Masking Strategies: Modern French Identities Modern French Identities

Modern French Identities 92 Modern French Identities
92
Gérard Genette’s seminal study of the paratext, Seuils (1987), is the Alistair Rolls and
Rolls and Vuaille-Barcan (eds) • Masking Strategies

starting point for this collection of essays, all of which seek not only
to engage with Genette’s taxonomy and apply it, but also to inter- Marie-Laure Vuaille-Barcan (eds)
rogate it and to move through and beyond it. In addition to mapping
Genette’s organization of (para)textual space onto a number of French
texts, including novels and plays, texts translated into French, book
series and publishing marketing material, these essays take up some
of the challenges raised in Seuils as well as posing their own. For
Masking Strategies
example, the relationship between Genette’s work and deconstruc-
tionist approaches to text and the intersection of paratextuality and
translation, which are hinted at by Genette, are explored in more
Unwrapping the French Paratext
detail in the volume, as is the notion of moving through and beyond
the paratext. As such, this book offers a significant re-engagement
with and deployment of paratextual theory and practice.
Alistair Rolls is Senior Lecturer in French Studies at the University of

Newcastle, Australia. His work has focused principally on twentieth-
century French literature, including Boris Vian, Existentialism and crime
fiction. With Marie-Laure Vuaille-Barcan he is currently working on an
analysis of the translation of Australian crime fiction into French.
Peter Lang
Marie-Laure Vuaille-Barcan is Senior Lecturer in French Studies at the
University of Newcastle, Australia. Her research interests include trans-
lation theory and second-language acquisition.
ISBN 978-3-0343-746-8
www.peterlang.com
Modern French Identities 92 Modern French Identities
92
Gérard Genette’s seminal study of the paratext, Seuils (1987), is the Alistair Rolls and
Rolls and Vuaille-Barcan (eds) • Masking Strategies

starting point for this collection of essays, all of which seek not only
to engage with Genette’s taxonomy and apply it, but also to inter- Marie-Laure Vuaille-Barcan (eds)
rogate it and to move through and beyond it. In addition to mapping
Genette’s organization of (para)textual space onto a number of French
texts, including novels and plays, texts translated into French, book
series and publishing marketing material, these essays take up some
of the challenges raised in Seuils as well as posing their own. For
Masking Strategies
example, the relationship between Genette’s work and deconstruc-
tionist approaches to text and the intersection of paratextuality and
translation, which are hinted at by Genette, are explored in more
detail in the volume, as is the notion of moving through and beyond
the paratext. As such, this book offers a significant re-engagement
with and deployment of paratextual theory and practice.
Alistair Rolls is Senior Lecturer in French Studies at the University of

Newcastle, Australia. His work has focused principally on twentieth-
century French literature, including Boris Vian, Existentialism and crime
fiction. With Marie-Laure Vuaille-Barcan he is currently working on an
analysis of the translation of Australian crime fiction into French.
Peter Lang
Marie-Laure Vuaille-Barcan is Senior Lecturer in French Studies at the
University of Newcastle, Australia. Her research interests include trans-
lation theory and second-language acquisition.
www.peterlang.com
Masking Strategies
M odern F rench I dentities
Edited by Peter Collier
Volume 92
Peter Lang
Oxford Bern Berlin Bruxelles Frankfurt am Main New York Wien
l l l l l l
Alistair Rolls and
Marie-Laure Vuaille-Barcan (eds)
Masking Strategies
Peter Lang
Oxford Bern Berlin Bruxelles Frankfurt am Main New York Wien
l l l l l l
Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek
Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche
Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available on the
Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
Masking strategies : unwrapping the French paratext / edited by Alistair

Rolls and Marie-Laure Vuaille-Barcan.
p. cm. -- (Modern French identities ; 92)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-3-0343-0746-8 (alk. paper)
1. French literature--Criticism, Textual. 2. Paratext. I. Rolls,
Alistair, 1971- II. Vuaille-Barcan, Marie-Laure, 1962-
PQ79.M38 2011
840.9--dc23
2011045833
ISSN 1422-9005
ISBN 9783034307468 (paperback)
ISBN 9783035302882 (eBook)
© Peter Lang AG, International Academic Publishers, Bern 2011

Hochfeldstrasse 32, CH-3012 Bern, Switzerland
info@peterlang.com, www.peterlang.com, www.peterlang.net
All rights reserved.

All parts of this publication are protected by copyright.
Any utilisation outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without
the permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to prosecution.
This applies in particular to reproductions, translations, microfilming,
and storage and processing in electronic retrieval systems.
Printed in Germany
Contents
Acknowledgements vii
Alistair Rolls and Murray Pratt

Introduction: Unwrapping the French Paratext 1
David Gascoigne
Paratext Rules OK 13
Gemma Le Mesurier
Reading Against the Author:
Layers of Impotence in Stendhal’s Armance 27
Alistair Rolls
The Striptease at the Dead Heart of Douglas Kennedy’s
Piège nuptial or How to be a bit French around the Edges 47
Marie-Laure Vuaille-Barcan
Douglas Kennedy or an American in Paris:
Paratextual Strategies and ‘Acclimatization’ of the Translated Text 69
Murray Pratt
‘Un jeu avec le je’:
Frédéric Beigbeder and the Value of the Authorial Paratext 85
vi
Hélène Jaccomard
The Paratext of Yasmina Reza’s « Art »: Overf lowing the Image 99
Jean Fornasiero and John West-Sooby

Covering Up:
Translating the Art of Australian Crime Fiction into French 119
Françoise Grauby
Writing (Learning about): French Writing Manuals and the Peritext 137
Alistair Rolls and Marie-Laure Vuaille-Barcan

Postface: Paratextuality, Self-Alterity and the Becoming-Text 159
Notes on Contributors 187
Index 191
Acknowledgements
At the University of Newcastle, we should like to thank Professor Kevin

McConkey, Deputy Vice-Chancellor Academic and Global Relations, and
the members of the Kelver Hartley Bequest committee, especially Profes-
sor John Germov and Associate Professor Roger Markwick, for generously
funding this work and the Research Excellence Workshop out of which
it was produced. We should like to thank all those who participated with
such enthusiasm and good will to the discussion of the papers that make
up this volume, including Professor Jean-Pierre Boulé of Nottingham Trent
University, whose contribution, if virtual, was nonetheless real.
Finally, in accordance with the spirit of this volume, we should like
to problematize the boundaries of the paratext by inserting inside these
acknowledgements a dedication to a departed colleague, Professor Law-
rence R. Schehr, without whom this volume would have been the poorer.
Larry was a great supporter of our work at Newcastle and a friend to us all
in French Studies in Australia. This book is dedicated to his memory.
ALISTAIR ROLLS and MURRAY PRATT
Introduction: Unwrapping the French Paratext
As an introduction to an edited volume, this essay is a liminal space between

the essays that constitute the collection entitled Masking Strategies: Unwrap-
ping the French Paratext and you, the readers who are preparing to engage
with them. Of course, the nature of this liminal space is to be both inside
this collection and outside it; it packages the essays, ef fectively sells them
to readers, enabling them to approach the collected texts through one, but
not the only, paradigm. Thus, it is the readers’ ‘discovery’ of the volume
through the paratext that determines its meanings. This liminal essay rep-
resents, however, our responsibility as authors to produce a reading context
for a new and productive exchange, between a here and a there constituted
on either side of the paratextual portal, and an us and a them.1 As an essay,
the current text has a double function: it both resembles the essays that
follow and, at the same time, introduces them, thereby becoming pulled
into the paratextual apparatus. Indeed, the other texts, for the most part,
do not speak to each other but directly to the readers, whereas this text
speaks to them as a collection. It speaks to them and, at the same time, it
enables them to speak (as a whole, with some degree of collective author-
ity) to readers. So, as we speak to the essays, we contributors also speak
rather dif ferently here to them, or you, than we do when we divide into
our respective individualities inside the body of the text(s) proper. It is
this dif ference that is the realm of the paratext. And it is the study of this
paratextual dif ference, of this dif ferentiating space between text, author
and reader, which we wish to interrogate here (and there) in this text (and
in the texts that follow).
1 The ‘us’ represented here includes all the contributors to the present volume and
those who contributed to the research workshop in an advisory capacity, especially
Jean-Pierre Boulé. We have tried to express the spirit of the exchanges that took place
as part of that collective process in this introduction.
2 ALISTAIR ROLLS and MURRAY PRATT
At what point does the paratext end and the text begin? Clearly, this
framing essay can only frame the debate. It is nonetheless a debate that
informed several months of dialogue amongst the contributors, leading
to an intensive two-day colloquium; it is also a debate that has been hap-
pening since Gérard Genette delimited the term in his seminal essay, Seuils
(1987).2 It is also, however, a debate that warrants further ref lection, hence
this book. Thus, with the word book, we make a move that closes the gap
between the outside and the inside, bringing the paratextual element that
is this introductory essay into the collective fold of these pages. But, of
course, the book also has a weight that is made up of covers, and these
are another matter. And they are also very much our matter here, as you
readers will discover, with the majority of the essays that follow being to a
greater or lesser degree interested in the covers that adorn and sell books.
Covers are the material that both attracts and protects, helping readers to
penetrate them and, at other times and often at the same time, complicat-
ing matters and rather surreptitiously masking the text within.
We are also interested in that space between the covers and the text
proper, which is this space, unless you consider that the text has already
begun. And if the text has already begun, then we are somehow in two or
more space-time continuums at once: the now of composition (and now
of editing), the then of the construction of the texts we read in preparing
this volume, and the future of your reading. As you can see, the paratext
is dif ficult to pin down in time and space, all the more so, given the ever-
evolving realms of hypertextuality that have grown to mediate so many
aspects of our experience of ours and other worlds since Genette penned
2 Gérard Genette, Seuils (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1987). Subsequent studies include
Philippe Lane, La Périphérie du texte (Paris: Nathan, 1992); and Mireille Calle-
Gruber and Elisabeth Zawiszka (eds), Paratextes: Études aux bords du texte (Paris:
L’Harmattan, 2000). More recently there have been a number of calls for papers for
special editions of journals and conference panels with a focus on the paratext, includ-
ing: Neohelicon: Acta Comparationis Litterarum Universarum, 1 (2010), Poetics of the
Paratext, guest-edited by R.-L. Etienne Barnett; and ‘Duly Noted: Approaches to
the Paratext’, a panel to be convened at the 2011 conference of the Northeast Modern
Language Association (NeMLA).
Seuils. Indeed, self-alterity and liminal space are arguably less innocent
and more complex concepts now that the virtual is so interwoven into
our everyday networks.
Titles, too, are matters of concern to us in this volume. As you will have
noticed, the title of this book is Masking Strategies: Unwrapping the French
Paratext. It is written on the cover. This title says something of the present
volume’s contents, packaging them as something coherent that lies within.
The title is metonymic, while also remaining metaphorical, of the book;
it says what it is while also admitting that its relation to it is emblematic
and ancillary. The title of the present essay is less encompassing; it incor-
porates the subtitle, and only the subtitle, of the full title. It thus says less
than the cover title while also, we hope, saying more about the book. So,
while you have moved deeper into the book, towards the text, as it were,
you also seem to have moved further away from the purchase you have on
the whole, losing the overarching perspective of the external and adopting
the partial view of the insider. For, in addition to attracting, the paratext
can also repel; the motion it represents and facilitates is two-directional,
if not multi-directional.
Further facilitating this process, we shall now say something about the
process that has led to the assembly of these essays. This is, of course, another
paratextual step. And in describing it thus, we realize that all introductions
to edited volumes are like this (for the simple reason that they are all para-
textual). This one is only dif ferent by degree. As the introduction to an
edited volume about the paratext, it is, if not more aware of, at least more
focused on its paratextual status. It is, in this way, rather like some of the
objects of study in the essays that follow: they too operate paratextually, as
covers and introductions, but they are somehow more markedly, on occa-
sion more self-referentially, so. And by positioning the spotlight on these
telling examples of the paratext we hope to make them even more so.
It is also worth acknowledging (if we may interrupt the expected para-
textual formalities) that this book began its life at a meeting of a university
committee. It was the Kelver Hartley bequest committee and the university
was the University of Newcastle in New South Wales in Australia. The
decision made at this meeting was to set up a workshop, the Kelver Hart-
ley Research Excellence workshop, designed to facilitate dialogue among
scholars on a particular topic, in this (the inaugural) case, the paratext. The
workshop took place between 15 December and 17 December 2010. The
process of editing this essay extends this period up to Sunday 20 Decem-
ber, and it is rather dif ficult to say whether the workshop has finished or
not – we are in a liminal space, between before and after the workshop that
generated the writing of these essays, including this one. On the one hand,
the last collective act of the workshop was arguably the final group discus-
sion, during which we discussed the last of the essays that are contained
within, responding to it as a group and suggesting modifications that will
happen between now (our time) and publication. On the other hand, to
the extent that a (post-)workshop swim enabled conclusions to be drawn,
we might consider the last collective acts to have included bodysurfing at
Newcastle’s beaches. Certainly, the appropriateness of the liminal space in
which this bodysurfing took place, on a coastal strip between inland (in this
case, urban east-coast Australia) and the sea, was not lost on us: with our
feet on and of f the ground, we also noted that we were discussing the event
that had been while realizing that we were keeping it alive, commenting
on it but also in it. In time and space then, our conclusion was markedly,
self-referentially paratextual. And by preceding the collective writing of the
introduction, it spoke volumes of the paratextual blurring of closure and
opening, covering and uncovering. Indeed, while much of what precedes
risks the indulgences of the self-referential, liminality remains resolutely
political, with the physical border of the Australian state having enacted
its own drama of attraction and repulsion in the days before the workshop.
The tragic drowning of refugees seeking asylum on the shores of Christmas
Island demonstrates how borders, and the crossing of borders, represent
an enterprise that shapes, and in some cases, destroys lives.
The idea that the paratext uncovers as much as it covers, masking
the work of the text (by replacing it with an attractive cover) as well as
unmasking it (by talking about the authors’ contribution), was one of
the key points driving this volume. It also points to the investments made
whenever we cross thresholds. We were struck not only by the wealth
of possibilities for textual debate generated by Genette but also by the
limits, in and of themselves ideological, that he puts around the paratext.
By discussing and performing his famous taxonomy of textual borders,
his scholarship speaks of a structuralist approach to text that must have

appeared almost reactionary at the time of its publication. For, to say that
we have moved on from structuralism is also to forget that the move from
structuralism to poststructuralism had already happened when Seuils first
came out. But have studies of the paratext themselves moved forward in
ways that permit new understandings of the politics, psychologies and
post-millennial positioning that permeate our own oscillations between
the text and hors-texte (which, as we all know since Derrida, may be an
illusory distinction)? This volume will not provide definitive answers to
these questions, but by picking the paratext up in a new context it ena-
bles them to be posed and grapples with what they might mean more
than two decades later. Certainly, the focus of the discussion is one that
more deliberately includes the role of the reader in the dynamics of the
paratext. Our starting point is thus one that follows on from Genette’s
own paratextual elements: the beginning and end of Seuils. In particular,
we are interested in the second footnote of that famous text,3 the way it
extends beyond that essay’s own parameters, connecting with the work of
the Yale School of deconstructionist criticism and in particular J. Hillis
Miller’s famous study of parasitism. So, even as Genette begins his author-
based consideration of what constitutes the limits of the text he enacts the
intertextuality that sees limits between his text and other discourses both
described and defined but also dissolved. By drawing this initial connection
between his own work and that of a school that might appear so opposed
to his own purpose, he sows the seeds for a reader-based counter-reading
of his own authorial consideration of borders, opening the opportunity
for cross-referencing with other theories of borders as contact zones and
sites of osmosis.4 While Genette is, of course, not against osmosis, it is the
possibility that the text’s identity may be embedded within a collective that
the author cannot control, although he might appeal to it and understand
3 Genette, Seuils, p. 7.

4 See, for example, Mary Louise Pratt, ‘Apocalypse in the Andes: Contact Zones and
the Struggle for Interpretive Power’, Encuentros, 15 (Cultural Center, Inter-American
Development Bank, March 1996); and Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa, Borderlands/
La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987).
its mechanics, which seems to problematize the ostensible aims made in

Seuils. This does not seem like an innocent act, given that this intriguing
footnote appears in a text whose focus is paratextual apparatus, including
such devices as footnotes. Thus, by appealing to deconstructionism, in the
most external perimeter of its inner text, Seuils exposes a nihilistic reading
of its own message. Another way of reading, another (writerly) reader is
introduced, parasitically, into Genette’s (para)text, even as the ‘intended’
(readerly) reader is crossing the threshold.
In addition to putting the reader back into discussions of the para-
text, we also wish to pick up some other paratextual dimensions that Gen-
ette does not discuss, including, for example, translation. As we shall see,
however, Genette once again manages to perform non-discussion within
discussion, as if, in his text, he is deliberately both talking about it and not
talking about it. One of his parting shots in Seuils is to suggest that had
he had more time and space he would have developed a discussion about
the paratextual function of the translated text. By making this point in the
concluding pages of his text, that is to say once again in that outer perimeter
of his diegesis proper, he emphasizes, or ref lexively enacts, the simultaneous
saying of his non-saying, actively opening a debate that he has not got the
time to open.5 Having opened with a footnote to a school of textual criti-
cism that is about a dif ferent, and more radical, kind of opening out (and
which has the potential to close him down before he has even begun), he
closes with another opening. In this way, by taking up his suggestion that
translation might be considered as a paratextual element, we are ourselves
conscious of remaining within the (paratextual) discourse of Seuils even
as we attempt to stretch its limits and, if possible, to go beyond it.
One of the areas of debate that we have found the most compelling
in the production of this volume is the idea of (the) paratext as a liminal
space, which can be considered as at once part of the text and separate
from it, and thus pointing both inwards towards (the) text and outwards
towards (the) hors-texte. If we consider the paratext as a zone of transition,
as something that extends the text, not only marking its border but standing
as its border, giving space and content to a place that might otherwise only

be virtual, then it functions very much as the limen that Genette appears
to have in mind, that is to say as a threshold area (vestibule, porch) which
serves to ease the reader’s transit from physical reality into the sphere of
text and imagination about to be revealed. This is not only a benign func-
tion of the paratext but also a Barthesian welcome to the pleasure zone,
introducing readers, initiating them and, importantly, entertaining them.
From a poststructuralist perspective, such a liminal function celebrates
the text in its readerliness, making it reader-friendly in the sense of ‘easy
to understand’. In such an initiatory paratextual structure, those elements
most concerned with the hors-texte are characteristically placed in the outer
layers (the generic markers of a collection or publishing house, quotes
from reviews, etc.) while any epigraphs or prefatory material, being more
related to text or authorial voice, tend to constitute inner dermal layers of
this enfolding structure. The sequence of this progression is not only tra-
ditional but also necessary if the reader is to take pleasure in the initiation.
This is the paratext as a kind of striptease, which is only as erotic as it is
slow and clearly signposted. And to return to our geographical metaphor
(or metonym), this limen is the stretch of beach between land and sea. To
go to the beach is generally to swim in the water, but it is also potentially
just about enjoying the sea’s invitation to step out (and in); one does not
necessarily have to accept the invitation as pleasure is there to be had in
the liminal space itself, which has volume.
A less innocent understanding of the paratext is one which reduces
this volume. This is less pleasurable because it is more dangerous. In coastal
terms, this is not the pleasure zone of Australia’s eastern beaches but, per-
haps, the rocky shores of Christmas Island or that tropical space where
inland Australia, the Bush, runs directly into the sea. As we shall see later
in the volume, Darwin is typical of this space, its waters full not only of
the sharks that embody our fear of the sea (and the water’s other side) but
also crocodiles, those animals that symbolize the dangers of Australia’s bush
fauna. In either of these examples then, there is no limen. Or rather, there
is and is not one at the same time. It is too insubstantial, too sudden to
be experienced as anything other than a threat of assault; for all its virtual
violence, its absence, it is nonetheless active. Indeed, as a vector of change
and as a gateway to radical otherness, such vanishing points are as much a
paratext as are their more voluminous cousins.
As the essays in this volume reveal, regardless of the nature and extent
of the paratextual periphery, there exists, too, a problematic, if not prob-
lematizing, function, one that lures the reader into paradox and impasse:
the paratext as mask. Otherness is not explained here; rather, it is veiled,
a trap into which the reader falls, unprepared. And yet, this disempower-
ment forces the reader to react and, then, to act. Such paratextual strategies,
which disguise their intent, albeit perhaps disingenuously, make demands
of the reader that result in a production of writerly text. It is therefore
important that this paratext remain masked, for it is in this way that the
text seduces the reader into taking responsibility for its (own) production.
As a striptease, this fails to give pleasure but, to draw on Barthes’s termi-
nology, its eroticism is only more blissful. This is the paratext as the text’s
silent relationship with the reader, which must escape the author (even
if the setting of the trap was a conscious authorial decision). Its presence
takes the form of an absence, and its silence in the texts discussed in this
volume speaks volumes of the writerly text that is implicit in all text. Again,
the paratext signposts what all text does by reminding readers that they
are there too, in the text.
David Gascoigne’s chapter has a programmatic function here insofar
as it immediately stretches the boundaries of the paratext by of fering an
analysis of Paul Fournel’s Oulipian text Banlieue. Oulipo’s mission – to
set rules that force texts to break traditional norms of literary construc-
tion – of fers a tantalizing satire of the paratext, which is developed beyond
all proportions in Fournel’s text. Indeed, as a liminal space it is extremely
present, providing the reader with ample critical apparatus through which
to read the text within. The text, however, is replaced by an absence, and it
is this development of textual absence that becomes a key leitmotiv in this
volume. For, if the paratext is all that there is in Fournel’s Banlieue, then
it must be the text, at which point the questions that it elicits somehow
take the place of the paratext, to the extent that an Oulipian puzzle must
be predicated on the answers to its own riddles. The title itself, Banlieue,
suggests just such a reversal. As Gascoigne points out, the outlying area
that, historically, once received its meaning from the metropolitan centre
is now what, like the paratext, gives meaning to the centre. The centre,
in turn, is dissolved into absence, reversed into the periphery and, lastly,
made meaningful by the paratextual clues that have now taken centre stage.
Ultimately then, this satire of paratextual rules hints at some of the ‘other’
truths of the paratext, which subsequent chapters of this volume pursue.
In terms of the deconstructionist other side of the paratext, at which we
have already hinted, Banlieue exposes the absence that is the other side of
any text. When a text is accompanied by such a vast paratextual apparatus,
there is a way in which the readings presented must serve to highlight the
text’s multiplicity. In addition to, rather than simply in place of, the text’s
metaphysical reading, its overarching structure, there is also its other side,
its nihilistic readings, which are the creative possibilities of that inevitable
absence that sits in, around and between the lines of the present text.
Gemma Le Mesurier follows on from the ludic elements of Paul Four-
nel’s Banlieue by revealing the dangerous side to the over-present paratext.
In this case, it is the extensive paratextual trappings of Stendhal’s Armance
that are taken to task. Le Mesurier demonstrates that the metaphysical
reading of this novel has been so forcibly sold to its readers by a mix of
editorial and authorial strategies that the limits of text and critical appa-
ratus have become blurred. This is a case where too broad and too heavy-
handed a liminal space has almost erased the autonomy of the text, to the
point where the text is present almost to echo and justify the paratext. As
Le Mesurier points out, there is also a ludic process within this apparent
f lagship of the French critical and publishing tradition: the basis of the
text’s scholarship seems to be predicated on a joke made by the author, a joke
made potentially at the expense of readers and scholars alike. By revealing
the joke in the text that then becomes the joke at once developed and lost
in the paratext, new textual possibilities – of a highly ref lexive text and a
sort of proto-poststructuralist project – are suggested for Armance. The
paratext is therefore shown both to be dangerous, inasmuch as it appears to
strangle the text and render it as impuissant as its protagonist, and playful
in the way in which it paradoxically points to its own wilful impuissance
and thus to its inability to control the text within.
The Barthesian framework drawn on by Le Mesurier is also employed
in Alistair Rolls’s chapter on Douglas Kennedy’s Piège nuptial. The concepts
of readerly and writerly text as well as Barthes’s essay on the Parisian strip-
tease are here used to develop a model of dermal textual layering, with the
paratext functioning as a paradoxical striptease, both pulling readers in and

provoking them, alerting them to the absence that will be the centre of their
quest. The absence at the centre of Kennedy’s text will be at once the desert
space of the Australian outback and the (ref lexively staged) poverty of the
plot of the novel itself. Absence will also be staged as the centre, potentially,
of all text, especially when considered in the framework of the marketing
strategies deployed to sell novels, authors and publishing series.
Considerations of Kennedy as French marketing phenomenon are
further pursued in Marie-Laure Vuaille-Barcan’s chapter, in which Genette’s
rather coy remarks about the paratextual potential of translated text are
taken up in all seriousness. Translation theories, especially Skopos theory,
are shown to have surprising resonances with the paratext. Translated
and retranslated, Kennedy’s first, cult novel has become emblematic of
the author himself who has been both an American in Paris, in much the
same way as the first authors of Marcel Duhamel’s Série Noire owed their
success to the marketing slogan traduit de l’américain, and now a self-styled
French author in his own right. Translation can make an author and it can
also style and control authorial identity. Here then, paratext changes text,
but text also changes to ref lect paratextual demands.
Murray Pratt’s chapter extends this analysis of the personality behind
but also within the text. Reading Frédéric Beigbeder’s 99F (both the novel
and the film) within the context of the writer’s broader career and media
persona, Pratt reveals an emergent paratextuality that comes close to brand-
ing – marketing, rather than masking, the strategies of both text and author.
Any notion of the text as something capable of providing value or sense is
disrupted by the repeated return to the individual personality as the only,
yet the only impossible, site of entry into reading (the other). More than
chronicling Beigbeder’s obsession with celebrity and hyper-luxury, however,
Pratt’s response to the call to the consumer is one that queries the paratext’s
power to set its own price or determine market demand. The paradox of the
paratext, in this instance, is that the contracts with readers and viewers it
negotiates, in line with an economics/ethics empty of reference, dislocate
value from text to transaction.
In Hélène Jaccomard’s chapter, the central absence of the work of art
is again placed centre stage. In this case, the history of the literary packag-
ing of Yasmina Reza’s theatrical masterpiece « Art » is detailed in a close
analysis of the paratextual covers that contain within them the published
script, establishing theatrical success as an objet d’art in its own right. Unu-
sual in that the script of this particular play has been so often re-published,
the choices of cover vary considerably, with some following the conven-
tions of the series and others extending the play’s own thematic concerns
about how public perception precariously and tenuously ascribes value to
works of art. In each case, the materiality of the work before its readers,
directors, performers and producers is established by the visual replica of
an untouched ‘piece of art’ in the form of the cover, standing as icon for
the tableau so central to the play.
The close-up on covers continues in Jean Fornasiero and John West-
Sooby’s analysis of the strategies that can be inferred from the art used on
the covers of Australian crime novels when they are marketed in transla-
tion in France. Fornasiero and West-Sooby’s comparison of ‘original’ and
‘French’ front covers and cover blurbs suggests a highly complex transfer and
redeployment of cultural traditions and stereotypes. The power relations
at play when a crime-fiction superpower translates and markets a(nother)
national crime fiction by which its own readers appear fascinated make
for a rich field of analysis, one lying at the intersection of translation, lit-
erary and cultural studies. Is French crime fiction a dominant paradigm
first and then a centripetal force that pulls in texts to be translated, in a
win-win scenario for both the French publishers and Australian authors?
Or is French crime fiction, at its heart, a national success story based on
translation and the cannibalization of other national crime fictions? Either
way, the paratext is at its most strategic in what Fornasiero and West-Sooby
describe as a cultural cover-up.
The concluding chapter in this volume is Françoise Grauby’s study
of the covers and introductory passages of a number of French creative-
writing manuals. While our ‘volume proper’ opens with an Oulipian take
on the paradoxes of paratext as double space, of filling (complementing
and commenting) and emptying text (pointing to a central absence or
centre as absence), Grauby draws our volume to a conclusion by picking
up a number of leitmotivs and opening space for new absences to be filled.
As a whole, the creative-writing-manual phenomenon, a recent but bur-
geoning industry in France, operates like a paratext: rather than instruct-
ing readers on how to interpret a single text, the creative-writing manual
instructs future writers on how to create any number of potential texts.

While the paratext that encompasses a single text tends ostensibly to close
down virtual possibilities (although, as we have seen, it also suggests their
co-existence with the reading proposed by the author or editor), in the case
of the writing manual as paratext it is precisely a virtual product (a writing
as opposed to a reading, in this case) that is showcased. Again then, the
text present in the manuals is almost entirely paratextual in nature and the
object of the paratext, which is usually the text (inside), is notable as an
absence, as a writerly reading always to be produced (outside). At the level
of the individual creative-writing manual, too, the paratext is ambiguously
charged. As Grauby demonstrates, the tension between ‘expressivism’, or
writing as an act of individual imagination, and the collaborative process,
or writing as dependent on a work ethic and thus open to all, is established
as early as the covers, whose artwork opposes the myths and realities of the
world of the writer. Once inside the introduction another opposition is
set up, this time between the dif ficulties confronting the aspiring author
and the strategies that allow these to be overcome. While the text serves to
work through the problems, moving from inspiration to production, the
paratext remains there, at the start and around the text, as a reminder to
the reader that successful authorial production is the virtual outcome of
this genre. In other words, the balancing out of text and paratext tempers
the seduction of success with the shadow of failure.
In the same way, the most ref lexive of paratexts is emblematic of all
paratext: closure is only the companion of opening, and absence the coun-
terpart of presence. Textual closure constitutes a field of study in its own
right. Neither Genette, nor the present volume accord suf ficient attention to
those pages that come beyond La Fin, still less to the process of preparing for
that final transition back from text. Yet, in their proliferation of formats for
understanding the paratext, the essays that follow suggest strategic deploy-
ments of paratextuality capable of generating ways of reading around the text
yet to come. Whether a well-sequenced liminal space or a highly charged
virtual barrier, the paratext is never innocent. As shown in Fornasiero and
West-Sooby’s paper, the tropes of masking, packaging and covering are fun-
damental to the play of the paratext: it is the masking work of the cover that
packages, while at the same time it is the cover’s packaging that masks.
DAVID GASCOIGNE
Paratext Rules OK
In 1990, the ‘secrétaire définitivement provisoire’ of OuLiPo (the Ouvroir

de Littérature Potentielle), Paul Fournel, made one of his occasional con-
tributions to the group’s in-house series of publications, the Bibliothèque
oulipienne. This fascicule, extending to (but not covering) thirty-two
pages, carries the title Banlieue, and simulates the format of a complete
fictional work in book form, equipped with an abundant paratextual
apparatus.1 This apparatus comprises a title-page (with added ‘bandeau
publicitaire’), the usual declarations on non-reference to persons living or
dead and on copyright, epigraphs, dedication, publisher’s notice, preface
(signed Marguerite Duras), prefatory statement by the author, footnotes
(on the following eight pages), ‘postface’ (signed François Caradec), a
‘dossier pédagogique’ (attributed to one M. Maurice Garin, Inspecteur
de l’Éducation Nationale), an index of place-names, a table of contents, a
list of errata and a quatrième de couverture with brief biographical note.
Within a concentrated space, therefore, Fournel assembles most of the
commonest types of paratextual material, allowing us to see how they
operate, separately and in interaction. Otherwise, there is just one element
which you expect to find and which proves to be wholly missing from this
elaborate confection, and that is the fictional text itself to which all this
paratextual material supposedly refers. The eight central pages on which
the actual text of Banlieue should appear are blank, with the exception of
the footnotes at the bottom of each page.
1 Paul Fournel, Banlieue, Bibliothèque oulipienne, 46, reprinted in Bibliothèque ouli-

pienne, vol. III (Paris: Seghers, 1990), pp. 183–214. References to this edition of
Banlieue will henceforth be given in brackets in the body of the text.
14 DAVID GASCOIGNE
‘On peut imaginer un texte sans paratexte – tout commentaire ne

débute-t-il pas par l’érection d’un modèle abstrait de l’œuvre à commenter,
délivrée de tout brouillage paratextuel? – mais non un paratexte sans texte’,
writes Ugo Dionne, echoing Genette.2 That is the challenge Fournel is
provocatively taking up, in the spirit perhaps of Oulipo’s skirmish with
Genette, whom they accused of misrepresenting the Oulipian project.3
At the simplest level, then, this represents a joke at the expense of
the reader, who is like the recipient of a parcel which turns out to be all
wrapping and no gift. However, bearing in mind OuLiPo’s stated aim of
promoting ‘potential literature’ by providing structured stimuli for textual
creation, one can more appropriately view it as a challenge to the reader to
imagine (or even to create) the missing text, on the basis of the clues that
can be derived from the multiple components of the surrounding paratext.
For the purposes of this essay, however, what is of particular interest is the
way in which the central lacuna causes the functions and ef fects of paratext
to be thrown into sharp relief. It is those secondary elements within the
book format, elements that we often take for granted, paying them little or
no attention, which by default we are here obliged to focus on. It is rather
like going to the theatre and finding that we cannot see or hear the action
on stage, but that instead the gestures of the stage-manager in the wings,
the activities of the make-up artist or the lighting technician, as well as
the jottings of the critic in the stalls, are all visible to us. The paratext has
willy-nilly been promoted to the status of text. My strategy in this essay
will thus be to examine first how the dif ferent paratextual elements func-
tion in Fournel’s artful concoction, before seeking to draw some broader
conclusions.4
2 Ugo Dionne, La Voie aux chapitres: poétique de la disposition romanesque (Paris: Seuil,
2008), p. 205.
3 See, for example, Noël Arnaud, Gérard Genette et l’Oulipo, Bibliothèque oulipienne,
63 (1993).
4 Bernard Magné, in an on-line survey of ‘contestations péritextuelles’, refers to Banlieue
as a notably ‘devastating’ example of such practices. He pays particular attention to the
‘protestation de fictivité’ which, as he observes, deploys a near-imperceptible but signifi-
cant change in the usual formula: ‘Toute ressemblance avec des personnages existants
The publication with which we are presented describes itself as a 1989

re-edition of a powerful work by one Paul Fournel, a young protest writer
from the disaf fected Parisian suburbs, a work which had caused intense
public outrage and scandal on its first appearance ten years earlier.5 The
publisher describes it as ‘ce texte qui fut un brûlot et dont la carrière a
connu les avatars que l’on sait’ (p. 189), while Duras in the preface bearing
her signature condemns the ef forts of ‘les imbéciles’ and ‘les barbons’ to
suppress and decry this ‘texte intuable’, this potent ‘film maussade et implac-
able du monde autour de la cité’. Duras concludes: ‘L’imaginaire au-delà
du périphérique a été ébranlé et cette nouvelle violence dans ce style ébloui
est devenu incontournable, monumentale. Pour écrire et lire la banlieue, il
faut passer désormais par Fournel. Forcément Fournel’ (p. 191).6
Lacking as we do the text being characterized here, we cannot assess for
ourselves how well-founded this appraisal is; instead, we are driven back to
reading such remarks in metatextual terms. The publisher’s comments ironi-
cally underline our lack not only of the text but also of our familiarity with
its history which he takes for granted (‘les avatars, que l’on sait’); it serves
ou ayant existé serait fortuite et indépendante de la volonté de l’auteur’ (rather than

‘personnes’). The issue is thereby no longer that of the relationship between fiction
and reality (mimesis) but rather that between this fiction and other fictions (semiosis).
He goes on to discuss, among others, the equally booby-trapped ‘protestation’ at the
head of Perec’s La Vie mode d’emploi. See Bernard Magné, ‘Toute ressemblance…’, at
www.fabula.org/ef fet/interventions/19.php (accessed 18 March 2011).
5 This fictional Paul Fournel, ‘né en 1957 aux Lilas’, appears to have little or nothing
in common with his homonymous creator, born in 1947 in Saint-Etienne.
6 The attribution of the preface to Duras is a cheeky deception: the piece is an artful
pastiche by Fournel himself, as the author has kindly confirmed in a personal commu-
nication (18 March 2011). The final f lourish (‘Fournel. Forcément Fournel.’) parodies
the famous phrase ‘Sublime, forcément sublime Christine V.’ placed at the head of
Duras’s much criticised article for Libération (17 July 1985) on the murder of ‘le petit
Gregory’. For a ferociously hostile account of Duras’s stance in this article, see Angelo
Rinaldi, ‘Marguerite D. comme détective’, L’Express, 26 July 1985 (I am indebted to
Marie-Laure Vuaille-Barcan for this reference). The postface is, by contrast, genuinely
by François Caradec, Caradec being a fellow-member of OuLiPo. ‘M. Maurice Garin,
Inspecteur de l’Éducation Nationale’ is, however, a caricatural invention, his name
being shared with the winner of the first ever Tour de France in 1903.
16 DAVID GASCOIGNE
as a reminder of how far this kind of paratext, as a discourse conducted

over the author’s head, as it were, can lazily rely on a culture assumed to be
shared. The short Duras piece engages more directly with the topos of the
banlieue. The title Banlieue is of course brilliantly appropriate for a work
foregrounding paratext: suburb, like paratext, is that which surrounds a
centre from which it radiates and from which it derives its function and its
significance. The first epigraph at the head of the text of fers the historical
definition of banlieue found in the Petit Robert: ‘territoire d’environ une
lieue autour d’une ville sur lequel s’étendait le ban’. Further, some of the
questions posed by M. Garin in his concluding dossier pédagogique direct
us quite precisely towards an aptly metaphorical line of thought:
– La banlieue: analysez les dif férentes définitions du concept.

