A Paratextual Threshold: Epigraphs and Postcolonial Literary Authority in Michelle Cliff's No Telephone to Heaven

Abstract

Abstract: With epigraphs derived from a broad range of sources—Yoruban hymns, Jamaican proverbs, and contemporary poets, among others—Michelle Cliff's 1987 novel No Telephone to Heaven produces a Caribbean literary archive that differs compositionally and qualitatively from the colonial English canon's construction of literary authority. The epigraphs in Cliff's novel, read as a metanarrative, open up an explicitly literary space of resistance to enact a radical reordering of the aesthetic, historical, and cultural frameworks that shape most readers' understandings of what the term "canonical literature" encompasses. Cliff's epigraphs collectively comprise a network of influence that refuses conventional hierarchies of gender, national origin, and genre. In Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation , Gérard Genette outlined four functions for the epigraph, namely, elaborating on a primary work's title, commenting on the main text of the work, making a gesture of affiliation with the author of the epigraphed text, and indicating "the genre, or the tenor of a piece of writing … [giving] a signal (intended as a sign ) of culture." Cliff's text performs what I argue to be the epigraph's fifth function—that of conferring authority—to declare her own canon.