with special reference to Stendhal - Springer Link

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Mar 25, 2010 - on title pages, many British and French Romantics went further, placing one or several mottoes at the beginning of each chapter or poem.
Neohelicon (2010) 37:139–153 DOI 10.1007/s11059-010-0042-0

How to do things with mottoes: recipes from the romantic era (with special reference to Stendhal) Rainier Grutman

Published online: 25 March 2010  Akade´miai Kiado´, Budapest, Hungary 2010

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. Keywords

Motto  Quotation  Paratext  Sign  Stendhal  Barthes  Peirce

… the citar is the stamp of the heel, the torero’s arched stance which summons the bull to the banderillos. Roland Barthes (1970, p. 29; 1974, p. 22)

The motto as paratextual device The epigraph, as it is sometimes called in English, but much more commonly in French and Spanish, was originally an inscription on a monument, statue, or building. Famous literary examples include the long poem on the main door of Rabelais’ The´le`me Abbey in The research leading up to this paper was funded by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. R. Grutman (&) De´partement de franc¸ais, Universite´ d’Ottawa, 60, rue Universite´, Ottawa, ON K1N 6N5, Canada e-mail: [email protected]

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Gargantua (Chap. 52) and the lines written above the gate of hell in Dante’s Inferno (3.19): ‘‘Per me si va nella citta` dolente … Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate’’ (in Henry Francis Cary’s 1805 translation, they read: ‘‘Through me you pass into the city of woe … All hope abandon ye who enter here.’’).1 By the eighteenth century, the word ‘‘epigraph’’ had taken on an altogether different meaning, though equally as respectful of its Greek roots (graphein: to write, epi: above). The Jesuit Dictionnaire de Tre´voux (1752) was perhaps the first to document this semantic shift: ‘‘On donne aussi le nom d’e´pigraphe a` une sentence ou maxime tire´e d’un e´crivain connu, que quelques Auteurs mettent au frontispice de leurs ouvrages, et qui en indiquent l’objet’’ (qtd. in Segermann 1977, p. 12). In English (as well as in German), a text fragment thus placed at the threshold of a much larger text is usually referred to with the Italian loanword motto. Samuel Johnson, who quotes Horace on the title page of his Dictionary of the English Language, defined the motto as ‘‘a sentence or word added to a device, or prefixed to any thing written’’ (1785, vol. 2, p. 156), device being understood in its heraldic sense, as ‘‘the emblem on a shield; the ensign armorial of a nation or family.’’ (1785, vol. 1, p. 583) Both definitions suggest that those who used (or abused) mottoes did not do so at random, but were guided by some general principles. There would have been, in other words, such a thing as a ‘‘poetics’’ of the epigraph, a set of rules. Describing these rules and the system behind them, more particularly as it developed in the Romantic era, a period known for its widespread use of mottoes, will be the main focus of this article. As is to be expected in a study of poetics, my approach will be formal: I will be more concerned with the textual embedding of mottoes than with their contextual, historical and even social functions—a fascinating topic that I have had the opportunity to explore on a previous occasion (Grutman 2005). What follows is an endeavour to investigate the paratextual modi operandi of the sayings that adorned so many books in the first decades of the nineteenth century. As will become clear, many of the effects regularly obtained by epigraphs are oblique, less related to their denotative content that to their connotative impact. In a number of instances, therefore, it is worthwhile to consider not only the mottoes’ messages, but their ‘‘illocutionary force’’ (to borrow Austin’s (1975) term, whose seminal lectures on speech act theory my title playfully alludes to).

Of crests and quotes In his above-quoted definition, Dr Johnson links modern mottoes to one of their previous incarnations, i.e. devices or aristocratic crests. They often had an emblematic quality, with an image being framed by a ‘‘gnome’’ (not the garden variety, but rather the pithy saying expressing a general truth). The Prince of Wales’ Ich dien (‘‘I serve’’) comes to mind, as does ‘‘Honni soit qui mal y pense’’ (‘‘shame upon him who thinks evil of it’’), originally the motto of the chivalric Order of the Garter, adopted since by several British and Canadian 1

Primo Levi echoes these last words when he asks us, at the very outset of his Auschwitz-memoir, Se questo e` 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!’’

