Who are epigraphs for?
My second novel, Elegy, Southwest, comes out on February 18, 2025 (US), March 5, 2025 (ANZ), and March 13, 2025 (UK). Please pre-order it by asking at an independent bookstore, or through any of these links: McNally Jackson, Skylight, Bookshop.org, Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Waterstones,
I have been thinking about epigraphs this last week, because I recently gave an epigraph to one of the many ‘new things’ I am working on. This, historically, means that something is working. Epigraphs are a gesture of confidence I make towards myself.
I am, at present, reading five or six books simultaneously (I always am). Richard Powers’ Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance has two epigraphs (one from Proust, another from a biography of Henry Ford). Jennifer Croft’s The Extinction of Irena Rey has an epigraph from Suzanne Simard, the scientist who pioneered the study of the ways that trees communicate. Mourning a Breast by Xi Xi has no epigraphs. The Corporeal Life of Seafaring has no epigraphs. The Women I Love by Francesco Pacifico has a new epigraph for each of his six sections, plus one or two more. I have not paid attention to a single one of these epigraphs, in any of the books. I see them without reading them, and turn the page.
So what are epigraphs for? If people like me are skipping over them, why are they there? Why do writers keep including them, why do publishers keep allowing them? I’m interested, because I use epigraphs. My first novel had three (Patrick White, Judith Wright, and a line uttered by Kassandra in the Anne Carson translation of Aeschylus’s play, Agamemnon).
I remembered that, for Elegy, Southwest, I at some point created an ‘epigraph’ document. When I opened it again this morning, I found that I had, in the end, had twenty-three options for epigraphs. At some point I made a decision on one, but there was a point in the writing process when all twenty-three options were in contention, listed in a muddle under the title of the book.
My contention is that epigraphs are, for the most part, for the writer and not the reader. At least that is what they are for me. They help give a shape to what I’m writing, and establish the frame. They sit up the top of the document, reminding me about the ‘feeling’ I’m trying to get at. They’re not always useful, and I think in the end they can be a hindrance. But it strikes me that there’s an interesting story to tell about writing a book through the epigraphs a writer collects and discards, and given that the journey for Elegy, Southwest is pretty fresh in my mind, it might be interesting to pick through the discards.
The very first document that contains traces of what became Elegy, Southwest is called, embarrassingly, ‘Like A Motel Out of a David Lynch Film.’ It was started in April 2020, and after a week or so remained completely untouched for six months. No epigraphs.
In September of 2020, a new document was started, titled ‘maybe this is a novella’. I worked on that until the end of 2021, when it was decidedly no longer ‘a novella’. That document is where the first epigraphs were written down – it contains thirteen out of the eventual twenty-three, none of which was the one I eventually decided on. Here are the first:
“There is the thing itself, and then there is the predicament of its cavity.” — Karen Green
“We are past the age of enlightenment. This is past reason. We are pretty deep into modern history and the decline of religion. This is when Nature itself has been stripped bare of its cozy personality and we all feel homeless in our own natures as well.” — Diane Williams
“To live past the end of your myth is a perilous thing.” — Anne Carson
[These were the originals, the very beginning of thinking about what this project was. They were a product of books I was returning to in 2020, underlinings I was making and thinking, right, yes, this one. I still rather regret that the Anne Carson isn’t in the book anymore. But the tone – declarative, all-knowing, sure of itself – isn’t the tone of the novel, the end product needed to be softer. But it was these three that first established the frame of the book.]
“O how shall I warble myself for the dead one there I loved?” — Walt Whitman
“We want the spring to come and the winter to pass.