[…]
– Qu’est-ce que la périphérie peut nous apprendre du centre?
– Le texte de fiction possède-t-il ses banlieues ? (205)
On reading the Petit Robert’s seventeenth-century definition, one is imme-

diately made aware of the recent shift in connotation: to a modern Parisian,
the word banlieue, far from evoking a periphery defined by its subordination
to edicts from the centre, is more likely to conjure up images of dissidence
and violence such as (we are told) those distilled in Fournel’s text. This
semantic paradox within the word itself is admirably conveyed by a text
which on the one hand purports to adhere scrupulously to a whole series
of conventions of publication but which then subverts this programme in
order to enact the displacement of text by paratext, mimicking the usurpa-
tion of the city as the source of authority by its unconsidered suburbs. In
the imagery of Duras’s words quoted above, the ‘banlieue’ has stolen the
prestige of the centre, which she describes as a ‘monde dévasté’. It is now
the suburb, and its writing, which is ‘incontournable, monumentale’.
The reader’s sense of lack is of course nowhere more acute than in
leafing through the eight pages (pp. 195–202) containing only footnotes,
devoid of textual referents. In the process, however, various functions and
ef fects of footnotes become startlingly apparent. These can be summed
up as follows:
1. To gloss elements of unfamiliar or non-conventional vocabulary (which

we are left to guess), e.g.:
magistrat municipal (= édile?);

motocyclette (= scoot(er)?);
laisse tomber (= laisse béton).
Another footnote suggests an extended exercise on these lines for students:

‘Ce passage est un mélange de verlan et de style beur. Transposez-le en
français usuel.’ In the light of what we have just concluded about the whole
textual project, this exercise is not ideologically innocent. It is an invitation
to nullify what is dissident and non-standard in the language and convert
it back to central norms. The footnote which reads simply ‘geste obscène’
suggests that even dissident non-verbal communication has to be glossed
for the benefit of the well-brought-up!
2. To draw attention to extreme features of the text, e.g.:
Quel type d’objectif vise l’auteur par une attaque aussi brutale?
L’érotique violent de cette scène est-il gratuit?
Dans quel drame humain Robert est-il englué? Drogue, alcool, violence, désamour,
marginalité: le contexte permet-il de trancher?
In context, we could be forgiven for discerning here a tendentious under-

tone of conservative disapproval of excess or apparent incoherence in the
writing.
3. To suggest avenues of ref lection deriving from the text, e.g.:
Montrez comment la dégringolade de Robert permet à Norbert de sortir de son

milieu, de réagir de façon positive.
Etudiez la montée d’un sentiment humain dans le personnage de Norbert. Comment

la cristallisation amoureuse s’opère-t-elle?
Again, without the text to check against, it is the inspector-editor’s own

values which stand out, in his emphasis on emancipation from the ban-
lieue environment as a positive reaction, and the implication of the less-
18 DAVID GASCOIGNE
than-human status of those not thus redeemed. The patronising tone is
enhanced by the reference to the Stendhalian concept of ‘cristallisation’,
which in this context seems comically pretentious.
4. To evoke intertextual allusions, e.g.:

‘Va, je ne te hais point.’ Phèdre, Racine.
‘La Terre est bleue comme une orange métallique’: élucidez la double allusion.
Corrections included in the concluding list of errata, however, undermine

the would-be authority of both notes:
p. 42 : au lieu de Phèdre, lire Le Cid;

au lieu de Racine, lire Corneille.
p. 62 : au lieu de ‘métallique’ lire ‘mécanique’.
which all adds to the satirico-comic image being created of M. Garin as
(incompetent) editor. Teasingly, two footnotes do of fer, for comparative
purposes, supposed quotations from (the fictional) Fournel’s earlier ‘ouvrage
autobiographique’, Tranches d’amour, which provide yet another starting
point for speculating on the nature of the missing text of Banlieue.
As this entertaining and highly intelligent conceit brings out, the func-
tions of paratext are indeed many and various, but one could summarize
those which are activated here under three main headings.
Firstly, there are those conventional features which confirm the proper,
publicly recognized status of the publication: the time-honoured formulae
re copyright and non-reference to persons living or dead, and indeed the
respect for the elaborate conventional order and layout of all the dif ferent
paratextual components. This respect for convention sits oddly, by implica-
tion, with the incendiary nature of the text which is thus framed: a kind
of reversal, in which a constraining periphery of formal order limits and
contains a dissident centre.
Secondly, there are the promotional elements, the ‘espace de séduction’,7

designed to whet the reader’s appetite. These can highlight quite dif ferent
lines of reasoning. The publisher’s own avertissement emphasizes his desire
that republication, after a gap of ten years, might allow the piece to be
appreciated for its innate literary quality rather than for its controversial
impact. He expresses the hope that it will bring to its author a sense of peace
after the tumult and to its readers ‘la certitude sereine que sous l’éphémère
scandale dormait l’éternelle littérature’ (p. 189).8 Duras, in her preface
immediately following, is not remotely preoccupied with eternity or peace,
but with the re-emergence of a voice of invincible violence in the pursuit
of justice against the forces of oppression. Caradec, meanwhile, is instead
exercised in his postface by a more local squabble between literati: he sees
republication as a final rehabilitation of Fournel in the face of accusations
made by Bernard Pivot on Apostrophes of plagiarism and of the use of a
ghost writer. These various promotional elements, like three dif ferent eye-
witness accounts of an accident, are hard to reconcile; rather, each reveals
the mind-set and the priorities of the commentator in question. One ef fect
which each of them has is to frame the work in question within a certain
set of expectations, whether ideological (Duras), literary (the publisher)
or personal (Caradec). Such framing is taken to be a necessary part of the
commercialization of a text, to excite in the reader a particular expectation
designed to stimulate purchase of the book. The quatrième de couverture
employs a familiar tactic of framing by placing the text ‘entre Céline et Sil-
litoe’ and referring to it, in obviously quotable terms, as ‘une sorte d’Orange
mécanique pressée’. Framing in all these forms is not innocent, however, in
that it artificially limits in advance the text’s potential significance for the
reader, and indeed may distort and betray it altogether.
Thirdly, this Oulipian exercise devotes particular verve to the ‘school
edition’ parts of the paratext. We have noted how the pedagogy is implicitly
7 Dionne, La Voie aux chapitres, p. 7.

8 A sly glance, perhaps, towards fellow-Oulipian Georges Perec and the epigraph
placed at the head of the ninety-ninth and final chapter of La Vie mode d’emploi:
‘Je cherche en même temps l’éternel et l’éphémère.’ This sentence derives originally
from Perec’s Les Revenentes.
20 DAVID GASCOIGNE
weighted towards values which are intellectually, linguistically and morally

conservative, in the face of a text which, it would appear, is none of these.
In this it is emblematic of a voice carrying the authority of the Academy,
defusing what is violent, erotic, rebellious and excessive, and recuperating
it within its own discourse, which the students responding to the editorial
material are invited to adopt. The heavy-handed ef fort to guide student
response along approved lines is artfully satirized in the final four questions
of the dossier pédagogique, under the heading ‘la forme’:
– Isolez les mots et syntagmes de faible occurrence littéraire.

– Quel type de production littéraire fait le plus grand usage de cette langue?
– Ce livre en dif fère cependant. Par quels écarts stylistiques?
– Peut-on dire que ce texte est ‘bien écrit’? (p. 206)
To sum up, the overall ef fect of the perversely lacunary structure of Ban-
lieue is broadly threefold. Firstly, it throws into particular relief functions,
strategies and ef fects of a wide range of paratextual elements, in establishing
the status of the printed text, in providing a contextual framework of infor-
mation about the author, the history of the text and aspects of the subject
matter, and in promoting the book by provoking the reader’s curiosity or
interest in various ways. Secondly, it casts a sharp light on the manner in
which such materials can be used by their creators to suggest frames and
contexts for the reading experience which more often than not carry a set
of unspoken assumptions both about the specific interest of the work in
question and about writing, reading and literary values in general. Thirdly,
and most importantly for our purpose here, it provides a ne plus ultra case
study of the tension between text and paratext. In setting up an extreme
model in which text has fallen silent, leaving the field of interaction open
to be delineated and usurped by paratext, Fournel is hyperbolically draw-
ing attention to a whole area of negotiation and of unease to which certain
areas of fiction in recent times have been increasingly sensitive.
The multiplicity of paratextual voices here present, from publisher to
fellow-authors to pedagogue and critic, itself creates an unresolved polyph-
ony of perspectives and partis pris. Moreover, the question ‘who is speaking?’
is not always clearly answerable, as in the case of the quatrième de couverture.
Is the author responsible for or complicit in the suggested comparisons

made there with Céline, Sillitoe and Burgess, or is this a marketing tactic
added by the publisher? Hubert Haddad has penned some wry remarks
on the redaction of such back-cover (or prière d’insérer) material. Pointing
out that, in the process of scanning bookshops’ stock or library shelves, we
have all read far more publisher’s blurbs than books, he continues:
Il y avait autrefois des rédacteurs spécialement af fectés à l’élaboration des quatrièmes;

et l’on peut reconnaître le style d’époque de ce genre littéraire particulier, souvent
tronqué, qui a sa rhétorique propre, son tempo, ses segments détachables (pour la
publicité). Aujourd’hui, bien souvent, l’éditeur se contente d’un extrait du récit ou
demande à l’auteur un premier jet qui sera à peine modifié: la vanité et l’ambition
concentrent assez de facultés pour torcher un feuillet promotionnel: donner le goût
de la lecture sans dénaturer celle-ci avec assez d’agacerie pour laisser croire, une fois
de plus, à la rencontre tant espérée.9
This piquant frontier between literature and advertising copy probably

merits further study. In the case of a traditional, unsigned quatrième such
as that exemplified in Banlieue, the reader does not know whether to treat
this as authorial text or as peripheral paratext. Authors who have also
made a career as editor in a publishing house, like Fournel, are likely to
be expert in the drafting of these pungent distillations: Michel Tournier,
for instance, a long-time editor with Plon, insists on drafting all his own
quatrièmes, which can in consequence be deemed to qualify as the object
9 Hubert Haddad, Le Nouveau magasin d’écriture (Paris: Zulma, 2006), p. 200. On page
199, Haddad draws attention to another text which begins by consisting of nothing
but footnotes on otherwise blank pages. This is Gérard Wajcman’s L’Interdit (Paris:
Editions Nous, 2002), first published by Denoël in 1986. A note on the publisher’s
website initially suggests some comparability with Banlieue: ‘Il y eut ici un récit.
Ne subsistent plus que des notes en bas de page dont les renvois invitent le lecteur,
d’une part à imaginer ce qu’était – ou ce qu’aurait pu être – ce texte et, de l’autre, à
s’interroger sur les raisons de cette inexplicable disparition’. However, L’Interdit is not,
we are told, a ‘jeu de pure forme’, but rather a drama in which an amnesiac struggles
to recover memory and language, with the main text finally reasserting its power and
status. This plot ref lects Wajcman’s professional interest in psychoanalysis. See http://
www.editions-nous.com/wajcman_linterdit.html (accessed 15 November 2010).
22 DAVID GASCOIGNE
of critical analysis alongside the text they accompany. Where the quatrième
simply of fers an extract from the work itself, the issue is dif ferent, but of
the same order: who chose to highlight this particular extract, and in terms
of what criteria are we invited to regard it as typical or emblematic of the
text as a whole?
The fundamental points at issue here can be summed up as follows:
how clear, in any given case, is the frontier between text and paratext, and
the frontier between that which is within the jurisdiction of the author
and that which is outside of it? These frontiers have been tested in dif ferent
ways. Footnotes can provide an interesting test-case. Raymond Roussel’s
Nouvelles impressions d’Afrique is an elaborately constructed text written
wholly in rhyming couplets in Alexandrines, and contains a number of
footnotes, also composed in alexandrines. Placing material in footnotes is
generally taken to indicate that the reader may either consult these as they
occur, or be content simply to stick the main text, on the understanding
that this is coherent in itself. This, however, is not entirely true of Rous-
sel’s text, e.g.:
L’ignorant qui voit fuir vers le large un bateau*
Dont seul émerge encore un fragment de mâture,
Si des squales déjà son monde est la pâture;
_____________________
* Pour qui n’a rien appris la terre est un plateau.10
Syntactically and semantically, the main text is coherent, without the

footnote, and the footnote is a paratextual aside, as it were, to the reader.
Formally, on the other hand, in order to respect the sequence of rhyming
couplets, the footnote line has to be included. In later examples of this
device, the footnote parenthesis can be much longer, running in one case
to forty-five lines. The overall ef fect is to complicate the relative status of
text and footnote, and the conventional subordination of the latter to the
former.
10 Raymond Roussel, Nouvelles impressions d’Afrique, suivies de l’Ame de Victor Hugo

(Paris: Pauvert, 1963), p. 17.
In Banlieue, the editorial remarks and analyses attributed to M. Garin

are, as we have seen, visibly not attuned to what we could infer about the
spirit and language of the text to which they are attached. A famous and
highly developed illustration of a similar disjunction between text and
editorial paratext is provided by Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire (1962), a
novel which centres around a 999-line poem by one J. F. Shade. To this
poem an eccentric editor, Kinbote, has attached a vastly longer commen-
tary, in which he is much more preoccupied with his own circumstances
and obsessions than with Shade’s writing; in consequence, the narrative
weight of the text is diverted onto the commentary itself rather than its
supposed object, and indeed Kinbote himself recommends his reader to
read the commentary first, before embarking on Shade’s poem. The index
develops the same autonomy, being also focussed on Kinbote’s fantasies and
including glosses on places never mentioned in the poem. Thus Nabokov
provides us (and no doubt Fournel) with a model of how paratext can
displace text as the centre of readerly attention, and can editorially distort
the reading process to its own ends. Nabokov’s text as a whole becomes
the site of a negotiation of meaning between text and paratext pushed to
the point of confusing contradiction and conf lict.11
Nabokov is one of the writers from whom Georges Perec systemati-
cally quotes in La Vie mode d’emploi (one such quotation is indeed taken
from Pale Fire),12 and Perec emulates his admired predecessor in including
in this work a disproportionately extensive paratextual apparatus: a con-
cluding ninety-page series of pièces annexes comprises an index of names
11 Julian Barnes’s novel Flaubert’s Parrot (1984) likewise brings to life the voice of an
enthusiastic student of and commentator on Flaubert, one Geof frey Braithwaite,
whose commentary is progressively infiltrated and distracted by his own obsessions.
In Barnes’s work, however, this tension is not formally expressed by a clear division
between text and paratext, although there are plenty of other games being played
with generic categories.
12 For details of Perec’s use of Nabokov in this novel, see Georges Perec, Cahier des
charges de La Vie mode d’emploi, edited by Hans Hartje et al. (Paris: Zulma, 1993),
p. 10. The concealed quotation (in French) from Pale Fire can be found in the penul-
timate paragraph of chapter 70.
24 DAVID GASCOIGNE
(of characters and of cultural artefacts), a dated chronology of events and,

more eccentrically, a checklist of anecdotes recounted in the text. A final
postscript reveals that the text conceals quotations from thirty or so writ-
ers, and lists their names. These appendices interact with the preceding
text in a variety of ways; the index, for instance, fills en passant some gaps
in information on characters’ lives, providing data which is not available
in the main text, and thus impinging on the diegetic function of the main
narrative. Most significantly, they of fer a series of modes d’emploi of the text,
suggesting to the reader dif ferent types of approach to the text: as a quasi-
factual bank of biographical and chronological data, as an assemblage of
fabulations or as a focus for intertextual collage. As in Banlieue, the reader
is confronted with quite dif ferent frames within which to operate.13
Genette, in Seuils, defines paratext as ‘[un discours] fondamentale-
ment hétéronome, auxiliaire, voué au service d’une chose qui constitue sa
raison d’être, et qui est le texte’.14 In Roussel, Perec and Nabokov, however,
we find variants on a pattern whereby the paratext is no longer content to
remain distinct and subordinate, but invades the territory and usurps the
function of text in dif ferent ways.15 More rarely, however, the annexation
13 For a fuller consideration of these pièces annexes, see David Gascoigne, The Games
of Fiction: Georges Perec and Modern French Ludic Narrative (Oxford: Peter Lang,
2006), pp. 247–50.
14 Gérard Genette, Seuils (Paris: Seuil, 1987), p. 16.
15 Another forerunner worthy of mention is Lathis, L’Organiste athée (s.l.: Collège
de ’Pataphysique, 1963, but, we are told, written between 1939 and 1943). Latis (the
spelling varies) was one of the pseudonyms of Emmanuel Peillet (1913–73), who
played a leading role in the Jarry-inspired Collège de ’Pataphysique before becom-
ing a founder member of OuLiPo. This slim sixty-page volume, reckoned to be his
most important text, comprises eight prefaces, a postface and a postlude, but not the
central fiction which should correspond to the title. The prefaces wittily investigate
the supposed expectations of dif ferent categories of reader, and the ‘jeu ambigu des
préfaces’ (p. 11) which results from addressing them. The postface of fers an account
(which the reader may believe or not) of how the central fiction was lost during the
war and never reinstated and why the prefaces were published as they stood. Most
interestingly, the sequence of prefaces progressively downgrades the necessity of the
fiction to follow: ‘��
Il est sûr que ces préfaces n’ont en aucune manière le pouvoir de “jus-
tifier” le roman ou prétendu roman, ni de le rendre plus intéressant ou démonstratif.
can take place in the opposite direction. Jean Ricardou’s fictions bear wit-
ness to the author’s wish to control every aspect of his fiction, and to make
of the whole textual production an apparently self-generating process
presenting its own autonomous inner logic of imagination and develop-
ment. It is no doubt in this spirit that he explains, in an exposition of his
methods, how some of the raw material in his novel La Prise de Constan-
tinople (1965) was derived from the title-page of the text: from his own
name, from that of his publishers, Editions de Minuit, and from their logo
(a five-pointed star and the letter M).16 Here we see an author reaching
out to take ownership of elements which are conventionally outside of his
textual territory, and redesignating them as resources for his own textual
exploitation. Moreover, he produces a subversive variant on the quatrième
de couverture: the back cover reproduces the sober front cover exactly, with
the exception that the novel’s title has changed in the interim from La Prise
de Constantinople to La Prose de Constantinople. He thus makes the title
itself subject to the play of the text: its autonomous fixity is undermined,
and the subject(-city), captured, becomes prose-text, at the command of
the author’s textual dictate.
To conclude, it is clear that the last half-century has seen, at least among
more avant-garde writers, a destabilization of the relationship between text
and paratext, both on the level of space and that of ‘authority’. This pro-
cess is of course one strand within a wider loosening of generic categories
which has characterized the period, and in the revalorization of discourses
Reste à savoir si cela a un sens de dire que le roman en question doit se défendre par
lui-même. A moins, ici, d’entendre DÉFENDRE au sens d’INTERDIRE. Ce qui
serait assez joli. / Ce roman d’ailleurs, est-il besoin de le dire (…) ? est un prétexte
aux préfaces’ (pp. 20–1). A summary of the plot of the missing fiction suggests that
the atheist organist in church can be read as a figuration for the author, as one who
has lost any belief in the status and necessity of the ‘main event’ which his artistry
in providing an enhancing frame is supposedly designed to support. The suite of
paratexts thus, arguably, enacts and replaces this narrative in its own way, justifying
the reinstatement of the sub-title ‘roman’ on the book’s title-page.
16 Jean Ricardou, ‘Naissance d’une fiction’, in Jean Ricardou and Françoise van Rossum-
Guyon (eds), Nouveau roman: hier, aujourd’hui (2 vols, Paris: UGE, 1972), vol. II,
pp. 379–92.
26 DAVID GASCOIGNE
hitherto considered as secondary and relatively unworthy of attention. It

can also be viewed as a kind of revolt on the part of authors against the
conventions which hedge round their text and its modes of presentation,
and in particular against the norms of commercialization. While this is all
very plausible, it may, however, be possible, given the self-consciousness
which much of this writing exudes, to develop a more interesting account
of this process: could it be that what this negotiation between textual
and paratextual functions and ef fects represents is an externalization of
the tensions inherent in literary creation itself ? The writer has, severally
or simultaneously, to imagine, to redact, to structure, to re-read, auto-
criticize and edit his/her work, as well as to collaborate actively with the
publisher in its promotion. These multiple functions find their ref lection
in the dif ferent elements of the published layout, and it may be that the
tensions between their dif ferent demands and claims, and the questions
raised over their hierarchy, is a ref lection not only of the often ambiguous
relationship between the writer and the process of commercialization, but
also of the complex inner negotiation between the dif ferent processes of
literary creation itself.
GEMMA LE MESURIER
Reading Against the Author:

Layers of Impotence in Stendhal’s Armance
Armance, a once-enigmatic text, now comes pre-furnished with an expla-

nation. The mysterious ‘secret’ of the protagonist that fuels the story, but
which remains undisclosed in the novel, is finally revealed. This revela-
tion comes in the form of a letter, written by Stendhal to Mérimée, a close
friend of the author, which has been deemed so significant that, to ensure
no reader should be deprived of this piece of knowledge, it has been given
a place by the novel’s side in the published text of the book (pp. 267–9).1
‘Il y a plus d’impuissants qu’on ne croit’ (p. 267), Stendhal’s letter begins,
announcing that the secret of the protagonist, and thus of the text, is impo-
tence. Equipped with the knowledge of authorial intent, readers can now
lay the novel down before them, stripped of all its mystery, and finally
understand its meaning.
And yet, it is surely not enough for us readers to assume that the para-
text, however convincing or ‘potent’, coincides neatly, or at least unprob-
lematically, with some metaphysical meaning of the text that it packages.
Indeed, on this point Genette himself is quite clear: ‘On ne peut deviner
que ce qui est, et dire “Octave est impuissant” ne signifie rien d’autre que
“Stendhal dit qu’Octave est impuissant”. Il le dit, mais il le dit ailleurs, et
c’est tout le point.’2 In the framework of the present volume on the place
of the paratext in French literature, the point is very much that Stendhal’s
1 The version of Stendhal’s Armance used is the Folio Classique edition, edited by
Armand Hoog (Paris: Gallimard, 2007). Due to the frequency with which they
occur, quotations and references from Armance will be followed, in the body of the
text, by page numbers given in brackets.
2 Gérard Genette as cited in Jean Bellemin-Noël, L’auteur encombrant: Stendhal/
Armance (Arras: Presses Universitaire de Lille, 1985), p. 9. The quotation is originally
from Figures II (Paris: Seuil, 1969), pp. 173–4.
28 GEMMA LE MESURIER
comments are both ‘here’ and ‘there’, both in and out of the text. As we
shall see here, the paratext’s power lies in its critical distance from the
text, which is a cleaving, as much a joining as a separation. Therefore, even
as the reader is told what to think about the text, in this case Armance,
the paratext also speaks of its own, and thus of the text’s, dif ference. Our
intention here is not, however, to extol the ref lexive virtues of the paratext
and the way in which its dif ference from the text ref lects the text’s own
underlying self-alterity; rather, we wish to overview the ways in which the
revelation of Octave’s impotence limits and, we should suggest, damages
the reading experience for the majority of readers. For, while the added
information of the paratext may make the story itself more coherent, it
also causes a reader to approach it with tunnel vision, an interpretation
already planted in his mind.3 By coming to the novel expecting to read a
story about impotence, a reader is predisposed not to read the other pos-
sibilities of this polysemous text.
Packaging Armance
This letter from the author is not alone in inf luencing how a reader
approaches the text. There are other elements that attach themselves to a
work and that can af fect our understanding of it. The primary perpetrator
is the paratext. According to Richard Macksey, in his foreword to Gérard
Genette’s Paratext: Thresholds of Interpretation, the paratext is those liminal
3 Despite the push for the use of gender-neutral pronouns, such as ‘he or she’, ‘s/he’ or,
increasingly, ‘they’ when referring to an individual of unspecified gender, the mascu-
line third person is used henceforth for the following reasons: 1) it continues to be
standard practice in French, and it is to a large extent ‘French standard practice’ that
is the object of our study here; 2) I wish to highlight gender roles associated with
textuality. Also on this intersection, see Judith Still and Michael Worton, Textuality
and Sexuality: Reading Theories and Practices (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 1993), especially their introduction, pp. 1–68; and Anna Livia, Pronoun Envy:
Literary Uses of Linguistic Gender (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
Reading Against the Author: Layers of Impotence in Stendhal’s Armance 29
parts of a work that surround the author’s text (the text proper), which are
often added by other people in the publishing process, such as the printers,
the editors, or the publishers themselves. This includes not only
titles and subtitles, pseudonyms, forewords, dedications, epigraphs, prefaces, inter-
titles, notes, epilogues and afterwords […] but also the elements in the public and
private history of the book, its ‘epitext’ […]: ‘public epitext’ (from the author or
publisher) as well as ‘private epitexts’ (authorial correspondence, oral confidences,
diaries and pre-texts).4
Macksey’s reminder of the blurring of the public and the private is impor-
tant here; for, as we shall see, the public and private histories of a book can
af fect each other, coincide and, potentially, replace the text itself in both
the public and scholarly imaginary.
In the Folio edition of Armance, the paratext includes, notably, a preface
and an avant-propos. The preface, written by Armand Hoog, takes the form
of a six-part essay, which focuses on both the novel and its author. Stendhal
himself writes the avant-propos (which is placed after the title page, giving it
the status of authorial text), where he claims that the novel was not written
by him, but by a female author. Following the story is a dossier, containing a
chronology of Stendhal’s life and works; a note on the present edition; the
famous letter from Stendhal to Mérimée; notes and amendments written
by Stendhal on his personal copy of Armance after its publication, which
he planned to include in later editions; and notes and variances where
the original text, the text of the present edition, and the notes written
by Stendhal are compared. These paratextual elements, not including the
bibliography, contents page and list of other works by the author, number
ninety pages, with the story Armance numbering two hundred and eight.
As Lejeune reminds us, the paratext is the ‘frange du texte imprimé qui, en
réalité, commande toute la lecture’.5 How much more commanding then is
a paratextual fringe that is almost half the size of the text itself ?
4 Richard Macksey, ‘Foreword’, in Gérard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation,

trans. Jane E. Lewin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. xi–xxii
(p. xviii).
5 Philippe Lejeune as quoted in Gérard Genette, Seuils (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1987),
p. 8.
Besides the avant-propos, where Stendhal is himself trying to control

the reader’s perception of the work, Hoog’s preface gives us guidelines for
approaching and interpreting the work mainly through an autobiographi-
cal reading of the protagonist. The inclusion of a chronology (‘chronologie
stendhalienne’) also implies the relevance of Beyle’s life to the work;6 the
letter from Stendhal to Mérimée has, as noted, had a substantial ef fect on
the interpretation of the work; and Stendhal’s notes on his own personal
copy of Armance (some of which have been incorporated into the present
work) demonstrate the control of the author over the text, not only in a
post-modern era where ‘the death of the author’ has liberated the text in
a figurative sense, but even following the literal death of the author.7 The
paratext is sending a clear message: what the author says is important. And
not only important, but paramount. This author-text association can be
beneficial in assisting a reader to access elements of the work; it can, how-
ever, also encourage passivity on the reader’s part and, as such, can limit
both the reader and the text if it is not ultimately transcended.
Genette describes the function of the paratext as ‘une action sur le
public au service […] d’un meilleur accueil du texte et d’une lecture plus
pertinente’.8 While it cannot be denied that the paratext does inf luence
the public, the claim that it provides a more pertinent reading of the text
is questionable. Arguably, pertinence requires comparing multiple readings
and defining one (or a number of them) as more significant than others.
The pertinence suggested here by Genette is perhaps rather a sly one. In
light of the death of the author, it is certainly one at odds with his sugges-
tion that Stendhal’s comments on his text are made ‘elsewhere’. While the
paratext – and in this case, a powerful public-private epitext – directs one
reading, it remains just one reading, and any coincidence with the author’s
opinions can do little to erase that most public of theoretical funerals.
6 Henri Beyle wrote and published under the pseudonym ‘Stendhal’. For the purposes
of this paper, ‘Stendhal’ shall be used when referring to Beyle’s authorial role, and
‘Beyle’ when referring to personal aspects of his life and character.
7 Barthes wrote on this subject and its implications in his essay, ‘La Mort de l’auteur’,
in Le Bruissement de la langue (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1984), pp. 61–7.
Does this mean we ought to renounce the paratext and thus the letter
to Mérimée? While Barthes’s readerly readers (those who read literary works
as products that are already complete at the time of reading) may rely on
the revelation of Octave’s secret to fill in the gaps in the work, writerly
readers (who include themselves in the writing process and the produc-
tion of the text) may find their ability to enjoy the work damaged by this
additional information.9 As Geneviève Mouillaud notes, ‘en transportant
l’explication à l’intérieur de l’œuvre, on détruit l’énigme mais du même coup
on détruit l’intérêt et le sens du roman’.10 Certainly, the paratext has an air of
irresistibility about it. The letter, although included in the paratext of this
edition of the work, may not have been included in others; yet, it is still a
renowned entity that many readers hear of before, or at the commencement
of, their reading of the novel. Furthermore, this quasi-mythical status has
been sanctioned by the French (secondary and tertiary) education system:
when taught at universities in France, it is common for the impotence of
the hero to be stated from the first lesson.11 It is assumed as fact, distributed
as knowledge, and employed as a conclusive key to the novel.
Agreement is not, however, universal. As Philippe Berthier points out,
‘à la porte du trésor, chacun d’essayer sa clef: hélas, elles ouvrent toutes, et
9 ‘Writerly’, an English translation by Richard Miller (1974) of the French term scrip-
tible, coined by Barthes, refers to ‘ourselves writing, before the infinite play of the
world (the world as function) is traversed, intersected, stopped, plasticized by some
singular system (Ideology, Genus, Criticism) which reduces the plurality of entrances,
the opening of networks, the infinity of languages’ (Roland Barthes, S/Z (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1990), p. 5). In other words, writerly readers, unlike readerly readers, regard
the work as a dynamic entity, unconstrained by a singular method of interpretation,
but with an infinite plurality of meanings, which we, as readers, write into the text.
10 Geneviève Mouillaud, ‘Stendhal et le mode irréel à propos de l’impuissance dans
Armance’, Modern Language Notes, 83 (1968), pp. 524–42 (p. 526).
11 This was my personal experience during my time studying at the Université de La
Rochelle, in France, where Armance was studied in the littérature française course that
I took. The tradition of studying Stendhal’s letter alongside the novel is not unique
to my experience, as witnessed by the parallel experience of studying the letter along
with the novel as recorded at http://sarahleslie.over-blog.com/article-7227208–6.
html (accessed 28 September 2009).
c’est bien pourquoi il est si naïf de s’en prendre à la naïveté d’autrui et de

croire qu’on est le premier et le seul à pouvoir en finir avec Armance’.12 As
previously mentioned, the paratext (even one as sizeable as that which
surrounds this edition) has its place since the information it provides can
inform and enrich our reading of the work. The danger lies in allowing it
to limit the text. If we attribute to it an omnipotence, that is to say if we
elevate it to the status of metaphysical reading, we as readers do neither
ourselves nor the text justice. We have to be able to read the paratext, and
then put it to one side (to deconstruct the ‘here’ and the ‘there’) as we
actively explore, or rather as we produce the novel as writerly text. This
may not be so easy in practice, however. With the paratext’s revealing of
Octave’s secret, it becomes near impossible to read the text without this
idea constantly presenting itself and disrupting the reader’s own ability to
infer and interpret.
It can be argued, therefore, that this paratextual letter has been over-
valued not only in terms of significance and authority but also of credibil-
ity. Its paratextual status (its status as both inside and outside the text) is
certainly interesting insofar as it ref lects the blurring of ‘truth’ and fiction
that is at the core of the story itself; indeed, it is all the more interesting
because this conjecture about the letter’s factuality is not a problem faced
by its fictional counterpart, the story itself. For his authorial title, Henri
Beyle uses the pseudonym ‘Stendhal’, which is therefore not Beyle func-
tioning as man, but rather Beyle functioning as Author. Similarly, the letter
to Mérimée is not signed ‘Henri Beyle’; it is signed ‘Comte de Chadevell’
– yet another pseudonym. Even now, to a close friend, Beyle does not con-
verse as most would; there is play-acting in his form of communication, an
assuming of roles. Because it is known to be Stendhal, the signification of
this idiosyncratic use of pseudonyms is often ignored in order to continue
with the ‘important’ part of the letter: the revelation of Octave’s secret. But
while we are tempted to feel satisfied because we now possess this key that
unlocks the text, Hoog warns us against this, saying that ‘[l]a seule façon
12 See Philippe Berthier’s ‘notice’ in Stendhal, Œuvres romanesques complètes (Paris:

Gallimard, 2005), pp. 860–1.
sérieuse de la prendre [la lettre], c’est de ne pas prendre au sérieux tout ce

qu’il [Stendhal] dit’ (p. 17). He continues by quoting Gide, who ‘avait par-
faitement jugé: “Je me méfie beaucoup, dit-il, de cette lettre à Mérimée…
Stendhal y af fecte un cynisme excessif, qu’il estime de nature à plaire à son
correspondant”’ (p. 17). It would appear that the novel does not stand alone
as a crafted and performative text. According to Gide’s evaluation, Stendhal
is still in the act of performing when he writes to Mérimée.
To return to Genette’s own reference to Armance, the perversity of the
paratext is very much the point. The reader is empowered by a discussion of
impotence. Therefore, empowerment and impotence, like a paratext that is
both inside and outside the text, function as opposites but together, with
one always already veiling and standing in for the other. By questioning the
letter in the preface, Hoog, albeit inadvertently, creates a situation where
the paratext questions itself. If one part of the paratext (that being the letter
written by the author) is questioned by another part of the paratext (the
preface), then the whole paratext becomes unstable as bolts fall out of the
scaf folding that claims to support the text. It becomes, instead, a case of
the scaf folding being held up by the work, leaning against it and, inevita-
bly, distorting it. The result of this destabilization is that the reader can no
longer grab hold of the paratext to steady himself within the story. To rely
on the paratext becomes a hazardous option. A reader must be responsible
for his own path through the work, perhaps using the paratext as a guide
if desired, but never as a definitive authority.
The Role of the Writerly Reader
In Barthes’s schema, the reader finds himself ‘no longer a consumer, but a
producer of the text’.13 It is no longer the author who unites the words of
the work to form a specific meaning, but the reader himself: ‘L’unité d’un
13 Barthes, S/Z, p. 4.

texte n’est pas dans son origine, mais dans sa destination.’14 When a para-
text is deployed, therefore, this destination is guided in such a way as to
limit the reader’s room for writerly manoeuvre. Yet, as we have seen in the
case of Armance, the paratext of fers itself up to the reader as troubled, as a
broken key, or perhaps as Berthier’s key to multiple readings. The enigmatic
nature of Octave’s secret not only allows for interpretation by the reader,
but demands it. This is, then, a forced freedom, where the only choice a
reader has if he wishes to ‘understand the text for himself ’ is to begin writ-
ing it. If he dares to disbelieve Stendhal’s letter to Mérimée, the reader can
experience the work with a heightened degree of intimacy. By stripping, or
perhaps rather by deconstructing, the barrier that the paratext represents,
the reader undresses the text, discovering aspects of its character neither
outlined in the paratext nor ostensibly destined for disclosure by the author.
In this way, the paratext foreshadows a power play between author and
reader, with the impotence of one feeding the power of the other. With
author and reader in contention, the hierarchy is broken, and the reader is
invited to step up and assume a far more powerful role than he is used to.
But while the balance of authority has been tipped to elevate the reader,
absolute power over the work is impossible to attain. No reading of a work
can be definitive, for while one reader is reading it one way, another reader
will be interpreting it in still another. While Barthes’s theories endow the
reader with increased power to create the text, the absence of a metaphysical
meaning, of one true ‘key to the text’, at the same time renders him impotent
against the work; he can no longer claim to have ‘penetrated’ it.15
14 Barthes, Le Bruissement de la langue, p. 66.

