Richard Macksey

Gérard Genette Paratexts: The name of the author

Place Nowadays it seems both necessary and “natural” to record the name – authentic or fictive – of the author in the peritext, but this has not always been so, if we judge by the common use of anonymity in the classical period. That common classical practice (which I shall say more about below) shows that the invention of the printed book did not impose this particular paratextual element (the name of the author) as quickly and firmly as it imposed certain others. Recording the authors name was even less necessary and natural in the era of ancient and medieval manuscripts, a period lasting for centuries, when there was, so to speak, no place available to put such information as the name of the author and the title of the work, except for a reference incorporated, or rather buried, in the opening ( incipit ) or closing ( explicit ) sentences of the text. It is in this form of an incorporated reference (which we will meet again in connection with titles and prefaces) that we have the names of, for example, Hesiod ( Theogony line 22), Herodotus (first word of the Histories ), Thucydides (same location), Plautus (prologue of Pseudolus ), Virgil (closing lines of the Georgics ), the romance-writer Chariton of Aphrodisias (at the head of Chaereas and Callirhoe ), Chretien de Troyes (at the head of Perceval, ) and Geoffroy de Lagny (Chretiens successor for Lancelot ), Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meung (whose names are recorded at the juncture of their respective works, at line 4059 of Roman de la rose ), “Jean Froissart, treasurer and canon of Chimay,” and of course Dante (canto 30, line 55, of Purgatory ).

Gérard Genette Paratexts: The functions of the original preface

“But what do prefaces actually do?” This diabolically simple question is what we will now try to answer. A preliminary inquiry, whose meanderings and hesitations I will spare the reader, has convinced me of this (highly foreseeable) point, that not all prefaces “do” the same thing – in other words, the functions of prefaces differ depending on the type of preface. These functional types seem to me for the most part determined jointly by considerations of place, time, and the nature of the sender. If we take as our base the chart of types of senders (type of sender remains the fundamental distinction) and make adjustments according to the parameters of place and time, we get a new and strictly functional typology divided into six fundamental types. Our cell A, which I have already said is the most heavily populated, will all by itself give us the first four functional types: (1) the original authorial preface ( authorial is to be understood, henceforth, as meaning authentic and assumptive); (2) the original authorial postface ; (3) the later authorial preface (or postface: at this stage, the distinction between preface or and postface is hardly relevant); (4) the delayed authorial preface or postface . Cell B and, very secondarily, cell C give us functional type five: the authentic allographic ( and actorial ) preface (the preface-writer–character is little more than a variant of the allographic preface-writer). All the other cells (A, D, E, F, and, for the principle of the thing, G, H, and I) merge, except for some slight differences, to constitute the sixth and last functional type: fictional prefaces .

The private epitext

What distinguishes the private epitext from the public epitext is not exactly that in the former the author is not aiming at the public and therefore does not have publication in view: many letters and many journal pages are written with clear foreknowledge of their publication to come, and undoubtedly this pre-science does not affect the writing of these letters and journals in a way that undermines their private – indeed, intimate – character. For us, what will define this character is the presence of a first addressee interposed between the author and the possible public, an addressee (a correspondent, a confidant, the author himself) who is perceived not as just an intermediary or functionally transparent relay, a media “nonperson,” but indeed as a full-fledged addressee, one whom the author addresses for that persons own sake even if the authors ulterior motive is to let the public subsequently stand witness to this interlocution. In the public epitext, the author addresses the public, possibly through an intermediary; in the private epitext, the author first addresses a confidant who is real, who is perceived as such, and whose personality is important to the communication at hand, even influencing its form and content. So much so that at the other end of the chain, when the public – eventually admitted to this confidential or intimate exchange – learns, always after the fact, about a message that is not addressed essentially to it, it does so “over the shoulder” of a third party who is genuinely treated as an individual person.

Other prefaces, other functions

Postfaces The main disadvantage of a preface is that it constitutes an unbalanced and even shaky situation of communication: its author is offering the reader an advance commentary on a text the reader has not yet become familiar with. Consequently many readers apparently prefer to read the preface after the text, when they will know “what its all about.” The logic of this situation should then lead the author to acknowledge such an impulse and offer a postface instead; here he could expatiate on his subject knowing that both sides were fully informed: “Now you know as much about it as I, so lets have a chat.” Further, I admit that at the start of this investigation I was expecting to encounter a corpus of original postfaces almost as abundant as the corpus of prefaces. But I found nothing of the kind: even given the very amateurish nature of my investigation, the meagerness of the corpus of original postfaces is conspicuous enough to be significant. I have already mentioned the “postscript” to Waverley and some “epilogues” by Borges – including that of The Book of Sand , which, moreover, invokes a supplementary motive peculiar to this genre: “Prefacing stories a reader has not yet read, since it demands the analysis of plots that it may be inconvenient to deal with in advance, is a somewhat impossible task. I therefore prefer an afterword.“

Gérard Genette Paratexts: The publisher's peritext

I give the name publishers peritext to the whole zone of the peritext that is the direct and principal (but not exclusive) responsibility of the publisher (or perhaps, to be more abstract but also more exact, of the publishing house ) – that is, the zone that exists merely by the fact that a book is published and possibly republished and offered to the public in one or several more or less varied presentations. The word zone indicates that the characteristic feature of this aspect of the paratext is basically spatial and material. We are dealing here with the outermost peritext (the cover, the title page, and their appendages) and with the books material construction (selection of format, of paper, of typeface, and so forth), which is executed by the typesetter and printer but decided on by the publisher, possibly in consultation with the author. All these technical givens themselves come under the discipline called bibliology , on which I have no wish to encroach; here my concern with them extends only to their appearance and effect, that is, only to their strictly paratextual value. Besides, this paratexts dependence on the publisher basically assigns it to a relatively recent historical period, whose terminus a quo coincides with the beginnings of printing, or the period historians ordinarily call modern and contemporary. This is not to say that the (much longer) pre-Gutenberg period, with its handwritten copies that were really even then a form of publication, knew nothing of our peritextual elements; and below we will have reason to ask how antiquity and the Middle Ages handled such elements Chertien as the title or the name of the author, whose chief location today is the publishers peritext.

Gérard Genette Paratexts: The public epitext

Definitions The criterion distinguishing the epitext from the peritext – that is (according to our conventions), distinguishing the epitext from all the rest of the paratext – is in theory purely spatial. The epitext is any paratextual element not materially appended to the text within the same volume but circulating, as it were, freely, in a virtually limitless physical and social space. The location of the epitext is therefore anywhere outside the book – but of course nothing precludes its later admission to the peritext. Such admission is always possible, and we will encounter many examples of it: see the original interviews appended to posthumous scholarly editions, or the innumerable excerpts from correspondence or diaries quoted in the critical notes of such scholarly editions. This purely spatial definition, however, has some pragmatic and functional repercussions. When an author, such as Proust for Du cote de chez Swann , chooses to present his work (here, the beginning of his work) by way of an interview rather than a preface, he no doubt has a reason for making such a choice, and in any case his choice leads to these kinds of effects: reaching a broader public than the public of first readers, but also sending this public a message that is constitutively more ephemeral, destined to disappear when its monitory function is fulfilled, whereas a preface would stay attached to the text at least until deleted upon publication of a second edition, if any.