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army regiments. In the same vein, Louis XIV of France (whose personal motto was Nec pluribus impar) had the ironic inscription ‘‘ultima ratio regum’’ (the last—and ultimate— argument of kings) engraved on his cannons. The limited space available on crests would explain the slogan-like quality of epigraphs. Eventually used beyond the emblematic tradition, they are more often than not concise, sententious, and thought-provoking: the dynastic politics of the Austrian Habsburgs, for instance, reputedly followed the Ovidinspired slogan ‘‘Bella gerant alii, tu felix Austria, nube!’’ (‘‘Wars may be led by others, you, happy Austria, marry!’’). Even more instructive is the definition given by the French Jesuits of Tre´voux, for it contains information about the motto’s physical position and meaning relative to the overall text: those frontally-placed words, we are told, indicate the book’s ‘‘object,’’ i.e. its theme and argument. They serve as a foreword of sorts, or better still, a title, since both mottoes and titles are semantically associated with yet typographically set apart from ‘‘their’’ text. Historically, mottoes were printed on the title page, a practice almost as old as printing itself, with examples going back to the 1500s and even the late 1400s (Segermann 1977, pp. 26–29). For centuries to come, they were considered an extension of the title: in several reviews he wrote as young man for La Muse franc¸aise, Victor Hugo (1967, pp. 431, 438, 452) identified the work under consideration not only by its title and author, but quoted the entire motto, as if it were the work’s coat of arms. The literary genre of the text being reviewed mattered little: Hugo presented Scott’s novel, Quentin Durward, Lamennais’ Essai sur l’indiffe´rence en matie`re de religion, and Vigny’s poem, E´loa, in this fashion. By the eighteenth century, mottoes began appearing inside books as well, first ahead of individual poems (an early example was Edward Young’s highly influential Night Thoughts [1742]), then instead of chapter-titles in novels (most ostensibly in Ann Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho [1794] and Matthew Lewis’ Monk [1795]). Early on in his career, Hugo himself had been fond of mottoes. After becoming famous and established, however, somewhere around the publication of Notre-Dame de Paris (1831), he ceased using them, preferring instead the longwinded, descriptive titles handed down by tradition since Rabelais and Cervantes. Hugo’s wavering suggests that mottoes and titles competed for the same ‘‘peritextual’’ space, to use Ge´rard Genette’s term.2 Now, apart from Genette’s (1987, pp. 134–149; 1997, pp. 144–160) own research, one cannot say mottoes have attracted a great deal of attention in literary theory. Three published Ph.D. theses (Bo¨hm 1975; Antonsen 1998; Segermann 1977) explicitly dealing with the topic in British, German, and French literature, have gone relatively unnoticed. The same can be said of McFarlane’s (1987) insightful article. True enough, when investigating quotation strategies, or intertextuality in general, scholars do end up devoting a certain number of pages to the matter (e.g. Kellett 1969, pp. 87–93; Compagnon 1979, pp. 337–339; Samoyault 2001, pp. 46–48). Rightfully so, considering that motto-multiplying writers take us on both an intertextual and a paratextual journey. From the former perspective, the motto qua quote is a trace of another text, absent but for the quoted fragments, with which the quoting text enters into a dialogue, or sometimes, a debate (e.g. by parodying or critiquing its source). On the paratextual level, we notice another type of interaction, this time involving equally or co-present elements, such as motto and title, motto and chapter, or even two mottoes. 2

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.

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Epigraphs can and do serve as ‘‘suggestive quotations’’ (Kellett 1969, p. 90) upon which the text itself expands, not unlike Bible verses provide preachers with a starting point for their sermons. As a form of commentary, they shed light on the text they accompany, thus operating in an associative, convergent manner, but their ironic and therefore divergent potential should not be underestimated either. Instead of helping us plod through the novel’s plot, mottoes can lead us astray, much like unreliable narrators, either by prompting us to ask false questions or by creating false expectations about the story about to unfold. In the words of the Abbe´ Mallet in Diderot’s Encyclope´die: ‘‘Les e´pigraphes ne sont pas toujours justes, & promettent quelquefois plus que l’auteur ne donne.’’ (qtd. in Segermann 1977, p. 30)

Romantic mottomania With respect to many of the above-mentioned issues, the Romantic era provides us with a particularly varied array of examples. So widespread was the fashion, first in Britain and then on the Continent, that one contemporary author, the Spanish satirist Mariano Jose´ de Larra, spoke of a ‘‘mania of quotes and epigraphs’’, or motto-mania (Pe´rez de Munguı´a [Larra] 1832; see Grutman 2005, pp. 281–283). Considering their sheer number, his choice of words seems justified. Granted, solemn Latin or Greek quotes had been adorning title pages of books since the late 1600s, but by Larra’s time, all kinds of textual fragments had become fashionable as headers not just of books but individual chapters, poems, or even newspapers: witness Le Figaro, founded in 1826, whose front page bore a quote from Beaumarchais’ eponymous play (most often, but not always, «Sans la liberte´ de blaˆmer, il n’est point d’e´loge flatteur»). The number of nineteenth century works sporting a single motto is so large that it is impossible even to arrive at an estimate: in his book-length study on British literature between 1820 and 1920, Rudolf Bo¨hm (1975, p. 15) analyzes 128 writers, a startling 108 of which were given to using mottoes. The following numbers, documenting their use by a single writer or within a single work, can nevertheless give some idea of the quantitative importance of the phenomenon, before we address its systematic nature. Beginning his enquiry in 1820, Bo¨hm does not include such notorious ‘‘motto-mongers’’3as Byron and Walter Scott.4 Even so, he finds about 600 examples in Edward Bulwer-Lytton alone! George Eliot also used chapter mottoes to great effect, forging a subtle link between her novels (Bo¨hm 1975, pp. 172–178). Wilhelm Raabe, Heinrich Heine, and much later, Theodor Fontane, were fond of quoting in general, but German writers did not fall prey motto-mania according to Jan Erik Antonsen: ‘‘Lediglich in der deutschsprachigen [Literatur] scheint diese Mode nicht durchgesetzt zu haben: Keiner der bedeutenderen Romane der deutschen Literatur des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts weist Kapittel-Motti auf.’’ (1998, p. 32) Like their English but unlike their German counterparts, French writers of the Romantic era did their share of quoting. Regarding poetry, we know from Krista Segermann’s Motto in der Lyrik (1977, p. 44) that between 1822 and 1837, 465 epigraphs were used in about a dozen albums (by the likes of Hugo, Gautier, Sainte-Beuve, Desbordes-Valmore, Borel, Vigny, and Musset). Considering only chapter-mottoes and leaving aside those many books 3

To use a word coined by Lovelace, in letter 169 of Richardson’s Clarissa Harlowe (1749).

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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.

