The Garden of Forking Paths: Para texts in Travel Literature

Abstract

In his influential study, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation (1987; trans. 2001), structuralist Gerard Genette provides a delineation of those territories of the book — titles, forewords, epigraphs and footnotes — that mediate between reader and text, which he labels ‘paratexts’. Paratexts are ubiquitous in travel writing: from the ‘The Epistle Dedicatorie’ beginning Richard Hakluyt’s Voyages (1582) to the self-consciously literary epigraphs in Peter Matthiessen’s The Snow Leopard (1978) and glossaries, headlines, indexes, marginal comments, text-boxes and timelines that decorate the latest Lonely Planet guides. In his topography of the printed text, Genette voyages across a wide range of literary examples, primarily nineteenth- and twentieth- century French literature, but also central works of the Western canon such as St Augustine’s Confessions (397-8) and Michel de Montaigne’s Essays (1570–1592), writings by modern literary theorists such as Roland Barthes, and even films like John Huston’s Prizzi’s Honour (1985). Yet, despite brief asides on such well-known works as Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy (1768) and Andre Gide’s Travels in the Congo [Voyage au Congo] (1927), Genette does not engage in a sustained examination of paratexts in travel literature.