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Les Hors d’œuvres du carnaval romanesque: The Préfacé as Vorspeise Steven G. Kellman P ROLEGOMENON—Every start is a false start. You do not have to be a Hindu or a Viconian, merely a Darwinian or a semiotician, to acknowledge that we are always in medias res. As every dis­ course presupposes an extant code of signification, the end of speech is more easily imaginable than its beginning; epilogues are more conceiv­ able than prologues. If in the beginning was the Word, what could we possibly have said to prepare ourselves for that Word? “ Les Préfaces, pour la plus grande partie, ne semblent faites que pour en imposer au Lecteur,” 1declares Crébillon in the preface to Les Egarements du cœur et de l’esprit. Just fifteen years earlier, in 1721, Montesquieu had similarly subverted his own preface to Lettres persanes by refusing to employ it as a conventional apology for what is to follow: “ ce seroit une chose très-ennuyeuse, placée dans un lieu déjà trèsennuyeux de lui-même: je veux dire une Préface.”2 Perhaps the creator of De l’Esprit des lois subscribed to a social con­ tract theory of reading—an implicit agreement between reader and writer accounts for the text’s authority. And this accord must exist prior to any act of reading, as it is what makes reading possible. This lectoral consen­ sus must already be in place even before the preface is begun, or else it would be illegible. Because of this, and because prefaces are usually com­ posed after what they precede and at least imply a dialogue with what follows, Henri Mitterand can insist that: “ . . .la préface est toujours en réalité une postface. . . .” 3 Despite its title, Franz Liszt’s Les Préludes is nothing of the sort. It is catalogued among the composer’s works as “ Poème symphonique no. 3,” and it is as likely to be performed in the middle of a concert program as at its beginning. Liszt originally conceived of Les Préludes as an over­ ture to a choral work to be called Les Quatre Eléments, a musical setting of four poems by Joseph Autran—“ La Terre,” “ Les Aquilons,” “ Les Flots,” and “ Les Astres.” However, after abandoning the longer project, he substituted Alphonse de Lamartine’s “ Les Préludes,” from his Nouvelles Méditations poétiques, as the orchestral piece’s proVol . XXVII, No. 3 19 L ’E sprit C réateur gramme. Nevertheless, Liszt retained a rhetorical question by Autran as epigraph to the music: “ Notre vie est-elle autre chose qu’une série de préludes à ce chant inconnu dont la mort entonne la première et solen­ nelle note?”4But once the song becomes known and the eternally exter­ nal signifié vanishes, all preludes collapse into interludes. Prior to beginning, let us start with an analogy. Reading is like eating, and all texts are readers’ digestions. Such is the trope found at the very outset of the book that comes closest to being a preface to the entire history of the novel. Of course, Don Quixote, any more than Amadis de Gaula, did not arise ex nihilo. But it is often regarded as the first novel, as if, pace sunstruck Ecclesiastes, there could ever be any genuine novelty. It is notable that, in the first stanza of its first prefatory poem, Cervantes invokes the metaphor of feeding to prepare us for the experi­ ence most readers will undergo throughout his book. Mas si el pan no se te cuepor ir a manos de idio-. verás de manos a boaun no dar una en el cía-, si bien se comen las mapor mostrar que son curio-.5 [To bake bread for fools is not thy mission: Hand raised to mouth, they’re hungry still, But taste thee the dunces surely will, And each his fingers will greedily lick To prove he appreciates the trick Of such fine fare and would eat his fill.]6 Subsequent narratives have been Quixotic not simply in replicating a pat­ tern of the ideal colliding against the real, but in being presented...

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