2 Reading Epitaphs

       Cynthia Chase

      You haven’t really read something until you’ve read it as an epitaph, said a friend of a friend of mine to whom I told this title. Tell them that.

      To read something as an epitaph. Not yet having begun to think, what would that mean? one recognizes the prescription, and one’s head fills up with words. Wordsworth’s. I want to talk about the “Essay upon Epitaphs” (the first one), which is one of the datable moments at which literature and epitaph define one another, partly in certain familiar post-Romantic terms: what more obviously than an epitaph should be universal, “permanent,” and sincere? Taking the epitaph as a paradigm for writing is one of the great power plays in humanism’s history, whatever else one has to say about it. By the same token, Wordsworth’s “Essay upon Epitaphs” could be titled “Epitaph on Literature.”

      De Man’s “Autobiography as De-facement” notes that the Wordsworth text states a preference for epitaphs written “in the third person,” from the position of the survivor, over those in the “first person,” those that “personate the deceased.” I quote the reading that is for many a familiar:

      Yet at several points throughout the three essays, Wordsworth cautions consistently against the use of prosopopoeia, against the convention of having the “Sta Viator” adressed to the traveler on the road of life by the voice of the departed person. Such chiasmic figures, crossing the conditions of death and of life with the attributes of speech and of silence are, says Wordsworth, “too poignant and too transitory”—a curiously phrased criticism, since the very movement of consolation is that of the transitory and since it is the poignancy of the weeping “silent marble,” as in Gray’s epitaph on Mrs. Clark, for which the essays strive.¹

      Citing the lines that Wordsworth’s text leaves out from its quotation of Milton’s sonnet-epitaph “On Shakespeare”: “... thou … Dost make us marble . . .,” “Autobiography as De-facement” remarks,

      “Doth make us marble”, in the Essays upon Epitaphs, cannot fail to evoke the latent threat that inhabits prosopopoeia, namely that by making the death speak, the symmetrical structure of the trope implies, by the same token, that the living are struck dumb. … The surmise of the “Pause, Traveller!” [conventional to epitaphs] thus acquires a sinister connotation that is not only the prefiguration of one’s own mortality but our actual entry into the frozen world of the dead.²

      To read great literature, Milton’s “On Shakespeare” says, is to be turned to stone, and because Wordsworth’s essay-epitaph perceives and performs that threat, it erases those lines of Milton that pronounce it.

      In teaching a reading such as this, de Man conveyed the experience of reading in the original. That one might read Wordsworth in the original, not in translation. Into, say, German or Flemish or French. No one of de Man’s formation would do such a thing, of course, but that English wasn’t one’s first language means something: the slight effort and unobviousness that that phrase “to read something in the original” conveys. “Death” for “dead” (and vice versa), “doth” for “dost,” “debt” (“deat’ ”) for “death”—now all those slips are finds, just because they may or may not have meaning; shells, coquilles. To read in the original means not to “know,” right off, what counts as a mere idiom, an assonance, a cliché, and so to have to reconstruct, painstakingly, a sense, of which the stresses may be altogether different than the emphases of the spoken and “understood” text. To this day I listen with dismay and cringing to how The Prelude sounds as “read” by English-born actors. I mean to praise here, though, not an alternative authenticity, another “original,” but a chance. “Slow reading,” Barbara Johnson calls it in a recent paper on some of these same texts. It gives the chance of unwinding the words from the meanings they (in phrases, in sentences, in verses) have over and over had. Reading in the original a text in a language not your own: this is the experience promised by literature (not only “Comparative Literature”), and a tolerable metaphor, perhaps a tolerable instance, of the “experience” of history, alternately that of intelligibility and of unintelligibility in a rhythm one may or may not pick up. But I bring up the matter of language learning also because it offers a real “correlate” to the “actual entry into the frozen world of the dead” that de Man’s text speaks of. Not knowing what elements of a