“Victor Hugo affected to add extraordinary epigraphs to the least of his poems
,” Charles Péguy wrote in 1910 in
Victor-Marie, Comte Hugo
.
Like a prelude introducing a carefully written score, the epigraph is, in literature, an element that the reader sometimes overlooks.
For others, however, it is oh so important.
The epigraph (from the Greek “epigraphein”, “to register”) is a short maxim generally located at the head of a work or chapter.
According to the writers who use it, it has different functions.
In
A King Without Entertainment
(1947), for example, Jean Giono places it at the end of the novel.
“A king without entertainment is a man full of miseries”
, he wrote.
This sentence borrowed from Pascal then acts as a moral.
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Very often, this sentence is intended to indicate upstream the object or the spirit of the book, through the words of other authors.
As Gérard Genette, theorist of literature, explains in
Seuils
(1987), the tradition of the epigraph…
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