Epigraphs and our sense of self
Methods for living
This edition reflects the author’s request that all previous epigraphs ... be removed, as he never really saw himself as the type of person who would use epigraphs. (Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius)
An epigraph is a quotation at the beginning of a work (a book, essay, thesis, etc) or a chapter within a work.1 Twenty-five years ago when Dave Eggers was the New Big Thing they were desperately uncool and uncontemporary and they probably still are. You’d think they would go nicely with our derivative age, with its sequelism, remakes and omni-pastiche, but they don’t fit with the spirit or aesthetic somehow—there’s a feeling of “Please, Mr Epigraph is my father. You can just call me Text.”2
I’ve always liked them, but then I have mostly really seen myself as the type of person who would use epigraphs.3 Possibly other people have also mostly really seen me as that type of person; recently a former colleague who’d just met an old schoolfriend of mine wrote to me saying:
Apparently, you’ve always been like that.4
In some ways that’s true though I’d say my outward carapace was mostly formed when I was 16 or 17.
As I approached middle age I noticed that many of the friends I’d acquired as an adult had some common quality that was hard to define. Thinking about this, it seemed to me that they’d all come up with some notably individual technique to manage something like childhood shyness that had influenced their character in powerful ways.
They might have developed, for example, the reserve, dry humour and understated competence of a fictional butler; the aura of a worldly and enormously self-assured pub landlady; the Narnian knight–mouse Reepicheep’s ferocious sense of honour and readiness to draw a sword at any perceived slight or injustice; or the ease and absolute ungovernability of a cat; each expressing a quality that meant something beyond a technique, beyond practical use, imbued with artistry and some kind of relish or enjoyment.
I was struck many years ago by (I think) Anthony Powell5 writing that life is best seen as a problem for which we all develop a method or technique, and this is a notion I’ve returned to again and again.
We all draw on ready-made ways of doing things from our parents and wider family, our peers, education and the culture at large; there are bounds within which we work. The degree to which we customise our method to get through life varies. As does the degree to which we recognise our predicament.
Graham Greene wrote that:
The moment comes to every writer worth consideration when he faces for the first time something which he knows he cannot do. It is the moment by which he will be judged, the moment when his individual technique will be evolved. For technique is more than anything else a means of evading the personally impossible, of disguising a deficiency…. The consciousness of what he cannot do—and it is sometimes something so apparently simple that a more popular writer never gives it a thought—is a mark of a good novelist. The second-rate novelists never know: nothing is beyond their foolish confidence…. Not for them the plan of campaign, the recognition of impenetrable enemy lines which cannot be taken by direct assault, which must be turned or for which new instruments of war must be invented.6
For my friends I sometimes imagine a combination of unusual sensitivity and—I’m not sure there’s a single accurate term for what I have in mind—intuition, imagination; talent of some kind—encountering the sometimes brutal, often bewildering world of childhood, and responding with largely unconscious art to protect itself and perhaps find a way to flourish.
In its mature form, this is intensely expressive: how you choose to defend yourself against the predations of the world, how you handle your difficulties and shortcomings, the method you develop, is suggestive of what lies within. There can be a bit of self-consciously playing a part but in itself it’s not false any more than painting a picture or writing a poem is false. As with any other art, it’s a question of whether it comes off or not. And over time the method is not easily separable from the persona, or perhaps it’s not separable at all.
Greene followed his observations with an aside on ill-advised imitation:
There is irony, of course, in the fact that the technique an original writer used to cover his personal difficulties will later be taken over by other writers who may not share his difficulties and who believe that his value has lain in his method.
This, too, applies to the art of character-building: people will sometimes copy those distinctive parts of others that are really a response to our particular problems in life—problems they may not share, or not in the same way. Perhaps this is one of the reasons that self-help books, ten habits of successful people pieces, etc are both popular and ineffective.
There’s also the danger that as we grow older we too start to almost mimic those distinctive parts of ourselves that were really a response to our early difficulties—becoming a caricature, a pastiche of what we once were. A living method becomes a dead habit, or a schtick, or is corrupted.
The tectonic plates beneath will have shifted with time; we may have grown to like our quirks too much; we might adopt a distorted version of them that’s reflected back from other people, how they see us; we can grow lazy and allow our method and manner to do all the work, no longer responding with thought or authenticity to the world.
Without constant small adjustments our methods eventually decay in one way or another, and perhaps even then. I wonder sometimes if that’s what’s behind some midlife crises—I’ve seen people try to change their whole method for living abruptly and disastrously in their thirties, forties and fifties. We can look at ourselves from time to time and say, like Dave Eggers, he (she) never really saw himself (herself) as the type of person who would…, and it’s not unusual for this to happen around the time of a landmark birthday or event.