We want
whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss—we want more and more and then
more of it.” — Marie Howe
“Who would I show it to.” — W.S. Merwin, ‘Elegy’
[I knew the title of the novel I was working on almost from the beginning – Elegy, Southwest – but at some point early on I decided I wanted to get to the bottom of what an ‘elegy’ is and was. I took out from the library volumes such as Dying Modern: A Meditation on Elegy (Diana Fuss), Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney (Jahan Ramazani), and The Oxford Handbook of the Elegy. I also went about reading pertinent examples of elegies. I liked these three instances of elegy – the Whitman was sentimental and over-the-top, but when I understood the poem it came from was about Abraham Lincoln, all wrong. The Marie Howe got at the endless wanting that powers elegiac writing, which I liked. The Merwin I liked because it comprised the entirety of his poem, ‘Elegy.’ ‘Who will I show it to’ sounds like a question, but without the question mark, the line gestures towards something else – the futility of elegy. The task of writing towards something or someone who is gone, cannot read or hear the thing you’re writing. This, along with the Anne Carson, is the other that I regret not having in the book.]
“We go where there is love,
to the river, on our knees beneath the sweet
water.” — Natalie Diaz
[I reread, both for pleasure and to teach it, Diaz’s beautiful collection Postcolonial Love Poem many times while writing the book. It is the most gorgeous, rapturous writing about the Colorado River I know of, and I’m sure that my repeated readings of Diaz’s poems found their way into the book in countless ways.]
“An elegy I think is words to bind a grief
in, a companionship of grief, a spell
to keep it safe and sound, to keep it
from escaping.” — Nick Laird
[This is an excerpt from Laird’s poem ‘Up Late’ about his father’s passing during the pandemic, which I remember reading on my phone one evening and weeping. This excerpt, especially, helped remind me of what I was trying to do in this novel that was by then, probably, only about 12,000 words long.]
“If you stand there long enough, and look carefully enough at nature in its absence, you disappear and the desert flows through you.” — Dave Hickey
“There it is. Take it.” — William Mulholland
“Because there is in this world no one thing
to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds,
a word is elegy to what it signifies.” — Robert Hass
“It is a wonderful thing to contemplate: this new conquest of the great southwest. Where everything that man desires is present. Everything except sufficient water. With sufficient water we can be assured of a great and a stable civilization.” — Ray Lyman Wilbur, Secretary of the Interior 1929-1933
[These four all came from reading and research I was doing for the book – Mulholland and Hass are woven into the actual prose of the novel now – and the Wilbur quotation came from re-reading Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner, arguably the most important book in all the many that I read and found their way into Elegy, Southwest.]
“All of man’s mistakes arise because he imagines that he walks upon a lifeless thing, whereas his footsteps imprint themselves in a flesh full of power.” — Jean Giono
[This one I must have just stumbled across while I was browsing, because I own three Jean Giono novels and have yet to complete a single one. The line does, however, gets at the way I was trying to think about land, and how to write about it without falling into familiar, well-worn potholes of language].
In 2022 I began a new document – I wanted a fresh start, 2021 was, I now consider, the worst year of my life – and this became what I think of now as the real ‘first draft.’ I ‘finished it’ at the end of May after spending several concerted weeks on a self-styled writing retreat at my now-mother-in-law’s house. I then promptly caught Covid on a French train, went back to New York, and printed out the first version of a manuscript in July at a Fedex near Bryant Park and then took it to read at a crappy bar in the West Village, treating myself to a frozen margarita. That document included all of the above, as well as the following:
“We will use our memories. And crawl towards our future. And live in this great barren.” — Charles Bowden
“A man is a god in ruins.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson
“There was a thick crust of fable over this region, and as the country was lifted slowly into knowledge the layers of fable lifted with it, bending upward at the flanks like sedimentary strata along the axis of a great earth-flexure. It would take a long while for these to wear away.” — Wallace Stegner
[These three all came from a spurt of re-reading either ‘classic American nature writing, (Emerson)’ or ‘writers of the American southwest I was fond of’ (Bowden), or both (Stegner). At this point, I don’t think I had really committed to any of these as likely to make the final cut of the novel, but while I was still writing the first draft the accumulation of frames felt useful, like each of these epigraphs was a nail that I could use to hammer the novel into place.]
