Paratextual Art

Consider the paratext of Gerard Genette's Paratexts. Or more precisely: glance at the cover image and try to imagine how the book might feel in your hands.¹ Originally published in French in 1987, Paratexts was translated into English and republished ten years later by Cambridge University Press as number 20 in the series "Literature, Culture, Theory."² It looks like it belongs there. The abstract linearity of the image suggests scientific reason, rational argumentation, and taxonomic precision. Without even cracking it open, you can sense that this book participates in what the series editors designate "the systematic study of literature." (P, front endpapers) At the same time, though, other paratextual effects pull in a different direction. The smooth, glossy finish of the binding calls to mind the supermarket paperback, the glitzy magazine, or the movie poster, while the tropical color palette (purple, magenta, aquamarine) conjures up the atmosphere of beach reading in the era of Miami Vice.

It is easy to find other paratexts that resemble this one: visual objects that not only index the state of the discipline but also employ the color palates of American mass culture at the time of publication. In fact, a whole genre of critical writing has been visualized this way. Take, for instance, Jonathan Culler's Structuralist Poetics, published in 1975, whose orange vortex suggests the widening gyre of lyrical complexity; or Fredric Jameson's The Political Unconscious, published in 1981, whose palimpsest of squares, evoking flyleaves or parchment paper, anticipates the semiotic cubes contained within its pages, and whose modest flash of color—lavender—offers just a touch of softness to a book that figures interpretation as a kind of blood-sport, "tak[ing] place," as Jameson writes in the preface, "within a Homeric battlefield."³ Indeed, the visual culture of the codex in the era of High Theory—when literary studies was striving explicitly and self-consciously to adopt what Michel Foucault called "the norms of scientificity"—is characterized by geometrical shapes, sans serif fonts, and various motifs of layering and repetition that connote both the bottomless mystery of the literary text and the strenuous work of depth hermeneutics.⁴

While the recent swerve in the literary humanities away from theory and toward method has called such notions into question, there remains much to be learned from Genette's Paratexts: a classic work of French literary theory that, in hindsight, appears to exemplify at least one version of "surface reading," insofar as it dwells on the visible, tangible apparatus through which literature makes and meets its publics.⁵ Of course, Genette was writing in the mid-1980s, a moment that feels like eons ago in the history of technical media, so his terms will need some updating to account for the rise of digital culture and other more recent phenomena—which is what I aim to do in this essay by placing Genette's theoretical account in dialogue with the everyday practice of book design in the twenty-first century.

However hypertechnical it can seem, Paratexts is worth rereading for at least two reasons: first, because it provides an analytically precise vocabulary for conceptualizing the abstract zone, or what Genette would call the "threshold," where text meets context; and second, because it constitutes a preliminary effort to analyze the status and function of the book cover, or more specifically the book jacket, which is one of the most significant and significantly underappreciated media platforms in the history of culture (P, 2).⁶ Far from being mere ornamentation, book jackets are crucial to literary art in the digital age. As part of a media ecology that includes promotional materials, digital marketing campaigns, and in some cases television or film adaptations, book jackets make novels visible in a world where there is simply too much to see.⁷ They form a hinge not only between reality and fiction but also between literature and design, aesthetics and politics, art and life.

To analyze a jacket or a cover, then, is to analyze a lively interplay among the people, institutions, business practices, economies, cultural conventions, desires, and values that make literature possible. And such analysis...