So far, no one writing about my book, Rope Walker: A Texas Jewish History Mystery, has commented on its epigraphs, those borrowings from other writers appearing at the start of a book and at the start of chapters. So, I will. The epigraphs in Rope Walker, thirty-six in total, comprise one of the best things in this book. Not a peep.
The epigraphs add necessary contrast and accent, summarizing and supplementing my exposition of historical fact and logical analysis. They are elegant sophistications of idea and musing. Did I mention, all but one were taken from Moby Dick, Herman Melville’s 135-chapter shamanic agitation? That one outlier, appearing at page x (that is, roman numeral ten), is not unrelated:
How the world whirls by! Herman Melville died the other day almost without newspaper notice
Pages x and xi provide reference citations for the thirty-five other epigraphs, excusing me from having to include a citation for them in the thirty-two chapters and three appendixes where they appear. An explanation of the use of the epigraphs is given on page x. A table on the next page lists Rope Walker chapters seriatim cross-referenced to the chapters in Moby Dick whence each epigraph came. I call this two-page author’s note, “Extracts.”
Not coincidentally, “Extracts” is the title of a note to readers at the start of Moby Dick, a collection of borrowings Melville never placed in the book’s interior—perhaps—or simply a “higgledy-piggledy” compilation of references to whales. I extracted Melville’s “Extracts” concept.
As preface to his eighty or so “burrowings,” Melville writes an appreciation of the unappreciated compiler, a “sub-sub-librarian”:
by how much the more pains ye take to please the world, by so much the more shall ye for ever go thankless!
Melville’s lament might be more broadly applied to the sizable nonfiction portions of Moby Dick, what Melville calls his “cetology,” a complete examination of whales and whaling. The thorough exposition is an “anatomy,” a genre today familiarly called a “microhistory.”
Rope Walker is a cetology, a microhistory of sorts. It is an anatomy of an event which grew into legend, a legend revolving around a mystery, the mystery of the unknown identity of an acrobat with one leg who fell to his death in Texas in 1884. Would anyone have ever read Moby Dick if Melville never added that fictional business about a peg-legged man and his deadly relationship with a rope?
Oh, the luxury of fiction. The author names and describes his protagonists according to his fancy. Melville never gave Ahab a last name and never said which leg was amputated. Why? In Rope Walker, I say which leg was amputated and provide the man’s name, both of them… Oh, the intellectual opportunities of fiction, where narrator waxes philosophic, poetic. All I could do was extract some of Mellville’s intellect to put at the head of each chapter.
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