Part I: I just happened to reread Michael Ende’s fantasy tale, The Neverending Story (Die Unendliche Geschichte). I own a lovely hardcover of the German text, with illustrations by Roswitha Quadflieg. I also own an English paperback, well translated by Ralph Manheim. The hero is a young boy named Bastian Balthazar Bux, “a fat little boy of ten or twelve”, who is bullied by the other children at school.
One morning as he tries to escape from the bullies, he runs into a second-hand bookstore owned by a crotchety old man named Mr Coreander. There he finds a book that oddly attracts him, a book titled The Neverending Story. He steals the book and takes it to the attic of his school; he hides there and starts to read. One might say that the book is escape literature.
The hero of the book Bastian is reading is a young boy named Atreyu, who is sent on a quest to save the fairyland Fantastica. I won’t go into the details, but about halfway through the story Bastian somehow enters the world he is reading about; the rest of the story tells how he becomes the savior of Fantastica. At the end he returns to his own world, our world of reality and all works out well. One of the central “themes” of the novel is the crossing of boundaries, from the “real” world to the “fantasy” world and back. I reread it because I’m interested in non-realistic world-building, and there’s a lot one could say about the world-building of this novel, but what I want to discuss here is a rhetorical figure called epimone.
The first chapter of the story inside the story (“Fantastica in Danger”) begins with the accidental meeting of four fantastic creatures from four different parts of Fantastica. All are messengers on their way to the Childlike Empress of Fantastica, who lives in the Ivory Tower, and each is carrying a message that Fantastica is in grave danger. The Childlike Empress herself has fallen ill. Many messengers have arrived with the same message, so the four we have met have to wait: “During the long waiting period, the four so unalike messengers became good friends. From then on they stayed together. ¶ But that’s another story and shall be told another time.” (31) That’s the end of Chapter I.
In Chapter Two, the Childlike Empress sends Cairon (a centaur) to find a hero who will go on a Quest to find a cure for the Childlike Empress and for Fantastica. The hero turns out to be a young boy, Atreyu, who is a Greenskin, and at the end of Chapter II he sets out on his quest. At the beginning of Chapter III we say goodbye to Cairon: “Old Cairon never went back to the Ivory Tower. But he didn’t die and he didn’t stay with the Greenskins in the Grassy Ocean. His destiny was to lead him over very different and unexpected pathways. But that is another story and shall be told another time.” (53)
Atreyu has many adventures, which are not to the point here. On his travels he meets a gnome named Engywook, who is a kind of scientific researcher in Fantastica. Here is the end of this episode, at the end of Chapter VII: “Later on, Egywook became very famous, in fact, he became the most famous gnome in the world, but not because of his scientific investigations. That, however, is another story and shall be told another time.” (126)
I’m sure you’re getting the point; I won’t take the trouble to detail each similar instance, but I will note that you can find them, if you care to look for them (in the English translation), on p. 240, 280, 339, 350, 386, 398, and 445, for a total of ten. They aren’t all exactly the same, either in the English translation or in the German original, but the differences are tiny and, so far as I can see, of no importance. Perhaps Ende felt that exact repetition would sound too mechanical.
The repetitions of this sentence constitute an example of the rhetorical figure “epimone”. Lanham (in “A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms”) defines the figure: “Frequent repetition of a phrase or question, in order to dwell on a point”, and he gives an example from Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar”: the repetition of “And Brutus is an honorable man” from Antony’s “Friends, Romans, countrymen” speech. One might ask how many times a phrase or sentence has to be repeated to count as epimone. I would say that the determination is a matter of judgment; as a rule of thumb, if the reader notices the repetition, then it counts. (I will have more to say about the definition of the term in section II.)
The effect of the repetition is probably cumulative. The first time you read “That, however, is another story and shall be told another time”, at the end of Chapter I, you may not notice it any more than you notice any other sentence in the story. It simply means what it means, and has no extra significance. The second time you read it, at the beginning of Chapter III, your attention may become primed to notice additional instances. By the third time, in Chapter VII, you may suspect that there’s some extra significance created by the repetition, and that suspicion will increase as you gradually read all ten.
Here’s my interpretation, for what it’s worth: The first instance suggests (although with no special emphasis) that the characters in this story have a life beyond what this story tells us. Mostly when we read we don’t pay much attention to what isn’t said about a character; we don’t ask (to use a famous example) how many children Lady McBeth has. We assume that the author has told us everything we need to know. (There is, however, a flourishing genre (sometimes called “parallel literature”) of stories that aren’t told in the original story. The repeated sentence here is a hint that there is more to be said about these characters than this story tells us. The reader may even wonder what these extra stories might be and when they might be told. The repetition in Chapter III strengthens that suggestion, and each additional repetition further piques the reader’s curiosity. Gradually the reader comes to feel that there is a world of interconnected (but as yet) untold stories, each linked to the others, and that the world of Fantastica is made of up stories, only one of which has been told here.
