Envoi
THERE’S A VERY OLD TRADITION in poetry of adding a little stanza, shorter than the rest, at the end of a long narrative poem or sometimes a book of poems. The function differed from poem to poem. Sometimes it was a very brief summation or conclusion. My favorite was the apology to the poem itself: “Well, little book, you’re not that much but you’re the best I could make you. Now you’ll just have to make your way in the world as best you can. Fare thee well.” This ritual sending-off was called the envoi (I told you that all the best terms are French—and the worst), meaning, more or less, to send off on a mission. If I told you that I didn’t owe my book an apology, we’d both know it was untrue, and every author wraps up a manuscript with some trepidation as to its future welfare. That trepidation, however, becomes pointless once the manuscript becomes a book, as the old writers understood, which is why they told the poor book that it was now an orphan, that whatever parental protections the writer could offer had ended. On the other hand, I figure my little enterprise can get along without me pretty well, so I’ll spare it the send-off. Instead I would address my envoi to the reader. You’ve really been very good about all this, very sporting. You’ve borne my guff and my wisecracks and my annoying mannerisms much better than I have any right to expect. A first-class audience, really. Now that it’s time for us to part, I have a few thoughts with which to send you on your way. First, a confession and a warning. If I have given the impression somehow—by reaching an end point, for instance—that I have exhausted the codes by which literature is written and understood, I must apologize. It simply isn’t true. In fact, we’ve only scratched the surface here. It now strikes me as highly peculiar, for instance, that I could have brought you this far with no mention of fire. It’s one of the original four elements, along with water, earth, and air, yet somehow it didn’t come up in our discussion. There are dozens of other topics we could have addressed as easily and as profitably as the ones we did. In fact, my original conception was for somewhat fewer chapters, and a slightly different lineup. The chapters that wound up getting included reflect the noisiness and persistence of their topics: some ideas refused to be denied, crowding their way in and sometimes crowding out those that were less ill-mannered. Looking back over the text, it strikes me as highly idiosyncratic. To the extent that my colleagues would agree that this mode of reading is at least a strong part of what we do, they would no doubt squawk over my categories. Quite right, too. Every professor will have a unique set of emphases. I gather my thoughts into groupings that seem inevitable, but different groupings or formulations may seem inevitable to someone else. What this book represents is not a database of all the cultural codes by which writers create and readers understand the products of that creation, but a template, a pattern, a grammar of sorts from