Epanadiplosis
[...]For Jean-Jacques Robrieux, epanadiplosis is a figure close to chiasmus,[8] as in this line by Victor Hugo, in which the indefinite pronoun “rien” is repeated symmetrically at the beginning and end of the proposition:“Rien ne me verra plus, je ne verrai plus rien”[9].For Nicole Ricalens-Pourchot, epanadiplosis is signaled by the use of “two juxtaposed propositions, separated by a comma or semicolon‘;[10] it is, therefore, as Georges Molinié notes, a ’microstructural figure”, as it only affects the limits of the sentence, and therefore only plays on both elocution and construction.
[15] Narrative epanadiplosis, or “anaplodiplosis” (anadiplosis in Latin), from the Greek ἀνάπλωσις (“explanation”) and διπλόη (“anything doubled, or divided in two”) is a figure of speech that consists in completing a work, usually a novel, as one has begun it.
At the end of the novel (or film), the reader or viewer encounters an identical or similar situation to that of the incipit, giving the work a certain depth.
César Chesneau Dumarsais, in his Traité des tropes, discusses and defines it as: “There is another figure [of words] called epanadiplosis, which occurs when, of two correlative propositions, one begins and the other ends with the same word”,[19] as in:“Man can cure everything, not man.” - Georges Bernanos, Nous autres Français[20]The figure can also border on tautology:“I am as I am”.
- Jean Cocteau, La Difficulté d'être[23]Some epanadiploses, however, are the result of the randomness of everyday language, without any particular stylistic research:“An immobile donkey on a median strip, like a statue of a donkey.” - Gilbert Cesbron, Journal sans date[24]A final effect may be that of parallelism.
According to Georges Molinié and Michèle Aquien, epanadiplosis often coordinates two propositions (in the sense of logical and semantic units) in the same sentence, which constitute repetition, by suggesting a parallel construction.
In Les Regrets, Joachim du Bellay forms a palindromic epanadiplosis[25]:If you want to live in court, Dilliers, remember To always accost your master's cuties, If you're not a favorite, pretend you are, And to accommodate yourself to the king's pastimes.
Advance nothing of yours, Dilliers, but your service, Nor show that thou art too much an enemy to vice, And be often mute, blind, and deaf.
Guillaume Apollinaire, for his part, uses the resources of epanadiplosis to make the cycle of the seasons tangible, closing the poem on itself in a single suggestive image:[26] The meadow is poisonous but pretty in autumn The cows grazing there Slowly poisoning themselves The colic colored of the ring and lilac Your eyes are like that flower Violet like their halo and like this autumn And my life for your eyes is slowly poisoned Schoolchildren come clattering in Dressed in hiccups and playing the harmonica They pick the colchicums that are like mothers Daughters of their daughters and the color of your eyelids Fluttering like flowers in the mad wind The herdsman sings softly While slow and mooing the cows abandon For ever this great meadow ill-flowered by autumn The incipit and epilogue of Émile Zola's novel Germinal form an epanadiplosis: the same character walks alone along the same road.
These include Bernadin de Saint-Pierre's Paul et Virginie (1788), Raymond Queneau's Le Chiendent (1933), James Joyce's Finnegans Wake (1939), Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist (1988), Anton Chekhov's The Wood Demon (play) (1889), Eugène Ionesco's The Bald Soprano (1950) and Stephen King's The Dark Tower (1982 to 2004).
In Primo Levi's stories and essays (La tregua, I sommersi e i salvati), admittedly far removed from novels, narrative epanadiplosis seals the author's radical pessimism: “What has been can happen again”, so everything is always to be started again.
[31] In Moebius and Jodorowsky's L'incal series, the story begins and ends with the fall of hero John Difool into the well of Suicide Alley.