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that have only one motto, a look at the novelistic production (the focus of my own research) yields the following results. Fifteen novels published between 1818 and 1837 (again) contain a total of 673 mottoes. The most extravagant examples are, in descending order: Balzac’s Clotilde de Lusignan (1822, 87 mottoes), Euge`ne Sue’s Salamandre (1832, 84 mottoes), Hugo’s Han d’Islande (1823, 83 mottoes), Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le Noir (1830, 73 mottoes), and Jules Janin’s Confession (1830, 66 mottoes, most of which, interestingly enough, are not identified as quotes). These numbers attest to a real inflation: individual chapters are preceded by not one, but two or even more mottoes,5 a practice that can be dated back to Charles Nodier, the first French writer to indulge in motto-mania: in Smarra (1822), he had systematically paired a Latin quote and a passage from Shakespeare. To appreciate fully the importance of the phenomenon, we have to go beyond sheer numbers, however. It is telling in this respect that the complete list of novels with chaptermottoes includes some very significant titles: Le Rouge et le Noir, first and foremost, but also Alfred de Vigny’s Cinq-Mars (1826, 27 mottoes) and Prosper Me´rime´e’s Chronique du re`gne de Charles IX (1829, 25 mottoes), two historical romances modeled after (against) Scott. Another motto-prone genre created in the British Isles was the Gothic novel: The Mysteries of Udolpho, The Monk, or Melmoth the Wanderer (by Charles Maturin, 1820) all display a wealth of mottoes, one for every chapter. It comes as no surprise, then, that their French imitators, the young Balzac and the even younger Hugo amongst them, should do the same. Even Jules Janin, ever so critical of ‘‘la nouvelle e´cole poe´tique avec ses bourreaux et ses fantoˆmes,’’ more or less contradicts himself by placing 32 mottoes in front of 29 chapters in L’aˆne mort et la femme guillotine´e (1829)… Other telltale signs of motto-mania’s deliberate and systematic nature include parodies and translations: while the former highlight, often to the point of caricature, the perceived salient features of the type of art that is being denounced, the latter tend to take into account local tastes and conventions, and do not hesitate to adapt foreign texts accordingly in order to prepare them for domestic consumption. This is what happened when Henri de Latouche anonymously smuggled one of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s tales, Das Fraulein von Scuderi, into French literature under the title Olivier Brusson (1823). Not only did Latouche fail to acknowledge that he had worked from an existing text (albeit by a then entirely unknown foreign writer), he also deftly manipulated the German original, considerably expanding its plot and… adding 19 mottoes! A few years later, Adolphe Mathieu dedicates his parody Les Derniers instants «a` tous les singes du romantisme, passe´s, pre´sents et futurs» («singer quelqu’un» means «to ape somebody»). Particularly revealing for our purpose is the fact the first six pages of his poem are taken up by an astonishing 60 mottoes. Adding insult to injury, Mathieu, in his tongue-in-cheek way, promises to explain these quotes in two future (and of course never published) volumes of notes, commentaries, portraits, facsimiles, and obituaries of the quoted authors (Mathieu 1830, p. 74; the poem was first published in 1826 according to Charlier 1927, p. 135). Parodies such as Mathieu’s are of interest in another sense as well. They both attest to the success of a particular literary feature (genre, style, or device) and to the fact that it is on its way out. In France at least, the days of Romantic motto-mania were numbered by the late 1830s: both Krista Segermann and I noticed a significant drop after 1837, an impression that is confirmed by the year-end review of poetry published in the Revue des Deux-Mondes on December 15, 1836. After deploring the recent and ‘‘general decay of poetry’’, the anonymous reviewer writes: 5

The same can be said for some shorter texts of the 1830s, be it Pe´trus Borel’s ‘‘immoral tales’’ in Champavert (29 mottoes) or Aloysius Bertrand’s prose poems in Gaspard de la nuit (56 mottoes).

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Ainsi les poe`tes secondaires que nous avons pre´sentement ont perdu beaucoup du coˆte´ de la forme, sans avoir rien regagne´ par le fond. Ils ne soignent plus e´galement le rythme. Ils riment avec moins de richesse et leur pense´e est reste´e tout aussi pauvre./Une autre perte notable que nous avons faite est celle des e´pigraphes, touta`-fait passe´es de mode aujourd’hui. Or les e´pigraphes, fournies par toutes les gloires litte´raires du pays et de l’e´tranger, n’e´taient certainement pas le moindre agre´ment de la petite poe´sie contemporaine. (1836, p. 756, qtd. in Segermann 1977, p. 43) Our reviewer almost seems to deplore the waning of motto-mania. For him at least, the multiplication of mottoes added considerable charm to Romantic poetry, in part because they gave some indication, together with the attention paid to rhyme and rhythm, of the effort that had gone into a poem’s formal composition. Far from being mere devices (in the derogatory, not the heraldic, sense) devoid of any real meaning, mottoes were the hallmark of a particular way of reading, writing and conceiving of literature. So much becomes clear from a less-known text by the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. In 1838, when he was still little more than an angry young man, Kierkegaard wrote a lengthy review of Hans Christian Andersen’s novel, Only a Fiddler (1837, Kun en Spillemand6), in which he takes his only slightly older but already more established fellow countryman to task. Among other shortcomings, Kierkegaard feels Andersen’s use of mottoes (Only a Fiddler has 48) to be both excessive and inadequate, which provides him with an argument a contrario: ‘‘by its musical power,’’ a motto ‘‘either ought to play a prelude,’’ putting ‘‘readers into a definite mood, into the rhythm in which the section is written…, or it ought to relate piquantly to the whole section’’. Still according to Kierkegaard, the epigraph should not ‘‘form a pun on one particular expression occurring once in the chapter or be an insipid general statement about the contents of the chapter.’’ (1990, pp. 92–93; see also Rehm 1964, p. 226; Segermann 1977, p. 39; Antonsen 1998, pp. 43– 45). This paratextual potential, he argues, was insufficiently perceived by Andersen, too content to have ‘‘at his disposal a large quantity of loci communes,’’ of commonplaces, and ‘‘to pay due regard to poets of second, third, and so on rank.’’ (1990, p. 93).