Seeing someone divest themselves of their life method in middle age7 can be like watching a hermit crab leaving its shell to find a new one, exposing its soft flesh to the outside in the meantime—except that, unlike the crab, they might not know that’s what they’re doing or how to go about it.
It’s not always something as luxurious as a midlife crisis; our method can suddenly become radically inapplicable. For example, we might have a technique that’s beautifully adapted to thrive in peacetime but hopeless in wartime.8 In the novel Some Do Not…, set shortly before and then during the Great War, Ford Madox Ford’s hero contemplates his position as an exemplarily steady, easeful, quiet Englishman of the Edwardian period facing all sorts of unfamiliar experiences:
It has been remarked that the peculiarly English habit of self-suppression in matters of the emotions puts the Englishman at a great disadvantage in moments of unusual stresses…. in the face of death … in the face of madness, passion, dishonour or—and particularly—prolonged mental strain, you will have all the disadvantages of the beginner at any game and may come off very badly indeed.9
Life sometimes seems like a series of shipwrecks, and each time, like Robinson Crusoe, you have to build something for yourself from materials that either were not of your choosing, as in the first wreck, when you were born, or were imperfectly or even disastrously chosen by your past self, inasmuch as you had some choice. In particular, I remember in my early thirties feeling washed ashore from early adulthood—And let the day be time enough to mourn/The shipwreck of my ill-adventur'd youth.10
I’ve always liked the idea of Robinson Crusoe, of being shipwrecked with what materials can be salvaged and then building a life with them.11 And each shipwreck can also be viewed from the other end as a personal renaissance, a rebuilding and reawakening.12
A healthy family life; a fairly sane and, if you’re lucky, sometimes wise culture; good friends; certain kinds of art, education and learning; skilled, meaningful work and interests; these can all help, but ultimately the building work is something you have to do for yourself:
Once I used to hope that experience of life could be handed on from nation to nation, and from one person to another, but now I am beginning to have doubts about this. Perhaps everyone is fated to live through every experience himself in order to understand.13
Paul Fishman (Skelsmergh, May 2024)
You already know that but think of the others.
There was quite a nice joke going round during the Titles Discourse that changed this to “Please. Mr X is my father’s name. Just call me Dr X.”
It’s true that there’s often a sense of unearned profundity in using epigraphs and they shouldn’t just be an ornament. (I’ve also always liked footnotes. Is there a link between them and epigraphs, psychological or otherwise? Possibly. Apropos of nothing, Evelyn Waugh said that pomposity is “nearly always an absolutely private joke against the world”.)
She didn’t say what that is but we both understood what she meant.
I thought it was in his memoirs, To Keep the Ball Rolling, but I haven’t been able to find it there, or in A Dance to the Music of Time, so I’m not sure.
Graham Greene, The dark backward: a footnote, Collected Essays.
In the classic scenario; you might even see someone do this as e.g. a fresher at university.
It doesn’t require a war, it could be e.g. having children; illness; bereavement; disability; a change in location or profession.
Some Do Not… is the first novel in Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End tetralogy, one of my favourite works of fiction and something I read repeatedly from the age of 17 through my twenties. Having looked up the passage I quoted from above, I thought how it must have influenced my thinking here without me properly recognising it.
Samuel Daniel, Care-charmer Sleep, son of the sable Night.
The last time I read Robinson Crusoe I actually found the hero grasping and unlikeable, but perhaps I’ll see him differently again next time.
I’ve always liked this by C S Lewis:
I do not much believe in the Renaissance as generally described by historians. The more I look into the evidence the less trace I find of that vernal rapture which is supposed to have swept Europe in the fifteenth century. I half suspect that the glow in the historians’ pages has a different source, that each is remembering, and projecting, his own personal Renaissance; that wonderful reawakening which comes to most of us when puberty is complete. It is properly called a re-birth not a birth, a reawakening not a wakening, because in many of us, besides being a new thing, it is also the recovery of things we had in childhood and lost when we became boys. For boyhood is very like the ‘dark ages’ not as they were but as they are represented in bad, short histories. The dreams of childhood and those of adolescence may have much in common; between them, often, boyhood stretches like an alien territory in which everything (ourselves included) has been greedy, cruel, noisy, and prosaic, in which the imagination has slept and the most unideal senses and ambitions have been restlessly, even maniacally, awake. C S Lewis, Surprised by Joy.
From an interview with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn by Michael Charlton for BBC Panorama (1 March 1976), reproduced in Warning to the West: Speeches 1975–1976 (Vintage).