Seuils by Gérard Genette (review)

Book Reviews Gérard Genette. S e u ils . Paris: Seuil, Coll. Poétique, 1987. Pp. 389. 150 F. My admiration for Genette has been virtually unconditional. His work has been exem­ plary in its combining a knowledge of literary history with a use of structural models to the end of renewing our understanding of rhetorical studies. It is therefore with some dismay that I find myself wondering if his latest book is not some kind of lapsus in judgment. In Seuils Genette has decided to catalogue, if not formalize all types of peripheral phenomena that accompany the production and dissemination of literary discourse. The first—and last —question that I ask is why bother to list all these procedures and conventions that, if they generate meaning, often do so on an ad hoc basis and which, when they are conventionally used, are usually minor issues of little interest? I am referring to all the forms of what Genette has decided to call paratexte. As the Greek suggests, paratexts include everything that goes along with the production and publishing of a literary text: choice of editors, titles, the prière d ’insérer, dedications, epigraphs, prefaces, notes, etc., etc. (the etc. here indicates an a priori condition). Or, in other words, “ Le paratexte est donc pour nous ce par quoi un texte se fait livre et se pro­ pose comme tel à ses lecteurs...” It is all that brings about the crossing of a seuil or a threshold as the book advances to its public. Never short on a formalist sense of logic, Genette divides paratexts in a priori terms into epitexts and peritexts. The Greek again serves to indicate that the latter practices are “ on” the book whereas the epitext includes all phenomena that accompany the book, but are not materially annexed to it. Epitexts are “ anywhere out of the book” : radio and TV interviews, auto-commentary, lectures, colloquia , or, as private epitexts, correspondence, diaries, first drafts, etc. etc. By the time he begins discussing these issues it is clear Genette has a post-Gutenberg prejudice in favor of the book as the basic unit of literary discourse. Folklorists and Derridians will both undoubtedly find grist for their mill here. Genette concludes this book about which he admits that it has been harassant by noting that it is an “introduction, et une exhortation à l’étude du paratexte.” For many literary scholars this exhortation will seem rather strange, since paratextual matters—like prose for M. Jourdain—have been their daily fare for most of their careers. My impression is that Genette, with the demise of a certain structuralism, and finding that neither psychoanalysis nor post-structuralism can offer a model for practical literary studies, has come back to literary history with a typical rhetorician’s strategy: he wants to delimit every aspect of textual studies, as classical rhetoricians once did, with a name that can confer some ontological dignity on the object studied. Genette is a major literary historian—a work like Mimologiques is a real contribution to literary history. But to classify historical practices in terms of paratextual rhetoric seems rather useless. These practices are indefinite in number and are usually quite well named by ordinary language. Or as Wittgenstein might have put it, we play these language games quite adequately with the natural taxonomies that ordinary language gives us. (If you didn’t know ‘‘Père Goriot” was a paratextual phenom­ enon would you be any less well off when it comes to generating meaning from the title?) Genette has compiled a wealth of information here, much drawn from English as well as French literature. For this reason alone the neophyte scholar may find some useful guides on how to make sense of all sorts of heterogeneous phenomena, whether he wants to become a paratextualist or not. A l l e n T h i h e r University o f Missouri 100 Fall 1987 ...