The Proustian Paratexte

By the word paratext, I mean all of the marginal or supplementary data around the text. It comprises what one could call various thresholds: authorial and editorial (i.e., titles, insertions, dedications, epigraphs, prefaces and notes); media related (i.e., interviews with the author, official summaries) and private (i.e., correspondence, calculated or non-calculated disclosures), as well as those related to the material means of production and reception, such as groupings, segments, etc. Less a well-defined category than a flexible space, without exterior boundaries or precise and consistent interiors, the paratext consists, as this ambiguous prefix suggest, of all those things which we are never certain belong to the text of a work but which contribute to present-or to presentify--the text by making it into a book. It not only marks a zone of transition between text and non-text (hors-texte), but also a zone of transaction, a space that is essentially pragmatic and strategic-and here I am referring deliberately to Leon-Pierre Quint's work devoted to Proust's literary strategy. This term, however, is not to be taken in the usual, let us say (unfairly) Balzacian sense of quest for success, power, fortune or glory. For, in regard to the work with which I will be dealing exclusively here, A La Recherche du temps perdu, the Proustian strategy has as its essential objectives first, the publication of the work-itself not a small matter, as experience clearly demonstrated--and then, given the conditions particular to its publication, a pedagogical objective, namely, the instruction of the public so as to guard against eventual misunderstanding and to orient the reader to the kind of reading which Proust considered the most faithful and the most pertinent. It is above all this second objective which relates to the paratext and which therefore we will consider here. As an amateur Proustian, without pretentions of revealing anything new to the specialist, I would like to offer, first, a succinct and non-exhaustive inventory of the paratext of the Recherche and, then, indicate what (to me) appear to be its principal critical and perhaps even theoretical lessons

Computer Science · French Literature and Critical Theory · French Literature and Criticism · Linguistics and Discourse Analysis

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