15 Barthes, Le Bruissement de la langue, p. 66.
Octave and the Reader
In line with the paratext’s perverse position inside and outside the text,
this balancing of impotence and potency is played out by the characters of
Armance, ref lecting the roles of the reader, the author and the work. Despite
not being the eponymous hero, Octave is the novel’s primary focus. He is
passionate about one thing: ‘la lecture’ (p. 53). Stepping beyond his literal
description, he becomes an allegorical reader. James T. Day recognizes this
allegorical relationship, noting that
the bookish protagonist is the image en abyme of you or me as reader; he participates

in a more or less conspicuous dimension of novelistic self-consciousness; his reading
helps determine our interpretations of his novel, since his own experiences with texts
logically inf luence our consideration of the book in which we find him reading.16
Repeatedly over the course of the novel, attention is drawn to Octave’s role
as a reader. For example, he is described as having been ‘conduit à l’étude des
écrivains qui depuis deux siècles ont essayé d’expliquer comment l’homme
pense et comment il veut’ (53). As revealed by this quotation, Octave does
not approach reading as a mere pastime, nor does he read for entertain-
ment. He is a reader engaged in studying the work; but he goes beyond
that, undertaking also the study of the author. His father, however, does
not approve of Octave’s passion for reading: ‘le marquis [père d’Octave]
[…] voyait avec une sorte d’horreur un jeune gentilhomme se passionner
pour la lecture’ (p. 53). The aggravation his father feels is due to more than
the simple fact that his son is not out enjoying status and society: Octave’s
reading, informed as it is by his study, challenges accepted customs and
16 James T. Day, ‘The Hero as Reader in Stendhal’, The French Review, 54 (1981),
pp. 412–19 (p. 412). In Day’s essay, this analysis forms part of a broad study of
Stendhal’s corpus and not a detailed reading of any individual work. Day concludes
that ‘the numerous references to reading in [Stendhal’s] novels create a self-ref lexive
dimension that […] is cultivated for its own sake’ (p. 419). Our aim here is to extend
this investigation of ‘hero as reader’ and thereby to reverse Day’s term: our search is
thus for ‘the reader as hero’.
values. He rejects traditional religious texts, such as the Bible, which his
mother implores him to read (p. 55), fearing that the freethinking books
that he reads (‘mauvais livres’ (pp. 55, 75), as they are referred to by his
mother and the narrator on separate occasions) will put unwanted ideas
in his head and that they could lead him to rebel against social strictures
and authorities. Indeed, as his mother, Mme de Malivert, exclaims, ‘tu lis
des livres impies, et bientôt tu en viendras à douter même de l’existence
de Dieu’ (p. 56).
During this conversation, in which she implores Octave to renounce
his reading of ‘mauvais livres’ and ‘livres impies’, Mme de Malivert refers to
God by the title ‘Tout-Puissant’ (p. 55). The significance of omnipotence,
when juxtaposed to Octave’s impotence, is telling. God is Octave’s antith-
esis. This Creator-God, Octave’s faith in whom is being threatened by his
studies, is powerful yet elusive (due to his lack of physical presence). As a
list of Holy attributes is collated, parallels begin to emerge, according to
which God increasingly takes on the trappings of the author. They share
the role of Creator, both are thought of as being in a position of ultimate
and unquestionable power, and, like the relationship between God and
the world, the author’s power over a work is traditionally acknowledged
despite his lack of physical presence within it. A further similarity exists
in the way the authority of God and the author are transmitted: through
text. The Christian God (as presented in Armance) reveals His will and lays
down His laws in the form of a book, namely the Bible, just as the author
communicates his ideas and judgements through the novel.
Octave’s reading of philosophy threatens his faith in God just as read-
ing critical theories, such as Barthes’s, threatens the reader’s faith in the
author. These literary theories are ref lected in the ‘bad books’ that threaten
to destabilize the empire of the author and the literary status quo. While
Octave’s questioning involves life and the reader’s involves literature, Octave
nonetheless accompanies the reader into deconstructionist paradigms of
literary analysis, which in this case is the world in which he lives.
It is not just literary theory that Octave reads. Often in Armance,
allusions to Octave’s role as reader are pertinent to the work in which
he himself is a character: Armance. One such example is when he tries to
read a tragedy (p. 65), which demonstrates not only his reading but his
impotent reading of a book which is of the same genre as Armance. This
mere hint of similarity is later taken further when, while he is speaking
with his socially adept aunt, Madame de Bonnivet, in her salon, she asks
him ‘Quand jetterez-vous au feu les livres de ces hommes si tristes que
vous seul lisez encore?’ (p. 88). Judging from Octave’s previous conversa-
tion with his mother, where she commented that he read ‘les philosophes
du dix-huitième siècle’ (p. 55), it is likely that these ‘hommes si tristes’ are
the philosophes. Once again, a reader is in the situation where events and
circumstances that take place within the text seem specific to the novel,
but when viewed from an external perspective, the words assume new
meaning. ‘Les livres de ces hommes si tristes’ becomes a significant phrase
insofar as it echoes the disposition of the primary character of Armance,
Octave, who is himself marked by sadness.
Octave’s reading of tragedies and books of hommes tristes establishes
an interesting correlation with Armance, but there is yet another indica-
tion that Octave’s reading material could well be very much like our own.
Octave reportedly reads ‘Helvétius, Bentham, Bayle et autres mauvais livres’
(p. 75). Here, the ‘Bayle’ is spelt with an ‘a’, not an ‘e’ as is the real name
of the author of Armance, but the homophone presents a mise en abyme,
putting forward the idea that Octave is a reader of the works of ‘Beyle’,
that is to say, of Stendhal, which opens the possibility of Octave’s reading
this text of Stendhal, Armance.
In each of these examples, the text indicates itself, and in each of
these examples the reader is Octave. Octave and reader are thus aligned,
and it is Octave who not only leads the reader through the text but who
manifests the reader within it – suggesting to us our own impotence as
readers while simultaneously goading us, encouraging within us a will to
empowerment.
Armance versus Armance
As for which character serves as a mirror of the text, the first indication
is the title. Armance gives her name to the novel, blurring the distinction
between character and text. Clarification between the two ‘Armances’ is
necessary to avoid ambiguity; without it, both meanings present themselves
simultaneously. This blurring, however, becomes a significant indicator of
the connection between the character and the text.
One resemblance of the character to the text is found in her name:
Armance de Zohilof f. Her initials, A. Z., comprising the first and last let-
ters of the alphabet, encompass every letter, the entire system of symbols
from which text is composed. While trying to forget his love for Armance,
Octave finds himself unable to ‘apercevoir à la tête d’une af fiche ou sur
une enseigne de boutique un A ou un Z, sans être violemment entraîné à
penser à […] Armance de Zohilof f ’ (p. 176). This scene shows Octave in
a position where it is not pictures, people or concepts that remind him of
her, but text. She becomes written into the world around him, into the
setting and into the scene, despite the absence of her character, through
the presence of the antipodal letters A and Z. These diametrically opposed
letters recall biblical ideas of the beginning and the end, the Alpha and the
Omega, just as Armance can be interpreted as embodying both the begin-
ning and the end of the novel.
Armance’s name thus suggests a reading from A to Z, from cover to
cover. And yet, by highlighting the A and the Z, she also incarnates the
front and rear covers themselves. In addition to being self-referentially
significant, as a symbol of textuality, she is also paratextually important, a
symbol of the limits of reading. Like a paratext, she conveys the prejudices
that cross the threshold with the reader. Thus, she is is described as having
‘quelque chose d’asiatique dans [ses] traits’ (p. 83), as being ‘remarquable
par ce que j’appellerais, si je l’osais, la beauté russe’ (p. 83), and as forming
‘un singulier mélange de beauté circassienne la plus pure et de quelques
formes allemandes’ (p. 84). While not necessarily possessing Asian traits
and a mix of Russian, Circassian and German beauty, the text Armance is,
like the character Armance, a mixture, lacking a distinct, singular origin.

The epigraphs, which are placed at the beginning of almost every chap-
ter, comprise a number of languages, including French, English, Italian,
Portuguese, Spanish and Latin, mimicking Armance’s mixed heritage.
Furthermore, these multilingual epigraphs create a sense of foreignness
for readers, the majority of whom would find themselves unable to read
all the epigraphs in the novel due to language barriers. Moreover, this lack
of particular origin runs deeper than just the use of a mixture of languages
for the epigraphs; the novel itself is a recreation of previous works, namely
Olivier by La Touche, which had in turn been inspired by rumours of Duras’s
Olivier, mixed with reportedly autobiographical elements of Beyle’s life,
and the additional inf luence of Mérimée’s suggestions. This selection of
sources results in a novel that is, like the character Armance, of distinctly
mixed origin.17 And like her polarized and polarizing name, she is (para-
textually) signposted as such.
Another interesting indication relates not to the work as a whole,
but to the very words that construct the text: ‘Elle fit son éloge avec la
bonhomie de l’innocence, si le mot ne rougissait pas de se voir employé à
l’occasion d’une femme qui avait de si belles poses dans sa bergère et des
mouvements d’yeux si pittoresques en regardant le ciel’ (p. 105). While this
quote refers to Madame de Bonnivet, not to Armance, the personification
of the word bonhomie is relevant. Bonhomie is endowed with the ability
to blush, which is inarguably a human action. By this personification, the
reader, at least for that moment, becomes aware of the text as a living,
personified creature, possessing awareness and emotional responses. Not
only the word ‘bonhomie’, but the entirety of the text is brought to life,
and becomes its own character in the novel. Significantly, throughout the
novel the character Armance is frequently depicted as blushing. Once in
the novel Octave blushes (p. 78) and once he ref lects on blushing (p. 199),
but Armance is the only other character to blush, and is, in fact, described
as blushing as many as six times over the course of the story (pp. 83, 131,
17 ‘Stendhal’, Encyclopedia Britannica Online: http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/

topic/565258/Stendhal (accessed 24 October 2009).
173, 195, 207, 224); she is also described as blushing in the letter written
by le commandeur de Soubirane, which he disguises as being from her
(p. 248). This propensity to blush establishes a unity between Armance
and the blushing word bonhomie, which reveals a correlation between the
character Armance and the words that build the text.
Interplay
The coincidence of character and text creates a metonymic situation, where

Armance stands for the text and Octave for the reader. They do not act out
a systematic course of mappable events that occur between text and reader;
rather, they signify a more abstract resemblance, where Octave and Armance
are linked to these associated roles by salient points of correspondence, such
as Octave’s incessant reading and Armance’s text-encompassing initials.
The nature of the reader is to lend to the text, for a time, his own life so
that the novel itself may be brought to life. A scene where this can be read
occurs after Octave has engaged in a duel; he is now gravely injured and
must write to Armance to inform her of his possibly imminent death:
On put bien procurer une feuille de gros papier d’écolier et une mauvaise plume; mais
il n’y avait pas d’encre dans la maison. Oserons-nous l’avouer? Octave eut l’enfantillage
d’écrire avec son sang qui coulait encore un peu à travers le bandage de son bras droit.
Il écrivit de la main gauche, et avec plus de facilité qu’il ne l’espérait. (p. 186)
The ease with which Octave is provided with paper and pen indicates the
ease with which one can be provided with a book or with the materials
for writing. But it is not these basic materials that create the text; to write
or to read words on a page requires more than just readily available sup-
plies. Octave, in using his blood, which is the principle indicator of life,
in order to engage with Armance, is mirroring an active, writerly reading
praxis, according to which in order to engage with a work, to bring it to
life, the reader must share a core part of himself.
The quotation also describes Octave displaying childlike creativity in

using what is available to him and changing its meaning in order to fulfil
his needs. By associating blood with ink, Octave is interpreting the world
around him according to his needs and desires, creating what might be
termed a ‘desire-shaped universe’, where things can stand in and be substi-
tuted for one another.18 This sinuosity of meaning is exactly what the reader
finds in a work; it is where one thing can become another in the mind of
the reader, who interprets the work in the f luid realm of the imagination,
not limited by the literal meaning of words and objects. The very nature
of language itself f lags its ability, and indeed its proclivity, to be figura-
tive, as language never is what it describes, but symbolizes an associated
object or concept.
The final description given with regard to Octave’s use of his own
blood as ink, shows him writing ‘de la main gauche, et avec plus de facilité
qu’il ne l’espérait’ (p. 186). This phrase, too, gives the reader something
to consider. With his right arm incapacitated, Octave is forced to write
with his left, which shows him literally having to approach writing from a
dif ferent angle, and finding it easier than he had expected.
The Impotent Reader
This moment of forced creativity – producing the text from the self – is
unsustained. Octave is willing to exert himself when he believes his own
death is imminent, but when he realizes that his health is improving and
that he will live, his developing relationship with Armance scares him. His
realization of his own creative power is almost immediately echoed by an
awareness of his impotence, which disallows their union. This impotence
18 This term is borrowed from Meakin’s study of Boris Vian’s L’Écume des jours, in which
the protagonist, Colin, shapes the world around him according to his wishes, both con-
scious and unconscious. See David Meakin, Boris Vian: ‘L’Écume des jours’ (Glasgow:
University of Glasgow French and German Publications, 1996), esp. pp. 45–60.
on the reader’s part recalls an inability to make one’s reading coincide

with one overarching, metaphysical Meaning; but it is an impotence with
potency at its core, for Octave can engage in the pursuit of love. After all,
consummation of this relationship would put an end to meaning-making
as a process always already under way, never finalized.
According to Allan H. Goroll and Albert G. Mulley, a ‘submissive
personality [is] associated with higher risk [of erectile dysfunction]’.19 Seen
in this light, Octave’s impotence can be seen to be a result of a submissive
approach to the relationship with Armance. It indicates his failure to take a
writerly reading of the text to its fullest extent. Instead, Octave reverts to a
role that is both passive and fruitless. His f laccidity signifies his lifelessness
when reading; it is a manifestation of his other side, his inactive relation-
ship with the literary work. For, however predestined his resignation may
appear in light of the paratextual diagnosis, in textual terms it has all the
trappings of an existential, and creative, choice.
When later Octave finds a letter, which he believes to have been penned
by Armance and which relates her unhappiness at the prospect of marrying
him, he resolves to commit suicide so that she may be happy. By taking his
own life, he hopes that hers will be improved. This death of the reader is
intended here to ransom the life of the work, freeing it from the limitations
that a reader, and a single reading, would place upon it. The discovery of
this letter, which he believes to have been written by Armance, but which
is, in fact, a forgery orchestrated by Octave’s uncle, le commandeur de Sou-
birane, has a profound ef fect on Octave’s interpretation of Armance and
his relationship with her. He assumes that this letter, not even addressed
to him but to Armance’s close friend Méry de Tersan, which describes
Armance’s unhappiness at the prospect of marrying Octave, is genuine.
Having found and read the letter, he allows it to have the utmost bearing
over his relationship with Armance and dismisses the happiness she shows
in his presence as a farce. As Day remarks, ‘Octave is more easily swayed
by the printed or written word than by firsthand experience.’20
19 Allan H. Goroll and Albert G. Mulley, Primary Care Medicine: Of fice Evaluation
and Management of the Adult Patient, 6th edn (Philadelphia: Lippincott Williams
& Wilkins, 2009), p. 938.
20 Day, ‘The Hero as Reader in Stendhal’, p. 413.
This is glaringly reminiscent of the discovery of Stendhal’s letter to

his close friend, Mérimée, whose name is strikingly similar to that of the
character of Méry. Upon discovering this letter, a reader so often takes it as
a genuine, and indeed indispensable, part of the text, and begins to project
this understanding onto the novel. While not even addressed to the reader,
the letter is read as if it is meant as a companion to the text with the pur-
pose of illuminating the story. The eventual result of Octave’s discovery of
le commandeur de Soubirane’s letter is his suicide. This, too, ref lects the
power of Stendhal’s letter, which results in the reader’s relinquishing of his
potential as active participant in the life of the work. As Day notes is the
case for Octave, the reader’s ‘demise [results] from the credence he gives
to the text of a […] letter’, as he accepts the letter as a reliable description
of Armance.21 He allows the author to dictate to him his reception of the
text, which results in his ultimate (metaphorical) death.
Consequences
Had Octave distrusted the letter, as a piece of communication that had

not come directly from Armance, and concluded its falsity by comparison
with the behaviour of Armance herself or by asking her about it directly, he
might have discovered its unreliability. He might, too, have admitted his
shortcomings (namely his impotence) to her, as he had been planning to
do until he discovered the letter; and he might have, as so vividly described
by Stendhal in his letter to Mérimée (p. 267), if not managed to overcome
his impotence altogether, then at least enjoyed exploring other methods
of intimacy. Yet, his trust in the letter is his downfall, and his suicide is
detrimental to Armance rather than helpful.
As Octave’s intention in his own death is to free Armance so that she
might live more fully, a reader’s intention in giving up his autonomy of
reading is to allow the work to become completed through the reading
21 Day, ‘The Hero as Reader in Stendhal’, p. 413.

dictated in Stendhal’s letter. However, as so aptly conveyed by the French

word achever, which means both ‘to complete’ and ‘to kill’, to view a text
as ‘complete’ is to kill the potential of the text. Only an incomplete work,
one that is continuously created and recreated, can be a living text. Thus,
Octave’s death results not in the completion of Armance but in her retire-
ment into a convent, where she exists without participating or interacting in
life. Without Octave, whom she loved, Armance enters a state of suspension
where she can continue existing although her life is over. Similarly, with the
writerly reader having given up his role and his involvement in interacting
with the work to create the text, the text cannot be lively and active, and so
is left dormant, in a state of suspension, subsisting but not living, finished
yet continuing to exist after the death of the reader. The bookshelf becomes
the book’s convent, where continued existence does not equal continued
life. But even though the book sits without a reader, there is no death of
the text, but merely a suspension of it, as there is always another reader who
will pick up the book, and through his interpretation of the work, recre-
ate the text. However, if reader after reader approaches the work only to
reapply Stendhal’s interpretation of it, then the text merely repeats itself.
It is a linear process, whereby the text is kept in its closed state. The reader
allows the discovery of a letter to control the relationship he is forging
with the work, and therefore to limit the text. By relinquishing his power
to the author, the reader leaves Armance to be confined once again in her
enclosure. It is only by separating Stendhal’s letter from Armance that the
text is released from its suspension and comes to life again. The result is a
circular text, which sees Armance break away from the fate of Armance but
only to return always to the same seductive role. For, to read from cover
to cover is always to return to the beginning, in that liminal space where
freedom meets fatality, and potency impotence.
Conclusion
This freeing of the text can only occur if a reader breaks away from the fate
of Octave. In the scene where Octave finds the letter he believes to be from
Armance, but which in fact is not from her, the reader can see what is to
come if Octave is to believe the letter and desires for him to see through
the deception. Because the reader can see this fatal error, he may well wish
that Octave had not found the letter, had never read the letter, and had
certainly not believed the letter. But Octave functions as an allegory for
the duped reader. For the impotent reader, the same process occurs: finding
Stendhal’s letter, reading Stendhal’s letter and, worst of all, believing Stend-
hal’s letter, which results in the termination of the relationship between
the reader and the work. Octave’s impotence becomes our impotence if we
fail to see beyond Stendhal’s limitation of the text. Stendhal tells the reader
how to read the work and yet instils in it a textness, indeed a textuality,
that belies this hermetic reading. The very act of stressing the impotence
of the character warns the reader of its presence and, at the same time, of
its perverse corollary, power.
Ultimately, Stendhal’s assertion that ‘il y a plus d’impuissants qu’on
ne croit’ (267) is true – in the literary, if not necessarily the literal, sense.
We, as readers, make his claim true by believing his letter and accepting
our textual impotency. It is not, however, the paratext that inhibits us but,
as for Octave, our willingness to read the work through it. As soon as we
readers transfer power of meaning-making to something or someone else,
we lose our potency. Once the traditional hierarchy of power over a work
has been dissembled, and disassembled, the letter, which had hitherto
furnished an explanation of the novel, becomes instead an explanation of
the reader. The identification of impotency as the ‘secret’ of the work does
not provide closure to the text, which would allow us to become compla-
cent in our reading of the novel, but rather it encourages us to reclaim our
potency as readers, for only then can the synergy between reader and work
be realized, and only then can we experience the text.
ALISTAIR ROLLS
The Striptease at the Dead Heart of

Douglas Kennedy’s Piège nuptial or
How to be a bit French around the Edges
The nature of the paratext is to lend itself to and to facilitate ambivalence.

Its own identity is to be always already double, an emblem of self-alterity.
For Gérard Genette, the paratextual elements of a text are those which
transform a manuscript into a book, an object to be presented to a reader.1
Such a privileging of the book as artefact over the text as site of produc-
tion may seem opposed to a deconstructionist agenda. Indeed, Derrida
himself sees the book as a limiting structure; it is the physical constric-
tion of the text: ‘[A]s I understand it […] the text is not the book, it is not
confined in a volume itself confined to the library.’2 For Derrida, then,
it is the nature of text to extend beyond itself, into the contextualization
provided by the reader; this is how the text seeks out its dif ferentiation
from self. This positing of the text as always also beyond itself is the very
essence of deconstruction, it allows Derrida to declare, for example, that
‘there is nothing outside the text [il n’y a pas de hors-texte]’, by which he
means precisely that ‘there is nothing outside context’.3
At face value, Genette’s work on the paratext could not be more
dif ferent: it accentuates the disconnection, drawing up a taxonomy of
the many layers of the book that separate the text from its reading context.
1 ‘Le paratexte est [donc] pour nous ce par quoi un texte se fait livre et se propose
comme tel à ses lecteurs, et plus généralement au public.’ Gérard Genette, Seuils
(Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1987), p. 7.
2 See ‘Afterword: Toward an Ethic of Discussion’, translated by Samuel Weber, in
Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988),
pp. 111–60 (p. 137).
3 Derrida, Limited Inc, p. 136.
48 ALISTAIR ROLLS
And yet, Genette himself, in the dermal layers of his own seminal work
on the paratext, admits the inversion of this principle via the parasitism
of deconstruction: the second (and first substantive) footnote on the first
page of Seuils is to none other than J. Hillis Miller, one of the Yale School’s
high priests of deconstructionist analysis.4 If Genette’s own insertion of
this footnote into the very skin of his own work is designed to inoculate
it against infection with ‘the critic as host’, he must also be aware of the
danger of contracting the disease of para’s polysemy; it is, after all, a ‘double
antithetical prefix signifying at once proximity and distance, similarity and
dif ference, interiority and exteriority’.5 With this in mind, we can see how
these same paratextual elements – the cover, epigraph and, we should add,
the opening and closing dermal layers of the diegesis proper (which term
is obviously thrown into question by the duality of the paratext as inside
and outside the text) – also serve to transform Derrida’s book, or the lit-
erary work in Roland Barthes’s sense,6 into an object whose potentiality
for meaning-making is immanent, into a text, an immanent-transcendent
space in which virtual meaning is actualized by the reader – or contextual-
ized, to draw on Derrida’s schema – as an instance of meaning production
or reading. The paratext is therefore exemplary of that osmotic tendency
of textual meaning to cross the borders between one text and another
(intertextuality, as developed by Julia Kristeva), and a text and its context
(paratextuality, as classified by Genette and examined here). It is the liminal
space in a text, or book, which can thus be seen to function metonymically
as that part of a text that draws attention to the entirety of that text, or
book, whose identity is predicated on the co-dependence of immanence
and transcendence, construction and deconstruction.
4 Genette, Seuils, p. 7, n. 2. Our use of the term ‘dermal layers’ here refers to the opening
and concluding sections of a text, which fit less obviously into Genette’s classification
of the paratext but which serve to predispose the diegesis to certain reading praxes.
5 J. Hillis Miller, ‘The Critic as Host’, in Harold Bloom, Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida,
Geof frey H. Hartman and J. Hillis Miller, Deconstruction and Criticism (New York:
Seabury [Continuum], 1979), pp. 217–53 (p. 219).
6 In the present chapter we shall draw on Barthes’s work on myth, but it will be clear
to readers that our understanding of text is informed by the distinction between the
readerly and the writerly text that he sets up in S/Z (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1973).
The Striptease at the Dead Heart of Douglas Kennedy’s Piège nuptial 49
In Douglas Kennedy’s The Dead Heart, identity is something that

both lies in the centre and at the edges.7 That is to say that the centre calls
out to the reader, seducing her into stepping across the threshold, almost
against her will, to confront the absence of the textual centre and to fill it
with meaning. For, while Kennedy’s text is not quantitatively absent as in
the case of Paul Fournel’s Banlieue (see Gascoigne, above), its centre, or
plotline proper, is distinctly, and we should argue self-referentially, lack-
ing in literary quality compared with the thriller-like staging of its premise
(and this desertion on the part of the novel also, of course, maps neatly
onto the desert centre of the Australian continent). This seduction, typical
of such modernist forms as the novel-as-diary that present themselves as
painful only to encourage a reader to adventure into the text more actively,
as discoverer-producers rather than passive consumers of meaning, func-
tions in Kennedy’s novel most obviously on the threshold of the text, and
for good reason – the novel is set in the desert centre of a country whose
population is almost entirely coastal and thus located on a peripheral strip
that presents something of a paradox: it is the most densely populated,
and increasingly the most iconic, site of Australianness; and at the same
time it is a limen where Australia transitions into non-Australian territory.
In the case of this, Douglas Kennedy’s first novel, the bridging of the gap
between the outermost limits of the text and (the concept of ) its dead
centre is a mercilessly driven marketing strategy. And this is especially the
case in France, where Kennedy has done all he can to pass for an indigenous
author, which is to say that the marketing of his texts in France appears to
skew, even eschew, his identity as American in Paris, instead revelling in his
apparently universal rootlessness, which sees him equally at home in Paris,
Berlin, London or Maine but, most particularly, in travel. In other words,
Kennedy is keen to market himself as an author in transit; as such, he is
7 Douglas Kennedy, The Dead Heart (London: Abacus, 1995 [2009]). The novel was
first published in London in 1994 by Little, Brown and Company. The novel was
first translated as Cul-de-sac into French by Catherine Cheval for Gallimard’s Série
Noire, in which it appeared in January 1997. It was subsequently retranslated by
Bernard Cohen as Piège nuptial, in which form it was published in Paris by Belfond
in 2008. For more details on the novel’s French odyssey, see the following chapter
of the present volume.
50 ALISTAIR ROLLS
himself always already in translation and thus quite pointedly part of the
paratextual apparatus of his works. Indeed, the deluxe version of the latest
French translation of The Dead Heart, Piège nuptial (2008), comes with
a DVD-of-the-book, which is rather appropriately dubbed into French;
that is to say that the original English of Kennedy’s lengthy soliloquy is
overlaid with a French translation such that a double soundtrack is cre-
ated: the original and translated soundtracks simultaneously produce a
double meaning in a cacophony that is, ultimately, rather dif ficult for
either the Anglophone or Francophone viewer to understand.8 Best of all,
the DVD-of-the-book turns out to have nothing specific to say about the
book, other than a brief introductory passage about the virtues of travel in
an unknown, barren land; it is, rather, a DVD-as-reading-of-the-book, an
oblique interpretation suggesting that Piège nuptial is both itself and not
itself (just as it is a film that is both about and not about the book that it
accompanies), both translation and original at the same time.
The film itself is a rather wonderful display of self-ref lexive authorli-
ness, as Kennedy moves from one shot (in Maine) to another (in Paris)
without ever really saying anything about his books or doing anything other
than drink cof fee. As mentioned, this is a celebration and marketing of
the absence of fixed identity and, ultimately, the absence of writing. And
while Kennedy f lits from city to city, talking about and around writing, he
wishes to make it known that his rootlessness is, perversely, nowhere more
grounded than in France, where unlike so many other Anglo-Saxon authors
who have had more success there than ‘back home’, he really is a French
author (cut to said author ostentatiously ‘doing writing’ in the Métro and
then at the Opéra). In another interview, Kennedy, for whom travelling
across Australia is the ultimate way of getting in touch with one’s self (as
translation), suggests that when writing a thriller ‘on crée son propre cul-
de-sac’.9 Cul-de-sac is, incidentally, the title of the first French translation of
The Dead Heart. We might suggest therefore that this title represents the
8 Douglas Kennedy ou l’Éloge de la fuite was directed by Armelle Brusq for L’Envol-
Arte in 2008. A DVD of this film is included in the deluxe 2008 edition of Piège
nuptial.
9 http://www.in.com/videos/watchvideo-interview-douglas-kennedy-cul-de-sac-
piege-nuptial-2367364.htm. (accessed 2 December 2009).
French translation of Kennedy’s admission that he was finding himself as

an author with this first novel. Its absence has since been filled by his suc-
cess, and the new translation can perhaps be seen to take his experimental
Frenchness to the level of a more genuine at-home-ness in his favourite
place to be read and to be seen to be writing.
As we shall see, The Dead Heart is predicated on the opposition of a
‘surface tension’ and a central core that is relatively lacking in substance.
This plays out in the transition from a hard-boiled beginning in the highly
charged double space of Darwin into the simple conceit and rather one-
dimensional plot of the central desert. It is tempting to read Kennedy’s
emergence as an author (and marketing phenomenon) through the lens of
this same transition: the premise (and promise) of the thriller tradition that
gives way to a lack of substance. Arguably, the initial French translation of
the novel as Cul-de-sac, with its stylized use of noir language, further high-
lights the (highly marketable) thriller-like beginning of the novel, which
then carries the story. As Vuaille-Barcan will demonstrate below, once the
substance of the author has grown, compensating for the inadequacies of
the debut novel, which – paradoxically – made his name, the new transla-
tion, as Piège nuptial, shifts in tone away from the polar towards the more
neutral voice, and nobler tradition, of ‘literature’.
As Brian Nelson has demonstrated, literary translation is always an
interpretative act.10 In light of this, Kennedy’s re-translation into French
can be read as a highly ref lexive recuperation of this interpretative act on
the part of the author and marketers of The Dead Heart. And, of course,
nowhere is this double motion of text-becoming-book-becoming-text
more clearly marketed than in the paratext. In this section of the present
volume, therefore, we aim to respond to a question raised by Genette,
almost as an afterthought, in the concluding dermal layer of Seuils, where
he ponders the place of translation within his paratextual schema.11 In other
words, by moving from the first to the last page of Genette’s discussion
10 Brian Nelson, ‘Preface: Translation Lost and Found’, In Other Words: The Art of
Translation, special edition of Australian Journal of French Studies, 47.1 (2010),
pp. 3–7.
11 Of the three paratextual practices that Genette admits to having left out of Seuils,
the first is translation (the other two are serialization and illustration): ‘La première
52 ALISTAIR ROLLS
of the paratext, we aim, paratextually, to deconstruct Douglas Kennedy’s

The Dead Heart through the parasitic absence-presence of its French (re-)
translation. Whether or not we can get to the heart of the issues of identity
posed by this phenomenon (Kennedy’s identity as author, text and mar-
keted product), we shall at least lend a critical frame to a question that so
many French readers must be posing about this author: ‘Ne serait-il pas
un peu français sur les bords?’
But before we examine the paratextual trappings of this second trans-
lation into French of Kennedy’s journey away from and back to the edge
of Australia, we shall consider the latest avatar of the English ‘original’.12
The 2009 edition of The Dead Heart ref lects the relatively newfound fame
of the author ‘back home’, in his mother tongue: almost all the specific
Australianness of the novel, which previous editions of the novel had cel-
ebrated with tourist-brochure-style images of road signs displaying stylized
kangaroos, is discarded in favour of conformity to a series that is recogniz-
able first and foremost as ‘Kennedy’.13 The outback becomes very much
background in this new cover; in the foreground, as on the other novels
in this series, is an unashamedly photoshopped image of a young woman,
est la traduction, en particulier lorsqu’elle est plus ou moins revue ou contrôlée par
l’auteur…’, Genette, Seuils, p. 373 (original emphasis).
12 There is clearly a way in which the inverted commas around ‘original’ are being used
here in that vaguely, and often derided, poststructuralist way to suggest that there
is no originality, no normality in the production of text; we should like to add to
this the fact that Abacus, the UK publisher of The Dead Heart is an imprint of the
London-based Little, Brown Book Group, which is itself an Hachette UK company.
Hachette, of course, is a ‘French’ publishing group. The original English version is
thus, in a way, French.
13 Following its initial publication in the traditional black and yellow of the Série Noire
in 2002, the Folio Policier version of Cul-de-sac (2006) adopted the same type of
iconic Australian imagery for its cover art as used for the English original. Following
the deluxe edition that marked the 2008 publication by Belfond of the new transla-
tion, whose cover art is the subject of this chapter, the paperback edition of Piège
nuptial has also (since 2009) returned to this stereotypically Australian cover style.
For more on the history of the various avatars of the translated text, see http://www.
polarnoir.fr/livre.php?livre=liv372 (accessed 10 June 2010).
seen from behind in this case. (The rear f lap shows two other novels by
Kennedy, The Big Picture and The Job, both of which have a young woman
on the front cover, seen from behind and from the side, her face obscured
by sunglasses, respectively.) This stylizing has the ef fect of denaturing the
image, removing the woman from the context of the novel, onto whose
background she is patently superimposed. In the case of The Dead Heart,
this has the advantage of suggesting a certain treachery of this woman
appearing from the outback, which will initiate the major plotline of the
novel. The ef fect of the relegation to the background of outback iconogra-
phy is to challenge the Australian identity that has contributed so strongly
to the development of the quasi-mythic status of the novel known in France
as Cul-de-sac.14 The idea of original text, or the origins of the text, is there-
fore problematized as early as the front cover.
The signs of deception and trickery of the front-cover art are reinforced
by the rear-cover blurb with its reference to the seductive powers of the
‘dumbshit map’ that brings Nick Hawthorne from Boston to Australia. The
explanation that follows accuses Australia of being treacherous, but it is its
mythology that leads readers and map-buyers astray. And it is precisely the
myth of Australia that is referenced by the cover blurb, which entices the
reader with its promise of ‘surf, sex and swill’. This triad has a clear double
function: first, it taps into the British idea of the Mediterranean summer
holiday with its ‘sun, sea and sex’ and thus sells the novel’s exoticism to
non-Australian Anglo-Saxons; second, it taps into the new myth of Aus-
tralia, which the novel immediately reverses by leaving the coastal strip in
search of the dead heart.15 As such, Nick travels back in time, somewhat
against the trend of fictional representations of Australia’s own myth of
14 The inner sleeve of Belfond’s paperback ‘pocket’ version of Piège nuptial (2009)
refers to ‘le mythique Cul-de-sac’. This recent edition returns to a cover image that
is almost identical to that of its French predecessor; additionally, the book comes
wrapped in a red paper band that announces the af filiation of the new text to the
myth of the old one: ‘Nouvelle traduction du roman paru sous le titre Cul-de-sac.’
15 It almost goes without saying, of course, that this now universal use of the triad cannot
be divorced from that particularly French use of three adjectives where one would
suf fice and that most French of all triple mottos – liberté, égalité, fraternité…
54 ALISTAIR ROLLS
itself, which has seen Australian identity, while remaining a complex ten-
sion between centre and periphery, shift progressively from the bush to the
coast over the course of the last century.16 For its part, Darwin is a-typical
of this new coastal myth inasmuch as it appears to be the abrupt end of
the inland; its inhabitants appear more rural than urban, or ‘bushmen’
as Kennedy describes them.17 While the inclusion of sex and swill in the
cover blurb is justified as early as the novel’s opening lines, the reality of
surfing in Darwin is neatly summarized by Justin Avery in his blog ‘Surf
the dream’.18 Responding to questions from bloggers who have been unable
to get information on good surfing spots in Darwin, Avery points out that
1) there are a lot of Tiger Sharks in the waters of f Darwin; 2) there are the
Box Jellyfish, which are almost impossible to see in the ‘dirty waters’; and
3) there are the Saltwater Crocodiles. For the surfing blogger undaunted
by this North Australian triad, he then casually throws in his clinching
argument: ‘there is no surf in Darwin’.
Darwin of fers a dramatic problematization of liminal space, of fering
no grey areas, simply the abrupt meeting point of bush and beach, of radical
dif ference. Paratextually, the blurb of fers a double ref lection of the text: it
misrepresents it insofar as there will be no surf in the story; on the other
hand, it entraps the reader in just the same way as the map of Australia lures
the protagonist (if you buy this book for the surfing, then like the protago-
nist you have made ‘a serious mistake’). While this may not appear at first
glance quite the hosting of the nihilistic reading within the metaphysical
reading of text that J. Hillis Miller had in mind in ‘The Critic as Host’, it
does show how the paratext can establish the counter-currents of the text
within. The dedication and epigraph that follow continue the destabilizing
16 For a discussion of the decentring of Australia’s identity in the context of Australian lit-
erature, see Alistair Rolls and Vanessa Alayrac, ‘Changing the Tide and the Tidings of
Change: Robert Drewe’s The Drowner’, Southerly, 62.3 (2002), pp. 154–67. Australian
crime fiction has also followed this path, leading from Arthur Upfield’s bush into
Peter Corris’s Sydney and, more recently, Peter Temple’s Melbourne.
17 The Dead Heart (2009), p. 3.
18 http://surfthedream.blogspot.com/2008/11/surfing-in-darwin.html (accessed 2
December 2009).
of any uniform textual identity. The dedication to the author’s son, which
arguably runs against the highly consumer-driven strategy of the cover
images, is followed by an epigraph that further polarizes Australian identity.
From Genette’s perspective this is a typical allographic epigraph: it is a quo-
tation from a text written by another author, imported into the text under
study. In this case, it is taken from a Federal Government-funded outback
survival guide. As a parasite, it is a site of multiple tensions. On the one
hand, it reinforces the paradox of mythical Australian identity inasmuch as
the outback is clearly defined as the Other, that space where people do not
live. From the perspective of a French identity, which Kennedy is striving
so hard to cultivate through his (re)translation of the text, this doubling
of national identity is more striking than the divide either between Paris
present and Paris lamented, represented and mythological (le mythe du vieux
Paris), or indeed between Paris and the provinces (or la France profonde): in
Australia there is quite simply a space where one can survive and another
where one cannot. While, on one level, the French are not unaware of this
dichotomy, there is a also a way in which the myth of the bush continues
to capture the French imagination, which, as demonstrated in Fornasiero
and West-Sooby’s chapter below, is no more clearly displayed than through
the cover designs typically chosen for French translations of Australian
novels.19 Finally, in terms of paratextual strategy, what Genette terms the
‘ef fet-épigraphe’20 – the importance of its simply being there – is here high-
lighted, and subverted, by a misspelling of the name of the other author.21
Whether this is an oversight or part of an attempt to put an autographic
stamp on the allographic epigraph, to mould it into a wider textual strategy
19 One might think, for example, of the highly successful use of Indigenous images
in the marketing of the French translations of Arthur Upfield’s works. On this,
see also John Ramsland and Marie Ramsland, ‘Re-assessing Arthur W. Upfield’s
Napoleon Bonaparte Detective Fiction’, in Alistair Rolls (ed.), Mostly French: French
(in) Detective Fiction (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2009), pp. 93–120.
21 The author of the text in question, Stay Alive, is given in the National Library of
Australia catalogue as being Maurice Dunlevy, not Dunleavy as it appears in The Dead
Heart, http://catalogue.nla.gov.au/Record/2172162 (accessed 24 May 2010).
56 ALISTAIR ROLLS
of deceit, this f lawing of the epigraph serves to undermine the Australian-

