Front Matter

Everything has been said before, but since nobody listens we have to keep going back and begin all over again. – Andre Gide, Le Traité du Narcisse

Thus reads one of the very few epigraphs that I remember well. It’s from the philosopher Shelly Kagan’s book, The Limits of Morality, and it is memorable both for being unexpected—Kagan’s book is a relentlessly analytical exercise in moral theory; the likes of Gide do not appear in what we call “the main text”—and for being beautifully aphoristic. Appropriately—necessarily!—Gide’s axiom is not original to him. Knowingly or not, he repeats the Roman playwright, Terence:

In fact, nothing is said that has not been said before. – Terence, The Eunuch

I was reminded of this by a recent essay on epigraphs in The Walrus, written by Tajja Isen, which sent me looking for predecessors. Everything has been said before…

In 2021, Thomas Swick wrote an article on epigraphs for LitHub, which Isen cites:

The epigraph page is like a ceremonial gate, ushering us into the realm of the author [whose] beloved quotation … perfectly reflects, or distills, the essence of what follows.

Swick is an epigraph fan. “I am always disappointed when I don’t find one,” he laments. “It’s like looking at a man in a suit who’s not wearing a tie.”

I’m not sure I understand the sentiment. A man in a suit without a tie is smart but relaxed, unstuffy—or perhaps disheveled, as the evening takes a licentious turn. Either way, he’s appealing, not off-putting.

Swick’s misfire reminds me of a more compelling case, made by the philosopher Michael Dummett, for another element of “front matter”—the preface—in one of the greatest of all time:

I am always disappointed when a book lacks a preface: it is like arriving at someone's house for dinner, and being conducted straight into the dining room. A preface is personal, the body of the book impersonal: the preface tells you the author's feelings about his book, or some of them. A reader who wishes to remain aloof can skip the preface without loss; but one who wants to be personally introduced has, I feel, the right to be.

Dummett’s preface to Frege: Philosophy of Language describes the hiatus in its writing as he put the book on hold for four years to devote himself to anti-racist activism, ending in despair; the preface closes with frank acknowledgement of Frege’s anti-semitism.

When I first read [Frege’s] diary, I was deeply shocked, because I had revered Frege as an absolutely rational man, if, perhaps, not a very likeable one. I regret that the editors of Frege's Nachlass chose to suppress that particular item. From it I learned something about human beings which I should be sorry not to know…

About prefaces, I agree with Dummett: I want to chat with the author over drinks and snacks before we sit down at the dinner table. About the epigraph, I’m ambivalent.

In one of the better iterations of the endlessly recycled epigraph article, Rachel Buurma sketches a theory of how they function:

Epigraphs escort us safely across the boundary between the title page and the story. Easing us into narrative, epigraphs make us pause and notice the transition from the world to the work, from life to the novel. They slow us down—which is why we often skip them.

Buurma is reviewing an anthology of epigraphs edited by Rosemary Ahern—a quixotic enterprise, as she notes:

In removing these epigraphs from their sources, The Art of the Epigraph attempts an impossible task and achieves an interesting failure. A symbiotic literary form, the epigraph cannot survive alone.

Buurma traces the fashion for the epigraph in Europe to the early 18th century and has some excellent anecdotes—for instance, that “George Eliot invented almost half of Middlemarch’s chapter epigraphs.” But she focuses on fiction.

What is the function of the epigraph in nonfiction writing? Not to mark the passage from belief to the suspension of disbelief. To serve as a motto, then, a lodestar that guides interpretation where an argument is obscure?

In my (more) pretentious days, I gave epigraphs to academic articles. The first was this:

[Perhaps] we should even wonder whether rationality might not be a minor virtue, or no virtue at all […] – Warren Quinn, “Rationality and the Human Good”

When your epigraph needs square brackets to mark interpolation, you should know you’ve gone astray. My second attempt was slightly better:

The view that human beings do not really know what they are doing is poised uneasily between truism and absurdity. – John Dunn, Western Political Theory in the Face of the Future

But both feel out of place. By the time I wrote an academic book, I had abandoned the epigraph—though I returned to it with Midlife and used another in Life is Hard. Their epigraphs summon guardians under whose signs the books were written: Rabbi Hillel in one case, Wittgenstein in the other. They are mottos, but they are also invocations.

The nonfiction epigraph can be pompous, a way of asserting stature, inserting oneself into a noble lineage, or pulling rank—think especially of untranslated excerpts or intricate, page-long passages that test a reader’s comprehension. It can function like a fantasy blurb, as though a titan has traveled through time to endorse one’s book.

But it’s a gesture of humility, too. To submit to an epigraph is to concede that one could not say it better oneself, that one is willing to play second fiddle in one’s own orchestra, to be read as commentary on a primary text, the Talmud to the epigraph’s Torah. It is to place oneself in the refuge of a higher power.