure of speech. They make the works that follow them an anticlimax. Walter Scott did better to fake his epigraphs (e.g., at the head of Chapter XXXVI of Ivanhoe: "Say not my art is fraud -- all live by seeming. . ." OLD PLAY); Ernest Hemingway likewise, without attribution, in The Snows of Kilimanjaro;* F. Scott Fitzgerald best of all, by taking the epigraph to The Great Gatsby from a fictitious poet in his early novel This Side of Paradise.

* But see his lapses in e.g., The Sun Also Rises, where, as elsewhere, he compounds the epigraph misdemeanor with the quoted-title one.

       Do not borrow epigraphs from better works than yours in hand, or from better writers than yourself.

        -- J.B.: "Epigraphs," in The Friday Book

       . . . worse than an epigraph is a brace of epigraphs, especially when the second is deployed in Tantalizing Ironic Counterpoint to the first, as it will almost always be. Dispense with epigraphs, comrades, as with quoted or kitschy titles, subtitles, printed dedications (unless love and gratitude blow away the rules), acknowledgments, prefaces, forewords, introductions, tables of contents, and all other throat-clearings and instrument-tunings, except where they are quite necessary or very useful* and for the love of God get on with the story.

        -- Ibid.

* The same, it goes without saying, goes for footnotes.

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