Of signs and snakes Like Kierkegaard, I will look at the ways epigraphs relate to readers and are embedded in the overall text. If we accept that a text is more than the sum of its parts, but rather a signifying structure whose interdependent elements derive their meaning from their function and position relative to other elements, we can hardly avoid the conclusion that the presence versus absence of any given element has repercussions for the text as a whole. This holds true for paratextual elements as well. It is not hard to imagine how the choice of a different title would affect the meaning of Joyce’s Ulysses, for instance, which would literally not be the same novel if it were called Bloom’s Day (a not altogether implausible title). Even more disturbing would be the absence of any title at all, in which case the novel would have to be identified by its first lines or words, as is common practice with medieval manuscripts (or, for that matter, modern poems) lacking titles. Wouldn’t it be strange to know Joyce’s masterwork only by its incipit: ‘‘Stately, plump Buck Mulligan’’?

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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).

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In the case of mottoes, their mere presence can also be said to be one of their more powerful effects. They send a signal just by being there, irrespective of their actual content (Genette 1987, 148–149; 1997, p. 160). To put it in more technical terms: mottoes always connote something, even without denoting anything at all; they have a ‘‘sense’’ (Sinn), even without ‘‘referring’’ (bedeuten) in the real world outside the text. Using the terminology of Peircean semiotics, we can distinguish between their symbolic, indexical, and iconic properties. First of all, mottoes are a chain of linguistic signs that, considering the largely conventional nature of the link between sound and meaning, correspond to Peirce’s symbols. In addition to the individual words they contain, the mottoes themselves can also be considered signs, in particular those that are (or at least purport to be) quotations, which is the overwhelming majority.7 Referring to and even standing for the text or the writer they are quoting from, mottoes conform to the scholastic definition of a sign (aliquid stat pro aliquo), updated and fine-tuned by Peirce in 1897: ‘‘A sign, or representamen, is something that stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity’’ (1994a, p. 228). The nature of the relationship between a sign and that which it stands for (its ‘‘object’’, as Peirce calls it) is threefold. In the case of symbols such as traffic lights, the fact that red means ‘‘stop’’ and green means ‘‘go’’ is a matter of convention. In Peirce’s own words, a symbol signifies ‘‘regardless of any similarity or analogy with its object and equally regardless of any factual connection therewith, but solely and simply because it will be interpreted to be a representamen’’ (1994b, p. 73). Conversely, in the case of indices like smoke (signalling fire) or footprints (signalling the recent presence of an animal or human being), there is such a ‘‘factual connection.’’ It need not be causal but it does rely on contiguity, thereby highlighting the metonymical nature of indexical signs (e.g. the thermometer as an index of temperature changes). Icons, finally, are signs by virtue of their ‘‘similarity or analogy’’ with their objects, not unlike metaphors: the stylized and abstract street map still resembles the actual streets enough for us to be able to find our way in an unknown city. Some signs possess several of these properties. The Canadian flag, for instance, in addition to being a symbol of a country, like all flags, has an iconic quality to it, since it proudly displays a stylized maple leaf (hence its nickname). In turn, the fact that this centrally-placed leaf is red, points (much like an index is used to point) to the British origins of what used to be the ‘‘Dominion’’ of Canada. Up until 1955, when the Maple Leaf was adopted, Canada’s unofficial flag was the (entirely) Red Ensign of the British Royal Navy, with a twist: it featured the Union Jack in the canton, defaced by the shield of the Coat of Arms of Canada.8 Returning to the matter of mottoes, we can readily qualify the quotes among them as indexical signs having been metonymically lifted from another text with which they maintain a ‘‘factual connection,’’ a relationship of effective contiguity. It makes sense to go one step further, and endorse Genette’s claim that the ‘‘epigraph in itself is a signal (intended as a sign [the original French text has, more correctly, indice, i.e. index]) of culture, a password of intellectuality’’ (1987, p. 148–149; 1997, p. 160). Mottoes indeed signal culture in the way that footprints signal human presence, i.e. they are traces of culture. Beyond this factual but rather general connection, however, the interpretation of 7

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 mottomaniacs: in this respect, it is worth noticing how the motto of Barbey’s ‘‘Rideau cramoisi,’’ ‘‘Really,’’ echoes Janin’s ‘‘Vraiment!’’ (Chap. 17).

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Images of both can be found in the Wikipedia articles on the ‘‘Flag of Canada’’ and the ‘‘Canadian Red Ensign’’.