The last instance deserves special mention. By this point of the story, Bastian himself has managed to enter the fairyland of Fantastica—he becomes a character inside the very story he is reading. (He is inside the novel we are reading “The Neverending Story”, and now inside the novel he is reading, also “The Neverending Story”.) He has a series of adventures, and he makes some serious mistakes, but at the end, all is well, and he manages to return to the real world—his real world, which is a fictional world that we are reading about. He is still hiding in the attic of his school, but the book, “The Neverending Story”, which he stole from Mr Coreander, has disappeared. I won’t go into all the details, but he goes to the bookstore (with his father) to confess his theft and the loss of the book. Mr Coreander, however, says there never was any such book in his store. As Bastian leaves the store, Mr Coreander mutters,
“Bastian Balthazar Bux. [. . .] If I’m not mistaken, you will show many others the way to Fantastica, and they will bring us the Water of Life.”
Mr Coreander was not mistaken.
But that’s another story and shall be told another time.
This sentence is the last line in the book. The sentence has migrated from the inside story, where it appears nine times, to the outside story, where it is the final sentence. It has crossed the boundary of the worlds, as Bastian did. And perhaps all those other stories that will be told another time will be told by Bastian.
Part II. Epimone, as Lanham defines it, is “frequent repetition of a phrase or question, in order to dwell on a point”, and I suggested above that a repetition is frequent when you notice it. Lanham’s first example is the repetition of “And Brutus is an honorable man” from “Julius Caesar”. But Lanham gives another example: a single stanza, nine lines, from Spenser’s “Faery Queene” (I.xi.54), in which the phrase “So downe he fell” is repeated four times. This kind of repetition is different from the repetition of “And Brutus is an honorable man” in “Julius Caesar” or the repetition of “But that’s another story and shall be told another time” in “The Neverending Story”, and I think these different types should be given different names. I restrict the term “epimone” to frequent repetition of a phrase or sentence over a whole work or at least a large section of a work. The phrase or sentence which is repeated I will call a ”motto”.
The frequent repetition of a single word or short phrase over a whole work or large section of a work I would call “palilogia”; an example might be the repetition of the word “crazy” in Joseph Heller’s “Catch-22” or the word “heart” in Ford Madox Ford’s “The Good Soldier”. Frequent repetition of a word or phrase in a short passage, as in the stanza Lanham quotes from Spenser, I have previously called “local palilogia”, but I now think that the traditional term “iteratio” is better. Both palilogia and iteratio are common; I won’t bother to list examples here. Epimone, I think, is less common, but it’s not hard to find examples. Here I will give examples from Anthony’s Burgess’ “A Clockwork Orange” (first published in 1962), George Orwell’s “1984” (first published in 1949), and James Branch Cabell’s “Jurgen” (first published in 1919). I begin with “Jurgen”, the simplest and most straightforward of the examples.
The hero of “Jurgen” is a no-longer-young poet and pawnbroker. The novel is set vaguely in the south of France sometime in the Middle Ages, but there is not the slightest attempt at historical verisimilitude in this fantasy tale. When “Jurgen” was first published, it became notorious for its indirect salacious humor, but by today’s standards this seems quite tame. For today’s audience, the appeal of the story may be found in the grace and wit of the writing, in the hero’s various adventures, and in his charming nonchalance.
At the beginning of the novel Jurgen falls into conversation with “a black gentleman”—the reader will perhaps assume this character is supposed to be the devil, but at the end of the story he turns out to be Koshchei, the maker of things as they are, who ranks somewhat above God. In the course of the conversation, Jurgen notes that his wife, Dame Lisa, does not understand him. As a favor to Jurgen, the black gentleman kidnaps her. After a few days, Jurgen somewhat reluctantly goes to find her. Near the beginning of the story he is restored to his youth, and the novel tells of his fantastic adventures‚ mostly amatory, as he looks for his wife. At the end of the novel, Jurgen again meets the black gentleman. He has matured from his experiences, and he asks the black gentleman to return Dame Lisa to him.
Jurgen’s attitude to life, at least in his restored youth, is expressed early in the story. In the second chapter, Jurgen meets a centaur, who offers to take him to what the centaur calls the garden between dawn and sunrise; the road to the garden circumvents both destiny and common-sense. Jurgen agrees to go: “at all events,” he says, “I am willing to taste any drink once” (16). This is the motto of the epimone; it occurs (by my count) eight more times (pp. 119, 137, 153, 177, 249, 258, 283, and 334). There is no need to go through these; they are all identical (after a variable introductory word or phrase, such as “Well” or “But”), and they are all spoken by Jurgen. I don’t think the meaning of the motto changes by repetition; nor is it related to any of the major themes of the story, if there are any. This is a story of surfaces rather than depth, and the motto is in itself superficial. Jurgen’s character is established at the beginning and it doesn’t really alter until the very end. The motto expresses his character on page 16 just as it does on page 334. Repetition is one of Cabell’s fundamental tools: note, for instance, the repetition of the phrase “deal fairly” (pp. 98, 99,134, 146, etc.); “monstrous clever fellow” (pp. 103, 110, 139, 140, 143, etc.), and “certainly I cannot go so far as to say they are wrong, but still at the same time—” (pp. 102, 140, 171, 210, 241). None of these develops by repetition. Even Jurgen’s final resigned acceptance of the prosaic real world is hardly a development. I don’t mean to be critical. I enjoyed the book when I read it as a teen-ager, and the teen-ager in me can still enjoy it. Cabell is an excellent stylist; he handles his materials with skill; and his use of epimone does its job.
