Discrete fertility: making a particle theory of hypertext

Epigrams are used traditionally to presage a beginning, the beginning. They announce the thematic import of the discourse that is to follow. The epigram is a kind of pre-talk, an avant-scene. Sometimes there is more than one. In the case of multiple epigrams, an entirely new system of relations is established between the epigrams themselves, a prestructure within a pre-structure. This kind of interconnected multiplicity---of a kind that detained the attention of the two great Augustan satirists of pedantry, Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift---prompts a question: what if the epigram is the event and not its harbinger? What, in other words, if the epigram is not the link that prepares us for conceptual passage elsewhere, but is itself a singular event in which an entire discourse is implicit?