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these traces quickly becomes a matter of convention, of socially (and slowly) acquired skills: one has to learn how to read footprints just as one has to learn how to decipher and appreciate mottoes. Isn’t it precisely these skills Genette uses when stating that ‘‘The presence or absence of an epigraph in itself marks (with a very thin margin of error) the period, the genre, or the tenor of a piece of writing’’ (ibid.)? This is where the third dimension of the Peircean sign comes into play, i.e. its ‘‘interpretant’’ or user (the ‘‘somebody’’ of the 1897 definition). Being able to label the period, genre, or tenor of a text from the use it does (or does not) make of mottoes, presupposes an acquired and intimate knowledge of literary conventions and historical poetics. Because of the conventional nature of much of that knowledge, we are no longer dealing with mottoes qua indices but rather qua symbols. The motto’s iconic qualities should not be underestimated either. The isolated epigraph stands out on the page: set apart by the use of blank space and the choice of a different character, type, font size, etc., it sometimes resembles an emblem or device in the heraldic sense (even more so, obviously, when accompanied by an image). Moreover, Romantic writers who frequently resorted to epigraphs tended to be quite aware of their potential as visual signs, and could be so demanding when it came to the layout of their books that modern mass-market editions rarely do justice to them. We know of Stendhal’s peculiar use of ‘‘running heads’’ (i.e. titles printed at the top of a page) in Le Rouge et le Noir: they did not repeat the chapter’s actual title but rather served to form a dialogue, both with the real title and the motto… Amongst other things, this allowed Stendhal to add flexibility to the division of the plot into rigid chapters, either by breaking up a chapter into several sections (identified with a different running head) or by letting a theme run its course beyond the chapter’s limits. Another well-documented instance of typographical extravaganza is Aloysius Bertrand’s Gaspard de la Nuit, whose section titles and mottoes were each intended by the author to be printed on separate pages. Inevitably, some mottoes will combine two or even all three of these semiotic characteristics. An extreme example is provided by Honore´ de Balzac’s Peau de chagrin (1831), a novel that opens with a squiggly line drawn horizontally across the page. Underneath it says: ‘‘Sterne, Tristram Shandy, Chap. CCCXXII’’ (Balzac 1954, p. 1). This information does not imply that the quoting was done bona fide. As often happens with romantic mottoes, Balzac’s appears to have been slightly altered: his line is horizontal, whereas the original was drawn diagonally, from the bottom left to the top right corner. In Sterne, it was supposed to mimic the irregular line drawn in the sky by Trim when asked his opinion about marriage. ‘‘Whilst a man is free,’’ he says and gives ‘‘a flourish with his stick’’ that, in the narrator’s words, ‘‘could not have said more for celibacy’’ than ‘‘a thousand of [Tristram’s] father’s most subtle syllogisms.’’ (Sterne 1978, pp. 743–744, book 9, Chap. 4) Celibacy was equated with liberty: thanks to their partial formal resemblance, the free movement of Trim’s arm became a metaphor for the unhindered movements of the unmarried man. Not so in La Peau de chagrin, where the irregular line symbolizes the ups and downs of life, the twists and turns of fate, in tune with the novel’s overall theme. Its main character, a destitute young man by the name of Raphae¨l de Valentin, is handed the magic piece of skin mentioned in the title, which becomes the token of a Faustian pact. While it can fulfill his every desire, much like the genie in Aladdin’s lamp, it also shrinks with each wish granted, and shrinks Raphae¨l’s own skin in the process, thereby condemning him to a slow and premature death. Symbolism operates on yet another level, as Peter Brooks has shown in Reading for the Plot. Taking his cue from the fact that Sterne repeatedly used arabesques to ‘‘designate the unfettered, digressive line of Tristram’s narrative, the incessant detours of its plot’’ (the final chapter of book 6 being a case in

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point), Brooks sees in Trim’s gesture as recycled by Balzac a ‘‘comment on narrative itself, suggesting the fantastic designs drawn by narrative desire’’ (1992, pp. 59–60). Last but not least, in addition to being an index and a symbol, Balzac’s epigraph is very much an icon as well: the resemblance to a snake immediately comes to mind. Interestingly enough, some of Balzac’s posthumous publishers did indeed mistake the line for a snake, and transformed it accordingly, drawing a head, a tongue, and adding scales to its skin (Balzac 1954, p. 474). The snake thus ends up biting its own ‘‘tale’’!

Of voices and codes Any appreciation of the motto’s textual embedding has to address a difficult preliminary question: whose voice do we hear in the motto? The question was first asked, it seems, by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (see Genette 1987, pp. 136, 143; 1997, pp. 146, 154). In the second preface to his epistolary novel, Julie, ou la Nouvelle He´loı¨se (1761), a preface that masquerades as a dialogue, Rousseau hides behind many layers of fiction: a ‘‘man of letters’’ (identified as ‘‘R’’) is asked by his publisher (‘‘N’’) not to sign the text. R insists on doing so, even though he denies being the author of these letters (claiming instead to merely be their editor)… At this point in the dialogue, the following exchange takes place: N. Ma foi, vous aurez beau faire, on vous devinera malgre´ tout. Ne voyez-vous pas que votre e´pigraphe seule dit tout. R. Je vois qu’elle ne dit rien sur le fait en question: car qui peut savoir si j’ai trouve´ cette e´pigraphe dans le manuscrit, ou si c’est moi qui l’y ai mise? (Rousseau 1961, p. 29) The motto quotes a sonnet by Petrarch, without translation (in the original edition at least): ‘‘Non la conobbe il mondo, mentre l’ebbe: Conobbil’io, ch’a pianger qui rimasi’’ (in Frederic J. Jones’ version: ‘‘This world knew her not when she was still alive: I knew her well, who still grieving here reside’’). This love for Italian poetry (mainly Petrarch, Tasso and Metastasio), Rousseau shares with his main male character, Saint-Preux (as evidenced by letter 12 of part 1 [Rousseau 1961, p. 61]). Either one of them could have picked the quote, whose meaning can arguably be transferred from Petrarch’s Laura onto Mme de Warens (in reality) or Julie d’E´tange (in fiction). The difficulty is compounded by the fact that the motto is in the first person singular (of the passato remoto: io cognobbi [modern spelling], io rimasi), and can therefore be assigned to either the extradiegetic ‘‘I’’ of the preface or the diegetic ‘‘I’’ of the letters written by Saint-Preux. To complicate matters further, an epistolary novel like La Nouvelle He´loı¨se lacks an overarching narrative voice that organizes all other voices. Most texts, of course, feature such a voice. A narrator typically only starts telling her story after the title, the dedication, and the motto, which are often thought of as not forming part of the plot (sjuzˇet). Genette warns against drawing such inferences, however, in the name of what he calls a ‘‘general narratological principle: to attribute … to the author only what it is physically impossible to attribute to the narrator’’ (1997, p. 154; 1987, p. 143), it being understood that the latter is also, in final analysis, the author’s creation.9 In many cases,

9

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.