“A thing is a hole in a thing it is not.” — Carl Andre
“No materials are solid, they all contain caverns and fissures. Solids are particles built up around flux, they are objective illusions supporting grit, a collection of surfaces ready to be cracked. All chaos is put into the dark inside of the art.” — Robert Smithson
[At some point I realized I wanted land art to be present in the novel, and these are a product of re-reading and research I did on different land artists and adjacent artists. The Smithson quote I always knew was too abstract, and while I liked the koan-like oddness of the Carl Andre quote, I never took it seriously, as I was never going to use an epigraph in my novel uttered by a man who had murdered one of my favorite artists, his wife Ana Mendieta (allegedly).]
“A journey is a gesture inscribed in space, it vanishes even as it’s made. You go from one place to another place, and on to somewhere else again, and already behind you there is no trace that you were ever there. The roads you went down yesterday are full of different people now, none of them knows who you are. In the room you slept in last night a stranger lies in the bed. Dust covers over your footprints, the marks of your fingers are wiped off the door, from the floor and table the bits and pieces of evidence that you might have dropped are swept up and thrown away and they never come back again. The very air closes behind you like water and soon your presence, which felt so weighty and permanent, has completely gone. Things happen once only and are never repeated, never return. Except in memory.” — Damon Galgut
[I distinctly recall reading this novel in May 2022 – which my husband had wisely bought for me, knowing my tastes very well – and I have a memory of reading this section aloud to my friend Landon, who was sitting at the foot of my bed. I still think this conjures something very close to the spirit of what I wanted Elegy, Southwest to ‘feel’ like. But it was obvious from the start that it was way too long.]
“Westerners call what they have established out here a civilization, but it would be more accurate to call it a beachhead.” — Marc Reisner
[I still love this one, but it always felt a little combative for an opening gambit.]
“It is hard to understand how we
Could be brought here by love.” — Jack Gilbert
[This one I remember being very attached to, but it strikes me now as far too sentimental, or too simple, or both.]
Between this draft and the next I decided my epigraphs had become unwieldy, and so shunted them into their own document, whereupon I added two more:
“Yes: I have re-entered your olden haunts at last;
Through the years, through the dead scenes I have tracked you;
What have you now found to say of our past —
Viewed across the dark space wherein I have lacked you?” — Thomas Hardy
“You have gone (which I lament), you are here (since I am addressing you).” — Roland Barthes
The second draft of the novel (which was minimally changed from the first) settled on three epigraphs: Ray Lyman Wilbur, Anne Carson, and Nick Laird.
The third draft, which I worked on until December 2022, comprising the biggest re-write, and, at the end of which, I felt the first flutters of the question, ‘am I finished?’ started with those same three epigraphs – Ray Lyman Wilbur, Anne Carson, and Nick Laird, but added in the Roland Barthes.
By the fourth draft (finished, according to my computer, on 31st January 2023), I had settled on just one epigraph, the one that has stuck.
“You have gone (which I lament), you are here (since I am addressing you).” — Roland Barthes
By the third draft, I didn’t need the epigraphs to frame the project anymore, and they didn’t need to direct me. The book was a thing – a messy thing – 104,444 words at that point (the final word count is 90,068) – but a thing nonetheless. The Barthes quote came late, a surprise, out of nowhere. My husband was reading A Lover’s Discourse for the first time – the copy I’d first read in 2015 – and I was paging through it to look for any potentially embarrassing notes or underlinings I’d made back then, so as to warn him. The quote was one of those original lines I’d underlined, in 2015.
Taken on its own, in the present-day, it did something none of the other epigraphs did – it framed the novel for the reader. It wasn’t for me alone. It goes some length to explaining why the novel is written addressed to a ‘you’, and many of my now more concrete thoughts about what this book does as an elegy.
In the end, it’s the only thing needed. And I think, I hope, that the novel is improved by its inclusion. I hope that readers don’t skip it. Even if they do, I hope all of this writing here goes some way to show that I really, really thought about it.