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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Epiphrase | 2/3 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epiphrase | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T15:41:05.688061+00:00 | kb-cron |
"You wanted a Republic; if you did not want at the same time what constitutes it, it would bury the people under its debris. What constitutes a Republic is the destruction of that which is opposed to it." The last sentence could be uttered on its own or in contexts other than the quoted speech. However, if it is removed from this passage, Saint-Just's argument becomes flawed. The difference can also be semantic: according to Jean-Jacques Robrieux, epiphonemas are distinguished from epiphrases because the former figure is intended to evoke a thought more generally and sententiously, as at this end of a fragment of Pascal's Pensées, where the figurative effect is reinforced using typographical parentheses:
"(How hollow and full of garbage is the heart of man!)"
=== Hyperbaton and epiphrase === The epiphrase is considered by the Group μ in its General Rhetoric as proceeding from linguistic permutation, not from addition. In this sense, the epiphrase is only a hyperbaton, like the anastrophe or the tmesis. The Group μ quotes this line from Jules Laforgue:
"He was beautiful, wasn't he, Narcissus? And distinguished!"
== Two purposes ==
The epiphrase is a figure of speech with two purposes; it can be either a brief comment, in the form of an incise, by an author about the idea he is developing, or an addition at the end of a speech, which allows the development of a final idea.
=== Adding words === The epiphrase has a general value of digression in the sense that it is an added and terminating development of a previously developed idea to which one returns to insist, put forward by the narrator; it is then close to palinody, which consists in returning to words, to contradict oneself voluntarily. Like all the incises of the author, or of the narrator, in the development of the plot, the epiphrase is often a specific mark of enunciation. There is indeed an epiphrase when the author intervenes in his work by means of comments inserted in the discourse, points out the literary critic and theorist Gérard Genette, for whom it is, in fact, close to the parenthesis, of which it is considered a variant:
For who avenges his father, there is no forfeit, And it is to sell one's blood to surrender to kindness. In this sense, it always marks the opinion of the enunciator and can constitute a disjunct. For example, Voltaire ends his portrait of the Duke of Guise, in La Henriade, with an accusatory epiphrase:
He formed in Paris this disastrous League Which soon infected all the rest of France; A dreadful monster that fed the people and the great,
Fertilized with carnage and fertile with tyrants. The nota bene, rejected in the paratext, is like an epiphrase for Bernard Dupriez because it is directed toward the reader.
=== Author's comment === Gérard Genette, in Figures II (chapter " Vraisemblance et motivation "), sees in the epiphrase the privileged mode of appearance of the author within his work, the one by which he can address his reader. The word is thus extracted from the discursive framework to concern the reader, as in a tête-à-tête. In this case, the figure concerns only the author and no longer the narrator. In Figure III, Genette argues that epiphrase is constitutive of the explanatory and moralist genre. He makes the figure the notion designating any intervention of the auctorial discourse in the narrative and considers that the name of "epiphonema" has become "inconvenient" to designate this phenomenon. Bernard Dupriez notes that the epode of Greek poetry, sometimes satirical, is close to the epiphrase. This commentary, which takes the place of parenthesis, is often placed at the end of a speech or a narrative and has the function of expressing a feeling or an opinion, in an exclamatory manner, according to Jean-Jacques Robrieux. The epiphrase adds a comment from the author, who wants to specify a particular point or to deliver a feeling or an idea, as in this extract from The Reveries of the Solitary Walker by Jean-Jacques Rousseau:
"I should have counted on this metamorphosis in advance, but so many strange circumstances were attached to it; so many obscure remarks and reticences accompanied it; I was told about it with air so laughably discreet that all these mysteries worried me. I have always hated darkness; it naturally inspires in me a horror that those with which I have been surrounded for so many years have not diminished." Jean-Jacques Robrieux considers that the epiphrase is a figure of speech used in rhetoric to "deviate" from the subject. Close to the parenthesis, it allows the author to present his feelings with emphasis, as in this example:
"Tomorrow I'll have finished this tedious work. It's about time! I'll finally be able to go on vacation. And it's deserved!"
== Stylistic use == Pierre Macherey notes that the epiphrases in Honoré de Balzac's work, which he calls "separable statements", are an integral part of the novelistic text and participate fully in its stylistics: "These separable statements are not separate statements: they are in work not as true statements, but as novelistic objects; they are there the term of a designation, of a monstration; their status, in spite of the appearances, is not directly ideological: the mode of their presence is that of a presentation which digs them, exhibits in them a fundamental disparity. Thus, they are not in the text as intruders, but as effects: they have meaning only by the metamorphosis that makes them elements among others of the process of novelistic production." By creating an epiphrase, the author allows for a break in tone, an effect of distance or, on the contrary, a rapprochement towards the reader, often with a comic or humorous intention as in this passage from Hector Berlioz in which "the memoirist intervenes directly to break the spell of his style himself":