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Rousseau’s included, he finds it ‘‘more interesting,’’ and ‘‘clearly … possib[le]’’ (ibid.) to link an epigraph to the narrator or even a character. A similar blurring of boundaries can be found in Stendhal, perhaps the most playful among the French Romantic ‘‘mottomaniacs.’’ His Rouge et Noir contains a chapter entitled ‘‘Cruel Moments’’ (2.18), whose running head reads ‘‘Malheur de la jalousie.’’ It bears the following motto, attributed to Schiller but probably made up: ‘‘Et elle me l’avoue! Elle de´taille jusqu’aux moindres circonstances! Son œil si beau fixe´ sur le mien peint l’amour qu’elle sentit pour un autre!’’ In this chapter, Julien Sorel’s love is being put to the test by the noble Mathilde de La Mole, who has decided not to be subjugated by her commoner-lover. By telling Julien in considerable detail of her past crushes on young aristocrats, she reminds him of his rank and station in life. Here too, personal and possessive pronouns allow us to attribute the first-person motto to the character Julien, instead of the author of the third-person overall narrative. Earlier on, Stendhal (or perhaps the narrator) had put a second-person motto to similar use. Chapter 1.18 recounts the visit of a foreign king to Verrie`res, the fictional town where Julien grew up and where the novel’s action is initially set. On this occasion, the newlyanointed bishop of Agde shows St. Clement’s relics to the royal visitor, after which ceremony he addresses the assembled faithful. The prelate’s speech, however, is only partially reported in the chapter itself. Another part was transferred from the main textual body to its periphery. The chapter’s motto, duly identified as being excerpted from the ‘‘Discours de l’e´veˆque, a` la chapelle de Saint-Cle´ment,’’ reads: ‘‘N’eˆtes-vous bons qu’a` jeter la` comme un cadavre de peuple, sans aˆme, et dont les veines n’ont plus de sang?’’ Again, we are encouraged to attribute these utterances not to the narrator or author, but to a (minor) character. Again, the distinction between paratext and text proper has become blurred. Puzzling because of its ambiguous diegetic status, this last motto raises other important issues. Situated between title and text, on the chapter’s threshold, before we hear of either the bishop or St. Clement’s chapel, it provides enough information to pique, but not to satisfy, our curiosity: who exactly is this bishop, we might ask, and why is his speech worthy of being quoted? As the chapter unfolds, we discover the relevance of the very young and elegant bishop: he momentarily attracts Julien to the ecclesiastical path instead of a military career. In addition, this fictional yet plausible speech allows Stendhal to infuse his text with ideology, and to indirectly pass judgment on 1830s France. This latter aspect is all the more oblique since the bishop does not really affirm anything but merely asks a question, albeit a rhetorical one (which is not uncharacteristic of religious discourse in the entire novel). Stendhal’s choice of an interrogative instead of an affirmative stance nevertheless signals an important departure from the motto’s epigraphic and heraldic heritage. Traditionally, on buildings and on books, on crests and on flags, mottoes quietly affirm or loudly proclaim the truth, without questioning it: US dollar bills always say ‘‘In God We Trust,’’ never ‘‘Do We Trust in God?’’. Both aspects of Stendhal’s motto, its functioning as an appetizer, a foretaste of what is to come, and its being formulated as a question, highlight hermeneutic qualities that are crucial to our understanding of literary epigraphy. Any text, insofar as it aims to be understood, is fraught with questions and (partial) answers, with enigmas and (partial) solutions. The very act of reading is an act of interpretation based on information gathered in part from the text, in part from the reader’s own horizon. As a matter of fact, as Roland Barthes has famously shown in S/Z, an arresting step-by-step reading of a novella by Balzac, the inherently enigmatic structure of a ‘‘readerly’’ text such as Balzac’s ‘‘Sarrasine,’’ which asks us to cooperate in its deciphering and hands us the tools to do so, is as important as the sequence of actions in the story told. Using the word in its etymological