ness of the ‘original’ and to establish the paratext, quite ref lexively, as a site
of two-directional exchange. Not only, therefore, does this act seductively,
in Barthes’s sense, to engage the reader in the production of the writerly
text, and thus towards an actualization of the virtual, nihilistic otherness
of the text, but it also alerts the reader to the dif ficulty in jumping from
paratext into text or diegesis proper; in this way, the paratext is extended,
its edges deliberately blurred.
This disconnected identity, or identity as disconnection, is quite liter-
ally stamped onto the text in the first line of the novel: ‘I had never seen
so many tattoos’.22 The opening paragraph throws protagonist and reader
alike into an Australia for which the cover images had not prepared them.
Furthermore, this paragraph operates a paradoxical encoding of the story as
both thriller and anti-thriller. For, when Nick meets the femme fatale, it is
he who walks into her of fice, and she is wearing entirely the wrong clothes.
Indeed, this Australian stripper is wearing very little, and he is only just in
time, which suggests that the story has already begun: ‘I’d walked into this
joint in time to catch the start of her act.’ Clearly, this both is and is not in
the same register as Rick Blaine’s famous recollection in Casablanca: ‘Of
all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine.’ As
Rick and anti-Rick, Nick is in a double space, to which, to judge by the
butterf ly tattooed on her buttock, the stripper clearly belongs. And yet,
not unlike a butterf ly, she f lits between two identities. The tattoo, after all,
reminds the reader that her identity is skin-deep: she is a mise en abyme of
the novel itself insofar as she has nowhere to go from here, no outer layers
to shed and, thus, nothing to of fer but her own sparsely embellished skin;
she is also like the paratext, a signifier of self-alterity. This double presence,
simultaneously inside and outside, counterbalances the apparent lack of
noir fetishism of the stripper’s sexuality: ‘And she looked seriously out of
love with life – perhaps because she was paid to let a bunch of toxic bush-
men look up her wazoo.’ The directness of this gaze, its indif ference to the
castrating power of the truth of the female genitals, would indeed stand
22 The Dead Heart (2009), p. 3. All the quotations from this passage that follow in this
paragraph are taken from this same, first page of the novel.
for a non-fetishistic, and ‘normal’ sexuality (in the Freudian sense) were
it not for the woman’s role as paratextual performer – she is ‘out of love
with life’, precariously balanced across the gap between text and non-text.
If Nick’s entrance is into a text that is always already begun, it is because the
novel’s textuality extends backwards into the paratext, a striptease that is
already underway. The stripper is, in other words, already exposed beneath
the divestiture of turned pages.
It is our contention that this use of dermal layering as striptease adds,
more than it strips, dermal layering; indeed, the original English text appeals,
albeit under the trappings of nonchalant humour, to a noir tradition that if
not French is at the very least at home in France.23 In this way, the original
prefigures its translation through a desire for (French) otherness. For, if
Kennedy’s use of the French term femme de nuit in the following reference
to Darwin’s prostitutes is less than innocent, it is because femmes are fatales
insofar as they symbolize a double truth, functioning as they do according
to Freud’s theory of the fetish.24 In this case they are Australians aspiring,
however humbly, towards Frenchness: ‘the occasional femme de nuit – all
hot-pants and peroxide and chapped lips’.25 Under the sign of the butterf ly,
they represent textual becoming; their paratextual function recalls a site of
heterogeneity in the Deleuzian sense, where they, and the text, are always
already Australian-becoming-French and French-becoming-Australian.26
23 For a more detailed account of the ‘Frenchness’ of detective fiction as a genre, see
the editor’s introduction and Alistair Rolls, ‘An Uncertain Space: (Dis-)Locating
the Frenchness of French and Australian Detective Fiction’, in Rolls (ed.), Mostly
French, pp. 1–15 and 19–51, respectively.
24 For Freud, the fetish stands in the place of an absent truth, one that has been shown
to be a myth but to which the fetishist is still able to cling, and a present truth; more
precisely in Freud’s case, the fetish allows the subject to negotiate his desire for his
mother to be phallic and the traumatic knowledge that she is not. For a more detailed
examination of fetishistic noir and French fatale, see Alistair Rolls and Deborah
Walker, French and American Noir: Dark Crossings (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan,
2009).
25 The Dead Heart (2009), pp. 9–10.
26 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari develop this type of becoming at the interface
with dif ference through the image of the wasp and the orchid. See Mille Plateaux:
Capitalisme et schizophrénie 2 (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1980), p. 17. For a
58 ALISTAIR ROLLS
Piège nuptial presents the reader with a plain black cover. The only
image is a hint of black fishnet stocking. The French translation appears,
in this way, to align itself much more clearly with the dress code of the
noir tradition. The black dress that invites the male gaze to look at the
legs of the femme fatale immediately couches her in the fetishistic space
where her truth is both symbolized and veiled in the text, both known and
re-imagined by the detective. The use of fishnet connotes a particularly
French, and thus wilfully sophisticated, brand of seduction.27 The reader
quickly discovers, however, that this corner of fishnet is in fact a cut-away.
The window exposes a female body beneath, which the reader is encour-
aged to undress by lifting up the outer cover. In other words, the paratext
is packaged as an unpackaging, a striptease that requires only the initiation
of the reader’s gaze (and then hands) to begin. What the lifting of the cover
reveals is a culture shock, a cross-dressing of social codes.
The second jacket cover, the one beneath the removable black dress,
reveals that the black fishnet belongs to a pair of pantyhose worn beneath
a pair of black shorts (perhaps not unlike the prostitutes’ hot-pants) and
a faded singlet. In short, the French sophistication of the black dress and
comparable Deleuzian take on national identity, see the first chapter of Andrew
McGregor, Film Criticism as Cultural Fantasy: The Perpetual French Discovery of
Australian Cinema (Bern: Peter Lang, 2010), pp. 11–24. McGregor conceptualizes
a connectedness of national identities, according to which he describes the intercon-
necting lines of f light as examples of the ‘“slipperiness”, “shifting”, or “blurring” of
national cultural boundaries’ (p. 20).
27 A close-up view of a black fishnet stocking was deemed suf ficiently seductive, in a
so-Frenchy-so-Chic way, for it to be used in 2007 in Australia by the Hilton hotel
chain to advertise their Provocateur package. For more on this, and to compare
the image used in the Hilton advertising and Kennedy’s French cover, see the fol-
lowing webpage: http://hiltonsydney.com.au/sleep/inspired/Packages/provoca-
teurPackage.aspx (accessed 23 May 2010). The wearing of fishnet stockings is still
considered by young French women to convey seduction. To see how this aspect is
tempered, but not contradicted, by the practicality of wearing them (how and in
what weather conditions), see such sites as http://www.candymoderne.com/vogue-
des-bas-resille-163/ and http://www.jadefromparis.com/2009/01/les-bas-rsilles-cest-
le-mal.html (accessed 2 December 2009).
fishnet stockings appears to have been replaced by an unsophisticated

look, which one might assume is the novel’s ‘true’ Australianness. Such
an assumption would, however, be rather hasty, overlooking not only the
mythology of the striptease and its paratextual function both here and in
the ‘original’ text but also the social coding of the clothes themselves. The
following description is taken from Yves Delaporte’s French study of punk
dress in the 1980s:
Mais la technique la plus originale, et peut-être la plus choquante pour le ‘bon goût’,
est l’assemblage des éléments les plus disparates, entraînant la destruction du système
vestimentaire, c’est-à-dire des relations habituelles entre pièces, caractéristiques non
seulement des habits de la majorité de la population, mais également de ceux des
autres groupes marginaux. Chaussettes trouées sur des bas résille, porte-jarretelles
sur un pull lacéré, jarretières de mariée (blanche) ou de prostituée (noires) passées
par-dessus un pantalon, pull long utilisé comme robe: autant d’innovations qui
se montrent autrement plus destructrices de nos manières d’habillement que, par
exemple, le blouson à tête de mort des Hell’s Angels.28
Perhaps more interesting than the revelation that a mixed dress code is
designed to shock our sense of vestimentary good manners is the idea that
youth culture of this type is as likely to occur in France as it was, and pre-
sumably still is, in Anglo-Saxon countries. As Delaporte continues, there
is a dif ference between the composition of alternative dress codes in Paris
and the provinces, in which the constitutive elements of one identity (be it
punk, rocker or Hell’s Angel, etc.) can be incorporated into another to make
it more acceptable, or less unacceptable, in the non-Parisian context:
En raison de la plus forte pression sociale et de la dif ficulté à se procurer certains

éléments vestimentaires, on porte rarement l’habillement complet du groupe dont
on se réclame; il y a par conséquent amenuisement, et souvent disparition, d’une
des plus importantes caractéristiques sémiologiques de ce type d’habillement: la
discontinuité du signifiant.29
28 Yves Delaporte, ‘Teddies, Rockers, Punks et Cie: Quelques codes vestimentaires

urbains’, L’Homme, 22.4 (1982), pp. 49–62 (p. 53).
29 Delaporte, ‘Teddies, Rockers, Punks et Cie’, p. 60.
60 ALISTAIR ROLLS
The suggestion might be that the external cover, which seems to market
a typical noir thriller in the plain black livery of the Parisian Série Noire,
has to divest itself of certain paratextual characteristics in order to pass as
an Australian thriller. Again, this is to move too quickly. The paratext itself
calls out to us, forcing us to consider the hermeneutics in play; indeed, the
interpellatory force of the paratext can be usefully analyzed via Barthes’s
understanding of myth, which ‘a un caractère impératif, interpellatoire’.30
Seen in this light, the call of myth is not unlike Genette’s ef fet-épigraphe,
except that where Genette sees in the epigraph a necessary contextualiza-
tion, the force of myth in Barthes’s schema hinges on an equally necessary
decontextualization. We should argue that both contextualization and
decontextualization are at stake in the paratext-ef fect. For if, like myth,
the paratext calls out to the reader, it does this through its self-alterity, its
paradoxical, double status as book and not-book. As Barthes describes,
we do not call a Basque house ‘Basque’ if it is present to us in the Basque
country; if we come across it in Paris, on the other hand, it calls to us and
we call it, in this case, ‘un chalet basque’.31 Furthermore, this house, as a
direct result of its disconnectedness from its usual surrounds, takes on for
us ‘l’essence même de la basquité’. In the case of Piège nuptial, for all the
Americanness of its author and the Australianness of its setting, the work
calls us and forces us to name it ‘French’ because of, and not in spite of, its
troubled status as translation (as French in a non-French context as well
as non-French in a French context).
Barthes’s work on mythologies can also help us to explain the shift from
the plain black cover (French) to the cross-coded second cover (French
and Australian). In his essay ‘Strip-tease’, Barthes immediately qualifies the
striptease as a Parisian af fair; or, at least, the kind of striptease in which he is
interested is the Parisian variety. And this striptease, Barthes tells us, is itself
predicated on a contradiction.32 The act of undressing the female form, he
30 Roland Barthes, ‘Le Mythe, aujourd’hui’, in Mythologies (Paris: Editions du Seuil,

1957), pp. 191–247 (p. 210).
31 Barthes, Mythologies, p. 210.
32 ‘Le strip-tease – du moins le strip-tease parisien – est fondé sur une contradiction’,
Mythologies, p. 147.
explains, is linked to a process not of sexualization but of de-sexualization.

In this respect, its use of layering recalls that used retrospectively by Freud’s
fetishist, and which also underpins so much of classic noir: it is designed
to counter the primal fear of female nudity; it inoculates and titillates via a
partial de-nuding of a threat, as Barthes describes it, of the ‘Fais-moi peur’
variety. Like a fetish, then, the display of the mechanics of the striptease are
enough to provoke ‘à la fois l’idée de sexe et sa conjuration’. The Parisian
striptease, then, is lengthy and couched in strict protocol, its own accessories
and stereotypes, which defuse – and deconstruct – the ultimate goal:
Seule la durée du dévêtement constitue le public en voyeur; mais ici, comme dans
n’importe quel spectacle mystifiant, le décor, les accessoires et les stéréotypes vien-
nent contrarier la provocation initiale du propos et finissent par l’engloutir dans
l’insignifiance: on af fiche le mal pour mieux l’embarrasser et l’exorciser.33
Here, we should argue, it is the nudity of the dead centre itself that is
‘embarrassed and exorcized’ by the front cover’s striptease. As striptease,
then, the paratext colours the reading praxis that is then deployed in the
text itself, throughout its length; by of fering a strong preliminary display
it covers the whole text, continuously counteracting the uncovering that
is the necessary consequence of reading. Furthermore, it empowers the
reader to combat the dif ficulty of the text, thereby encouraging an active
engagement with the text (as opposed to simply selling the metaphysical
reading or the author’s slant on the book). This ref lexive display of the
paratext as privileged site of self-alterity thus allows the text to grow by
appealing to that otherness (its nihilistic deviation from the accepted,
standard ‘reading’) that is both separate from and a part of itself. This is
clearly the territory of Barthes’s own writerly text, which expands as the
reader constructs it and whose meaning is not only added to but actively
33 Barthes, Mythologies, p. 147. This passage from Barthes’s essay strongly recalls the
journey of Nick himself who is seduced by props and eventually engulfed in insig-
nificance; the story, too, reveals itself to be one of absolute insignificance once the
liminal space of the text is passed. The exorcising power of the striptease serves,
however, to work the other way, to redeem this central absence and, ultimately, Nick
(and Kennedy) himself.
62 ALISTAIR ROLLS
created as the pages are turned and the book stripped. The erotics of read-
ing are therefore based on a textualization, an adding of layers; or, as in
the case of the Parisian striptease, the most naked of literary narratives is
now, and forever, veiled in the magical layering of all text: ‘On aura donc
dans le strip-tease toute une série de couvertures apposées sur le corps de
la femme, au fur et à mesure qu’elle feint de le dénuder.’34
In Piège nuptial, the paratext is both Parisian striptease by virtue of its
specific dress code (the ‘quelques atomes d’érotisme’ that announce it as
Parisian striptease, and which include inter alia ‘les bas résilles’)35 and its
accentuated layering. This ref lexive staging, or overstating, via the Parisian
striptease, of Piège nuptial’s Frenchness is arguably a perverse part of its
status as translation. It is as if Piège nuptial is seeking to declare its French-
ness even at the expense of an Australianness that is likely, given the French
predilection for all things Australian but especially for Australian litera-
ture and tales of the outback, to ensure a healthy market share. We might
wonder whether the paratextual artistry deployed here is designed less to
market the novel than Douglas Kennedy himself; the striptease would thus
function here, precisely as in Barthes’s essay, in which the dance ‘donne au
spectacle la caution de l’Art’.36 It is arguably, then, Kennedy himself who
is cast in this artistic light and who, as such, rises above the ranks of the
humble writer of foreign thrillers translated for an easy market.37
The call of the paratext is at its most perverse in the case of Piège nup-
tial. The little black dress of the 2008 black cover functions paradoxically
both to reference the French thrillers of the Série Noire (to which it formerly
belonged under the title Cul-de-sac), with all the cachet that publication

35 Barthes, Mythologies, pp. 147, 148.
37 Stephen King springs to mind as an author always being read by someone in the
Parisian Métro, but more recent examples are many (Candace Bushnell, Stephenie
Meyer, Philip Pullman, J. K. Rowling). One need only look at the bestseller list in
France, or the inclusion of the search term livres en français on the online website
www.amazon.fr, where it is listed beneath livres en anglais, to gauge the importance
of the market for translated literature in France.
in this famous series confers, and to distance Kennedy’s text from them.
For Kennedy appears to wish to avoid those other connotations of Marcel
Duhamel’s series, which conjure titles of famous thrillers written for the
most part by authors specializing in the genre; in particular, it is strongly
associated with the translations of works by a number of key English-
speaking authors (Peter Cheyney, James Hadley Chase, Carter Brown, all
of whom, it should be noted, are examples of authors who had more success
in France than ‘at home’).38 Seen in this light, the excessive frou-frouing
of Piège nuptial’s paratext appears to draw on the genre of the thriller in
order to inoculate its own textual body against accusations of formulaic
writing. Even as its pages are turned and the reader quickly leaves behind
the liminal space of Darwin for the dead centre and its tawdry story of a
forced union, the initial vision of the black dress wards of f the terrifying
absence that is the plot: ‘[car] c’est une loi évidente que tout le strip-tease
est donné dans la nature même du vêtement de départ’ (p. 148).39 The whole
novel is thus cast in the shadow of French elegance with an undercurrent
of duplicity; this is, in other words, a novel that is both sophisticated and
rough-trade, canonical and popular, French and Australian.
In the case of the 2008 version of Piège nuptial, the additional outer
cover also functions proleptically to recuperate, and Parisianize, the more
amateurish striptease that, as we have seen, constitutes the initial dermal
layer of the diegesis proper. Without the caveat of this paratextual vêtement
de départ the striptease in the pub in Darwin would be starkly lacking in
the two elements crucial to the Parisian variety: accoutrements and slow,
confident gestures. In the case of the first, it is interesting to note that the
key to the Parisian striptease is its exoticism:
38 Note the inverted commas again. Peter Cheyney and James Hadley Chase are both
British authors who passed for American (see Rolls and Walker, French and American
Noir, 2009), while Carter Brown’s conversion from British to Australian was set
against a highly Americanized backdrop. For an analysis of the marketing strategy
behind the Carter Brown Mystery Series, see Toni Johnson-Woods, ‘Crime Fiction’s
Cultural Field: Carter Brown in France’, in Rolls (ed.), Mostly French, pp. 53–73.
64 ALISTAIR ROLLS
L’exotisme est la première de ces distances, car il s’agit toujours d’un exotisme figé
qui éloigne le corps dans le fabuleux ou le romanesque: Chinoise munie d’une pipe
d’opium (symbole obligé de la sinité), […] décor vénitien avec gondole […] tout ceci
vise à constituer au départ la femme comme un objet déguisé…40
In other words, to be recognizable as ‘Parisian’ a striptease needs to be

dressed up as Chinese, Venetian or, as Barthes notes elsewhere, a Spanish
f lamenco dance. In a similar way, Piège nuptial calls out so strongly to the
book-buying public not because it is a French novel but because it is dis-
guised as a French novel. Its otherness does not lie, as one might expect,
in its dif ference from ‘French novels’ (this would be the Australian novel,
as chalet basque, uprooted and translated into a French context) but in its
dif ference from recognisably Australian novels. This is, after all, a novel
that shatters the myth of Australia; or rather, it confirms that in Australia
the (French) myth is disconnected from reality, unlike the (French and
Australian) myth of Frenchness, which co-exists with the reality of the
urban (and usually Parisian) present.41
The Parisian-ness of its paratextual striptease announces and sym-
bolizes the tension of a text in permanent f lux, whose identity oscillates
between a Frenchness that is always already a disguise and an Australianness
that is either empty or disingenuously exoticized. The French translation
serves from the outset to provide a (ref lexive and openly dishonest) myth
that will accompany the reader into the traumatic reality of the outback
story. In this way, the barrenness of the Australian outback is made natural,
that is to say endurable, by the haunting presence of its (French) mythi-
cal otherness, just as the shocking truth of the female genitals is disarmed
before the fact by the fetishization of the striptease: ‘[L]a fin du strip n’est

41 Ross Chambers talks of this co-presence, or ‘haunting’ of what is present by what is
represented, as a pan-urban experience, and he mentions Sydney as a place where he
himself feels it. We should argue that the disconnection would be more startling for
a French citizen in the Australian metropolis, although the Sydney Opera House can
now of fer solid iconic competition both to France’s Tour Eif fel and its own gum trees
and red earth. See Ross Chambers, Loiterature (Lincoln and London: University of
Nebraska Press, 1999).
plus alors d’expulser à la lumière une profondeur secrète, mais de signifier,

à travers le dépouillement d’une vêture baroque et artificielle, la nudité
comme habit naturel de la femme’.42 Inoculated, the reader is both present
to and removed from the ultimate goal of the strip-inside-the-(striptease-)
text, which is seen vicariously, through the crowd of Australian, and mark-
edly non-Parisian, voyeurs.
The Darwin stripper also lacks composure in her movements, thereby
failing the second criterion of the Parisian striptease. In the mise en abyme
she quickly abandons all artistry in favour of the clumsiness that is the
marker, for Barthes, of the ‘concours populaires’.43 Without the screen of
artistry, the women who strip in these amateur events find themselves more
obviously unveiled, with each un-layering being exactly that. To strip too
fast is, to borrow a phrase from Ross Chambers, to ‘make a beeline’. ‘An
interest in alterity’, Chambers argues, ‘is incompatible with getting there
fast’.44 As such, a paratextual striptease that goes too fast is one that signposts
the reader’s path to the centre of the text, allowing her to make a beeline
to the diegesis, which can then be consumed passively and to the exclu-
sion of self-alterity (both of the text and reader).45 The discomfiture of the
Darwin stripper moves the novel deeper into the dermal layers of the text,
towards the dead centre (where abnormality, and fear, will provide the new
‘natural’ order). As such, the striptease scene reveals the tenacious will of
the novel to become Australian: the crowd force the stripper to remove
not only her clothes but also her professionalism, her urbanity and her
veil-as-myth, and in so doing to become amateur. The condition of such
42 Barthes, Mythologies, pp. 147–8.

44 Chambers, Loiterature, p. 26. Chambers is referring specifically here to Phileas Fogg
whose own beeline around the world is continually counter-posed by the loiterly
sightseeing of his manservant Passepartout.
45 As one of Chambers’s ‘socially marginal’ loiterly figures ‘always on the cusp of a
context’ (Chambers, Loiterature, pp. 56–7), Kennedy’s stripper, perched on her
stage between the peritext and the diegesis proper, functions as an allegory of the
reader, the stripper of pages, whose own self in otherness is produced in reading, in
the textual identity that is forged at the interface of reader and text.
66 ALISTAIR ROLLS
a stripper, Barthes notes, is one ‘de faiblesse et d’apeurement’,46 which is,

of course, the condition of the solitary stranger in an unknown environ-
ment who, according to Kennedy’s epigraph, ‘éprouvera naturellement de
l’angoisse’.47 In this way, the paratextual stripper also points backwards,
via the epigraph out into the contextualization of its being read in trans-
lation, thereby adding a loiterly, sight-seeing touch to the passage to the
dead centre. By referencing the epigraph, by pointing backwards, she thus
makes room for alterity within haste.
Whereas the professional, Parisian striptease desexualizes the artiste,
the sporting-style striptease (of the Moulin Rouge or the ‘Strip-tease Club’)
seeks to domesticate the erotics of the act. This too, however, can be con-
sidered ‘typically French’.48 For Barthes, this bourgeoisification of the strip-
tease, with its amateur (salesgirl or secretary) performers, corresponds to
the demands of the French man in the street. Such is apparently not the
case in America, which goes some way to explaining the reaction of the
bushmen in the bar in Darwin, whose rejection of the stripper’s beach ball
and woman-next-door costume (‘[e]lle était attifée en femme au foyer lamda
venue passer une journée à la plage’),49 and her whole Beach Boys routine,
is less anti-American (indeed, the other American present is delighted by
the bushmen’s impatience) than anti-French:
Le strip-tease réintègre ici [au Strip-Tease Club] la salle, se familiarise, s’embourgeoise,
comme si les Français, contrairement aux publics américains (du moins à ce qu’on
dit), et suivant une tendance irrépressible de leur statut social, ne pouvaient con-
cevoir l’érotisme que comme une propriété ménagère, cautionnée par l’alibi du sport
hebdomadaire, bien plus que par celui du spectacle magique: c’est ainsi qu’en France
le strip-tease est nationalisé.50
Thus, even as the stripper is forced to do her act non-domestically and

Australian-style (if we consider the rejection of the Beach Boys to be

47 Piège nuptial (2008), p. 9.
49 Piège nuptial (2008), p. 14 (our emphasis).
an Australian spin on an otherwise typically American reaction to the

striptease),51 the scene’s paratextual dynamics are aligned with the French
Strip-tease Club, as this dermal layer integrates the strip-joint space, which,
via the mise en abyme, leads into the diegesis proper. Consequently, the
transition to the under layers, to the central Australian space that is the
(dead) heart of the novel, which is to say the extensive paratextual layer-
ing of the novel, operates textually – both immanently (the inescapable
sameness of the bush: French, amateur strip) and transcendentally (the
tendency to extend beyond borders, the framing device of travel and return:
Parisian, professional strip) – according to a recognizably French method
of un-layering.
Kennedy or perhaps those responsible for promoting the Kennedy
brand in France (and subsequently in Anglo-Saxon countries where, as
we have seen, the surf-sex-swill campaign is following suit) are, as are all
good advertisers, master-inoculators. In this way, they manage to sell the
French the myth of Australianness that they want to read while, at the
same time, handing them a story of the breaking of that very myth. So,
when in 2008 Piège nuptial of fered itself as a striptease, it was using the
power of the paratext as myth to call out to its French readership and to
appeal to that threshold between text and context, which for Derrida is
‘an incessant movement of recontextualization’.52 As such, the translated
paratext reminds the reader of the paratext’s necessary af finity with and
relation to translation. Perched on the cusp of his text, Kennedy, like his
stripper, defines his Frenchness in his performance of Australianness and
vice versa; this is his self-alterity.53 And in 2008 in France – as in Darwin
– ‘[t]he crowd hooted their approval’.54
51 We should point out that the paratextual striptease does involve a layer that also
blends Australian and American pop music: the epigraphical reference to Stay Alive
is only a slight distortion of a song by the Bee Gees. And we might also add that one
Australian response to The Dead Heart was the 1997 film Welcome to Woop Woop,
directed by Stephan Elliott, which naturalizes the harshness of Kennedy’s Wollanup
by turning it into a musical.
52 Derrida, Limited Inc, p. 136.
53 As Derrida notes, ‘[d]if férance is a reference and vice versa’ (Limited Inc, p. 137).
54 The Dead Heart (2009), p. 4.
MARIE-LAURE VUAILLE-BARCAN
Douglas Kennedy or an American in Paris:

Paratextual Strategies and ‘Acclimatization’
of the Translated Text
In France it is dif ficult to escape the promotional campaigns for novels by

American author Douglas Kennedy. He has been at the top of the best-
sellers list for the last decade. He has his own of ficial internet site and
Facebook page, and huge numbers of blogs of fer comments on his novels.
The commentary is not uniformly positive, however; indeed, the weight of
the advertising machine is counterproductive for some bloggers:
Il est des noms d’auteurs qui ne m’inspirent pas confiance, et dont Douglas Kennedy,
entre autres fait partie. Je n’avais, jusqu’alors rien lu de lui, mais ses af fiches sur papier
glacé dans de nombreuses librairies de France et de Navarre m’ont toujours paru
suspectes.1
Kennedy’s first novel, Dead Heart, was first translated for publication in
French by Catherine Cheval in 1997 as Cul-de-sac. Gallimard included this
version in its prestigious crime series, the Série Noire. It was subsequently
published as a Folio Policier paperback before the rights to the original
were bought by Editions Belfond in 2008, at which point it was retranslated
by Bernard Cohen under the new title of Piège nuptial. This novel, which
is the story of an American journalist who is kidnapped and held against
his will in the centre of the Australian desert, has been hugely successful
1 Quote taken from Anne Sophie Demonchy’s blog on current literary events: http://
www.lalettrine.com/article-27186815.html (accessed 13 October 2010). However,
Demonchy does go on to make some positive comments about Kennedy’s novel
Piège nuptial.
70 MARIE-LAURE VUAILLE-BARCAN
in France. Our aim here is to interrogate the way in which the paratext
and, notably, these two successive translations, which we shall analyze as
paratextual elements, have been used to promote Kennedy as an author
in, and part of, the French literary system.
In Seuils, Gérard Genette designates as ‘paratext’ all those elements that
surround and extend the text.2 Within this, he distinguishes between the
authorial and editorial paratexts, the peritext (situated inside the book) and
the epitext (press releases and interviews given by the author before, during
or after the publication of the work, letters, diary entries, etc.). What we
have here, to borrow Ugo Dionne’s definition, is an ‘“ensemble hétéroclite”
de pratiques verbales, graphiques, “factuelles”, matérielles et numériques
qui sert d’escorte [au livre] lors de sa dif fusion en volume’.3 Visibly, the
paratext and the signals it sends are strategically crucial in organizing the
way in which the text is received. These mechanisms, we should suggest,
are of still greater importance when the text in question is a translation.
As Genette himself recognized in his conclusion,
J’ai également laissé de côté, faute d’une enquête qui pour chacun d’eux exigerait
peut-être autant de travail que l’ensemble ici traité, trois pratiques dont la pertinence
paratextuelle me paraît indéniable. La première est la traduction, en particulier
lorsqu’elle est plus ou moins revue ou contrôlée par l’auteur, comme fit Gide, avec
Groethuysen, pour la version allemande des Nourritures terrestres, et à plus forte
raison lorsqu’elle est entièrement assurée par lui, selon l’usage constant d’un écrivain
bilingue comme Beckett, dont chaque traduction doit, d’une manière ou d’une autre,
faire commentaire au texte original.4
Even in cases where the translator is not the author, we can, to the extent
that all translation is a form of rewriting and thus ‘a commentary on the
original text’, go further, and consider, as does publisher Hubert Nyssen,
that the translation itself is paratext:
2 Gérard Genette, Seuils (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1987).

3 Ugo Dionne, La Voie aux chapitres: Poétique de la disposition romanesque (Paris:
Éditions du Seuil, 2008), p. 202.
De tous les apprêts éditoriaux, de toutes les interventions paratextuelles, de tous

les artifices de mise en scène dont un texte peut bénéficier ou pâtir, la traduction
est certainement le plus important, voire le plus monstrueux (au premier sens du
terme).5
In translation studies, both Skopos theory and Polysystem theory analyze

the decisions made by the dif ferent people (author, translator, publisher)
involved in ensuring that the text is received favourably in the target literary
system. In this chapter, we shall explain these two approaches to transla-
tion with a view to shedding some light on the publication of Douglas
Kennedy’s first novel in France.
Skopos Theory and Polysystem Theory
Skopos theory was developed in the 1970s by German theorists Hans

J. Vermeer and Katarina Reiss.6 Vermeer’s name for this theory, skopos
theorie in German, is taken from the Greek Skopos, meaning ‘purpose’.7
For Vermeer, the Skopos is the fundamental principle that determines a
translator’s choices: ‘Translating is acting, i.e. a goal-oriented procedure
carried out in such a way as the translator deems optimal under the pre-
vailing circumstances’.8
According to this approach, the process that leads to the translated text
must be preceded by a negotiation stage during which the ‘client’ explains
to the translator what the purpose of the translation is and the conditions
under which it must be carried out. The key element in determining the
5 Hubert Nyssen, Du texte au livre, les avatars du sens (Paris: Armand Colin, 1995),
p. 48.
6 Hans J. Vermeer and Katarina Reiss, Grundlegung einer allgemeinen Translationtheorie
(Tübingen: M. Niemeyer, 1984); Hans J. Vermeer, A Skopos Theory of Translation
(Heidelberg: Textcontext, 1996).
7 In French, this is commonly referred to as le but (objective, goal) of the translation.
8 Vermeer, A Skopos Theory of Translation, p. 13.
Skopos is the target readers, who are characterized by the knowledge and
expectations modelled in their culture. The client will decide either to keep
the aim of a text or to change it. When the aim remains the same, which is
most commonly the case, the ef fect on the target readership also remains
the same. What is so innovative about this theory is that it allows for those
cases when the purpose of the final (translated, target) text is dif ferent from
that of the initial (original, source) text: ‘It is not the source-text and/or
its surface-structure which determines the target-text and/or its surface-
structure, but the Skopos’.9
The main argument against Skopos theory as it pertains to literary text
stems from the claim that literature is not produced with a communicative
purpose. Vermeer and Reiss counter this argument by saying that even if
we allow for the fact that a literary text is written without a reader in mind,
the translator works to a brief given by a publisher and thus for readers.10
The translation of a literary work is therefore inscribed within a context
of communicative interaction that is itself subject to a Skopos.
Vermeer outlines his approach as follows:
What does it mean to translate? […] to have a Skopos and accordingly transfer a
text(eme) from its source-culture surroundings to target-culture surroundings, which
by definition are dif ferent from the former. […] One will have to decide before
translating a text whether it is to be ‘adapted’ (to a certain extent), i.e. ‘assimilated’,
to target-culture conditions, or whether it is meant to display and perhaps even stress
its ‘foreign’ aspect. […] In both cases, the text will be ‘dif ferent’ from what it was in
its ‘normal’ source-culture situation, and its ‘ef fect’ will be dif ferent.11
Clearly, it is legitimate within Skopos theory to adapt the text to its new
public and the new conditions in which it will be received in the target
language and culture. For the purposes of our argument here, this is where
Polysystem theory, developed by Itamar Even-Zohar in the 1970s, steps in to
supplement Vermeer’s functional approach. According to Even-Zohar, the
translation process forms part of a socio-cultural context in the broad sense

10 See, for example, Christiane Nord, Translating as a Purposeful Activity (Manchester:
St Jerome, 1997), p. 83.
of the term (literary genre, dominant ideology, political system, and so on).
As such, he considers translation not only in terms of a transfer between
languages but also between systems. As Mathieu Guidère explains,
[p]ar ‘polysystème’, Even-Sohar (1990) désigne un ensemble hétérogène et hiérarchisé
de systèmes qui interagissent de façon dynamique au sein d’un système englobant
(le polysystème). Ainsi, la littérature traduite ne serait qu’un niveau parmi d’autres
au sein du système littéraire, lequel est inclus dans le système artistique en général,
mais ce dernier fait également partie intégrante du système religieux ou encore
politique.12
Translated literature occupies a peripheral position in France, as it does

in most countries with an established and rich literary history. In this
case, Even-Sohar believes that translators (or translation clients) tend to
adapt themselves to the norms of the target literary system so as to ensure
that the text will be better accepted. For his part, Nyssen points out that
works translated into French are still widely perceived as strange on the
basis of their foreignness more so than on the basis of their qualities as
text, which, of course, also depend on the skill of the translator. He goes
on to explain that
cette méfiance de l’altérité […] favorise les traductions ethno-centristes qui ramènent
le texte à notre conception de l’écriture, à nos objets culturels. […] Le sens du texte
traduit, déjà paratextualisé dans son édition d’origine, se trouve ainsi livré à une
nouvelle et importante transfiguration, tout entière soumise aux dispositions prises
par les exploitants éditoriaux.13
It is for this reason that André Lefevere goes beyond the notion of norms
and considers translations to be rewrites and translators ‘manipulators’:
‘Rewriters adapt, manipulate the originals they work with to some extent,
usually to make them fit in with the dominant, or one of the dominant
ideological and poetological currents of their time’.14
12 Mathieu Guidère, Introduction à la traductologie, 2nd edn (Brussels: De Boeck, 2010)

p. 66.
13 Nyssen, Du texte au livre, p. 51.
14 André Lefevere, Translation, Rewriting, and the Manipulation of Literary Fame
(London and New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 8.
Lefevere’s opinion is borne out by other translation specialists. For

example, Pier-Pascale Boulanger describes Polysystem theory as being
fondée sur la multistratification des systèmes littéraires et des cultures, à savoir non
seulement qu’il y a des littératures et des cultures, mais que celles-ci sont composées
de systèmes, qui eux-mêmes comportent dif férentes strates interagissant selon des
rapports de force semblables à ceux qui animent la dynamique des classes sociales.
Sont également considérées comme autant de facteurs régulant le processus traduc-
tif la relativité et la mouvance des conventions littéraires dif férant selon la période
historique, l’idéologie en cours, la poétique dominante, le donneur d’ouvrage et les
stratégies mises en œuvre par le sujet traduisant. La traduction est reconnue comme
une pratique de réécriture, où s’ef fectue ouvertement ou non la manipulation des
éléments du texte source.15
The term ‘manipulation’ is also used by Philippe Lane to explain the para-
text’s major function: ‘Le rôle du paratexte est essentiellement de l’ordre
de la manipulation, il est d’inf luencer la lecture’.16 It thus becomes clear
that Skopos theory and Polysystem theory converge around this idea that
a text can be modified so as to ensure its acceptance in the target system.
The paratext facilitates this ‘intrusion’, which, while always risky, has been
so successful in Kennedy’s case. It is this manipulation of the source text
by the American author and his French publishers, via the apparatus of the
paratext, and translation in particular, that we shall now examine.
The Most Famous American Writer You Never Heard Of
In the space of ten years American author Douglas Kennedy has become
something of a household name in France. In November 2010 he was
heralded as a ‘grand auteur de polar américain’ by the popular magazine
15 Pier-Pascale Boulanger, ‘L’Épistémologie cinétique de la traduction: Catalyseur

d’éthique’, TTR: traduction, terminologie, rédaction, 17.2 (2004), pp. 57–66 (p 60).
16 Philippe Lane, La Périphérie du texte (Paris: Nathan, 1992), p. 10.
Télérama,17 while in the same month the film adaptation of one of his
novels, L’Homme qui voulait vivre sa vie, was screened in French cine-
mas, with actors of the stature of Romain Duris, Marina Foïs, Catherine
Deneuve and Niels Arestrup in the lead roles. In July 2007 he had already
been dubbed ‘The Most Famous American Writer You Never Heard Of ’
by Paris-based American journalist Donald Morrison.18
Thus, we can say with some certainty that Kennedy, who left the United
States in 1977 and who lives mainly today between London, Paris and
Berlin (he also has a house in Maine), has made it into the French literary
and cultural system. How then did this author, rejected by his American
publisher, win such acclaim in France, to the point of being honoured
with the title of Chevalier dans l’ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2006? We
should suggest that the paratextual apparatus that accompanies his books
has had a major part to play in this, as have the two successive translations
of his first novel, firstly in 1997 and then again in 2008.
First of all, Kennedy has learnt the importance of ‘playing’ the expat
writer looking to find his place in his host country. In the DVD that accom-
panies the large-format paperback edition of the republication of his first
novel, entitled Douglas Kennedy ou l’éloge de la fuite, he often speaks in
French. And when he speaks English, the French translation drowns out
his mother tongue. We see him in Paris, writing in his studio f lat and in
the Metro. He comes across as a f lâneur (‘I am a f lâneur’, he says, as if to
confirm the point) in the purest Baudelairean tradition. In the same film,
his publisher at Belfond, Françoise Trif faux, presents him as ‘le plus français
des auteurs américains’. It should be noted, too, that at no time in the film
is any mention made of the book that it accompanies. This is, therefore, a
much broader marketing strategy, one that aims to ‘introduce’ the author
in, and into, the French literary scene.
17 This interview was uploaded on 25 September 2010: http://www.telerama.fr (accessed

