Narrative Beginnings: Theories and Practices

Part One: Origins, Paratexts, and Prototypes

Three major areas of research have emerged since 1975 that theorize beginnings before the narrative proper gets under way. These are rhetorical situation, paratextual apparatuses, and ideological positioning . Peter Rabinowitz’s important study Before Reading: Narrative Conventions and the Politics of Interpretation is a comprehensive analysis of the literary and cultural presuppositions that the reader brings to the text prior to its actual processing, or the implicit contract that exists between author and reader. Rabinowitz identifies four main types of preexisting narrative conventions, several of which have direct implications for our processing of the opening sections of the text. The first of these conventions are rules of notice, which help establish a hierarchy of importance among the many clusters of words that make up a novel. Among the rules of notice are rules of positioning, which suggest that titles, epigraphs, descriptive subtitles, and the first and last sentences of most texts are accorded a privileged import. He goes on to identify, second, rules of signification, which “tell us how to recast or symbolize or draw significance from the elements that the first set of rules has brought to our attention” (44). The third set, rules of configuration, helps the reader “assemble disparate elements in order to make patterns emerge” (44). In more formulaic works, we need only look at the opening scene to get a good sense of what is likely to follow. Fourth are rules of coherence, which suggest that we read a text as a purposive whole; these rules help us deal with textual disjunctures and inconsistencies “by transforming them into metaphors, subtleties, and ironies” (45). Taken together, these rules *P A R T O N E Origins, Paratexts, and Prototypes 12 P A R T O N E describe the interpretive conventions that readers draw on as they approach a text for the first time. For Gérard Genette, the paratext is the means by which a text makes a book of itself and proposes itself as such to its readers. The paratext includes titles, dedications, epigraphs, prefatorial material, notes, appendixes , and other contextualizing practices. It is a threshold, an undecided zone between the inside and the outside, a “fringe” that attempts to direct the book’s reception. As Genette asks, how would we read Joyce’s Ulysses if it were not called Ulysses? Although the ways and means of the paratext change constantly over time, Genette suggests there has never existed a text without a paratext. He classifies the varieties of paratext in a series of comprehensive categories. Spatially, the materials that come with the work proper (preface, titles, postscripts) are the peritext, while those that appear outside the volume (correspondence, interviews, subsequent essays) constitute the epitext. Temporally, one may differentiate between the original paratext, which appears when the book is first published, and anterior ones, which precede its publication, as well as subsequent, belated, and posthumous paratexts. Genette also identifies factual paratextual matters, such as indications of the author’s age, race, gender, or sexual orientation; examines the paratext’s illocutionary force (conveying information, intention, and interpretation); and discusses the pragmatic status of this entity, addressing questions like who precisely is the addressee of the paratext. The value of such a meticulous survey reveals itself at several points, such as the seemingly simple issue of the author’s name on the cover, which Genette clarifies in his reflections on pseudonymity and anonymity. Werner Wolf and Walter Bernhart have recently assembled an anthology, Framing Borders in Literature and Other Media, that takes up these and related issues from a variety of contemporary perspectives. A number of scholars have begun to scrutinize a particular part of the paratext: the title. Genette provides a thorough overview of the varieties and functions of titles, noting, among other things, the many purposes a title can perform. Rabinowitz analyses the different expectations that would be have been produced if Jane Austen, as she originally intended, had called her book First Impressions rather than Pride and Prejudice (60). Jacques Derrida, in his discussion of frames Origins, Paratexts, and Prototypes 13 and framing, deconstructs the opposition of an inside and outside to a work. The frame does not demarcate the two but is rather “a hybrid of inside and outside”; it is “an outside which is called to the inside of the inside in order to constitute it as inside” (63). Several other...