6 - Dedications and inscriptions

Summary

The French noun dédicace designates two practices that, while obviously related, have important differences. Both practices consist of offering the work as a token of esteem to a person, a real or ideal group, or some other type of entity. But one of these practices involves the material reality of a single copy and, in principle, ratifies the gift or consummated sale of that copy, whereas the other involves the ideal reality of the work itself, the possession of which (and therefore its transfer, gratis or not) can quite obviously be only symbolic. Some other features, which we will encounter below, also distinguish the two practices from each other. But although the French nouns, unfortunately, are identical, very happily the verbs distinguish these two actions: dédier [to dedicate] for the action that involves the work, dédicacer [to inscribe] for the action that involves the copy. I will begin with dedications, after excluding from the definition those works that are entirely addressed to a specific addressee – works such as epistles, certain odes, certain hymns, elegies, and other poems of amorous lyricism, as well as Wordsworth's Prelude (addressed to Coleridge), all of which are genres in which the text and its dedication are inescapably consubstantial. I know of no example of a work addressed to one person and dedicated to another, but perhaps I haven't searched patiently enough. In the realm of works of passion, in any case, that situation could prove quite interesting.