Anthony Burgess’ “A Clockwork Orange” begins as the first-person Narrator says to his three chums, “What it going to be then, eh?” (3). They are hanging out at a milkbar and deciding what to do with the evening. The Narrator then fills in various contextual details the reader will need to understand the world of the story. Then again, “What’s it going to be then, eh?” (4). It’s not clear if the narrator is saying this again to his chums or repeating what he has narrated already. And then, after a long paragraph, again, “What’s it going to be then, eh?” (4). And then again, “What’s it going to be then, eh?” (5). The four then leave the milkbar and begin their night of gratuitous violence. Part One ends as the Narrator is arrested for rape and murder.
Part Two begins, “What’s it going to be then, eh?” (85). This line is repeated again (86) and again (87) and again (88), and after a few pages, again (94). Part Two describes the treatment the Narrator undergoes which leads to his cure.
Part Three begins “What’s it going to be then, eh?” (147). The Narrator has been released from prison and he is deciding what to do with himself now that he is free. Once again the line is repeated (148) and repeated (149) and repeated (150). In Part Three all the major events of Part One are recapitulated, though with variations. Then Chapter 7 of Part Three begins the story all over again: “What’s it going to be then, eh” (200, 201) but with important changes in the Narrator’s attitudes and behavior: in short, he has matured and reformed. The penultimate paragraph begins: “That’s what it’s going to be, then, brothers, as I come to the end of the tale” (212).
The motto in “Jurgen” is uttered by the hero to other characters within the story. The motto expresses Jurgen’s character, or more precisely his own opinion of his character, but it does not carry a large thematic weight. The motto in “The Neverending Story” is uttered only by the third-person narrator outside the story, never by a character inside the story. The significance of the motto grows by repetition, but it is distributed here and there, not according to any pattern I can see; the final repetition, however, provides a climax and a kind of open-ended closure. The motto in “A Clockwork Orange” is uttered by the protagonist, who is also the narrator, to other characters inside the story—but also in a sense to the reader, who is directly addressed by the narrator. The repetition of the motto is only one of a pattern of important repetitions. The repetitions of the motto mark structural components of the novel, and the last repetition is significantly altered. But the question “What’s it going to be then, eh?” doesn’t have much meaning, nor I think does it gain meaning by being repeated. In a way it loses meaning by repetition, or perhaps the repetition shows the meaninglessness of the actions and the lives of the narrator and his chums.
The reader of George Orwell’s “1984” will surely notice three mottos right away: almost at the very beginning the sentences “WAR IS PEACE” and “FREEDOM IS SLAVERY” and “IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH” are presented all in capital letters, each line centered in the page (4). They are repeated on pp. 16, 26, and 104—at the very end of Part One. Then in Part Two the phrases are repeated, but singly rather than in the group of three, in quotations from Emmanuel Goldstein’s subversive tract “The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism”: IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH on p. 184, WAR IS PEACE on p. 185, IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH again on p. 201. Then FREEDOM IS SLAVERY is repeated on p. 277. In “The Neverending Story” the mottos belong to the voice of the narrator outside the text; in “A Clockwork Orange” they belong to the voice of the narrator, both as he speaks within the story to his chums and also as he speaks to the reader. The mottos in “1984” belong to the world within the story. At the beginning of the story, Winston sees them written on the side of the Ministry of Truth (p. 4). A little later, during the Two Minute Hate, the three sentences appear on the telescreen (p.16). Shortly afterwards, as Winston is walking down the street, he sees them again on the Ministry of Truth (26). At the end of Part One, as Winston is looking at the image of Big Brother on a coin, the words come back to him (104). Winston reads them in the book by Emmanuel Goldstein (pp. 184, 185, and 201). Near the end of the story, when Winston has been brainwashed, he writes on his slate in clumsy capitals, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY (277).
The three mottos in “1984” are directly and obviously connected to the major themes of the novel. They do not develop by repetition—they have the weight of the repeated blows of a hammer. The motto in “The Neverending Story” becomes thematic through repetition, as does the motto in “A Clockwork Orange”. The repetitions in “Jurgen” are an exercise in wit. All of these are instances of epimone, used for various effects. As a general rule we can say that a figure does not have one particular meaning, but a range of applications.
The Art of Reading Slowly 