Introduction to the Paratext

Abstract

HE LITERARY WORK consists, exhaustively or essentially, of a text, that is to say (a very minimal definition) in a more or less lengthy sequence of verbal utterances more or less containing meaning. But this text rarely appears in its naked state, without reinforcement and accompaniment of a certain number of productions, themselves verbal or not, like an author's name, a title, a preface, illustrations. One does not always know if one should consider that they belong to text or not, but in any case they surround it and prolong it, precisely in order to present it, in usual sense of this verb, but also in its strongest meaning: to make it present, to assure its presence in world, its reception and its consumption, in form, nowadays at least, of a book. This accompaniment, of varying size and style, constitutes what I once christened elsewhere,' in conformity with frequently ambiguous meaning of this prefix in French2--consider, I said, adjectives like parafiscal or paramilitary-the paratext of work. Thus paratext is for us means by which a text makes a book of itself and proposes itself as such to its readers, and more generally to public. Rather than with a limit or a sealed frontier, we are dealing in this case with a threshold, or-the term Borges used about a preface-with a vestibule which offers to anyone and everyone possibility either of entering or of turning back. An undecided zone3 between inside and outside, itself without rigorous limits, either towards interior (the text) or towards exterior (the discourse of world on text), a border, or as Philippe Lejeune said, the fringe of printed text which, in reality, controls whole reading.4 This fringe, in effect, always bearer of an authorial commentary either more or less legitimated by author, constitutes, between text and what lies outside it, a zone not just of transition, but of transaction; privileged site of a pragmatics and of a strategy, of an action on public in service, well or