Ronsard's Pretext for Paratexts

There has been much discussion in modern criticism (at least of late) of what is now commonly referred to as the paratext, that is, to paraphrase G6rard Genette's Palimpsestes, a number of signals (titles, prefaces, postfaces, footnotes, epigraphs, illustrations, etc.) which form the entourage of the text and, at the same time, constitute a major locus for the conditioning process of potential readers.' In taking the prefaces of the Franciade as my object of study I intend neither to examine the theory of the heroic poem or epic-it has already been the object of much expert analysis2-nor to carry out a historical study that would position Ronsard in the evolving myth of the French people's Trojan origins.3 Instead, choosing texts that are by nature explanatory, normative and prescriptive, I hope to surprise the poet in the act of intentionality. By intentionality I mean here not so much the explicitly declared intentions of the author-these should not always be taken at face value-as the implicit confessions capable of being gleaned from specific contradictions in the utterances of the discourse. Since all representation is a doubling of the self and the refashioning of a subject as an object, establishing the characteristic features of this object will allow us to understand better the subject's strategy in so composing it. Far from accepting at face value any advice to the reader (who is encoded as such in the prefatory discourse), I would like to attempt to unearth the semior largely unconscious projective symbolic system of the paratext, and to read, beyond the surface utterances that stage the fiction of the apprentice reader, the ambiguous projection of the Ronsardian theory of imitation

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