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sense, Barthes (1974, pp. 19–21; 1970, pp. 26–28) conceives of a ‘‘text’’ as a ‘‘weaving of voices,’’ whose convergence creates the ‘‘stereographic space’’ of writing (e´criture), the point where five codes or voices intersect. They are, above all, the ‘‘proairetic’’10 code of actions taken and not taken, of decisions made and not made (‘‘Voice of Empirics’’), as well as the hermeneutic code of questions and answers, enigmas and solutions (‘‘Voice of Truth’’). To these two sequential codes that propel narratives forward, Barthes adds cultural references (‘‘Voice of Science,’’ meaning ‘‘a body of knowledge’’); semes, or minimal units of signification, attached to fictional characters (‘‘Voice of the Person’’); as well as rhetorical devices or symbolism (‘‘Voice of the Text’’) that allow us, in Peter Brooks’ words, ‘‘to enter the text anywhere and to play with its stagings of language itself’’ (1992, p. 20). Barthes acknowledges that it can prove difficult to tell these five codes apart, all the more so since they are woven together by the act of reading in any given fragment (1970, p. 166; 1974, p. 160). To illustrate his theory, he divides Balzac’s 30-odd page short story into 561 such fragments, called lexias. The motto, if there had been one, would certainly have constituted another unit. It may well have been analyzed as extensively as the novella’s title, ‘‘Sarrasine,’’ which is discussed at length by Barthes (1970, p. 24; 1974, p. 17). Indeed, one easily imagines how epigraphs could express many of Barthes’s ‘‘voices.’’ As evidenced by our example of the bishop’s speech in Stendhal, they clearly participate in the hermeneutic process, both by setting up interpretive possibilities and by forcing us to pay particular attention to certain aspects of upcoming events. In this respect, they function much in the same way as titles (especially of the narrative kind favoured by Rabelais, Cervantes, Fielding, Sterne, or Diderot), with one crucial difference: titles tend to describe, whereas epigraphs can and have been formulated as questions. Stendhal was well aware, not only of their ironic potential, but also of what we would now call their ‘‘poetics.’’11 He seems to have used question-mottoes fairly regularly. A glance at Le Rouge et le Noir’s peritext yields the following instances (attributed to Machiavelli, Ronsard, and Beaumarchais, respectively): ‘‘E sara` mia colpa/Se cosi e`?’’ (1.4); ‘‘Que fait-il ici… s’y plairait-il? penserait-il y plaire?’’ (2.4); «He´las! pourquoi ces choses et non pas d’autres?» (2.32). They all ask questions, whether it be about certain characters (as do the first two examples, which can be cross-referenced under Barthes’ ‘‘Voice of the Person’’) or about the plot’s plausibility (a fact that links the last example to the so-called proairetic code). Epigraphs do not, however, have to be interrogative in order to have a hermeneutic function, nor is it necessary for the answers to be found in the ensuing chapter. Stendhal’s novel offers more than one instance where mottoes simply echo other mottoes. Most famously, the quote supposedly taken from Polidori’s Vampyre12 and placed in front of chapter 1.14 (‘‘Une jeune fille de seize ans avait un teint de rose, et elle mettait du rouge’’), 10

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.’’ 11 In an often-cited journal entry from May 1830, Stendhal writes: «L’e´pigraphe doit augmenter la sensation, l’e´motion du lecteur, si e´motion il peut y avoir et non plus pre´senter 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. 12 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 Ame´de´e 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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appears almost verbatim in the next chapter (1.15: ‘‘C’est une jeune fille de seize ans, qui a des couleurs charmantes, et qui, pour aller au bal, a la folie de mettre du rouge’’) before being contradicted by the main motto of the novel’s second book (where it is attributed, probably falsely as well, to Sainte-Beuve): ‘‘Elle n’est pas jolie, elle n’a point de rouge’’. The alternative narrative thus created runs parallel to the main story, with which it intersects (Chap. 1.15 echoing the motto of a previous chapter) yet from which it remains separate. Furthermore, because they all mention the colour ‘‘red,’’ these fragments develop symbolism contained in the novel’s enigmatic title, Le Rouge et le Noir, where these colours can stand for many things (blood and mourning, a military uniform and a cassock, etc.). Mottoes thus weave a web of signification that, contrary to the main narrative, is not bound by the sequential order of either telling or reading. Hovering above the story, both in a figurative sense and in the literal sense suggested by the etymology of ‘‘epigraph,’’ they can be read in sequence or not. When they are, their hermeneutic and proairetic functions (the Voices of Truth and Empirics) are highlighted. Conversely, not reading them in order foregrounds their semantic and symbolic qualities (the Voices of the Person and the Text), to which I shall turn briefly before concluding. As pointed out before, the presence of ‘‘rouge’’ in some mottoes participates in the novel’s overall symbolism. There is, however, another link to the Voice of the Text as conceived by Barthes. The ‘‘quote’’ from Sainte-Beuve (‘‘Elle n’est pas jolie, elle n’a point de rouge’’) not only echoes Polidori’s but also contradicts it: instead of having pink cheeks and no use for blusher, the girl is neither pretty nor wearing any ‘‘rouge.’’ This rhetorical opposition can be tied in with the global antithesis between books I and II of Le Rouge et le Noir, set, respectively, in the bourgeois milieu of Verrie`res (where Julien initiates his social ascension) and the aristocratic salons of Paris (that will be his downfall even while he gains acceptance into them). Upon closer examination, the narrator’s statement in chapter 1.15 and, by extension, the motto attributed to Polidori, concerning ‘‘une jeune fille de seize ans,’’ turn out to be a judgment of Julien’s behaviour. Having just seduced Mme de Reˆnal out of pure vanity, the angel-faced teenager tries too hard to impress her by playing the experienced lover, the Don Juan that he obviously cannot pretend to be, when she was in fact attracted by his innocence and almost girlish good looks. Julien, in other words, is the 16-year-old that does not need make-up. In Stendhal’s novel, like in Balzac’s novella, connoted femininity can be regarded as ‘‘the signifier par excellence… a shifting element which can… create characters, ambiances, shapes, and symbols’’ (Barthes 1970, p. 24; 1974, p. 17). In this sense, mottoes serve to illustrate characters, especially if they can be attributed to the narrator, as is the case here. They can be linked to Barthes’ Voice of the Person (1970, pp. 196–197; 1974, pp. 190– 191) in yet another way. As Genette reminds us, ‘‘with a great many epigraphs the important thing is simply the name of the author quoted.’’ (1987, p. 147; 1997, p. 159) Stendhal was a notorious name-dropper, so much so that at least one critic has envisaged the possibility of looking at who is quoted in Le Rouge et le Noir, in addition to what these mottoes say. Alongside their actual text thus appears what Jean-Jacques Hamm has called «le roman des noms ou une reˆverie sur les noms propres»: On constaterait, a` parcourir toute la galerie des noms propres de ce roman en e´pigraphes, qu’ils ont presque dans tous les cas un rapport privile´gie´ a` notre auteur. Sautant de Hobbes a` Machiavel, a` Faublas, a` Byron, mais e´galement a` Shakespeare, a` l’auteur des Lettres d’une Religieuse portugaise, nous dessinerions un archipel stendhalien et une odysse´e nominale. (Hamm 1977, pp. 32–33)

