Ten Minutes for Seven Letters: Reading Beloved's Epitaph

(EiHT1ELL them that." The last reported words from an anony- JL mous "friend of a friend." Taken by itself, the command raises ambiguity to its highest level—the imperative for someone to tell some- thing to others. Read contextually, the implied "you" of the imperative "Tell" is Cynthia Chase. The "them" is the audience at the 1993 New York University conference "Deconstruction is/in America" listening to Chase's "Reading Epitaphs" presentation. The "that" is "You haven't really read something until you've read it as an epitaph." Yet the "that" of Chase's related comment raises even more questions: what is an epi- taph? How does one read it? How and why does this reading differ from normal reading—or rather, how does reading something as an epitaph constitute reading in its essence such that texts read otherwise aren't "really read"? And how can something that is not an epitaph be read as an epitaph? One can begin to approach the dilemmas posed by the idea ofread- ing epitaphs by observing that to read something as an epitaph, as writ- ten on a gravestone, is, first of all, to make the relationship between language and death explicit—epitaphs are always curious types of dead letters that mediate the relationship between the living and the dead. Reading something as an epitaph forces one to consider the strange materiality of language, the way in which the sign can persist in the absence ofboth its producer and addressee. The epitaph marks a site of