20 November 2010).
18 Donald Morrison, ‘The Most Famous American Writer You Never Heard Of ’, Time
(19 July 2007), http://www.time.com (accessed 20 November 2010).
Kennedy follows in the great tradition of American expat writers in

Paris, whose ranks include Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Gertrude Stein.
Françoise Grauby mentions many of Kennedy’s compatriots who con-
sider time in Paris as a rite of passage in their journey towards becoming
an author. ‘[T]o become [an artist] is a conscious decision’, she writes, one
‘that involves a cultural construct aimed at cementing an identity amongst
an imagined community.’ As Grauby further notes, quoting critic José-
Luis Diaz, ‘we tend to forget that “a writer:” is an imaginary being who
presupposes a staging’. For her, too, the f lâneur is a compulsory role for
the Parisian intellectual: ‘a walk which mimics the stages of a legendary
voyage through the streets haunted by Balzac, Baudelaire, the Surrealists
or Barthes’.19 In Kennedy’s case, the role of the expat, even exiled, writer,
is f lagrantly staged, and not only in this DVD but in book signings and
interviews, some of which are available online. An entire paratextual appa-
ratus has been deployed around his books and is continuously updated to
suit ‘what the public wants’: Internet sites, blogs, social networking media,
‘trailers’ for novels, applications for mobile phones, and so it goes on. All
this serves to reinforce the illusion of a connection between readers and
author, while, to borrow an expression from Philippe Lejeune, ‘[l]’auteur
est, par définition, quelqu’un qui est absent’.20 Indeed, the author-text rela-
tionship is reversed in Kennedy’s case through the weight of the paratext:
‘[l]’auteur doit induire le désir de lire ses textes, alors qu’avant c’était le
texte qui donnait envie d’approcher l’auteur’.21 It would be possible to go
further and to speak in terms of the relative absence of (literary) text in
the face of this paratextual tidal wave (of which Kennedy is not the only
example).22
19 Françoise Grauby, ‘A Transcultural Becoming: The Cultural Immigrants of Paris’,

Literature and Aesthetics, 20.1 (2010), pp. 52–68. My thanks here to Françoise for
pointing me to this article, as well as to the chapter entitled ‘L’image de l’auteur dans
les médias’ in Philippe Lejeune’s Moi aussi (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1986).
20 Lejeune, Moi aussi, p. 87.
21 Lejeune, Moi aussi, p. 94.
22 For a satirical reading of an explosion of paratextual elements to the detriment of
the text, see David Gascoigne’s chapter in the present volume.
If Kennedy has had the support of a particularly ef fective publishing

strategy, he has also benefited from the taste for American novels that has
been prevalent in France since the end of the Second World War. Jean-
Marc Gouanvic, who has done extensive research into the translation of
American crime novels into French, argues that
les écrivains traduits sont dotés d’une légitimité qui émane de leur appartenance à une
langue/culture étrangère. Par exemple, un auteur américain traduit en France après
la Seconde Guerre mondiale jouit d’une légitimité très forte, quel que soit le genre
qu’il pratique. Un auteur d’une nation en émergence n’aura pas la même légitimité,
quel que soit le type de récit traduit.23
The share of the commercial publishing market in France occupied by trans-

lations is considerable; it stands at fourteen per cent, with English being,
unsurprisingly, the most translated language with 5,638 titles in 2009, or
62 per cent of the total number of translations produced.24 This phenom-
enon is confirmed by Donald Morrison: ‘[Conversely,] foreign fiction –
especially topical, realistic novels – sells well in France. Such story-driven
Anglo-Saxon authors as William Boyd, John le Carré and Ian McEwan are
over-represented on French best-seller lists, while Americans such as Paul
Auster and Douglas Kennedy are considered adopted sons.’25 It is interest-
ing to note that Kennedy’s legitimacy as an American author has not been
diminished by his thirty-year ‘exile’ in Europe, nor by his lack of success in
his homeland, where he has only begun to be published again since 2010,
that is to say since he acquired his ‘best-seller’ status in France.
23 This reference is to Gouanvic’s unpublished conference paper delivered at the Congrès

du Conseil International d’Études Francophones held in Montreal from 28 June to
5 July 2010: ‘Traduction et internationalisation dans les luttes de pouvoir en Série
Noire de Marcel Duhamel (Gallimard)’, p. 4. My thanks to the author for sending
me a copy of this paper.
24 Source: Livres Hebdo/Electre, http://www.centrenationaldulivre.fr/IMG/pdf/
Chif fres-cles_2008–2009.pdf (accessed 2 December 2010).
25 Donald Morrison, ‘In Search of Lost Time’, Time, 21 November 2007, http://www.
time.com (accessed 20 November 2010).
In and Out of the Série Noire
Cul-de-sac first appeared in Gallimard’s famous Série Noire. Obviously, this

publishing choice was no accident. Indeed, a great number of American
authors populated this series in the 1940s and 1950s, or at least English
authors passing themselves of f as Americans, such as Peter Cheyney and
James Hadley Chase. These authors owed their success, we should argue,
to the loose style of translation preferred, and often carried out, by Marcel
Duhamel. According to Gouanvic, the Série Noire boasted 3,000 titles in
2010, of which eighty per cent were translations, almost exclusively from
the ‘American’.26 In an interview that he gave in January 2004, the direc-
tor of the collection at the time, Patrick Raynal, having initially explained
how French authors ‘assurent les plus grosses ventes’, went on to mention
Cul-de-sac as being among the greatest commercial successes of the series,
with sales figures in excess of 100,000 copies.27
The style of this first translation reproduces certain stereotypes of the
polar, or Série-Noire-style thriller, of the 1950s, which Gouanvic describes
in the following terms:
le contexte social du récit est soutenu par une manière de traduire bien particulière,
une manière ludique, parfois jubilatoire même, qui ne se prend pas au sérieux et fait
usage de la langue familière et argotique. Il n’y a pas de style empesé dans la Série
Noire, ce qui ne signifie pas que le style est secondaire, loin de là. Mais il est au service
de l’énergie du récit, de son dynamisme.28
This ties in with the conclusions drawn by Polysystem theory. Even if

an American author imported into the French literary system is not in
a position of inferiority, he or she will benefit from being translated in a
‘traditional’ way and thus integrated recognizably with others works of
26 Gouanvic ‘Traduction et internationalisation’, p. 5.

27 Interview with Patrick Raynal conducted by E. Borgers, Brussels, 24 January 2004:
http://polarnoir.net16.net/raynal_interv2.html (accessed 20 November 2010).
28 Gouanvic ‘Traduction et internationalisation’, p. 6.
the genre. Drawing on Richard Jacquemond’s work on the problems of

translating across power dif ferentials, Harry Aveling makes the following
points apposite to our argument here:
[a] hegemonic culture will only translate those works by authors in a dominated
culture that fit the former’s preconceived notions of the latter […];
and
[a]uthors in a dominated culture who dream of reaching a large audience will tend
to write for translation into a hegemonic language, and this will require some degree
of compliance with stereotypes.29
To test this, here are the opening lines of Cul-de-sac as it appeared in the
Série Noire:
Jamais je n’avais vu une telle épidémie de tatouages. Pas un habitant de Darwin ne
semblait y avoir échappé. Toute la faune du bar était tatouée – y compris la strip-
teaseuse, qui se brandouillait sur scène en exhibant un vulcain rutilant sur sa fesse
gauche.
Pas vraiment pulpeuse, l’ef feuilleuse. Une greluchonne, dans les trente ans à vue de
nez – cinquante kilos toute mouillée, le sein anémique et la cuisse maigre. Et avec ça,
l’air brouillée à vie avec l’existence – sans doute parce qu’elle était payée pour laisser
une bande de bushmen toxiques lui reluquer la chatte.30
In order to integrate the novel into the system and thus ‘to sell’, the French
version is initially couched in the American noir tradition, with the famous
black cover with white border and yellow title.31 One might suggest,
29 Harry Aveling, ‘“Belatedly, Asia’s Literary Scene Comes of Age”: Celebratory
English Discourse and the Translation of Asian Literature’, Asiatic, 2.2 (2008),
pp. 14–23 (p. 17). The full text is available at http://asiatic.iiu.edu.my/v2n2/arti-
cle/HarryAveling.pdf (accessed 30 October 2010).
30 Douglas Kennedy, Cul-de-sac (Paris: Gallimard, 1998). The edition referred to here
is the Folio Edition of 2006, and the quotation is taken from page 15.
31 High-quality images of the covers referred to here can be accessed online at the
following websites: for Gallimard’s Série Noire and Folio images of Cul-de-sac, see
http://www.polarnoir.fr/livre.php?livre=liv372; see http://www.douglas-kennedy.
however, that in this case the story is more thriller than polar: there is no
detective and no mystery to be resolved; instead, the suspense stems from
finding out whether and, perhaps especially, how this American anti-hero
will escape from this figurative cul-de-sac, this Australian trap. On the
other hand, the novel’s violence, and particularly that of the principal
female character, corresponds to a certain extent to Raymond Queneau’s
definition of the Série Noire:
La brutalité et l’érotisme ont remplacé les savantes déductions. Le détective ne ram-

asse plus de cendres de cigarette, mais écrase le nez des témoins à coups de talon.
Les bandits sont parfaitement immondes, sadiques et lâches, et toutes les femmes
ont des jambes splendides; elles sont perfides et traîtresses et non moins cruelles
que les messieurs.32
Everything in Cul-de-sac resonates with this description, however satiri-

cally – everything except the eroticism, which is of a rather dif ferent kind.33
By including Kennedy’s first novel in the Série Noire, the publisher was
almost certainly counting on the collection’s prestige and its glorious past,
which Gallimard’s website describes in the following terms ‘le grand souf f le
romanesque américain, emballé dans un noir et blanc “d’époque”.’ 34 Impor-
tantly then, the key to the Série Noire’s success lies not only in the literary
qualities of its American imports but also, and, we should argue, crucially,
in their packaging.
As a result of its success, which was due in large part no doubt to the
translation, Cul-de-sac was republished in 2006 in the famous paperback
com/site/piege_nuptial_&300&1&1&9782714445025&0.html for Belfond’s large-

format edition of Piège nuptial; and for Belfond’s poche Pocket edition, see http://
www.douglas-kennedy.com/site/piege_nuptial_&300&1&2&9782266192828&0.
html (all sites accessed 29 July 2011).
32 This famous quotation can be found on Gallimard’s website: http://www.gallimard.
fr/catalog/html/event/index/index_serienoire.html (accessed 30 October 2010).
33 See Alistair Rolls’s chapter in the present volume for a more detailed reading of the
textual erotics at play, which have more to do with the reading experience than the
details of the plot.
34 Again, see http://www.gallimard.fr/catalog/html/event/index/index_serienoire.
html (accessed 30 October 2010). The emphasis here is mine.
collection ‘Folio policier’. According to the website devoted to this series,

‘plus des deux tiers des titres ont été publiés en première édition dans la
“Série noire” […] Les titres d’auteurs français dominent, mais la littérature
américaine constitue à elle seule plus du tiers de la collection’.35 Cul-de-sac
is mentioned here too as a best-seller, with sales figures of 290,000 copies.
When the book reached its second edition with Folio the austere black
cover was abandoned in favour of a new one, one designed this time to
attract French readers for whom Australia remains one of the last exotic
destinations. Cover images include the famous ‘Beware Kangaroos’ sign,
a yellow combi van and, in the background, Uluru. The novel was next
republished by Gallimard in 2002, again in the Série Noire. And then, in
2008, Cul-de-sac was once more republished, this time by Belfond. The new
look includes a larger format but also a new translation, and with it a new
title, Piège nuptial. In November 2009 Piège nuptial appeared in Pocket’s
livre de poche series, at which point Cul-de-sac was removed from circulation
by Gallimard. The ‘touristy’ style of this cover was again picked up in 2009
when it was in fact used for a travel guide: this appears confirmation that
the sales strategy was firmly focused on attracting French readers with an
attractive, stereotypical image of Australia while, paradoxically, the story
itself seems designed to discourage travel down under.36
The first novel by Kennedy to be published by Belfond was L’Homme
qui voulait vivre sa vie (The Big Picture) in October 2005; it was translated
by Bernard Cohen, who went on next to retranslate The Dead Heart. It is
important to note that all Kennedy’s novels are published in Belfond’s ‘for-
eign literature’ collection (Belfond Etranger–Littérature étrangère) and not
the foreign stream of their ‘noir’ collection (Belfond Etranger–Belfond noir).
The publisher announced the release of Cul-de-sac’s second skin in the
35 http://www.gallimard.fr/collections/fiche_folioetco02.htm (accessed 23 November

2010).
36 Another rather perverse touch is Gallimard’s release in 2009, in its loisirs collection,
of Australie, a travel guide to Australia written by Hugues Festis, Alexis Galmot, Paul-
Jacques Lévêque-Mingam and Laurent Mariot. The image used is the same one that
appears on the Folio edition of Cul-de-sac. It is tempting to see in this turn of events
Cul-de-sac’s revenge, its legacy still living on at Gallimard after its disappearance in
(another) translation.
following terms: ‘Aujourd’hui, Belfond réédite son premier roman-culte,

Piège nuptial, déjà paru sous le titre Cul-de-sac, dans une toute nouvelle
traduction de Bernard Cohen, la voix française de Douglas Kennedy.’37 For
reasons of the costs involved, it is extremely rare for a book to be retrans-
lated after a period of only eleven years. It is all the more astonishing in
this case because, judging from a survey of literary blogs, it seems clear that
the first translation played a large part in the American author’s success.
The reason of fered for this retranslation was the need to give uniformity
to the style of Kennedy’s novels in French.38 In an interview given on 26
November 2008, which is available on Belfond’s website, the author makes
the following statement:
J’ai beaucoup aimé la traduction de Catherine Cheval en Série Noire de Gallimard,

mais Bernard Cohen et moi nous avons travaillé depuis L’Homme qui voulait vivre
sa vie. Donc c’est notre onzième livre ensemble. […] Je pense que c’est un roman
complètement dif férent maintenant. Il comprend mon style, le rythme de ma langue.
[…]. C’est très bien fait.39
Kennedy had by this time acquired greater competence in French and was
able, as a successful writer in the language, albeit via the intermediary of his
translators, to assess the stylistic features of the Série Noire version. Able
to assess this style and, it appears, keen to distance himself from it.
A thorough comparative analysis of the two translations is unfortu-
nately beyond the scope of the present chapter. We should like to note,
however, that the second translation is much closer to the original text. It
marks a clear move away from the style expected of a typical polar. In the
first translation of the novel’s opening lines, for example, Catherine Cheval
uses terms that resonate with the argot of the Série Noire (the words se
brandouiller and une greluchonne leap of f the page in this regard); she plays
extensively with rhymes and sound patterns, thereby giving a comic edge to
situations that are otherwise quite sinister (we might think of the comment
37 http://www.amazon.fr/ (accessed 15 September 2010).

38 It is also possible that Gallimard did not want to give up the rights to the translation
to their competitors.
39 http://www.belfond.fr/site/piege_nuptial_&100&9782714445025.html (accessed
20 November 2010).
‘Pas vraiment pulpeuse, l’ef feuilleuse’). Cheval’s choices correspond well to

Gouanvic’s description, as quoted above, of the playful translation praxis
adopted by Marcel Duhamel and his team. In contrast, the second transla-
tion appears much f latter and, with a few notable exceptions (‘une bande
de bushmen craignos’ seems a better solution than Cheval’s ‘bande de
bushmen toxiques’, but at the same time craignos is a very recent word that
evokes the 1990s more than the 1950s), is generally less cutting. Here are
Cohen’s opening lines:
Partout, des tatouages. Je n’en avais jamais vu autant de ma vie. A Darwin, tout le
monde en avait. Et dans ce bar aussi, y compris la stripteaseuse en train de se tortiller
sur la scène improvisée, exhibant le papillon vulcain qu’elle avait à la fesse gauche.
Je lui donnais la trentaine. Un petit bout de femme maigrelette, quarante-cinq kilos
sans les frusques, poitrine en planche à pain, jambes squelettiques. Et l’air sérieuse-
ment fâchée avec la vie, en plus, peut-être parce qu’elle était payée pour laisser une
bande de bushmen craignos lui reluquer la fente.40
The move to Belfond also instigates a clear change in cover art. As has been
seen in the previous chapter, the cover of the first, large-format paperback
edition abandons Australia for a black cover with a slightly sleazy allu-
sion in fishnet to tourist traps more readily associated with Paris’s Pigalle
district. The confusion is only heightened by the title Piège nuptial. This
combination of title and cover image makes it impossible to guess that
the story takes place in the Australian outback. A second, standard-sized
paperback edition is more explicit: it is made up of a close-up shot of a
young woman, which shows a part, and only a part, of a tee-shirt, a very
short pair of black shorts and fishnet stockings. The ef fect is of a mixture
of dress codes that is now no longer Parisian but is not really anywhere
else either. On the other hand, the Pocket edition reinstates the Australian
setting, including the ‘kangaroo’ sign and a typical outback pub. It is as if
Belfond is playing a double-edged marketing game.41
40 Douglas Kennedy, Piège nuptial (Paris: Belfond, 2008). Here I am referring to the
2009 pocket edition. The quotation is from page 13.
41 The transition from the black cover of the Série Noire to Australian iconography was
more staggered at Gallimard. With Piège nuptial, Belfond appear to be recreating
the journey of Cul-de-sac in one swift marketing move; indeed, one might say that
they are trapping the reader by marrying the French and Australian images…
Conclusion
Douglas Kennedy and his French publishers have proven to be very skilful
in their use of paratextual elements. They have ensured that the American
author’s first novel, in its two successive translations, has been successfully
integrated into the French system. Their first move was to play on the
French reading public’s attraction to noir literature in the American tra-
dition, with its stereotypical motifs and rather derisive 1950s argot. Once
success was assured and the persona of the rootless writer was ‘installed’ in
Paris, a second translation was able to make its appearance, this time very
dif ferent from the first and much closer to the style of the original text.
The covers moved from the plain black of the Série Noire, to black with a
small section revealing a Parisian fishnet stocking, and then to a cover in
full colour, adorned with a close-up shot of the torso of a young woman
whose nationality is ambiguous and who is dressed in a tee-shirt, shorts
and fishnet stockings. At the same time, the paperback editions exploit the
French love af fair with the exotic destination that Australia still represents
in their eyes. Many readers describe how they were struck by the dif ference
between Kennedy’s first novel and those that have followed. It is as if the
American author, once ‘enthroned’ in Paris, was able to cast of f his crime-
writer disguise – even if, as we have seen, this remains an integral part of
his reputation – and speak, while still in translation, in his own voice. This
is a good illustration of Skopos theory and Polysystem theory at work: the
same initial (source) text can result in two dif ferent translations, depending
on the purpose that is set out. Literature in translation must sometimes
resort to subterfuge to gain acceptance in its new home repertoire.
MURRAY PRATT
‘Un jeu avec le je’: Frédéric Beigbeder and

the Value of the Authorial Paratext
11 septembre 2001.
Les Twin Towers se sont écroulés. – Après-midi piscine.
– L’Egoïste romantique, p. 216
Notre égoïsme économique est devenu un mode de vie

– L’Egoïste romantique, p. 32
Frédéric Beigbeder is known to the French public as an author of novels,

autobiographical texts, and chronicles. Among his best known works are
99 francs, a fictionalized rise-and-fall account detailing the excesses and
hypocrisy of the advertising industry, which was adapted for the cinema
in 2007 by Jan Kounen, and Windows on the World, published in 2003, a
meditation on the lives of characters caught up in the events of 11 September
2001 in New York. He has also written the scenario for two bandes dessinées
about the lives of the super rich. He has worked as an editor, advertising
executive, literary critic, music compiler, political advisor and television
presenter. Beigbeder is a celebrity who writes about celebrity, often about
his own celebrity, whether actual or distorted in the form of an avatar or
double, and using either his own name, such as in Un roman français, or
that of alter egos, such as Octave Parengo or Oscar Dufresne, as is the case,
respectively, in the thinly veiled fiction 99 francs (2000) and in the ambigu-
ously autobiographical journal, L’Egoïste romantique (2005), about which
Beigbeder comments, ‘[c]’est un antijournal […]. A partir de mes notes et
de mes carnets intimes, j’ai fait des transformations: il y a des vérités et des
86 MURRAY PRATT
choses complètement inventées.’1 Blurring the boundaries between fiction

and autobiography is not a new practice. Indeed, the tradition is a long-
standing one, and since the publication and critical success of A l’ami qui
ne m’a pas sauvé la vie by Hervé Guibert in 1990, with its complex inter-
play of the fabricated truth and the truly false,2 the autofictional domain
is often considered as constituting a major genre in contemporary French
literature.
Writing in 1987, only three years prior to Guibert’s inf luential work,
Gérard Genette imagines a more straightforward demarcation between the
author, the text and the extra-textual when he designates one category of
threshold between text and the hors-texte as the ‘public authorial epitext’.3
Ef fectively, with this term, Genette is referring to public appearances made
by authors in which they discuss their works, such as occur in print and
broadcast interviews. For the purposes of Seuils, his focus is on demonstrat-
ing how the transactional negotiations set up by the paratext circumscribe
and inf luence, potentially define, the readings brought to bear on specific
texts. Writing as he was in the retrospectively innocent mid-1980s, his
approach is one that assumes a less highly mediatized realm of experience
than we currently inhabit, where simply constituting a sub-category of a
category was probably quite suf ficient to describe and circumscribe a par-
ticular readerly relation. Indeed, it becomes increasingly more dif ficult to
remind ourselves that a world existed, not so very long ago, that predated
the advent of hypertextuality as an everyday paradigm; multi-channel 24/7
television with its insatiable thirst for celebrity gossip; or even the sense
that advertising campaigns could be ‘multi-platform’, never mind ‘viral’.
Beigbeder (and his alter egos), however, inhabits a somewhat dif ferent
multiverse. This chapter argues that in the case of Beigbeder, the empha-
sis on the persona of the author’s brand value and resulting uncertainty
about how far this is actually anchored in his life – and, in particular, the
1 Angie David, Frédéric Beigbeder (Paris: Editions Léo Scheer, 2007), p. 59.
2 See Jean-Pierre Boulé, Voices of the Self (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press,
1999).
3 Gérard Genette, Seuils (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1987).
‘Un jeu avec le je’: Frédéric Beigbeder and the Value of the Authorial Paratext 87
putative lifestyle that emerges within his work – is elevated to a level of

visibility which determines key aspects of the textual encounter. It does
so by interrogating some of the ways in which, as a complexly constructed
public persona woven into and around his texts, brand Beigbeder func-
tions to set up, promote, but equally to problematize, the product he is
placing. The focus is therefore on how Beigbeder positions himself and
his writing, through the paratextual, as an exploration of identity, value
and markets. In the process, I contend that by interweaving the authorial
persona throughout the filigree of the text itself, Beigbdeder expands the
realm of the paratext such that it carries over into the text itself, as well as
determining the readerly approach to text. Finally, I conclude that these
strategies combine to ef fectively explode the geospatial paradigm according
to which the authorial paratext is normally configured, suggesting instead
a much more complex (and more up-to-date) geometry of relationality
between authors, texts and readers. Many of these traits can be detected
in each of Beigbeder’s works. One might cite the collaborative nature of
the dialogue about religion and atheism which he conducts with Jean-
Michel di Falco (the Bishop of Gap); the inclusion of work-notes at the
threshold to his second BD collaboration or the conceit of writing about
his family history as a black sheep from the perspective of his prison cell in
his most markedly autobiographical text to date.4 This chapter, however,
concentrates on two major texts as a way of elucidating the ways in which
Beigbeder’s problematization of the paratext operates.
4 Respectively, the texts referred to are: Jean-Michel di Falco and Frédéric Beigbeder,
Je crois – moi non plus (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 2004); Frédéric Beigbeder and Philippe
Bertrand, Rester normal à Saint Tropez (Paris: Dargaud, 2004); and Frédéric
Beigbeder, Un roman français (Paris: Editions Grasset, 2009).
88 MURRAY PRATT
Textual (Im)Precisions
The texts considered here are 99 francs, published at the time of the mil-
lennial moment when the franc gave way to the euro (and therefore mer-
iting the hasty addition of a suitably marked-up subtitle ‘(14,99 €)’), and
L’Egoïste romantique, which followed in 2005.5 On face value, these are
quite dif ferent texts, and dif ferent kinds of texts. The former presents as a
novel, charting the career of a promising advertising executive, as, through
a combination of nonchalance and heroin, it starts to self-destruct, only
to bound back with a prize-winning, and hence utterly inane, campaign
promoting the yoghurt ‘Maigrelette’ for the company ‘Madone’. The latter
text is more fragmented, a cross between a journal documenting the life
and times of a fictional author as he lives (or perhaps more often imagines
living) the high life, and a series of Pascalian meditations on the, or perhaps
given the unverifiable and often fabulous nature of much of the incidents,
a world of celebrity.
However, despite these superficial dif ferences, an attempt to chart
some of the characteristics of each text, largely with reference to their con-
ventional textual and paratextual apparatuses, begins to reveal a surprising
amount of similarity, particularly with respect to the ludic approach to the
verifiability of information and the status of the texts.
5 While I regret that I have not retained my receipt for the purchase of the folio edi-
tion of 99 francs (Paris: Editions Grasset, 2000), my recollection is that the actual
price I paid for the book in Bordeaux bore no relation to the titular value in either
francs or euros. To complicate matters further, my folio copy of L’Egoïste romantique
(Paris: Editions Grasset, 2005) bears a label on the back cover indicating that it cost
400 bhat, a reminder that I bought it, appropriately given its globe-trotting content,
at the bookshop of the Alliance Française in Bangkok.
Title 99 francs (2000) L’Egoïste romantique (2005)

Main character Oscar Parengo Octave Dufresne
Four sections, each written
Predominantly first person
in a dif ferent person (je, tu,
in each of the eight sections,
vous, ils), interspersed with
Authorial voice / listed in the index at the end
random inserts, e.g. ‘ET
textual organization of the book, allocated to the
MAINTENANT UNE
consecutive seasons of two
PAGE DE PUBLICITE’
years and including subtitles.
(pp. 65–6). No index.
Dedicated to two individuals.
Quotations from works Dedicated to one individual
by Aldous Huxley, Alain with an unattributed
Souchon and Charles quotation. Further quotations
Dedications Bukowski. Comment: from Louis Aragon and
and epigraphs ‘THE NAMES HAVE Jacques Audiberti (‘Qu’est-ce
BEEN CHANGED TO qu’un “journal”? Un
PROTECT THE GUILTY’ roman.’). Further quotations
(p. 13). Further quotations introducing each section.
introducing each section.
Ludic ‘credits’ attributing the
character Tamara’s wardrobe
to ‘Stella McCartney pour
Chloé’, referring to a non-
Standard thanks to three
existent website and stating
Acknowledgements individuals ‘sans qui ce livre
that the text will soon be
n’existerait pas’.
available in virtual reality.
Standard thanks to eleven
individuals, concluding that
‘[c]e livre est aussi leur faute’.
Lundi.
Tu crois que j’ai un truc à
Tout est provisoire: l’amour,
dire? Tu crois que j’ai vécu
Opening lines l’art, la planète Terre, vous,
quelque chose d’important?
moi.
Peut-être pas, peut-être pas.
Je suis juste un homme.
90 MURRAY PRATT
What becomes clear from this attempt at a structural comparison

is that in neither text can Beigbeder (as author) be said to be directly
implicated as the subject of the narrative. Instead, each text approaches
its external interface with a degree of irreverence for the conventions that
normally circumscribe the boundaries separating the textual construct
from the context within which it is actualized. Moreover, these guerrilla
tactics continue to operate within the texts themselves, constituting in
each case a sort of diversionary smokescreen that continuously erodes any
diegetic certainty.
If 99 francs is the more fully plotted of the two, and contains more of
the textual paraphernalia and indices of fiction, it nonetheless nods and
winks towards an authorial reference, containing near the start a phrase
that could be considered either redundant or a clear allusion to some degree
of similarity between author and narrator: ‘Etant donné qu’Octave c’est
moi’ (p. 29). The authorial association carries through into the film in the
form of the cameo appearances Beigbeder makes as the mirror image of
Jean Dujardin, the actor playing Octave. Equally, the path of the textual
plot is often interrupted. On one level, the storyline is repeatedly sup-
planted by fantasy sequences, usually laying out various versions of the
advertising campaign, but towards the end dissolving to a lengthy capital-
ized and sloganized commandment, consisting of the wall-to-wall interior
life of homo publicitus who, among other things, is enjoined to imagine the
perfection of Gillette, the freshness of Hollywood chewing gum as he is
welcomed into ‘UN MONDE MEILLEUR’ (p. 299). At the same time,
narrative development is often suspended by meditations on contempo-
rary living and attitudes, as announced by the opening lines of the text and
continuing into passages such as a ref lection on boredom as the modern
condition, containing the aphorism ‘[l]e monde est irréel, sauf quand il
est chiant’ (p. 152).
Philosophizing about post-modernity, consumption and celebrity
serves as the soundtrack to L’Egoïste romantique, with passages ranging
from ‘everyman’ social observation, such as contemplating how the solitude
of the cybernaut is the logical consequence of individualism and economic
egotism (p. 32), or ‘[d]iscothéquisation du monde, toujours’ (p. 249), to
accounts of expensive dinners with celebrities. While the ‘journal’ contains
a plot insofar as it details an emerging relationship, this is secondary to the

nombrilism it occasions, in particular, the obsession with what it means to
be a celebrity, or, in the text’s own human economic register, an explora-
tion of the conditions and surplus values that construct celebrity. Debat-
ing Michel Houellebecq’s emphasis on poetry as the way to ‘rester vivant’,
Beigbeder proposes ‘rester normal’ (also the title of his first bande dessinée)
as the aim of the celebrity, describing a bathmology à la Renaud Camus
according to which the more that famous people pay attention to the eve-
ryday tales of the people they meet, the more they are enacting normalcy,
such that their image will be enhanced, and, conversely but simultaneously,
the more calculating they are (pp. 126–7). To some extent, with Houel-
lebecq, Beigbeder’s world in L’Egoïste romantique is one that is hurtling
towards a post-human apocalypse insofar as the sustainability of the human
relation has been overtaken by a form of object relations that renders any
form of integrity unviable. The dif ference though is one of tone. In contrast
to Houellebecq’s purviews of humanity on the brink of reproductive and
af fective crisis in texts such as La Possibilité d’une île, Beigbeder’s diarist
seems to refract his disillusion through layers of personal dissolution and
malfunction.
As with 99 francs, the uncertainty principle extends to the level of
diegesis, in particular as Dufresne’s globe-trotting and name-dropping
escalate to untenable proportions. Emblematic of his series of ref lections
on the diary form, autofiction and the works of other diarists (including
Guibert), in one passage Beigbeder/Dufresne addresses head-on the ques-
tion he imagines readers posing about what sorts of lies he is telling in the
text. He answers:
Raconter sa vie sous son vrai nom rend les choses ennuyeuses car beaucoup trop sim-
ples: on connaît la tronche de l’auteur, on sait qui parle, on voit tout – trop facile, et
puis tant de génies l’ont fait (tant de ringards aussi). Le détour par un hétéronyme
transforme la lecture de ce journal en un jeu de cache-cache. ‘L’Egoïste romantique’
pourrait être défini ainsi: c’est un jeu avec le je. (p. 133)
The impression gleaned by comparing the texture of these converging

autofictions published five years apart is of an unusual and complex terrain, a
literary space that borrows much of its staging from fiction (and cites heavily
92 MURRAY PRATT
in borrowing all the authority of the canon to do so), but one that permits
forms of ingress by the author to a messy mediatized world less familiar
to literary conventions. Beigbeder himself emerges as the undoubted star
of the show, as a far from integral individual, interpellated by publicity to
the extent that, at times, he functions as little more than one other sign in
the forest, while, at others, he retains the ability to contemplate or com-
ment on hyper-consumerism and the cult of celebrity. These shifting sands
defy, in a sense deliberately, the easy recognition of positions that Beigbe-
der might take or clear messages (i.e. devoid of cynicism or irony) about
how he envisions contemporary society. First and foremost, the titles and
covers, followed by the opening sections of each publication, set in motion
a range of readerly operations that draw attention to the status and content
of the texts. However, by further considering the paratexts of 99 francs and
L’Egoïste romantique, as an exploration of a domain, the locus of territo-
rial expansion, and finally as a site of self-destruction, it is possible to map
the field of land mines and the consequent perturbation of reading, and,
importantly, consuming, certainties that he is laying out.
Paratextual Exploration, Expansion and Explosion
99 francs
The folio edition of 99 francs draws attention to the implications of entitling

a novel with a price, with its cover image consisting of nothing other than
a large, stick-on (or alternatively peel-of f ), bright yellow label of the kind
associated with bargain shops, marked in blurry print with the numeri-
cal value ‘99F’. The actual title is repeated in the usual places, beneath the
author’s name in the top left hand corner of the front cover, the spine, the
back cover and the title page. The impression of the image ef fectively sup-
plants the title such that the book, rather than having a title per se, has a
price, and therefore a value. Aside from the initial confusion as to whether
99F (or the euro equivalent) is the actual price to be paid for the book,
there arises the question as to how this (price rather than) title relates to
the contents of the book. For, immediately, the ef fect of this transposition
is for consumers (rather than readers) to identify (and identify with) the
object, or book (rather than text). To do so, however, is far from straight-
forward: how can they measure the value of the product, other than rec-
ognizing that it is no doubt a bargain (given that ninety-nine is, as we all
know, considerably better value than one hundred), when there is no title
to suggest the content (other than the price)? Alternatively, is the referent
of the price the author, next to whose name it is displayed?
The above scenario is a little artificial. As made much more explicit
in the movie version of 99F (the film uses the symbol ‘f ’ rather than the
word ‘francs’ in its title), via the montage-deluge of publicity that sets up
its opening scenes and the barcode theme of its opening credits, real read-
ers, like savvy movie viewers, recognize the postmodern ludicity at work
in the conf lation of title with price, and the resulting cognitive processes
are less naïve or strictly logical than those indicated. The impact of this
strategy, however, is to raise ontological questions about the values that
are ascribed, to texts and books, authors and authority, and about the acts
of reading and consumption, relevant not least in an era when technologi-
cal control over digital copyright material is under scrutiny. Perhaps the
English adage, knowing the price of everything but the value of nothing,
is pertinent, in that this extension of the paratext into the commercial
transactions that enable access to artistic production is also an explora-
tion of the ways in which consumer culture increasingly has no hors-texte.
If, as the opening lines of the novel explain, ‘[t]out est provisoire’, then
everything is also commercial, and it is this theme that the text goes on
to explore: ‘Tout est provisoire et tout s’achète. L’homme est un produit
comme les autres, avec une date limite de vente’ (p. 18). Expounding the
politics of the post-Fordist era of publicity in the following pages, Beig-
beder describes an experience of absolute freedom (of purchase) which
paradoxically imposes absolute captivity to the market. It is within this
context that Parengo recounts the mind-numbing nullity of a campaign
meeting, and (perhaps more as Beigbeder) justifies its inscription within a
literary project: ‘Je ne vois pas l’intérêt d’écrire des livres si ce n’est pas pour
cracher dans la soupe’ (p. 32). The intention is of opening up a critical space
94 MURRAY PRATT
from which Beigbeder can operate as a spoiler to hyper-consumer society;

yet given the all-pervasive brain-washing characteristics of his target, he
does so by extending the moment of paratextual confusion further into
his text. While, at the threshold, readers were prompted to wonder about
the value of everything (nothing), the narrative has to continuously switch
focus in order to keep them there, hence the tone shifts of narrative voice
and the gradual disintegration of the storyline such that the latter sections
are characterized by ever more extreme or daring assaults on the bastions of
capitalism with their unrestrained legal reach. Listing in billions the adver-
tising budgets of major French companies, Beigbeder (again, perhaps at this
point more himself than his avatar) concedes that the pretext for fiction
itself is economically determined: ‘Quant au livre… Madone n’est pas le vrai
nom de mon client afin d’éviter un procès pour “dénigrement de marque
déposée”, “contrefaçon”, “parasitisme”, “dif famation”, “détournement” ou
“concurrence déloyale”’ (p. 236). The ‘better world’ of advertising, the text
is contending, is won (or rather fabricated and ultimately lost, since it is
lived by nobody) at the expense of more meaningful forms of human values,
themselves now dif ficult to (re-)imagine since we all (including Parengo
and Beigbeder) are now ef fectively only defined in monetary (or sexual,
which comes down to the same thing in the af fective market) terms. Only
through extending the radical paratextual strategies around the reading
experience itself, and thereby drawing readers into direct contact with that
reality themselves, is Beigbeder able to explore and explode the ubiquity
of our economic enslavement.
L’Egoïste romantique
In the 2005 text, the title, while not quite so confounding, nonetheless
indicates a puzzle of sorts that leads into the text. To start with, it describes
a paradox, in that egotism is, by definition an obsession with the self that is
so absorbing that the regard for or empathy with others, typical of love or
romance, is incompatible.6 There are, competing definitions of romantique
6 See Freud’s introduction to narcissism. Sigmund Freud, On Metapsychology: The

