Gérard Genette and the Pleasures of Poetics

Gérard Genette does not like colloquia. He defined them as series of soliloquies supposedly pertaining to a common subject, given to all kinds of irrelevancies, and governed by everyone’s impatient reactions to everyone else’s papers. But his work is surely worth several such “intellectual jamborees” (Bardadrac 76–77).¹ With essays like “Structuralism and Literary Criticism,” where he describes the latter as a kind of bricolage and locates the structuralist method between pure formalism and traditional realism; “Rhetoric Restrained,” where he traces the gradual narrowing of the rhetorical domain and argues for the elaboration of a “new rhetoric,” a semiotics of all discourses; and “Figures,” where he characterizes the figural as “the tiny but vertiginous space that opens up between . . . two languages in the same language” (Figures 59), Genette helped to define and design a supple and sparkling stucturalism. He illustrated its critical power in articles like “Stendhal,” on the author’s transgressions of the rules making up the literary game, like “Vertige fixé,” on Robbe-Grillet’s labyrinths, like “Flaubert’s Silences,” on the moments when the writer’s narrative escapes narrative, and like “Proust Palimpsest,” on the ceaseless merging and entanglement of figures and meanings that constitute À la recherche du temps perdu. Besides, he introduced literary structuralism into the leading avant-garde journal Tel Quel; he played a significant part in the publication of Tzvetan Todorov’s influential collection of Russian formalist writing, Théorie de la littérature, as well as in that of Roland Barthes’s Critical Essays and of Criticism and Truth, Barthes’s celebrated response to Raymond Picard’s Lansonian attacks; with Todorov and Hélène Cixous, he founded Poétique, perhaps the finest journal dedicated to poetics; and he still directs for Editions du Seuil the series “Poétique,” which published not only Vladimir Propp, Roman Jakobson, and Northrop Frye but also Arthur Danto, Käte Hamburger, Abdelfattah Kilito, and Jean-Luc Nancy. In 1972, Genette published “Discours du récit” (Narrative Discourse). Together with such essays as “Frontiers of Narrative” or “Vraisemblance et motivation” (“Verisimilitude and Motivation”), it made him a narratological household name. Indeed, so exemplary was Narrative Discourse that both the Grand Larousse de la langue française and the Grand Robert wrongly suggested 1972 as the date of appearance of the term “narratologie.”² Paradoxically, Genette had not been particularly interested by the mechanics of narrative, which he viewed as the least attractive dimension of literature. Whereas some of us skip the descriptive parts in texts to get to the narrative ones, he did the reverse. In fact, his favorite literary genre is not necessarily the novel nor is his favorite art necessarily representational (see Figures IV 15, Bardadrac 352, and Codicille 249–54).

The years following 1972 saw the publication of many other outstanding texts by Genette, including Mimologics, on the (Western) Cratylic tradition; The Architext, on genre theory; Palimpsests, on “literature in the second degree”; Narrative Discourse Revisited, which elaborates, refines, or corrects some of the arguments advanced in Narrative Discourse; Paratexts, which investigates textual elements like titles, subtitles, epigraphs, prefaces, or book jackets; Fiction and Diction, which explores the conditions for literariness. There was also The Work of Art and The Aesthetic Relation, on the modes of existence of artworks and on their modes of action; Métalepse and the transgressive interpenetration of distinct enunciative situations, narrative levels, fictional domains, or artistic worlds; Bardadrac, his thoroughly delightful autobiographical dictionary; and, most recently, in 2009, the splendid sequel to it entitled Codicille. Yet, in spite of this remarkable production, Genette successfully discouraged at least one conference that was to focus on his person and his work, probably because of some basic intellectual distaste and certainly because of the temperate modesty that, if he had to have a motto, would lead him to adopt “moderato ma non troppo” (Bardadrac 117).

Of course, modesty does not necessarily mean lack of firmness in rebutting unconvincing opponents, whether it be C. J. van Rees on anachronies, analepses, and more, Nicolas Ruwet on Roman Jakobson and poetry, or Marc Fumaroli on structuralism, tradition, and...