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In the top spot of this chart, we find Byron, whose long satirical poem Don Juan is quoted seven times. If (for the reasons outlined in footnote 12) we add Polidori’s motto to Byron’s oeuvre, the latter’s presence colours more than 10% of the epigraphs of Le Rouge et le Noir. It should come as no surprise, then, that the excerpts from Don Juan were not chosen at random. As several critics have shown, they act as a parallel story to, and a commentary of, Julien’s sentimental education, with more than on scene in the novel being modelled after Byron’s poem. In Anneli Vermeer-Meyer’s opinion, ‘‘Alle Kapitel, denen Mottos vom Byrons vorangestellt sind, beschreiben wichtige Episoden aus Julien Sorels Liebesgeschichten’’ (1976, p. 498, emphasis added). George Rosa, whose dissertation investigated ‘‘The Presence of Byron in the novels of Stendhal,’’ goes even further: ‘‘Of the four most significant events in the novel—the seduction of Mme de Reˆnal, the seduction of Mathilde, the reconquest of Mathilde, and the shooting of Mme de Reˆnal—the first three are immediately followed, and the last foreshadowed, by epigraphs from Don Juan’’ (1980, p. 336). In addition to contributing in a discreet yet decisive manner to the unfolding of the plot (‘‘Voice of Empirics’’) the quotes from Byron also feed into the novel’s overall symbolism, highlighting this time not ‘‘le rouge’’ from the title but its complement, ‘‘le noir.’’ Stendhal puts the same line, ‘‘As the blackest sky/Foretells the heaviest tempest’’ (1.73), in front of two chapters (1.10 and 2.30), one in each of the novel’s two books, thereby creating both a parallel and an antithesis.

In cauda venenum? Four of Barthes’ five codes have thus far been shown to be relevant. Keeping the fifth code, the ‘‘Voice of Science’’ and of cultural authority, for the end, was done on purpose. It makes perfect sense, after all, to consider literary mottoes qua quotes (which they almost always are or purport to be) as cultural references. To Barthes himself, such a link would have appeared obvious, even though he rarely went beyond the most cursory examination of literary allusions in S/Z (Allen 2000, p. 88). Considering his well-documented aversion to traditional literary history, he probably felt little need to do so. Barthes did discuss, however, formal features of the cultural code’s utterances, describing them as ‘‘implicit proverbs’’: … they are written in that obligative mode by which the discourse states a general will, the law of society, making the proposition concerned ineluctable or indelible. Further still: it is because an utterance can be transformed into a proverb, a maxim, a postulate, that the supporting cultural code is discoverable… (Barthes 1970, pp. 106–107; 1974, p. 100). This, as well at what Barthes has next to say about proverbs (that they ‘‘have a very special syntactical, archaistic form’’), is of special relevance to our topic. Because of their epigraphical and heraldic heritage, mottoes are almost intrinsically concise and thoughtprovoking. These utterances do not need to be transformed into maxims because they already are maxims. Antoine Compagnon found epigraphs to be the quotes par excellence, ‘‘the quintessence of quotation’’ (1979, p. 337); we can now add that they are cultural codes par excellence, explicit instead of implicit proverbs. Mottoes possess this quality not only because of the way they are formulated but also because of their semiotic status. Connoting Culture by the very fact of their existence, even when they fail to denote anything (as in the case of Balzac’s Peau de chagrin), they are indeed the Voice of Literature. In the literary realm, there is no other reality than that of

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fiction: words do not refer directly to the real world but to a copy thereof. Intertextuality, of which mottoes are also an instance, further complicates this process by adding yet another layer of discourse. When writers constantly incorporate other writers’ texts into their own, Barthes argues, they spend their time ‘‘referring back to books: reality is what has been written.’’ (1970, p. 39; 1974, p. 46). In his view, this short-circuiting of reality is not entirely positive, as it ‘‘creates a sense of repetition’’ and ‘‘cultural saturation’’ (Allen 2000, p. 90). Most of nineteenth-century literature is replete with ‘‘a nauseating mixture of common opinions, a smothering layer of received ideas’’ (the very bourgeois culture Flaubert poked fun at in his ironic Dictionary of Accepted Ideas), which becomes one of its major flaws. Barthes even speaks in this respect of the ‘‘fatal condition of Replete Literature, mortally stalked by the army of stereotypes [references, cultural codes] it contains’’ (1970, p. 206; 1974, p. 211). The unbridled use of mottoes, to be sure, can be seen as a telltale sign of Romantic literature’s cultural saturation, its overreliance on books and its unwillingness to engage with reality. Motto-mania was a double-edged sword. Even while allowing the likes of Stendhal to play games with the ‘‘happy few’’ among their readers, it quickly reached its limits, turning into parody before vanishing as abruptly as it had appeared. Its continual display of High Literature occasionally also tested the limits of literature, of readability, something for which several ‘‘motto-mongers’’ have actually been held accountable in the court of literary judgment. This conjures up another meaning of the French word ‘‘citation,’’ which can also be a subpoena, a summons (‘‘une citation a` comparaıˆtre’’). Things get even trickier in Spanish, as Barthes reminds us in the passage I have chosen as an epigraph, for to ‘‘quote’’ (citar) a bull is to provoke him into a mortal encounter. Over-quoting writers can perhaps similarly be said to have run the risk of provoking Replete Literature into a fatal duel with itself…

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