Theory of Psychonalysis (London: Penguin, 1984), pp. 59–97 (especially, p. 93).
in French: it can also mean ‘fanciful’, ‘imaginary’ or even ‘impractical’ as

well as referring directly to Romanticism as a literary movement, and, to
some extent in this context, connoting af finities with both the novel form
(although it dif fers in sense from the more typical adjective ‘romanesque’
in this context). Given that the back cover (of the folio edition) refers to
‘un écrivain fictif ’ and quotes Beigbeder’s definition of the book as an
‘antijournal’, ‘un miroir déformant que je promène le long de mon nombril’,
the allusion to literary style and genre within the title is not lost. However,
the same back cover also mentions that he is an ‘obsédé sexuel’, redirect-
ing threshold readers to the original paradox of the title, while the front
cover contains a naïve style painting (attributed to Antonin Louchard) of
a blushing man in a suit surrounded by a group of naked females arrayed
like so much fruit among the branches of a tree. The twin epithets to the
text, from works by Louis Aragon and Jacques Audiberti, respectively, re-
emphasize the notion of imposture, asking, rhetorically in the first instance,
‘Quel est celui qu’on prend pour moi?’, and in the second, ‘Qu’est-ce qu’un
journal?’, to which the answer given is ‘un roman’.
If little about the nature and status of the text or its author is entirely
clear as the text commences, it is nonetheless obvious from the paratext
that Beigbeder is again inducting readers into a postmodern situation, one
that will be both profoundly self-referential and ontologically uncertain.
In keeping with these expectations, many of the diary entries focus on the
veracity or otherwise of the text and nature of the author’s relation to it,
drawing on an impressive range of literary antecedents in the process, with-
out resolving these in any comprehensive way. The subject matter, insofar as
it is possible to dif ferentiate between this and the self-referential ref lections
that are interwoven with it, relates to the diary author’s dissolute and self-
absorbed life and lifestyle as one of le people, with a particular focus on his
quest to get laid, as often and with as little regard for partners as possible.
A typical sequence includes passages such as the following: ‘Pénélope a un
téléphone qui vibre. Je me dis qu’il faudrait lui of frir un vibro qui sonne’;
‘Pour que les gens tombent amoureux de vous, il n y a pas trente-six méth-
odes: il faut faire semblant de s’en foutre complètement’; and ‘Je suis un
vampire: je m’empare de la vie des autres pour la faire croire mienne. Je
suce les existences’ (all p. 88). These observations come across as frank, in
that they are delivered from behind the carapace of polite society, but also
96 MURRAY PRATT
of fensive, in that they objectify others, usually women but also frequently
gay men (for the egoist any attention from others justifies high self-regard).
The two strands suggested by the paratext (the romantic egoist and the
fictional diary) merge around this increasingly exaggerated caricature of
the author as a malfunctioning sex machine: by denying that Dufresne is
Beigbeder, the author has licence to play out a fantasy version of his desires
without assuming responsibility for it – ‘Oscar Dufresne, c’est lui en pire;
sinon pourquoi l’aurait-il inventé?’ (p. 31).
There is a further sense, though, in which the paratext’s twin focus on
the paradox and the postmodern merges in L’Egoïste romantique, one that
entails extending the critique of advertising expounded in 99 francs into
the later text. In the earlier work, Beigbeder reveals that the real cost of
advertising is the soul: rather than making dreams come true, the industry is
accused of erecting a wall of publicity that separates contemporary humans
from experience, territorializing desire such that existence is reduced to
consumption. Characteristic of this state of being is a focus on price and
transaction, rather than moral or ethical value. Here, the egotist’s approach
to other people is framed in similar economic terms. Rereading the sequence
of passages quoted above on page eighty-eight of L’Egoïste romantique in
this light, it is possible to notice the transactional emphasis of each of the
imagined relations (giving a gift, acting in a certain way to produce an
ef fect, draining the lifeblood of others to give one’s own value).
In fact, once one begins to read the text in this way, an entire math-
ematics of solipsism begins to emerge, according to which each instance
of an event (whether diegetically imagined or described) is weighed up in
terms of possible benefits to the actors (whether Dufresne, or Beigbeder, or
a generic on or nous). Considering just the opening few entries of the text
in this way it is possible to unpack layers of economic calculation – measur-
ing ef fort against return, assigning market value against age, mapping out
unit prices that can define the individual in any given context – operating
beneath the surface of almost all the remarks made. This can be most readily
detected in the shorter aphorisms, such as ‘[i]l y a une justice: les femmes
jouissent plus fort que nous mais plus rarement’ (p. 16) or ‘[l]a crise du
quinquagénaire, moi je l’ai vingt ans plus tôt’ (p. 17). However, the longer
passages also function according to the same logic. This can take the form
of an obsessive quantification of the author’s environment and entourage

that structures an account of a holiday (pp. 17–18) made ‘worthwhile’ by the
sight of a beautiful girl (‘le seul véritable génie que je connaisse’, ‘[i]l y a trop
d’algues pour se baigner’, ‘[o]n enchaîne’, ‘[o]n croise’ ‘elle ne m’a pas donné
[…] pourtant […] grâce à elle […] réussies’) or equally form the economic
rationale for an opinion: ‘J’en ai marre des billets d’humeur. Rien n’est plus
épuisant que tous ces chroniqueurs payés pour ronchonner’ (p. 15).
In one entry on the second page of text this is made quite explicit:
Dufresne asks whether the rich have increasingly bad taste before listing
the products associated with luxury and comparing these unfavourably to
‘les nouvelles marques de fringues comme Zara ou H&M’ which he con-
siders have ‘rendu les bimbos fauchées mille fois plus sexy que les pétasses
friquées’ (p. 16). In a chronologically unfeasible prolepsis this entry ends
by promising that the author will reveal, at the end of ‘ce livre’ why he
is disgusted by the smell of leather in luxury car upholstery. And here,
having teased, it is probably necessary to digress, if only momentarily. For
anyone interested, the pat answer is that it reminds him of his playboy
father’s suite of limousines, and Dufresne of fers the facile resolution of
his complex psychology with, ef fectively, and here endeth the digression,
an equation: Dad was liked by girls (or maybe his cars were). Dufresne fils
(as was) wanted to be liked by Dad. Hence Dufresne needs to be liked by
girls (pp. 365–6). And maybe hence too he needs to chase luxury accoutre-
ments while being disgusted by them?
A slightly more humble and human version of the same calculation fol-
lows and signals the final solitary image of the text: ‘Si personne n’appartient
à personne, alors personne ne s’occupe de personne, et ce sera chacun pour
soi pour l’éternité’ (p. 366). Dufresne and Beigbeder have journeyed here
to the horror at the heart of post-capitalist relations (signalled by sub-
title of the first section of the book, ‘Voyage au bout de la Night’) and
entered into the paradox that structures both the text and the title: How
is it possible to love (well, be loved – it’s almost the same thing, isn’t it?)
when we are so thoroughly constructed as the self-seeking and self-serving
individual worlds-to-ourselves that the market needs us to be? How is it
possible (other than via a playful exploration and explosion of the limits
of our society and culture) even to imagine such a question?
98 Murray Pratt
Concluding Thought
One ef fect of redefining and extending the paratextual territory in market

terms is that it stretches to the limits the notion of contact between authors
and readers, in essence reconstituting this as a commercial transaction, an
act of consumption as much as a textual engagement. In absolute (i.e. for
Beigbeder, market) terms, authors have less control over the minute details
of the dissemination of their texts, ceding to marketing strategy, and instead
become one cog in an industrial machine aimed at maximizing returns for
publishers. To take the notion of the book cover alone, a concept much
meditated elsewhere in this volume (perhaps only possible at the point
in time when Kindle and tablets threaten to render it redundant), arrays
of focus groups and visual-imagery expertise are brought to bear on every
aspect of the design of an individual book, not to mention the constraints
imposed by publisher formats. Taken to its logical extremes, this tendency
constitutes the overwriting of literary value (merit) with commercial value,
or price. At the same time, Beigbeder’s view is that human values (morals,
ethics, generosity, love) and relations are increasingly defined in monetary
terms in a hyper-consumerized world that reduces experience to consump-
tion and people to objects. Through extending an awareness of the trans-
actional nature of literature from the point of the paratext where its most
visible manifestations lie (title, price, author, cover, quotes), drawing these
further into the text itself, and by exploding myths that diegetically separate
fiction from lived experience, Beigbeder opens up a terrain in both these
texts where we can become more aware of, and explore the square roots
and dif ferential equations subtending, our own values.
HÉLÈNE JACCOMARD
The Paratext of Yasmina Reza’s « Art »:

Overf lowing the Image
The face of the Other at each moment destroys and overf lows the plastic
image it leaves me.
– Levinas1
You only have to glance at the ten or so French editions of Yasmina Reza’s
« Art » that have been published since the play was first written in 1994 to
be struck by the variety of cover designs.2 And yet, little critical analysis
exists of the illustrations used for book covers, and still less for when the
book is a play.
In signalling the importance of the editorial peritext in the reception
of a book, Gérard Genette was keen to stress the crucial role played by
1 ‘Le visage d’Autrui détruit à tout moment, et déborde l’image qu’il me laisse.’
Emmanuel Lévinas, Totalité et infini: Essai sur l’extériorité (The Hague: Martinus
Nijhof f Publishers, [1961] 1991), pp. xvi, 3. The translation is taken here from
Alphonso Lingis’s translation of Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (The
Hague: Martinus Nijhof f Publishers, 1979), pp. 50–1 (first published by University
of Duquesne Press in 1969).
2 The English translation of the French title of Reza’s play « Art » is not unproblem-
atic. Both double and single inverted commas have been used for the English title.
The spelling ‘Art’ is the more usual and is the choice for Christopher Hampton’s
translation (Dramatists Play Service, 1999; London: Faber & Faber, 2005). Clearly,
the inclusion of the inverted commas in the original title has paratextual significance
that poses a challenge to publishers. Their inclusion by Reza signals, as early as the
cover, the debate as to what may and may not be designated as art. For the purposes
of this chapter, the French guillemets have been retained.
100 HÉLÈNE JACCOMARD
the words inscribed around the text proper: the author’s name, the title
and sub-title, colophon, epigraph, dedication, cover blurb and advertising
slogans. Great list-maker that he was, Genette includes covers and their
artwork among the elements to be taken into consideration.3 On the same
page, he provides anecdotes on the significance of the colour of a cover
(for example, the yellow covers formerly used for licentious books); a bit
further on, he suggests that ‘quatrièmes [de couverture] presque muettes’
can be interpreted as ‘un signe extérieur de noblesse’.4 A year after Seuils
was published, Genette developed his short analysis of the anthumous and
posthumous covers of A la Recherche du temps perdu, which seemed to him
to strengthen the case for an autobiographical reading of the text.5 In the
twenty-five years since the publication of these seminal texts, there has been
little follow-up work on cover art. And yet, in an era like ours that is so
dominated by the image the relationship between peritextual iconography
and the text is a vital aspect of any work on the paratext. The meaning of
cover art, or its absence, is not obvious, notably because it is more dif ficult
to evaluate the impact of a (visual) percept than a (written) concept.
Following Genette’s analysis of Proust, our aim here is to look more
closely at the interplay of the cover and text of the dif ferent editions of
Yasmina Reza’s most famous work, « Art », which has been staged all
over the world, several times a year, including in many places at the same
time, since it was first performed in Paris in 1994. The printed version of
« Art » has been republished eight times (nine times if we include the
digital version).6 The dif ference in the covers can in part be explained by

5 Genette, Seuils, p. 33; and Gérard Genette, ‘The Proustian Paratexte’, trans. Amy G.
McIntosh, SubStance, 56 (1988), 63–77.
6 Throughout this chapter I use the terms ‘republish’ and ‘republication’ to describe
the play’s réédition by French and other publishing houses. As there is little (and
no standardized) semantic dif ference in English between the terms ‘reprint’ and
‘republish / republication’, no distinction is made here between the publication of
a new editions of « Art » by one publisher and the play’s publication for the first
time by another.
the change of publishing houses. In this way the play’s journey has been
recorded on paper, leaving rich ground for the literary scholar.7 Further-
more, the need to question the covers of « Art » – and especially, the
question of whether or not they include images, and if so, what sort – is
raised by the play itself, which is all about the plastic arts. By way of a
quick reminder, the relationship of three friends is put to the test when
one of them pays a high price for a canvas that is entirely white. The jux-
taposition of the text and peritext becomes part, more or less deliberately,
of the play itself, hence the importance of dealing with it deftly, without
imposing one single interpretation (as Faber & Faber did with the English
version).8 While for Genette the paratext sheds light on the meaning of a
text, it seems that the inf luence exerted by and among all elements of the
paratext and the text itself is ever-shifting and multidirectional. This close
reading of « Art » will thus allow us to broaden a much-neglected field of
study: drama publishing and the corresponding paratexts.9
7 Editors’ note: The digital trace of this development is still reasonably easy to trace,
too. At the time of publishing the present volume the majority of the covers dis-
cussed in this chapter can still be found on publishers’ and booksellers’ websites.
Suggested links are given at the relevant point in the text. The one cover that could
not be located on Internet is the Albin Michel edition with the brown cover (2002,
2009), which is no longer in print.
8 For an image of this cover, see http://www.faber.co.uk/work/art/9780571190140
(accessed 1 August 2011).
9 The paratext has almost exclusively been studied in relation to the novel. The excep-
tions include some rare studies of the poetic paratext, such as, for example, David Orr,
‘The Age of Citation’, New York Times (19 September 2010): http://www.nytimes.
com/2010/09/19/books/review/Orr-t.html (accessed 29 October 2010).
The Theatrical Peritext
Even if we limit our study to iconography alone, the theatrical peritext

presents particular challenges insofar as plays are designed to be staged.
Several scenarios emerge: in some cases the play is printed and remains to be
put on stage; in others the play stays in script form and is only distributed
within the limited circles of the production; in still others the text appears
at the same time as the play is staged, which is the case for « Art », which
was staged at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées and published by Actes Sud
papiers, both in 1994. It should be added that the staging of plays prolifer-
ates the epitext in the form of posters, programmes,10 and photos or even
films. In the case of « Art », the first production was indeed filmed and a
version is available on line.11
The theatrical peritext suf fers more than that of any other genre from
a surfeit of elements that prevent what Gilbert David sees as its nebulous
possibilities becoming actualized.12 This risk has been noted by certain
theorists in relation to the novelistic peritext and the hermeneutic limit
it places on Genette’s analysis. It is against the background of such an
inf lation of paratextual inventories that Robert Allen makes the case for
a re-examination of the notion of the paratext.13 Allen points out that
Genette finds himself in the dif ficult position of cleaving the text and the
paratext. Indeed, nothing could be simpler than interpreting covers via their
text. What is more, Allen posits that the paratext can only be understood
diachronically. This makes a good deal of sense and explains our brief detour
through the fifteen-year chronology of the republications of « Art ».
10 What David terms the ‘contrat ante festum’. Gilbert David, ‘Éléments d’analyse du
paratexte théâtral: Le cas du programme de théâtre’, Annuaire théâtral, 34 (2003),
pp. 96–111 (p. 96).
11 http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x66105_art-de-yasmina-reza-la-piece-aux-2_fun
12 David, ‘Éléments d’analyse du paratexte théâtral’, p. 97.
13 Robert Allen, ‘Perpetually Beginning until the End of the Fair: The Paratextual
Poetics of Serialised Novels’, Neohelicon, 37 (2010), pp. 181–9.
The Covers of Plays
Any study of book covers is necessarily located at the meeting point of
the literary and the practico-economic, an area of the cultural field where
numerous, and barely indistinguishable, intentionalities come together. The
intentions of the author, however, are not among them since a book’s cover
depends on protocols that have nothing to do with writing or the written
text. Publishing conventions, potentially supplemented by the constraints
of a particular series editor, take the process into a cultural field oriented
towards consumption, with emphasis heavily stacked on packaging and the
act of reception. Whatever the case, producers of text set up their ef fects
at the pre-text stage. Whether the publishers choose to illustrate the cover
or not, whether they obey their own protocols for a particular text or not,
whether they go as far as to design a specific cover for an author, all these
decisions are significant in terms of the paratext. Or, in the words of the
contemporary art review, Bil Bo K, ‘[l]a surface possède un double avantage
et elle est la seule à en bénéficier; d’un côté elle se trouve en relation avec le
dessous qu’elle entoure et sans doute protège; de l’autre, elle communique
avec le dehors qu’elle enregistre’.14
First then, a few words on the peritextual practices of theatrical pub-
lishers. In the theatrical world, publishing has experienced an ongoing
crisis since its golden age in the 1950s.15 Collections specializing in plays
struggle to keep up with playwrights’ demands. In this light, the multiple
republications of « Art » are all the more unusual.
The Internet site Théâtre contemporain lists 175 theatrical publishers,
including Solitaires intempestifs, L’Arche, L’Avant-Scène théâtre, Théât-
rales and Actes Sud papiers.16 This figure of 175 tends to overlook certain
14 Bil Bo K, 27 January 2006. http://www.scopalto.com/magazine/bil-bo-k (accessed

28 November 2010).
15 See, for example, Martine Antle, ‘L’année théâtrale 1999’, The French Review, 74.2
(2000), pp. 46–51 (p. 46).
16 http://www.theatre-contemporain.net/editions/editeurs (accessed 30 October 2010).
Interestingly, some texts cited as plays are in fact novels, including Anna Gavalda’s
Je l’aimais.
disparities: for example, some publishers produce only one or two texts
before disappearing (such as Thelem or Editions Zinedi); the others boast
catalogues of between eighteen and 500 plays, and sometimes double-up
as publishers of books and reviews, which is the case of L’Avant-Scène
théâtre. A production rate of twenty-five plays per year, such as that of
L’Arche, is considered exceptionally high. These publishing houses work
alongside generalists for whom theatrical publication is a sideline, usually
providing an outlet for house authors, which is the case for Gallimard (205
plays), Les Editions de Minuit (112 plays), Christian Bourgois (nineteen
plays) and Albin Michel (eighteen plays). These big publishing houses
rarely have a specific cover style for plays whereas specialist publishers use
distinctive designs, such Solitaires intempestifs and their famous royal blue
cover with white clouds.
When Actes Sud papiers published « Art » in 1994 they had already
published La Traversée de l’hiver (staged in 1987 but only available in print
since 1990) and Conversations après un enterrement (1991). L’Homme du
hasard followed in 1995.17 In total therefore, Actes Sud papiers have to date
published four of Reza’s nine plays. According to its mission statement,
the objective of Actes Sud papiers is to publish works that ‘questionnent
le travail de l’acteur ou du metteur en scène et d’autres qui témoignent de
l’histoire du théâtre.’ Accordingly, the publishing house ‘a également pris
l’initiative de nouvelles traductions du répertoire, ou encore invite des
artistes à concevoir des livres qui rendent compte de la singularité de leur
créativité’.18
If these four plays by Yasmina Reza are innovative in terms of their
rhythm, their treatment of time, their chiselled scripts and representation of
the postmodern condition, all coupled with a joyous melancholy, they are
not experimental. Certainly, these epithets (innovative, experimental) are
based on a longstanding dichotomy, that opposing a ‘théâtre de consomma-
tion’ (or théâtre de Boulevard) and a ‘théâtre de création’.19 Even if we allow
17 While it was written before « Art », L’Homme du hasard was staged and published
a year afterwards.
18 http://www.actes-sud.fr/node/35 (accessed 14 November 2010).
19 Jean Duvignaud and Jean Lagoutte, Le Théâtre contemporain (Paris: Larousse, 1974),
p. 10.
Reza’s works what Michel Corvin terms a certain seriousness, theatrical

chroniclers, those who react to the performance as opposed to those who
react to the text, admit their growing incomprehension faced with a body
of work that is becoming increasingly complex in form and subject matter
but which contains certain conventions of the Boulevard, such as the coup
de théâtre, the salon bourgeois, the wealthy social milieu and an absence of
political content.20 Roland Barthes’s comments on the inanity of critical
buttonholing spring to mind: ‘C’est assez singulier, l’aventure qui arrive à
la pièce de Samuel Beckett: parti comme une œuvre d’avant-garde, Godot
atteint aujourd’hui l’audience d’une pièce de Boulevard.’21 It appears that
Reza’s work is encountering exactly the opposite trend: it has progressively
made its way into the literary pantheon.22 Christiane Blot-Barrère ranks
her alongside Marguerite Duras, Anton Chekhov, F. Scott Fitzgerald and
Borgès, while Patrice Pavis compares her to Nathalie Sarraute.23 But Actes
Sud papiers had seen the promise in Reza’s work from the outset. Once
« Art » was a popular and critical success, rather than turning her into a
house playwright like Jean-Claude Grumbert, for example, who has been
writing for Actes Sud papiers since 1985, they allowed Yasmina Reza, with
all her prizes (not least among them her Molière),24 to head of f to other,
20 For Corvin, ‘le Boulevard sérieux issu de la tradition bien française de l’analyse psy-
chologique’. Michel Corvin (ed.), Dictionnaire encyclopédique du théâtre à travers le
monde (Paris: Bordas, 2008), p. 208.
21 Roland Barthes, Ecrits sur le théâtre (Paris: Seuil, 2002), p. 87.
22 For Reza’s bibliography and filmography, see http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yasmina_
Reza (accessed 21 July 2011).
23 Elsewhere, I have discussed Reza’s work in relation to Thomas Bernhardt and Imre
Kertèsz. See Hélène Jaccomard, ‘Du blanc, rien que du blanc: la traduction anglo-
américaine d’« Art » de Yasmina Reza’, Traduire, 222 (2010), pp. 42–56. See also,
Christiane Blot-Labarrère, ‘Yasmina Reza Mesures du temps’, in Nathalie Morello and
Christine Rodgers, Nouvelle écrivaines, Nouvelles Voix? (Amsterdam and New York:
Rodopi, 2002), pp. 269–85, and Patrice Pavis, Le Théâtre contemporain: Analyse des
textes, de Sarraute à Vinaver (Paris: Nathan/VUEF, 2002). Finally, for a comparison
to Schnitzler, see Robert Schneider, ‘Yasmina Reza in a Major Key’, American Theatre,
15.9 (1998), pp. 12–15.
24 More details of the prizes Reza has won for her writing and translating can be found
on the English version of Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yasmina_Reza
(accessed 11 November 2010).
bigger publishing houses: after a short stint with Flammarion,25 she joined
Albin Michel in 1997. In 1999 Actes Sud papiers continued to promote
« Art », or rather to meet the demand for it, by republishing a new ver-
sion identical to the 1994 text.
The four republications of « Art » (one in 2002, now out of print,
and three in 2009, a paperback, a hardback and an e-book)26 and her later
plays have been brought into the Albin Michel stable where they will form
part of its ‘small’ theatre collection (eighteen titles are designated as plays
in a catalogue of 8,000, with 200 new titles published every year). The
2009 republication is the only version to have appeared in hardback, which
suggests that from here on Reza’s marketability is suf ficiently established
for Albin Michel to be able to of fer a deluxe edition. Two complementary
phenomena explain the new editions of « Art » that have been produced
by other publishing houses (including Magnard, Hatier, Klett and LGF):
the global success to which we have already alluded prompted German pub-
lishers Klett to publish the original text in 2002 and paperback company
LGF to print a compilation of four of her plays, including « Art ».27 This
popular success also brought with it something quite unusual: « Art » was
included in the French national curriculum for year-ten students and the
baccalauréat, hence the two high-school editions (Magnard and Hatier).
Let us now compare the text with the covers on which each publish-
ing house has sought to leave its own mark.
25 Reza published one text with Flammarion, her controversial account of Nicolas
Sarkozy’s election campaign: L’Aube le soir ou la nuit (2007). For an analysis of this
text, see Hélène Jaccomard, ‘L’aube le soir ou la nuit de Yasmina Reza, ou comment
figurer le politique sans politique?’, Raison Publique, 12 (18 May 2010): http://www.
raison-publique.fr/L-aube-le-soir-ou-la-nuit-de.html.
26 See, for example, http://livreelectronique.lescontinesdeline.com/SELECTIONS/
DETAIL/0/70988–70999-71032/LIVRES/FICHES/62672.Livre (accessed 12
November 2010).
27 Yasmina Reza’s success in Germany is perhaps greater than it is in France. For a read-
ing along these lines, see Amanda Giguere, The Plays of Yasmina Reza on the English
and American Stage (London: McFerland & Company, 2010), chapter 4. Such com-
pilations as LGF’s are commonplace in theatrical publication, with individual plays
typically being less than one hundred pages long.
Text meets Peritext 1: Actes Sud papiers
Only the first edition of « Art » comes out of a specialized publishing

house, Actes Sud papiers. This publisher came into being in 1987 when
Actes Sud took over Papiers, an independent company founded in 1985
by Christian Dupeyron.28 By 2010 the new publishing house proudly
boasted a catalogue of more than 400 plays. Interestingly, the description
of the collection explicitly, and unusually in publishing circles, mentions
its graphic designer by name. Maxence Sherf has stamped his own graphic
identity on Actes Sud’s slimline, easily recognisable format,29 thereby giving
their plays an individual look:
[f ]ormat, couleur des couvertures et du papier Vergé Conqueror (entre ivoire et

sable, un beige-jaune très délicat), grain de ce papier, typographie (Bodoni corps 12)
on peut dire qu’ils ont mis au point, Maxence [Sherf ] et [Christian Dupeyron], des
livres parmi les plus élégants qui soient. Cousus et brochés […].30
This is a collection, then, whose prestige extends to its packaging. Like its
parent company, it speaks of literariness and cultivation. Publication in
this collection, therefore, gave an aura of quality to Reza, who as recently
as 1994 was still relatively unknown.
The front-cover format of Actes Sud papier’s theatre collection is as
follows: title and author’s name at the top, publisher’s name at the bottom;
black type against a white background; a thin black line frames the cover,
inset two centimetres from the edge.31 While many of the plays published
28 Armelle Héliot, ‘Christian Dupeyron, à jamais dans les étoiles’, Le Figaro (2 August
2009): http://blog.lefigaro.fr/theatre/2009/08/christian-dupeyron-a-jamais-da.
html (accessed 2 November 2010).
29 http://www.bief.org/Annuaire-33658-Editeur/Actes-Sud.html (accessed 12 November
2010).
30 http://blog.lefigaro.fr/theatre/2009/08/christian-dupeyron-a-jamais-da.html
(accessed 2 November 2010).
31 See http://www.amazon.fr/gp/product/images/2869434103/ref=dp_image_0?ie
=UTF8&n=301061&s=books (accessed 1 August 2011).
in the collection sport an abstract motif in the bottom right corner, which
takes up a fifth of the cover, there is no such image on the first-edition cover
of « Art ». The result is an entirely white cover.
Had this omission been specific to « Art », it would undeniably have
functioned as a mise en abyme of the famous white canvas beneath the cover.
For, when Serge buys the Antrios, his friend Marc criticizes the purchase
and brings in a mutual friend, Yvan, to convince Serge that he is a snob
and that his painting does not constitute art. Throughout the play, the
characters take turns trying to get the other two to accept their descrip-
tion of the painting, in an attempt either to justify the purchase as a work
of art (for Serge, it is ‘un chef d’œuvre’, for Yvan ‘un tableau qui n’est pas
monochrome, qui a une vibration’) or to discredit it (for Marc, ‘c’est une
merde blanche’).32 But it is Marc who is the most vehement, in a ref lection
of his loss of inf luence over Serge, whose purchase signals that he no longer
needs a mentor (p. 69). There is even a sexual edge to this relationship
breakdown, as if Serge has left Marc for the painting (p. 68).
On a number of occasions Marc describes the Antrios as ‘une toile
d’environ un mètre soixante sur un mètre vingt peinte en blanc’;33 ‘[l]e
fond est blanc et si on cligne des yeux, on peut apercevoir de fins liserés
blancs transversaux’ (pp. 16, 19). The biggest dif ficulty lies in visualizing
these white stripes on their white background.
Marc [to Yvan]: Représente-toi une toile d’environ un mètre soixante sur un mètre
vingt… fond blanc… entièrement blanc… en diagonale de fines rayures transversales
blanches… tu vois… et peut-être une ligne horizontale blanche en complément,
vers le bas…
Yvan: Comment les vois-tu?
Marc: Pardon?
Yvan: Ces lignes blanches puisque le fond est blanc, comment tu vois les lignes?
32 All references to the text of « Art » are taken from the Magnard edition (2002). The
dialogue here can be found on pages 28, for Serge and Yvan’s comments, and 77 for
Marc’s put down.
33 Amusingly, the dimensions of the canvas are in the same proportions as Actes Sud’s
books.
Marc: Parce que je les vois. Parce que mettons que les lignes soient légèrement
grises, ou l’inverse, enfin il y a des nuances dans le blanc! Le blanc est plus ou moins
blanc! (p. 22)
Marc clings resolutely to these stripes, which he alone seems able to see,
because they posit the painting in a genre of modern art that is less pro-
vocative than painting the void, nothingness. Not even a frame can check
the spread of the painting’s infinite white surface. Despite our focus here
on the French publications of the play, it is worth mentioning the Anglo-
American editions whose cover at first appears quite aberrant insofar as
it ref lects visually one of the most abstract, and perhaps abstruse, features
of the text. This ‘chatty’ cover guides the potential reader to an irrevoca-
bly prosaic reading of the play.34 Furthermore, it takes the side of one the
characters.
According to Mir-Samii, for whom the play is an example of his typol-
ogy of whites, Marc wants to see in the white ‘un hyper- ou archi-signe’.35
Marc’s attempts to reduce the painting to a percept (lending itself to visual
description) and not a concept (where words are reduced to nonsense) are
brought to a head at the end of the play, when to prove that his friendship
for Marc and Yvan means more to him than the painting, Serge throws
a black marker pen to Marc, who draws a little man skiing on it. This is
an iconoclastic act that transforms the Antrios from an artwork worth
200,000 francs to a figurative, even narrative, lump of paint, an artistic
degree zero:
Marc: Sous les nuages blancs, la neige tombe.

On ne voit ni les nuages blancs, ni la neige.
Ni la froideur et l’éclat blanc du sol.
Un homme seul, à skis, glisse.
La neige tombe.
Tombe jusqu’à ce que l’homme disparaisse et retrouve son opacité. (p. 81)
34 For a more detailed reading along these lines, see Jaccomard, ‘Du blanc, rien que du
blanc’, op. cit.
35 Reza Mir-Samii, Les blancs du texte: Acte de la journée d’étude de 2004 (Rennes:
Presses de l’université de Rennes, 2005), pp. 31–47.
If the man has disappeared, it is because the three friends have just cleaned
the canvas (Serge had in fact acted hypocritically, knowing all along that
the pen was not permanent) and the painting has been returned to its
virgin state, if indeed such a state exists… Its white is now, to use Marc’s
expression, ‘more or less white’, like the friendship of the three characters,
which has been stained by jealousy and deception; and like the cover of
the Actes Sud papiers editions, it is ‘entre ivoire et sable, un beige-jaune
très délicat’. When the cover is seen in the light of the text, it becomes the
canvas beneath which the text functions as a reminder of ‘l’homme et son
opacité’ and these three characters remain bound in contradiction, opaque
for themselves as for the Other.
Fortuitously then, for, let us recall, Actes Sud papiers presents other
plays that have nothing to do with modern art in the same way, through
such a significant cover design, the prime function of the work as script is
paralleled by another, non-utilitarian signification: not quite white, with
no stripes or little skiing figures, the text’s packaging symbolizes a neutral
position in relation to the ideological battle opposing Marc, the advocate
of art’s philosophical, and therapeutic, usefulness, and Serge, for whom art
is fundamentally useless, a sign of nothingness.
Text meets Peritext 2: Albin Michel
Founded in 1910 and still operating independently, Albin Michel is a gener-

alist publishing house that began to diversify after the Second World War
as did a great number of publishers at the time.36 Its theatre collection is
very small. Nothing has been said in the literary or mainstream press about
Reza’s move from Actes Sud to Albin Michel in 1998, and she herself has
36 The website of the international bureau of French publishing (BIEF) cites Albin
Michel as one of the top ten players in French publishing: http://www.bief.org/
Annuaire-33659-Editeur/Albin-Michel.html (accessed 12 November 2010).
not mentioned it in any of the numerous interviews that she has done since
that time. The same cannot be said for other defections and dissensions,
which tend to be highly mediatized (such as Camille Laurens and POL or
Michel Houellebecq who played Fayard of f against Flammarion over one
novel). To a large extent, Reza’s stature as an author and her huge popular
following would have been dif ficult to manage for a regional publishing
house with a focus on less commercial plays.
Be that as it may, the first book of Reza’s work published by Albin
Michel, in 1998, was a compilation of her first three plays. While only
third in the list of four play titles featured at the top of the cover, « Art » is
nonetheless given preferential treatment in the form of a red band wrapped
around the book, featuring a line from The Times: ‘« Art » un classique’.37
From an advertising perspective, there is something rather cunning about
this quote: drawing on the authority of The Times, which means less to the
French public than it does to an Anglo-Saxon one, the caption provides a
f lattering comment by an American critic (to be heralded a classic only four
years after first being staged is a rare exploit), which little hard evidence
can substantiate. The use of a reference to the play’s success in America to
market the text in France seems to send out something of a mixed mes-
sage, which, when added to the author’s foreign-sounding (Iranian) name,
makes it look like a translation from the English. And indeed, one may
question whether a play’s resounding success on Broadway is enough to
warrant its elevation to the status of ‘classic’. It seems that the red band is
rather preaching to the converted and to those who might not want to
pass up the opportunity of buying such a well-known text. For five years,
« Art » had been being played all over the world, and it is for this reason
that the potential buyer has to take this text seriously, as one does in the
case of a ‘classic’.
Like the lack of illustrations on the Actes Sud papier cover, however,
this (perhaps stage-managed) quote is not inappropriate given that the
conf lict between Serge and Marc, which we have just discussed, revolves
37 For an image of this cover, see http://www.albin-michel.fr/Theatre-EAN=978222

6087621 (accessed 1 August 2011).
precisely around a ‘classic’ subject: the quarrel of the Ancients and the
Moderns.38 Marc represents the Ancient in his literary as well as his artis-
tic taste (Paul Valéry, for example, whose resistance to modern art is well
known); Serge on the other hand, refers of course to contemporary art
but also to deconstruction, considering that his friend ‘est un ennemi de
la modernité […] un adepte du bon vieux temps’ (p. 17).
The cover of Albin Michel’s 1998 anthology of plays seems at first
glance a carbon copy of the Actes Sud papier one, with the exception of
the author’s name, which appears first, and the ‘really white’ white back-
ground. The principal dif ference is the red advertising band that covers
the bottom third of the cover, and which totally obscures the potential
allusion to the white painting.
Albin Michel present all their texts in the same way, with no exception
made for « Art ». Reza’s plays that followed also had this same sober format,
minus the red band, except in the case of the her latest success, Le Dieu du
carnage (2007), whose bottom section showcases a quote taken from the
play printed in white against a red background, and which mimics, and
subverts, the advertising function of the prestigious red band. The pres-
entation of two of Reza’s works, Trois versions de la vie (2000) and Adam
Haberberg (2003), picks up the author’s marketability by including her
photo on the lower part of the cover against a reddish or grey background.
The design of these two works marks a break from the publisher’s usual
practice; it also disturbs the unity of Reza’s work as published by Albin
Michel. Faced with this strategy, Levinas might have commented that the
‘image overf lows the face’. In this case, Reza’s image is a sign of notoriety,
which goes beyond the need to recognize her face. The text alone is no
longer enough: the author-ef fect is magnified because, henceforth, Reza
is very much at the head of the work. Thus, her image overf lows her face.
It appears that Albin Michel also published an edition of « Art »,
on its own this time, in 2002 and again in 2009, with a brown cover with
beige text, a sober design that does not seem to be aligned with any other of
38 See Denis Guénoun, Avez-vous lu Reza? Une invitation philosophique (Paris: Albin
Michel, 2005).
their collections. As these editions are now impossible to find, their exist-
ence remains hypothetical; indeed, it is dif ficult to frame them within our
present discussion. They are an interesting case to note if nothing else. For
the most recent edition published by Albin Michel, 2009,39 a small change
shows how their design has been gradually ‘modernized’ over time: the
author’s name features in black and the title in red, and in this case again,
Reza’s work conforms to the company model. The cover design remains
sober, which is the case for the only hardback edition of « Art » thus far.
Hardback publications are rare for contemporary authors in the dramatic
arts. This edition strengthens the case for the play’s classic status by inte-
grating it, paratextually, into the canon of literature above and beyond the
canon of great plays.
Paradoxically, the same argument holds when it comes to explaining
« Art »’s inclusion in a collection of four plays in a paperback edition
the following year (1999). The publishers in this case, LGF, specialize in
republications. The LGF cover is always fairly busy, which is a trademark
of more af fordable editions. The cover of Théâtre is illustrated with cubist-
style faces and bodies in three tones (two of brown and white); the ef fect
is not unlike details of Picasso’s Rape of the Sabine Women.40 Despite the
suggestion of modernity evoked by this cover, the relationship with painting
is too tenuous to sustain a detailed examination of the cross-fertilization
of text and epitext.
39 For an image of this cover, see http://www.albin-michel.fr/-Art--EAN=9782226192431

40 See http://www.chapitre.com/CHAPITRE/fr/BOOK/reza-yasmina/theatre-l-
homme-du-hasard-et-autres-pieces,1043948.aspx (accessed 1 August 2011).
The High-school Epitext: Hatier and Magnard
« Art »’s status as a ‘classic’ grants us insight into the paratextual elements

of the other editions of the text. Indeed, after its consecration in hardback
and in the famous French poche format, the play became established as a
classic of the classroom, appearing in editions designed specifically for
French secondary students. The text of the play itself is supplemented
with a whole scholarly apparatus, including footnotes, quotations, sample
questions, extracts from other texts (film dialogues and novels as well as
plays), all serving to establish the literary context of its themes, characters
and genre (biting comedy, irony, etc.).
Our first example is Hatier, who in 2005 published a literary guide to
« Art », which is to say a critical commentary of the play and not the play
itself. In this way, « Art » took its place in a catalogue of some 200 texts of
this kind. This collection (Profil d’une œuvre) has a strong visual identity
made up of a sober design, with yellow text against a red background.41
For Daniel Peraya, such a design scheme is typical of a clearly codified field:
‘Les paratextes des manuels scolaires s’inscrivent dans une pratique textuelle
qui relève d’une réalité institutionnelle et d’un usage social strictement
circonscrits: la communication didactique et pédagogique.’42
The other, earlier classroom edition (2002), presented by Professor
Jocelyne Hubert, saw « Art » remain in the Albin Michel catalogue. Mag-
nard is the educational arm of the group and the third biggest player in
this genre in France. The collection in which « Art » appears is entitled
‘Classiques & Contemporains’; its slogan is quite clear: it is none other
than ‘[l]a collection qui dépoussière les classiques et fait briller les con-
temporains’.43 The breadth of the catalogue, which spans periods, genres
and authors, is testament not so much to a publishing direction as to an
alignment with evolving curricula. As if in compensation for the diversity
41 See http://livre.fnac.com/a1659394/Yasmina-Rez-Art (accessed 1 August 2011).

42 Daniel Peraya, ‘Vers une théorie des paratextes: images mentales et images matérielles’,
Recherches en communication, 4 (1995), pp. 1–38 (p. 3).
43 http://www.classiquesetcontemporains.fr/ (accessed 13 November 2010).
of the collection, its cover design relies on a distinctive use of graphics: the
name of the collection appears on a vertical band, white against a violet
background; the upper half of the cover is illustrated with a photograph,
more often than not of one or more of the actors (if it the text is a play),
while the author’s name and the book title feature beneath against a pastel
background to match the scheme used for the name of the collection. There
is little to no need to entice the reader; all that is required is to conserve
the seriousness and pragmatism of a classroom edition from one text to
the next. It is this uniformity that makes the book readily identifiable for
what it is. Here again, Peraya’s comments are pertinent:
[L]e paratexte pédagogique correspond strictement aux images de type fonctionnel:
celles qui servent à ‘communiquer ou à connaître le monde’, c’est-à-dire des images
de ‘communication’ ou de ‘compréhension’ à l’exclusion des images ou des composi-
tions artistiques qui relèvent d’une volonté de créativité et d’expression individuelles,
donc d’une intentionnalité très dif férente.44
And yet, each text bears its own specific photograph on the front cover.
And each photograph operates at the interface of text and epitext. In our
case, the photograph shows a scene from a play. Of all the photographs
taken of « Art » being performed in 1994 (on the occasion of the play’s
opening night or during rehearsals), Magnard chose one of Fabrice Luc-
chini in the role of Serge, by all appearances a purely functional image.
The actor is shown from side on, sitting on an of f-white couch and con-
templating the famous Antrios, which for its part is on the (of f-white)
f loor and propped simply against the (of f-white) wall.45 This is therefore
a photograph taken early on in the plot since the painting is hung on the
wall towards the middle of the play. Clearly, this image strongly connects
scene and text, with the painting having the same colour, and even the
same tone, as the couch and furnishings: of f-white. Against this square that
is almost entirely white, Lucchini (Serge), with his black suit and shoes,
stands out like the little skiing figure quickly sketched on, and as quickly
44 Peraya, ‘Vers une théorie des paratextes’, pp. 3–4.

45 See http://www.chapitre.com/CHAPITRE/fr/BOOK/reza-yasmina/art,958841.
aspx (accessed 1 August 2011).
wiped of f, the canvas at the end of the play. This disjuncture of colours
and the illusion to the ending contained in this single incipital (and thus
ref lexively paratextual) image give the epitext a profoundly ironic tone
that is not immediately transparent. Indeed, its pragmatic function runs
the risk of masking this sub-text.
The prize for the most ironic cover, however, goes to the German
publisher Klett, whose edition of « Art » came out in 2002.46 Klett is one
of the specialist high-school textbook imprints of the largest German
educational and paraeducational publishing houses, Velcro. We may sup-
pose that « Art » was included on the French curriculum for German
students. In terms of lay-out, Klett’s covers are similar to Magnard’s: the
page is divided into two parts with a photograph or graphic design in the
upper section and the details of the work appearing against a blue strip,
which forms the smaller, lower section. Klett’s edition of « Art » is illus-
trated with a photograph showing seven dif ferent paintbrushes set out in
descending order of size from the left; the last and smallest of the brushes
is the only one that appears to have been used: on it one can still see traces
of white paint. And even then, only close inspection reveals this detail,
this white paint, because the background itself is entirely white (like the
white stripes against the white background of the Antrios). Just as the cover
precedes the text, the paintbrush with its white paint precedes the paint-
ing. Metonymically, the brush stands in for the ‘artist’, the famous Antrios,
idolized by Serge and despised by Marc, and who is himself replaced in the
play by the metonym that is his painting. This cover seems to highlight the
materiality of the painting to the detriment of the af fective and ideologi-
cal proportions that it takes in the minds of the characters. This is perhaps
the other side of the paratextual hook. Rather than simply engaging the
reader emotionally, drawing us into the drama of the text, this cover also
engages the reader critically, forcing us to assume the powerful position
of objective distance.
46 The German translation is by the famous Eugen Helmlé who died in 2000. It was
published by Lengwil in 1996 as « Kunst » and staged immediately thereafter. For
an image of this cover, see http://livre.fnac.com/a2561735/Yasmina-Reza-Art-texte-
et-documents (accessed 1 August 2011).
In conclusion, we should suggest that this panorama of the various

editions of « Art » and their covers reveals a quite singular situation in the
world of theatrical publishing, in which the republishing of texts is rare
indeed. For any author, irrespective of the genre of her work, to be appearing
in print with several publishing houses at the same time is highly unusual.
It is rarer still for an author’s work to be the subject of simultaneous and
multiple republications, such as the case of « Art » in 1999 (LGF and Actes
Sud papier) and again in 2002 (Magnard, Klett and Albin Michel). Reza’s
republished works also spanned multiple publishing genres: af fordable
paperbacks, deluxe editions and school textbooks. The 2009 republica-
tions can also be explained by the huge success of Reza’s last play to date,
Le Dieu du carnage (2007). This play presents numerous parallels with
« Art » and, as such, has rekindled popular interest in it. These parallels
include the vigorous verbal exchanges, grating humour and the challeng-
ing of values (artistic tastes on the one hand, and bourgeois manners and
humanitarianism on the other).
It is our hope that this close-up on a single text by a single author may
encourage a broader revisiting of the theatrical paratext and, perhaps espe-
cially, its cover designs. If it is easy to demonstrate that republication is a
rare phenomenon in this field, it would also be interesting to see whether
current strategies produce, as here, as many reading ef fects. By situating
the story of the covers of « Art »’s various editions, it has been possible
to extend and develop Genette’s approach. Notably, we have been able to
highlight the sub-text of « Art »’s rapid rise to classic status. While this is
undoubtedly part of a marketing strategy, it is also a reality both in terms
of public opinion and classroom curricula. This explains the push to reach
the widest possible audience, and five or six publishing houses are barely
suf ficient to saturate market demand. In other words, a diachronic study
of the play’s covers exposes what Pavis terms the work’s ‘cheminement de la
légitimation’.47 As the author grows in stature, the publishing houses subtly
adapt their standard designs in order to accentuate the author-ef fect (with
47 Pavis, Le Théâtre contemporain, p. 224. Image – the white painting and the black line
of the text – overf lows in all directions.
a photograph, for example), the performance-ef fect (a photograph of a

performance featuring a famous actor)48 or the ironic relationship between
text and paratext (as in the case of the Klett edition).
Without exception, the republications of « Art », with their multi-
layered covers, also work to saturate the relationships between text and epi-
text. And yet, it is possible to read in these many cover designs the inherently
polysemous, and twisted, nature of « Art » where the image – the white
painting and the black line of the text – overf lows in all directions.
48 This cover strategy could usefully be compared to republications of novels that have
been adapted for the cinema.
JEAN FORNASIERO and JOHN WEST-SOOBY
Covering Up: Translating the Art of

Australian Crime Fiction into French
The paratext constitutes a kind of ‘threshold’ or liminal space – as signalled,

in appropriately self-referential fashion, by the title of Gérard Genette’s
seminal essay on the subject.1 As such, it is the site for dialogue between
the textual zone it foreshadows and the ‘extra-textual’ space of the reader’s
world: if, as Philippe Lane has noted,2 the function of the paratext is to
act upon potential readers and lure them in towards the text, it also serves,
conversely, to project the text out of its strictly diegetic domain. It thus
mediates between the text and the hors-texte. Moreover, like all liminal
spaces – the hotel lobby, the shore, the airport or train station – the paratext
is a dynamic and unstable space whose status is fundamentally ambiguous.
It admits of intrusions, both from within and from without, so that the line
of demarcation between the text and the hors-texte is frequently blurred
and dif ficult to draw with precision. If it is a border, then it is a porous one.
And not only are its contours f luid, but it is also, in and of itself, made up
of layers – a kind of mise en abyme, as it were, of the layered relationship
on the macro level between text, paratext and hors-texte.
Of the various dermal layers that make up the paratext, it is the cover
that constitutes the epidermis. As the first point of physical contact between
book and reader,3 the cover plays a pivotal role, most obviously in terms
of the seductive process. Contrary to the popular dictum, books can be
1 Gérard Genette, Seuils (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1987).

2 See Philippe Lane, La Périphérie du texte (Paris: Nathan, 1992), p. 17.
3 We are discounting here the role of Genette’s ‘epitext’ (interviews with the author,
other related texts, and so on), as this is situated beyond the physical book itself and
can thus be seen to have an ‘extra-dermal’ status.
120 JEAN FORNASIERO and JOHN WEST-SOOBY
– and often are – judged by their covers. Like the title which is featured
on it, the cover as a whole has to serve the purpose of attracting the atten-
tion of the reading (and buying) public, while at the same time hopefully
saying something meaningful about what the reader will find inside. The
paratextual elements that figure on the cover of a book therefore provide
us with some important insights into the tastes and values of the intended
reading public – or at least into the presumptions that are made about
those tastes and values by the publisher. They of fer a clue, in other words,
to what we might term the ‘reading praxis’ of the particular cultural group
with which they are meant to resonate. The various paratextual elements
that feature on the cover of a book therefore function as a kind of cultural
barometer. And in the French context in particular, they point to a read-
ing praxis that has shaped, and been shaped by, a publishing tradition that
treats books as highly valued objects whose physical appearance is itself
pregnant with semiotic meaning.
This role of the paratext as a yardstick for cultural tastes and expec-
tations becomes even more evident when we consider the changes that
are made to the cover design of works that are translated for a dif ferent
cultural audience. As Genette himself has pointed out, translation as a
practice has inherent paratextual significance, since every translated text
must inevitably be seen as representing a commentary on the original text.4
That being the case, when we consider the way in which the paratext itself
is ‘translated’ or transposed for a new cultural market, we should likewise
find that there are important lessons to be drawn from comparing the para-
textual apparatus of the translated work with that of the original. In the
case of covers, such a comparative study will draw attention, for instance,
to the dif ferences in publishing traditions in the two target cultures, and
to the contrasts in the expectations and (buying) habits of the respective
reading publics. And, most importantly, an examination of the two sets of
4 Seuils, p. 372: ‘chaque traduction doit, d’une manière ou d’une autre, faire com-
mentaire au texte original.’ Genette is admittedly talking here of the extreme case
where a bilingual author such as Beckett translates his own work, but this is given
as a particular case of a more general principle applying to translation per se.
Covering Up: Translating the Art of Australian Crime Fiction into French 121
covers should highlight the transformations that are made to the cultural
identity that is posited by the original paratext when it is transposed for
a new target culture.
One domain in which the issue of cultural identity, as expressed (and
posited) through both the text and the paratext, is particularly problem-
atic – and therefore of great relevance to the question of translation – is
that of crime fiction. Thanks in no small part to the conventional nature
of the themes and tropes that characterize it, the genre of crime fiction
has been highly successful in transcending national barriers. Crime writ-
ing is consumed by vast numbers of readers who extend far beyond the
writer’s national audience, since so many crime novels find their way into
translation, and usually into more than one other language – a sure sign
that publishers are persuaded of the universal currency of these texts. And
yet, despite the popularity of the genre and the universality of its generic
features, cultural specificities can and do find expression in crime fiction
novels. Indeed, much of the scholarship in the field is devoted precisely
to mapping the genre along national lines.5 At the very least, then, this
suggests that there is a tension between the international and the national
dimensions of the genre, a tension which invites us to consider more closely
what happens to works of crime fiction, and to the cultural identity they
might be seen to project, when they are translated and prepared for publica-
tion in a dif ferent cultural market. This question is particularly important
when we move from a relatively small but culturally distinctive setting such
as Australia to one in which there is a long and well-established crime fic-
tion tradition (and market) – namely France.
This issue of the cultural identity that can be seen to be expressed in
Australian crime fiction and of the transformations it undergoes when
works are translated or transposed for a French-speaking audience merits
extensive and systematic investigation, for there is much more at stake than
simply looking at how the French might translate peculiarly Australian
5 In the case of Australian crime fiction, see, for example, Stephen Knight, Continent
of Mystery: A Thematic History of Australian Crime Fiction (Carlton: Melbourne
University Press, 1997).
expressions and concepts. As crime writer Shane Maloney observes, by

the time he had finished explaining to his translator such terms as ‘hoon’,
‘Paddle Pop’, ‘blue heeler’, ‘living the life of Riley’, ‘being of f with the pixies’
or ‘bonking your ears of f ’, he ‘could have taught a course on antipodean
social anthropology at the Sorbonne. Oz as Other.’6 In other words, such
problems, which appear to be of a simple lexical nature, actually point to
the significant question of how a culture is represented. While translators
would naturally encounter these same problems in translating all types of
Australian novels, crime fiction of fers particular advantages as a case for
study. Not only is it a discrete and readily recognized genre, but, as noted
above, it is a site for competition between the expression of cultural specifi-
city on the one hand and, on the other, the respect for the conventions of
the genre, conventions which transcend national boundaries and are the key
to its universal appeal. A comprehensive comparative study of Australian
crime novels and their French translations should therefore provide some
important insights into the question of cultural identity and how this is
transformed in the process of translation.
The problem of cultural identity and its fate in (French) translation
is rendered even more acute because of the fact that crime fiction enjoys a
privileged status in France, where a strong and healthy publishing tradition
in the genre has developed over a long period of time. In this context, the
books, and their covers, become fetishized objects, as Shane Maloney has
noted, not without some bemusement:
6 To give the full quotation, Maloney describes the experience of working with his
French translator as follows: ‘Niceties such as tone and voice remain well beyond my
grasp, however, and translation into French involves more than merely massaging the
syntax. A degree of intellectual exertion is also involved, as I soon discovered. Not
content with definitions for hoon, Paddle Pop, blue heeler and doona, my traduc-
teur also requested clarification on the issues of bonking her ears of f, living the life
of Riley and being of f with the pixies. By the time we’d finished with Clive James,
Melbourne-Sydney rivalry and the witchetty-grub cappuccino, I could have taught
a course on antipodean social anthropology at the Sorbonne. Oz as Other.’ Shane
Maloney, ‘On being translated’, Australian Author (December 2004), republished
in The Age (24 December 2004). Available online at: http://shanemaloney.com/
articles-and-speeches/post/on-being-translated (accessed 25 July 2011).
But the contents are only a part of the package. In French hands, the physical books
themselves are transformed into cultural artefacts. Since my novels fall within the
broad taxonomy of crime fiction, Cartesian logic identifies them as romans poli-
ciers. So, in keeping with the conventions of the genre, they come printed on cheap,
grainy paper and bound between plain yellow covers. Whenever I thumb through
one of them, I can almost feel the ink fading and the glue coming unstuck. Say
what you like about the frogs, they know how to treat pulp fiction with the respect
it deserves.7
As this suggests, in order to prepare a ‘foreign’ work of crime fiction for

entry into the French market, a complete make-over is required, and this
has consequences for both the text and the paratext. Moreover – and not-
withstanding the internationalist status of crime fiction – a peculiarly
French paradigm has developed in the genre, and this has in many ways
become the standard, not just within France but also beyond its borders.8
On face value, at least, this would seem to suggest that cultural specificities
might readily be sacrificed to over-arching concerns of conformity with this
dominant paradigm as well as with the market forces which have shaped
it, and which it feeds. This is indeed borne out by some recent studies that
we have conducted. One such study examined the titles given to Austral-
ian crime novels in French translation, comparing them to the originals
– an analysis that reveals the subtle transformations that are wrought in
order to make the titles conform to the tastes and expectations of a French
7 Maloney, ‘On being translated’.

8 Space constraints prevent us from presenting a comprehensive demonstration of this
phenomenon here, but it is well known that the Série Noire collection, ostensibly
created for the purposes of importing American ‘noir’ to a French Market, heralded
the creation of a genre as opposed to simply importing one. See, for example, Franck
Évrard, Lire le roman policier (Paris: Dunod, 1996), p. 55. For a well-argued account
of the French ‘cannibilization’ of American noir, for example, see Alistair Rolls and
Deborah Walker, French and American Noir: Dark Crossings (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2009). See also the introductory essay by Rolls, ‘Interrogating the Idea
of National Detective Fictions, or French Detective Fiction: What Other Type Is
There?’, in his edited volume Mostly French: French (in) Detective Fiction (Oxford:
Peter Lang, 2009), pp. 1–15.
readership.9 Another analysis has highlighted, through case studies, the

role that French translations played in re-awakening interest in their home
market of the crime novels of several Australian women writers.10 This is
just one indication of the way in which the French translations can come
to inf luence the tastes and expectations of the original cultural readership.
While detailed analysis of a wide range of texts is needed to evaluate the
full nature and extent of what appears to shape as a case of cultural appro-
priation, we can further add to the mounting evidence by focusing on the
covers of a sample of Australian crime novels and on the ways in which they
have been transformed by their transposition into the French market.
In the French publishing tradition, the cover both defines and
announces the content. And this is not restricted to crime fiction. The
Collection Blanche established in 1911 by Gallimard, under the auspices
of the Nouvelle revue française, is one of the most famous examples of this
phenomenon. Its sober and distinctive of f-white cover, which represents a
refusal of decorative distractions, immediately signals to the French reader
that the contents have been judged to be of great literary merit.11 Impor-
tantly, the statistics show that this lack of decorative variety has in no way
been a handicap to the marketing of such works. On the contrary, there
is every reason to think that the restrained nature of the cover has in fact
been instrumental in their success – these books have become all the more
conspicuous because of the inconspicuous character of the Collection
Blanche cover design.
Traditions with respect to cover design quickly emerged in France for
the publication of crime novels. A range of approaches was adopted by the
dif ferent publishing houses, from the more conventionally lurid covers
of the pulp fiction tradition to the sober designs that came to typify the
9 See John West-Sooby, ‘Lost – and Found – in Translation: The Frenchification of
Australian Crime’, in Rolls (ed.), Mostly French, pp. 123–40.
10 See Jean Fornasiero, ‘Wakefield Queens of Crime Go to Paris: The Publishing
Adventures of Patricia Carlon and Charlotte Jay’, in Rolls (ed.), Mostly French,
pp. 141–54.
11 For examples and a history of this cover, see http://www.gallimard.fr/collections/
blanche.htm (accessed 9 August 2011).
‘classier’ collections. As far as the translations of Australian crime novels

are concerned, there are some notable cases where it would appear that
their cultural identity, far from being ‘domesticated’ for the French market,
actually came to be used as a selling point. The covers of Arthur Upfield’s
famous Bony novels, published in the Grands Détectives series of the
prestigious 10/18 publishing house, are a case in point, as they appear,
through their use of Aboriginal dot motifs, to highlight rather than deny
the cultural specificity of the stories. But it might be argued that this is
not quite so far from the French tradition and French tastes as might be
first thought. Late in establishing a crime series, 10/18 chose to create a set
of sub-series that fell under the nostalgic banner of the ‘Great Detective’
and, as such, required artistic conventions that captured the character of
each featured detective and defined them as ‘great’ – in Bony’s case by fea-
turing the qualities conferred upon him by his Aboriginality. Moreover,
the iconography that is a feature of Upfield’s French covers owes at least as
much to strategic marketing as it does to a putative respect for the cultural
identity projected by the work: while the visual evocations of Indigenous
culture could be seen as a dutiful acknowledgment of the text within and
its cultural origins, it is in fact plausible to suggest that they are calculated
to appeal to the well-established interest of the French in all matters eth-
nographic. The stylish image on the French version of A Bone is Pointed,
for example, bears little resemblance to the artwork of the original Austral-
ian version, which underlines the belonging of Upfield’s work to the crime
genre.12 Hence, while appearing to nod towards Australian culture, the
French cover is actually designed with the French reader in mind.
The novels of Kerry Greenwood point to a similar kind of contradic-
tion, though in this case it is because there is nothing particularly Austral-
ian on either the original covers or the French versions. Indeed, little has
been done to alter the style of the original designs, where 1920s fashion
is the predominant element.13 The representation of the heroine as 1920s
12 For an image of this cover, see http://www.10–18.fr/site/l_os_est_pointe_&100&978

2264019646.html (accessed 9 August 2011).
13 For a selection of the original covers, see http://www.phrynefisher.com/books.html
fashion icon thus provides the main selling feature on both sets of covers,
though curiously the faces on the French covers are often pointing in the
opposite direction from the originals.14 The Australian setting of the novels
is only highlighted for the French reader/buyer on the red bands that sur-
round the covers of the French versions – perhaps a sign that the 1920s
iconography in itself is insuf ficient and that some exoticism is necessary
to attract French readers and convince them that this sub-series consti-
tutes a renewal of, rather than a return to, the standard British exemplars
of bygone days.15 However, the use of the red band is in itself a guarantee
of excellence, in French terms, of the contents, signifying that the author
occupies a space within the ‘star system’ of French crime fiction. Paradoxi-
cally, then, the allusions to Australianness on the French covers of the novels
of both Greenwood and Upfield serve more to highlight the worthiness
of these two recent sub-series to belong to the great French family than to
emphasize their roots in a foreign culture.
In contrast to such new arrivals in the market, the long-established
crime fiction series in France adopted a market strategy based on under-state-
ment, using covers which were characterized by sober design. The absence
of artwork from the traditional covers of these series not only prevents any
recognition of the cultural identity of translated works, but over time has
come to signal these works both as generic and as belonging to a distinctively
French tradition. The strong colour coding for crime collection covers was
originally set by Le Masque, with its distinctive yellow cover bearing the
simple but eloquent design feature of a mask and a quill.16 Established in
1927, this series quickly earned a reputation as a label of quality, publishing
the great names of crime and mystery writing, both French and foreign. In
14 This is particularly the case with the early covers. Compare the original cover of
Murder on the Ballarat Train (see the site referenced in n. 13 above) with the cover of
Un train pour Ballarat, which is available online at http://www.evene.fr/livres/livre/
kerry-greenwood-un-train-pour-ballarat-26091.php (accessed 9 August 2011).
15 For an example of the use of the red band, which highlights in bold that the setting
is Melbourne, in the 1920s, consult the selection of titles available on amazon.fr.
16 See http://www.lemasque.com. For a brief overview of the collection and its covers,
see http://www.polars.org/spip.php?article41 (both accessed 9 August 2011).
the 1980s, two variations to the standard series were created: the Maîtres
du roman policier and the Reines du crime, whose initial purpose was to
resurrect forgotten masterpieces of the genre. Other cover designs to feature
strong colours are those of the Série Rouge and the Série Noire, both of
which took their lead from the model of the Collection Blanche as a marker
of genre and iconic status.17 At the same time, by the use of colour, the two
collections set themselves apart from the Blanche, as working to a popular
or ‘anti-conformist’ audience.18 Australian writers to feature in such collec-
tions in their early days, unsurprisingly, went unrecognized as Australian
on these covers. The only form of exoticism considered worthy of note on
the cover was American, which was deemed to be so synonymous with the
genre and hence part of the label of quality, that translation from any form
of English, including Australian English, was announced as ‘translated from
American’.19 Notable Australian authors who were to feature early within
these collections as American were Jon Cleary and Carter Brown.20
A number of Australian authors also found their way into the Masque
collection, some of whom, such as Charlotte Jay and Patricia Carlon, were
deemed worthy of inclusion in the prestigious Reines du crime series. The
comparison between the cover of their Australian novels and their French
translations is instructive in a number of ways. In the case of Charlotte
Jay’s Beat Not the Bones, there is a shift from the individualized design of
the original, whose iconography vividly picks up the theme announced by
the title and gives a clear indication of the danger that lurks in the novel’s
17 An image of the first title in the Série Rouge can be found at http://www.bibliopoche.
com/livre/Le-meurtre-de-Glenlitten/111325.html (accessed 9 August 2011). For a
history of the Série Noire and an image of its first cover, see http://www.gallimard.
fr/catalog/html/event/index/index_serienoire.html (accessed 9 August 2011).
18 On this point, see Évrard, Lire le roman policier, p. 54.
19 It was an early condition of the right of entry into the Série Noire that all works should
be considered as translations from American, even for French authors, so as to preserve
the tone and the unity of the collection. See Évrard, Lire le roman policier, pp. 55–6.
20 For Jon Cleary, see the list of the first Série Rouge titles at http://www.polar-sf.com/
SiteOpta/Serie%20rouge/Serie%20rouge.html (accessed 9 August 2011); for the first
Carter Brown cover in the Série Noire, see http://polarnoir.net16.net/livrescr94.
html (accessed 9 August 2011).
pages, to the generic and sober cover of the French series.21 Even though,
as Shane Maloney suggests, this represents a kind of consecration, it also
incorporates the author and the text into a context where the collection is
given more prominence than the individual writer or novel. The process of
gentrification inevitably involves a kind of ‘genrification’. Secondly, there
is a far longer explanatory text on the back cover of the French version of
Beat Not the Bones than in the original. This is a trend that is particularly
well illustrated by Patricia Carlon’s The Whispering Wall, whose French
cover bears significantly more information regarding the story within than
does the Australian cover.22
Since these Australian authors are not as well known to the French
reader as their British counterparts, Ruth Rendell or Agatha Christie,
additional information on their status as Reines du crime is required. It
is also likely, however, that the absence of individualized iconography on
the standardized French cover creates both the opportunity and the need
for compensatory textual material. In either case, the shift in emphasis
from the iconographical to the textual is the sign of a very dif ferent set of
cultural expectations.
21 The edition of Beat Not the Bones which was taken up by Le Masque was the 1992
reissue by Wakefield Press, 1989. Its cover can be seen at http://www.wakefieldpress.
com.au/product.php?productid=61 (accessed 9 August 2011). The French cover can
be viewed at http://www.librys.fr/charlotte-jay/au-coeur-de-la-jungle (accessed 9
August 2011).
22 For the original cover, which in this case is that of the Wakefield Press reissue of
1992, which was taken up by Le Masque, see http://www.wakefieldpress.com.au/
product.php?productid=813 (accessed 9 August 2011). For the French cover, see
http://www.decitre.fr/livres/Le-murmure-du-mur.aspx/9782702428337 (accessed
9 August 2011).
The Whispering Wall Le Murmure du mur
‘You’d better get used to corpses, Val,’ – theSara ne pouvait plus marcher. Ni parler.
wall hummed with the brutality of that Ni bouger ses bras. Elle n’avait donc
assured voice – ‘if we’re going to turn your aucun moyen de communiquer avec les
stepfather into one.’ siens. Un vrai poids mort. Enfin, c’est
ce qu’ils ont cru. Eux qui ont projeté,
Laid out like a fish on a slab, Sarah listens planifié, détaillé leur crime de l’autre côté
as the walls whisper their deadly plans. du mur. Même quand ils ont compris
The house is full of watchers; even the qu’elle avait tout entendu, aucune
furniture has malevolent eyes. The nurse inquiétude ne les a ef f leurés.
watches over Sarah, Rose watches out for
Sarah, Gwenyth watches the house, the Leur plan ne souf frait aucun
Phippses spy and plot… contretemps. Leur victime était toute
désignée. Leur mobile, plusieurs milliers
de dollars. Leur organisation, sans
défauts. Comment une femme impotente
pouvait-elle lutter contre deux criminels
en possession de tous leurs moyens? Elle
était si proche de la mort, un simple geste
l’enverrait dans l’au-delà…
Une reine du crime australienne qui

distille l’angoisse lentement mais
sûrement…
Traduit de l’anglais par Laurence Kiéfé.
The narrative function of cover art is thus performed in the French

versions not by distinctive iconography but by the combination of the
generic design, heralding the nature of the contents, and complementary
textual information. A further illustration of this contrast is provided by
Barry Maitland’s The Marx Sisters. Here, the original cover features a busy
kind of collage representing the jigsaw puzzle of clues that the reader will
need to be alert to as the novel unfolds – not least establishing the presence
of Karl Marx as a cultural reference alongside the first degree reference to
Groucho and his brothers.23 No such help is given to the French reader. In
contrast to the example of Patricia Carlon, the amount of text on both of
the covers here is fairly similar.
The Marx Sisters Les Sœurs Marx
Jerusalem Lane is a little piece of À Jérusalem Lane, leur petit quartier
Dickensian London untouched de Londres, la vie semble se tenir à
by development, its inhabitants l’écart des af fres de la modernité. Aussi
mainly refugees from pre-war central l’arrivée de l’inspecteur Kolla et d’un
Europe. But could elderly Meredith agent de Scotland Yard n’est-elle pas sans
Winterbottom really have been killed for surprendre les résidents.
the politics of another age?
As DS Kolla and DCI Brock delve into Il n’y a rien de plus naturel à ce qu’une
the Lane’s eccentric melting pot, past vieille personne rende l’âme, et l’idée que
and present interlink in unexpected Meredith ait pu être assassinée leur paraît
ways. What connects Mrs Rosenfeldt invraisemblable. D’autant plus qu’elle et
and Adam Kowalski to a smooth ses sœurs étaient appréciées de tous, ici.
property developer and an American
academic? And what is Meredith’s son Pourtant, à bien chercher, les deux
Terry up to? Not to mention the dottily enquêteurs finissent par mettre au jour
Marxist sisters. Could this be a recipe for de vieilles rancœurs. Et ce petit coin de
murder? paradis prend soudain les allures d’un
enfer…
Un duo de f lics inhabituel, pour une

peinture sociale au vitriol…
However, whereas the English description highlights murder and poli-

tics, as well as the strange assembly of characters in the story (juxtaposed
without explanation in a nice ref lection of the kaleidoscopic cover art),
the French presentation focuses on the social commentary inherent in
the novel and, as the Marx reference in the title is suf ficient to imply, in
its two meanings.
23 The original cover can be seen at http://www.barrymaitland.com/book_MarxSister.

html (accessed 9 August 2011), while the French cover is at http://www.amazon.
co.uk/soeurs-Marx-Barry-Maitland/dp/2702429335 (accessed 9 August 2011).
The case of another Australian author to be published in the Maîtres

du roman policier series of the Masque collection, Shane Maloney, is more
complex.24 As his popularity and the number of his titles in the collection
increase, he emerges from his initial assimilation into the generic series to
re-conquer a more individualized identity. There are two factors at work
here: firstly, as the red band attached to the cover of Spécialité de fruits de
mer indicates,25 there is no doubt that Shane Maloney’s star has risen con-
siderably since the publication of Stif f, and that he has come to command
a personalized style of packaging; secondly, after six or seven decades of
commercial success, the traditional formula for the cover design of Le
Masque may finally have begun to lose some of its marketing ef fectiveness,
with the result that concessions needed to be made to the evolution in the
tastes of the reading public – a public which, from the 1980s onwards, has
increasingly sought to identify individual writers, particularly those recog-
nized as ‘stars’, as a guarantee of quality, above and beyond the assurance
provided by the familiar yellow cover.
Yet, even when an author such as Shane Maloney is allowed to escape
from the generic straitjacket of the yellow cover, there is still a degree of
Frenchification evident in the cover design. The contrast between the stark
photographic quality of the cover of Nice Try and the stylized image of
its French translation is evidence of this.26 As an image, the body on the
French cover could have a variety of significations, but the lack of bright
colour, the use of largely black and white tones, and the presence of the
familiar icon of the mask and the quill immediately signal to the French
reader that this is a work of crime and mystery. A similar trend can be seen
in the cover of the French version of Something Fishy, which caters further
to French tastes by including a significantly greater amount of text than the
24 For the cover of Maloney’s first novel to appear in Le Masque, Stif f (Viande froide à
Melbourne), as well as its Australian original, see http://shanemaloney.com/books/
book/stif f (accessed 9 August 2011).
25 See http://livre.fnac.com/a1819218/Shane-Maloney-Specialite-de-fruits-de-mer. For
the Australian cover, see http://shanemaloney.com/books/book/something-fishy
(both sites accessed 9 August 2011).
26 See both covers at http://shanemaloney.com/books/book/nice-try (accessed 11
August 2009).
original version.27 The name of Maloney’s character, Murray Whelan, may

be a suf ficiently eloquent marker for the Australian reader, but if the author
is to find a niche within the vast French marketplace, the laconic Austral-
ian approach clearly will not do. Even though Maloney has succeeded in
graduating from the relative anonymity of the generic yellow cover, then,
the covers on the French versions of his texts continue to assimilate the
book into the graphic and textual conventions of ‘noir’ fiction with which
the French reader is instantly comfortable.
The same pattern emerges with the famous Série Noire collection,
whose cover has likewise evolved over time, despite the romantic percep-
tions of popular mythology. Created in the aftermath of World War II, the
Série Noire quickly established itself as an institution – and a distinctly
French institution at that, since to be a writer of ‘noir’ is to need no transla-
tion. To be translated and published in the series soon came to be seen as
a consecration, as it gave the crime fiction writer a hierarchical status akin
to that of the author in the White collection, in spite of the parody that
had presided over the creation of the Black. It also meant, for a foreign
writer, not only that the work would be assimilated into a generic tradi-
tion but also, in the early years at least, that it ran the risk of being com-
pletely transformed in French translation in order to make it conform to
the house style which was defined by three tenets: the French versions had
to be ‘dynamic, tough and sensual’.28 The process of cultural appropriation
was thus already in full operation when the series was establishing itself – a
subject which Alistair Rolls has examined in the case of Peter Cheyney and
other Anglo-American writers who were among the first to appear in the
collection.29 The familiar black cover with the yellow writing evolved over
27 For the French text on the back cover, see http://www.svel.eu/shane-maloney/

specialite-de-fruits-de-mer. For the shorter Australian text, see http://penguin.
com.au/products/9781877008702/something-fishy (both sites accessed 11 August
2011).
28 Marcel Duhamel’s programmatic 1945 advertising poster promised readers that the
novels to be published in the series would be ‘durs, dynamiques, sensuels’.
29 See, for example, his essay ‘Throwing Caution to the French Wind: Peter Cheyney’s
Success Overseas in 1945’, Australian Journal of French Studies, 43.1 (2006),
pp. 35–47.
time to include an image – a concession, no doubt, to the changing tastes

of the public. But by 2005, this new tendency was corrected in order to
restore the balance between the evolution in graphic design and the origi-
nal intentions of the creators of the series: the image was henceforth to be
a black and white photograph.30 As with Le Masque, the evolution in the
covers of the Série Noire did not therefore involve a rejection of the set of
conventions that made it distinctively French. On the contrary, despite the
use of cover illustration, the covers of the Série Noire remained a guarantee
of generic identity. The return to the predominance of black and yellow,
and the presence of the classic typography, are deliberate reminders of the
original cover design conceived by Picasso, and the end result is a cover
that sits firmly within the literary tradition of the various collections of
the Gallimard publishing house.
The recent example of Peter Temple’s Broken Shore clearly illustrates
the faithfulness of current conventions to the longstanding tradition of the
series. Firstly, the process of cultural appropriation is clear in the contrast
between the Australian and French covers.31 While the theme of the two
photographs is analogous – an interesting point in itself, given that the
French title has become divorced from any notion of shoreline or broken-
ness – the use of black and white, and yellow, on the French cover, along
with the presence of the words ‘Série Noire’, make it clear that this novel
bears a product label, and a label of quality at that. There is also a consider-
able amount of text on the French cover (almost 50 per cent more than on
the original) – a consistent trend, as we have noted, and one which serves
here, as elsewhere, not to add an exotic cultural note of Australianness, but
both to explain the adherence of the novel to the crime genre itself, usually
through a detailed plot summary, and to explain how the author, already
30 For examples of the ‘Grand Format’ adopted in 2005, see the following website
(accessed 11 August 2011): http://www.vivedimanche.net/boutique/policiers/serie-
noire/grand-format.html?mode=list.
31 The Australian cover can be seen at http://textpublishing.com.au/books-and-
authors/book/the-broken-shore, while the French cover of Séquelles is to be found
at http://rivieres.pourpres.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=2357 (both sites accessed
11 August 2011).
well known in another country, is worthy to be part of the series. In this
case, the novel is explicitly described on the French cover as fitting within
the ‘pure hard-boiled tradition’, in contradiction to the Australian cover,
where it is seen to defy ‘the boundaries of genre’. The issue of genre is thus
intimately related to the dif ference between the paratextual practices in
French and Australian crime publishing, with the Série Noire unsurprisingly
providing the most clear-cut example of the primacy of ‘genrification’.
While the Série Noire is the most well-known collection of crime fic-
tion in France, there are several others that emerged during the twentieth
century, as the genre’s popularity grew. These other series may not have had
the long-established tradition of sober and classical covers that characterized
for so long the two major collections, but they have nevertheless adopted
the same strategies when it comes to translated works and cover design. In
the case of The Empty Beach by Peter Corris, for example, we see a similar
shift from colour to black and white, from straightforward imagery to a
more stylized, almost Mediterranean type of image, when we move from the
original edition to its French publication in the Rivages/Noir collection.32
Claire McNab, on the other hand, is given plenty of colour in the French
version of The Wombat Strategy, but all cultural specificity is removed, or
rather transformed to ref lect the American setting where most of the action
takes place, thereby divorcing the cover iconography completely from both
the title and the story’s origins.33 For McNab, just as it was in the post-war
years for Jon Cleary or Carter Brown, American identity is a more reli-
able guarantor of genre than Australianness. Covering up the exotic rather
than exposing it emerges as a key feature of the French covers of translated
Australian crime fiction that we have examined in our survey.
32 For Peter Corris’s titles and cover images, including The Empty Beach, see http://www.
allenandunwin.com/default.aspx?page=311&author=222. For the French cover of
La Plage vide, see http://www.payot-rivages.net/livre_La-Plage-vide--Peter-Corris_
ean13_9782869301474.html (both accessed 9 August 2011).
33 The original cover of The Wombat Strategy by Claire McNab can be seen at http://
books.google.com/books/about/The_wombat_strategy.html?id=a6S9Ofo8UzQC;
the French cover of La Tactique du wombat appears at http://www.ktmeditions.com/
produit.php?ref=2–913066-25–9&id_rubrique=3 (both sites accessed 11 August
2011).
The pattern we have identified is thus both consistent and generalized.

Even the outlying cases that we considered such as Upfield and Green-
wood relate to the inclusive French crime family. Together, our examples
demonstrate that, when Australian crime fiction has been successful in
the French market, this is due in no small measure to its assimilation into
a generic visual paradigm that is distinctively French. In this way, notions
of place and time have been elided and cultural specificities transformed.
Any features on the original covers that might signal the cultural identity
of the text are subservient to this primary and compelling requirement,
and either disappear completely or are consigned to the margins of the
paratext. The overriding function of the crime fiction paratext is thus to
ensure that the work conforms to the French generic paradigm. In other
words, as befits the practitioner of crime, the French publishing industry
has adopted and perfected the art of the cover-up.
FRANÇOISE GRAUBY
Writing (Learning about):

French Writing Manuals and the Peritext
Most ref lections on the paratext agree on its pragmatic dimension. They

evoke the inf luence, even manipulation, be it consciously or unconsciously
experienced, that it exerts. As Philippe Lane argues in La périphérie du texte,
‘[l]e paratexte se compose […] d’un ensemble hétérogène de pratiques et
de discours qui réunit cependant une visée commune, celle qui consiste à
la fois à informer et convaincre, asserter et argumenter’.1 He notes further
that ‘leur vocation est d’agir sur le(s) lecteur(s) et de tenter de modifier leurs
représentations ou systèmes de croyance dans une certaine direction’.2
If we follow Bourdieu’s framework, belief systems are common to
all producers of cultural artefacts in a given period. As he reminds us, ‘la
présence permanente du passé du champ [de production]’ is such that it
perpetuates traditions and creates a historicity of the present: ‘[L]e refus
qui est au principe du changement, suppose et pose, et rappelle par là au
présent, en s’opposant à lui, cela même à quoi il s’oppose’.3 And then there
is the sociologist Judith Schlanger, who points out that ‘les représentations
culturelles ont leur façon à elles de se distendre et de perdurer’.4
We may well imagine how much more important these representations
and belief systems are when the book, the cultural artefact in question, is a
manual, user guide or teaching tool, and the reader a learner. Any didactic
intention contains a will to impose and to convince whether this be con-
veyed under the guise of demonstration or, in some cases, entertainment.
1 Philippe Lane, La Périphérie du texte (Paris: Nathan Université, 1992).

2 Lane, La Périphérie du texte, p. 17.
3 Pierre Bourdieu, Questions de sociologie (Paris: Minuit, 1980), p. 218.
4 Judith Schlanger, La Vocation (Paris: Seuil, 1997), p. 222.
138 FRANÇOISE GRAUBY
To convert readers to a particular system is to make them agents for its

propagation. The belief systems brought into play in peritexts, both edito-
rial and authorial, are all the more interesting to study insofar as they allow
us to speculate not only as to the particular readership that these guides
address but also the types of learning pathways represented in them.
For the purposes of the present chapter, we have chosen to look at
a number of manuals aimed at teachers running writing workshops and
aspiring writers with particular emphasis being placed on the presence
throughout these texts of universally recognisable, stock representations
of writing and writers.5 This feature is all the more interesting because
most manuals, taking their lead from Anglo-Saxon countries where works
on writing have been published for a number of years now, claim to rep-
resent a break with certain traditions. Certainly, they are using the clear
increase in the numbers of writing workshops in universities and other
institutions to create opportunities for everybody to be able to write and
publish.6 Despite touting themselves to some extent as the antidote to a
system glorifying the creative individual and the sacred nature of the art
of writing, they nonetheless fail to avoid this ‘permanent presence of the
past’ that Bourdieu speaks of. To take but one example, the choice of the
word roman in the title of certain works (J’écris mon premier roman; Le
5 Paul Désalmand, Guide de l’écrivain (Paris: Marabout, 1994); Nadège Devaux, L’ABC
de l’écrivain: Guide pratique de l’écriture (Québec: Les Éditions du Cram, 2006);
Bernard Baudouin, Comment écrire votre premier livre: Depuis le désir d’écrire jusqu’à
la conception, la création et la publication (Geneva: Ambre, 2002); Eva Kavian, Ecrire
et faire écrire: Manuel pratique d’écriture (Paris: De Boeck, 2007); Louis Timbal-
Duclaux, J’écris mon premier roman: Guide technique à l’usage des auteurs et des
ateliers d’écriture, Romans, récits, nouvelles, histoires, contes…, 4th edn (Beaucouzé:
Editions Ecrire aujourd’hui, 2009); Faly Stachak, Ecrire, un plaisir à la portée de tous,
350 techniques d’écriture créative (Paris: Eyrolles, 2004). My preference has been to
choose the better known manuals and authors: Timbal-Duclaux is recognized as an
expert on the writing workshop in France; the works of Baudouin and Désalmand
have been reprinted several times; and as for the Canadian author Nathalie Devaux,
her work comes from a francophone region where writing workshops are widespread,
including in universities.
6 For a more detailed analysis, see Françoise Grauby, ‘Ecrire ensemble? Théories et
implications des ateliers d’écriture en France’, Australian Journal of French Studies,
47.3 (2010), pp. 238–52.
Travail du romancier, etc.) refers to the dominant literary form today:

the novel. By latching onto new values associated with social changes, the
novel has since the nineteenth century appeared as ‘le genre de la liberté,
qui […] permet l’innovation formelle ou thématique. A priori sans limites,
il peut dire aussi bien l’individu (toute la littérature du Moi) que le social’.7
It should be noted that this fact – the role of the novel as dominant para-
digm and the production of a means of writing and reading the world – did
not become synonymous with a specifically nineteenth-century writing
practice for the simple reason that this model has not changed, and the
novel is now almost synonymous with the book, whose forms and func-
tions are well set out.
Our focus here will be the editorial peritext and the prefaces of the
French writing manual. It is in the editorial peritext (front pages, covers
and blurbs) that the most powerful inf luence is exerted on the reader.
The front page incites the reader to buy the book; the cover catches the eye;
the blurb, or back-cover, is the sales-pitch. In this way, we might think of the
cover paratext as the mental images that the future reader constructs of
the reality of fered by the book; and these images are based on preconceived
ideas, or representations, what Umberto Eco refers to as one’s personal
encyclopaedia.8 Described by Genette as ‘d’hyperboles valorisantes liées
aux nécessités du commerce’,9 the editorial peritext of writing manuals
is of interest here because of the particularly iconic images used in their
wording and their cover art. As for the functions of the preface, it will thus
be interesting to dwell on this aspect here in order to gauge the way that
it provides a utilitarian agenda of the book and defines a specific reading
public. As Genette points out, ‘Guider le lecteur, c’est aussi et d’abord le
situer, et donc le déterminer’.10 The prefaces here allow us to form an idea
of the typical student being targeted, in this case ‘[des] auteurs en herbe’,11
whose calls for advice are increasing as their numbers swell.
7 Yves Reuter, Introduction à l’analyse du roman (Paris: Nathan-Université, 2003),

p. 15.
8 Umberto Eco, Lector in Fabula (Paris: Grasset, 1985).
11 Paul Désalmand, Guide de l’écrivain, p. 12.
If, to borrow Bourdieu’s expression, ‘on entre en littérature non comme

on entre en religion, mais comme on entre dans un club sélect’,12 then the
authors of writing manuals (for the most part writers, lecturers, people
teaching writing classes or running writing workshops, or journalists) play
the role of ‘sponsors’, promising to open the doors of a notoriously closed
world. The manuals thus provide a certain number of pathways into this
prestigious circle (let us not forget that it is dif ficult to get published and
that publishers are not in the habit of familiarizing authors with their
particular house rules). Thus, the manual confers admission into a world
with strong emotional and symbolic connotations.13 As stated in L’ABC
de l’écrivain, ‘[v]ous ferez alors partie de la grande famille des écrivains qui
ont réussi en cristallisant leurs visions sur des feuilles de papier’.14
However, by neglecting to contextualize the literary field historically
and failing to mention the struggle for its recognition, the prefaces intro-
duce paradoxes pertaining to the state of writing and culture in general,
paradoxes that have been well established by a number of sociologists
(including Schlanger and Nathalie Heinich). In terms of the cultural
hierarchy, there is some consensus that the production of a work of art,
and in particular a work of literature, stands at the top of an eminent
pyramid: ‘Pour qu’il y ait littérature il faut avant tout qu’une production
écrite soit reconnue comme primordiale dans le champ culturel, valorisée
comme telle, acceptée et dignifiée par une opinion et des institutions de
légitimation’.15 The book and publication thereof are thus af forded cult
status, a fact stressed repeatedly in the writing manuals. For example, in
Comment écrire votre premier livre we read: ‘Aux quatre coins de notre
12 Pierre Bourdieu, ‘La production de la croyance’, Actes de la Recherche en sciences

sociales, 13 (1977), pp. 3–43 (p. 6).
13 To give an idea of these emotional and symbolic connotations, Jean-Paul Sartre
evokes the formative dimensions of a mythology of creativity and of a great family
of writers: ‘[S]ans cette grande illusion je ne serais jamais devenu un écrivain’. Jean-
Paul Sartre, Les Mots (Paris: Gallimard, 1970), p. 53.
14 Devaux, L’ABC de l’écrivain, p. 13.
15 Jean-Marie Goulemot and Daniel Oster, Gens de lettres, écrivains et bohèmes:
L’imaginaire littéraire 1630–1900 (Paris: Minerve, 1992), p. 37.
modeste planète, sur tous les continents et dans bon nombre de langues,
les sociétés les plus évoluées réservent au livre une place des plus éminen-
tes, lui conférant toutes les vertus d’un instrument d’ouverture, à l’essor et
à l’évolution inégalés’.16 As the book is made sacred, both as an object and
vehicle of language, and as prestige is conferred upon it, it becomes not only
increasingly legitimate but also necessary to express oneself by this noble
means. As Schlanger states, ‘[l]es vocations créatrices nobles apparaissent
désormais comme le comble de la réalisation de soi, tandis que les œuvres
culturelles sont sacralisées comme le trésor commun de la mémoire qui est,
en droit, le bien de tous’.17
Now, the right of everyone to gain access to writing is not without
its contradictions. Schlanger further notes how ‘nous disons à la fois que
chacun a droit à ce que son occupation […] ne soit pas imposée et insig-
nifiante […]. Et nous disons aussi que “droit” commun et universel a pour
signature première et pour illustration évidente des cas singuliers, qui sont
étrangers par définition à l’expérience courante’.18 This paradox between
the democratization of the practice of writing and the imposition of sin-
gular examples or destinies, with attendant reminders of the dif ficulty of
obtaining publication and of gaining a place among the select few, underlies
the discourse of writing manuals, which deploys a whole range of strate-
gies to resolve it. Thus, the manuals play a double game: on the one hand,
they highlight the lure of another world to which everyone has access in
accordance with the legitimate desire to live on for posterity; on the other
hand, they set out the framework of a quantifiable system, which exists and
which is selective. This is a case of the easy (writing is within everybody’s
reach) co-existing with the dif ficult (writing demands hard work).
A closer inspection of the paratext thus reveals in these writing manu-
als both the declaration of a universal right to write and the glorification of
the creative project, and a selection process based on work that redresses
the balance in favour of economic imperatives, since ‘producing’ writing,
and making a profit out of it, are also the stated aims of these texts.
16 Baudouin, Comment écrire votre premier livre, p. 19.

17 Schlanger, La Vocation, p. 110.
Creating: Glorifying the Creative Project
Even if the path proves selective (and the cultural milieu is particularly
narrow), the doors must remain wide open to reach the greatest number
of potential writers. How can this paradox be resolved? First, by af firming
that everybody can write and that writing can be learned.19 Without going
into contemporary debates about the writerly vocation versus the idea of an
apprenticeship, the manuals stick from the outset to the idea that one can
learn to become a novelist and that it is suf ficient to apply a few clear rules
to make a novel ‘hang together’. But this is also to legitimize the desire to
write. Thus, Comment écrire votre premier livre poses this desire as universal:
‘Ecrire? D’accord, pourquoi pas? Sous-entendu: pourquoi pas moi? Mais
écrire quoi? Et comment? A peine la question est-elle posée, une réponse
jaillit, instinctive, dans la fulgurance d’un réf lexe: un livre!’20
At the beginning of each work a scandal is broached: the attack on
writing as a vocation. Indeed, nothing is more shocking to our liberal socie-
ties (and this as far back as the Enlightenment) than the idea that we might
be carrying within us a destiny and a project that will not be realized. To
claim the desire to write is not only to play on that aspect of discovering
one’s own talents, and putting them to use, that is to do with self-fulfilment;
more than that, it is posed as a necessity: ‘Nous posons en principe que toute
richesse humaine est précieuse; c’est pourquoi tout désir vocationnel doit
être encouragé et aidé comme une valeur, et tout particulièrement s’il s’agit
d’une vocation d’ordre culturel’.21 In this way, a risk is posed that is the exact
19 As highlighted in L’ABC de l’écrivain, ‘[t]out le monde peut écrire. L’écriture n’est pas
un don. Elle n’a ni âge, ni sexe. Elle n’est pas non plus destinée à une élite bardée de
diplômes, car elle se soucie peu du statut social et de la scolarité de chaque écrivain.
Seuls l’amour des mots, la passion, le désir de s’exprimer et la patience comptent’.
Devaux, L’ABC de l’écrivain, p. 10 (emphasis original).
21 Schlanger, La Vocation, p. 34. She adds that ‘[i]l y a plus ou moins deux siècles que
sont nées ensemble en Europe la préoccupation démocratique (l’horizon, les prob-
lématiques, les enjeux de la démocratie moderne) et la grande valorisation moderne
de la culture, cette valorisation par laquelle l’activité culturelle est placée au sommet
de la hiérarchie des activités possibles’ (p. 110, emphasis original).
opposite, the troubling one of ‘not writing’.22 The prospect is raised of a
talent smothered, an aptitude lost. It would be possible, if distressing, to
lead a ‘non-expressive’ life, that is to say an oppressed, insignificant one. This
myth of ‘cultural loss’, as described by Schlanger, is perceived as an immense
wrong done to society as a whole, and a wrong that could have been avoided.
It is almost as if the manuals’ sole occupation is to save endangered talents.
Their ‘mission’ of writing for all is predicated on the idea that any virtual
book can come into being and, through this self-realization, realize the full
extent of its own potential. In short, without ‘your book’, the world would
be an impoverished and dismal place.
Second, this operation to realize aspirations is presented as simple. The
decision to write, for example, is, as one manual puts it, ‘la transformation
d’un point d’interrogation en un simple point’.23 Writing is an activity that is
best presented as ‘instinctive’, a kind of ref lex: ‘Si vous voulez écrire, écrivez!
Ecrivez, lisez, regardez, écoutez, vivez!’24 Comment écrire votre premier livre
insists on ‘le désir, le besoin pressant d’écrire un livre’,25 while in Ecrire et
faire écrire the preface by Albert Jacquard, geneticist and humanist, stresses
the importance of writing as a way of leaving a mark and travelling across
time: ‘[A]ider à cette création comme le fait Eva Kavian c’est participer à
l’humanisation de notre petit domaine d’univers’.26
We need to communicate, to transmit, to endure. Cultural activity, at
the interface of the public (the book) and the private (the ‘I’), is encour-
aged because it allows us to realize our right to self-actualization, our very
right to exist. All value must be displayed, as Schlanger notes: ‘Développer,
cultiver, épanouir ses aptitudes possibles, c’est le grand devoir envers soi-
22 In the same framework, another manual evokes the drama constituted by the destruc-
tion of books: ‘[D]ans les périodes les plus troublées de l’histoire des hommes, chaque
fois que l’on a voulu briser un peuple on a commencé par détruire ses écrits, et, quand
ils avaient atteint cette forme, par brûler les livres. On comprend dès lors, pourquoi
le livre est à ce point auréolé de prestige’. Baudouin, Comment écrire votre premier
livre, p. 20.
24 Kavian, Ecrire et faire écrire, p. 6.
26 In Kavian, Ecrire et faire écrire, p. 5.
même, le devoir individualiste par excellence’.27 It is a guiding principle of

the manuals that all human production is precious, which is why it is to
be encouraged: ‘[Q]ue le talent demande à s’exercer, que l’œuvre demande
à exister, c’est à nos yeux une requête légitime’.28
In this way, the writing manual embodies a type of maieutics; its ambi-
tion is to bring out desire, to reveal it and to make it happen. What is at stake
in the manual is not only, then, the actualization of the book as a cultural
object but the blossoming of the writing subject itself: ‘il s’agit désormais
d’un livre que l’on désire, que l’on va “écrire”, soi-même, du premier au
dernier mot, avec entre les deux, quel qu’en soit le thème, un univers jailli
de notre conscience’.29 The book becomes my book. The formatting of the
formless, the raw, the spontaneous, all that which bursts out of the chaos
within, getting in touch with substance, initiating the act of writing – these
expressions occur repeatedly in the manuals.
In some manuals, this personal subject matter lends itself to the use
of the second-person to address the reader: ‘vous désirez écrire un livre’,
announces L’ABC de l’écrivain;30 ‘[v]ous voulez écrire de la fiction’, ‘[v]ous
voulez, pour vos études ou votre plaisir, mieux analyser et comprendre les
romans et autres œuvres de fiction’, insists J’écris mon premier roman.31 This
playful use of dialogue is a commonly used technique, which reproduces
the interaction between teacher and pupil, with the former causing the
latter to get in tune with herself, thereby reinforcing her individuality. As
Ecrire, un plaisir à la portée de tous promises, ‘[d]écouvrez l’écrivain que
vous n’osiez pas devenir’.32

28 Schlanger, La Vocation, p. 34. And this is an injunction to survive that has been ringing
out since as early as the Enlightenment, as Goulemot and Oster have noted: ‘Ecrivez!
Ecrivez! il en restera toujours quelque chose. Vous survivrez dans la mémoire des
hommes. Avant que d’exister dans ses pierres et ses rituels, le Panthéon commence
à vivre dans les rêves d’espoir de ceux qui écrivent’. Goulemot and Oster, Gens de
lettres, écrivains et bohèmes, p. 53.
31 Timbal-Duclaux, J’écris mon premier roman, back cover.
32 Stachak, Ecrire, p. 7.
The manual therefore proposes a conversion of the raw material of the

second-person subject – vous – into an aesthetic object, and this along a
well-signposted trajectory. This object becomes the very ref lection of the
person writing it, a sort of projection of the whole self (formatted and made
public): ‘[il] devient le prolongement de soi, de ce que l’on pense, de ce
que l’on est’;33 ‘chacun possède une fibre créatrice; si vous ignorez encore
la vôtre, il faut la faire remonter, l’écouter, la travailler, l’aimer, l’af firmer,
avec une tranquille confiance’.34
This is put right up front with the cover paratext, which emphasizes
the exaltation of writing, using representations of the author and the tools
of the trade. Literature, insofar as it has become the ultimate model of a
life dedicated to art and thus a revered creative vocation, is also associated
with the personal adventure of a life’s project. The front covers, therefore,
ref lect these dual specifications.
On the whole, the choice for the front cover is dominated by figurative
representations of people or clichéd objects, all easily recognizable cultural
references. A cursory glance reveals a pen, a typewriter, a computer, a hand,
all identifiable, and highly suggestive, icons: metonymically, they stand for
the profession of the writer. Perhaps most powerfully of all, the goose quill
(which appears on the cover of Ecrire, un plaisir à la portée de tous) signals
an outmoded and thus all the more enticing representation of literature.
This archaic image, which is nonetheless one familiar to us all, reminds
us that the place of the artist in the popular imaginary has been idealized
since the nineteenth century and that this aura, both real and imaginary,
continues to capture the imagination even in our computerized world.
Implicit here is the message that these values have not been lost and that
we are still seduced by an old-fashioned representation, which continues
to inform our perception of writing. If we instantly recognize the charming
anachronism that is the goose quill, it is because it is still part of us.
These images immediately convey the writer’s profession at once
as ‘manual’ and ‘mediated’ by its tools. They draw on knowledge that is

somehow anchored in a culture where manual work is valued and in which

the artisan still has a certain kudos. Indeed, the concept of craftsmanship has
long been central to the prestige in which literature is held. Composition
is associated with a noble manual activity, along the same lines as weaving
or jewellery. This means an emphasis on the painstaking and highly precise
task of assembling words and ideas, and an image of the solitary craftsman
concentrating over his work.
Now, the reverence in which the solitary artisan is held can be dated.
Roland Barthes places it at around 1850, at which point ‘commence à
s’élaborer une imagerie de l’écrivain artisan […] [qui] dégrossit, taille, polit
et sertit sa forme’.35 And ever since sole rights to the ownership of literary
works were conferred to the author, which is to say towards the end of the
seventeenth century, his image too has been of an autonomous, eccentric
figure, a near recluse. What we are dealing with here, then, in the case of
this cover art is the definition of the writer as artist sitting alone at a desk,
producing an aesthetic object prized for its unique qualities. One author,
one book, one instrument (and we could add, too, one title, one publisher):
everything here is signed in the singular. Comment écrire votre premier livre
states that writing is a challenge ‘à assumer en solitaire, car l’écriture d’un
livre ne concerne en premier lieu que celui qui écrit’.36
Despite the workshops for which these manuals are written or to which
they refer, it is clear that all notions of collaborative or communal work
are put aside in favour of the struggle between an author and the tools of
the trade or the finished product. And the variety of tools featured on the
front covers attests, at least implicitly, to a chronological progression from
manuscript to book, and pen to computer.
But here too, this tribute to craftsmanship is undermined by the mod-
esty of the writer’s tools: a few basic pieces of equipment are all that is
required. This emphasis on simplicity is taken up again in introductory
sections, with such trite reminders as these, taken from Ecrire, un plaisir
à la portée de tous: ‘Pour avancer en écriture, vos bagages sont on ne peut
plus légers: un crayon, un stylo, une plume ou un clavier d’ordinateur, des
35 Roland Barthes, Le Degré zéro de l’écriture (Paris: Seuil, 1953), pp. 50–1.

feuilles de papier’.37 And again, this time in the Guide de l’écrivain: ‘Pour
écrire un prix Goncourt ou entrer à l’Académie française, il suf fit d’une rame
de papier, d’un stylo et d’une corbeille à papier’.38 Such promises have the
slogan-like ring of the sales-pitch: not only can anyone write but all the nec-
essary tools are within easy reach. No costly or sophisticated equipment, no
rites of initiation, what we see taking shape here is a paradoxical technique
that is rolled out again and again: at the same time as the processes of the
craftsman are extolled the element that is the work itself is erased. Writing
is, therefore, portrayed as a slow, arduous and thus prestigious process and,
at the same time, as disconcertingly easy, an act of pure magic.
In this way, the cultural image of the writer alternates with more ‘natu-
ral’ images of young girls writing in fields and of f lowers blossoming out of
books, poeticized scenes that provide the freshness and simplicity necessary
for the creative process. One preface tells how ‘un livre est issu d’une forêt
respirant à travers ses pages’;39 another advises ‘[d’]écrire comme on respire,
comme on expire l’air de ses poumons’.40 Nature here brings out the values
of inspiration and emotion. Of course, such images date back to antiquity,
when the poet’s Muse was represented as the breath of the gods.41 Images
of trees growing and f lowers opening are regularly used to represent the
creative act as a ‘germination’ of words and ideas. Inspiration is thus drawn
from the life force of the elements, and the book itself appears the prod-
uct of a lifecycle, the idea being the seed to the book’s tree or f lower. The
recourse to ancient creation myths colours representations of work with
the simplicity of nature: as such, the writer generates ideas instinctively, as
a tree bears fruit, in what Barthes describes in ‘L’Écrivain en vacances’ as
‘une sorte de sécrétion involontaire’.42 Barthes goes on to argue that myth

38 Désalmand, Guide de l’écrivain, p. 31.
41 On the subject of the Muse, see Jacqueline Assaël, Pour une poétique de l’inspiration,
d’Homère à Euripide (Louvain: Peeters, 2006).
42 ‘Il est très “naturel” que l’écrivain écrive toujours, en toutes situations’, Roland Barthes,
Mythologies (Paris: Seuil, 1957), p. 30.
functions to evacuate the real: ‘[U]ne prestidigitation s’est opérée, qui a

retourné le réel, l’a vidé d’histoire et l’a rempli de nature’.43
Particularly telling is the image of a young girl writing alone in a natu-
ral setting on the cover of J’écris mon premier roman. This communion
with nature, at the water’s edge, connotes meditation and confession, the
recognizable topoi of romantic literature. Yet, it also evokes the Muse, the
goddess of nature, from whom inspiration is drawn. Gathering f lowers
draws on the same idea and vocabulary as germination (the verbs cueillir
and recueillir describe a gathering or harvesting while the pronominal form
se recueillir signifies a gathering of thoughts).
Inspiration can take yet another form when it is cast as a cup held in
two hands. In this case, the metaphor is of the brain captured in its intui-
tive, creative mode. This is the ‘eureka’ moment (Archimedes in his bath,
Newton and his apple). The manuals mostly remain faithful to the idea
of the exalted vocation, emphasizing the creative impulse and the origi-
nal discovery. As the Guide de l’écrivain implores, as if to confirm that the
inventive genius is still the only mark of talent, ‘Inventez! Inventez! Ou
taisez-vous’.44 Schlanger embellishes on this theme: ‘L’ethos ouvert à tous
de la vocation moderne ouvre un champ d’activité très vaste: af firmez-vous,
définissez-vous, choisissez, inventez, produisez’.45
This brief survey of cover-page motifs reveals an allocentric percep-
tion of inspiration coming from open spaces, with their references to an
external source (nature) or a homocentric one, which place the source of
creativity inside (a craftsman’s workshop, skull or cup). Furthermore, the
word ‘inspiration’ so often mentioned in these works but never defined, that
is to say historicized, thus becomes a sort of ‘mana’, as defined by Roland
Barthes drawing on Lévi-Strauss.46 This revered empty space or repository
of meaning can be readily conveyed with this same lexis of ‘inspiration’:
43 Barthes, Mythologies, pp. 216–17.

44 Désalmand, Guide de l’écrivain, p. 14.
46 ‘Le mana est une sorte de symbole algébrique […], chargé de représenter “une valeur
indéterminée de signification, en elle même vide de sens, dont l’unique fonction est
de combler un écart entre le signifiant et le signifié”’, Barthes, Mythologies, p. 129.
divine breath, magic wand or laurel wreath; gift, vocation or grace; the
non-quantifiable, non-digitized and non-computable in the writing pro-
cess; that something extra that marks someone as special. In a word, all
that is not technique.
Thus, the vocational, intuitive and spontaneous aspect of writing is
broached in the manuals, which are nevertheless designed to focus on
technique. So, while no definition of inspiration is given, we are left in no
doubt that it lies in the realm of the vocational, the singular, according to
which the writer’s skill is anchored ‘dans la possession native d’une apti-
tude détachée de toute action humaine, au-delà de la maîtrise technique’.47
Because it strikes without warning, grace, with its obvious religious over-
tones, puts some necessary mystery back into traditional creation. With
its marked elitism – aptitudes, gifts and talents are not equally distributed
– grace belies the democratic nature of both the manuals’ message and their
target audience. Indeed, there is a rejection, even, and perhaps especially,
among writers, of the possibility of training and application alone being
suf ficient to produce a work of art. Perhaps the most striking example,
taken from Incidences by Philippe Djian, shows a creative writing student
telling her teacher that ‘[é]crire est une question de travail. C’est quatre-
vingt-dix-neuf pour cent de travail’, to which the teacher replies: ‘Je dois
vous entretenir du un pour cent qui reste.’48
Bernard Lahire’s survey of the writer’s condition is conclusive: the
majority of writers questioned considered themselves to have been singled
out by what they describe as a calling.49 By taking on board such declara-
tions and incorporating them as best they can into practice (particularly
in the paratextual elements of the cover), the manuals metaphorically
close the door that has been opened so wide – that of the writer’s career
as open to all.
47 Nathalie Heinich, L’Elite artiste: Excellence et singularité en régime démocratique

(Paris: Gallimard, 2005), p. 86.
48 Philippe Djian, Incidences (Paris: Gallimard, 2010), p. 71.
49 Bernard Lahire, La Condition littéraire: La Double vie des écrivains (Paris: La
Découverte, 2006). To the question whether writing could be defined as work,
46.3 per cent responded ‘yes’ compared with a ‘no’ response of 31.5 per cent, the latter
group seeing it as a vocation.
Producing
Créer est le nom noble de produire

– Judith Schlanger
The internal experience, according to which the writing process is essen-

tially mysterious, emphasizes individual introspection. Drafts, themes and
practical lessons on the art of writing, on the other hand, refer to a didactic
transmission of knowledge. On the whole, the manuals present a well-
crafted mix of both, that is to say inspiration (which cannot be defined
since it is, by its very nature, mysterious, unpredictable and elitist) and
composition, vocation and technique, thereby ref lecting the two elements
that to this day make up our definition of literary practice.50 The successive
nature of tasks is also respected: writing mobilizes a mechanical process
but the idea and initial inspiration (holy cup, divine breath), are essentially
magical. Transcendence claims, or reclaims, its place in the hierarchy of
creation. For, the question of composition brings with it considerations
of hierarchy, and while everyone has the right to learn to write, everyone
does not have the necessary aptitudes to become a writer.
50 Vocation and inspiration – these theological terms express a transcendental quality. In

this regard, we might think of the ‘Dionysian’ moment described by Michel Onfray
in L’Art de jouir: Pour un matérialisme hédoniste (Paris: Gallimard, 1991) in terms
of the existential hapax, which is a sort of creative rush followed by an ‘Apollonian’
moment, at which point discursive and aesthetic form is taken on. Contemporary
theoretical and philosophical writers, on the other hand, have argued against this tem-
poral progression from inspiration to composition. Examples include Jean Ricardou,
Alain Robbe-Grillet and Clément Rosset, the latter noting in Le Choix des mots
(Paris: Minuit, 1995), p. 41, that ‘il n’y a pas de pensée préalable et en quelque sorte
préfabriquée […] sans le mot qui seul compte dans l’expression d’une pensée, la pensée
en question n’est qu’un pur fantôme en attente de corps’. For his part, Alain Robbe-
Grillet writes as follows in Pour un nouveau roman (Paris: Minuit, 1963), p. 121:
‘Croire que le romancier a “quelque chose à dire” et qu’il cherche ensuite comment
le dire, représente le plus grave des contresens. Car c’est précisément ce “comment”,
cette manière de dire, qui constitue son projet d’écrivain’.
This contradiction is perpetuated in the prefaces. If the question of the

lifelong project, of the concretization of a cultural desire, is presented as
authentic, it is equally presented from the outset as a dynamic movement
into the future. Indeed, we should not forget that the project of writing, or
of writing oneself, is part of an active quest. It is by leaving behind a quiet,
stable, known world in search of the unknown space of creation that the
aspiring author moves towards new possibilities. The idea of trajectory
governs most of the manuals, whose tables of contents ref lect this sign-
posted pathway. Above all, the definition of this pathway brings into play
on the one hand this abandoning of self to adventure, and on the other,
the imposition of theoretical frameworks. Funnelling raw creative energy
necessitates of fering plans and methods for giving direction to desire. For
this reason, metaphors of travel and personal adventure are thrown into
the didactic mix in a particularly ambiguous way. The resolutely optimistic
tone of the manual draws on holiday brochures and travel guides, with all
their vocabulary of self-fulfilment, whereas their plan is structured along
the lines of a school textbook.
The back cover of Ecrire, un plaisir à la portée de tous stresses the motif
which will be taken up and developed in the introduction, that is writing
as a journey of discovery. To this end, lexis supports the departure theme:
‘jeter l’encre’, with its play on words on jeter l’ancre, ‘pistes à explorer’, and so
on. The text is further enhanced with a photo of the author very much in
holiday-club mode (smiling, sun-tanned, of f-the-shoulder top), a reminder
that the writing workshop is also something of a summer-holiday activity
in the villages of the south of France. Intuition and the freedom to roam
are on of fer for those taking part. Rather like an ethnologist, the author
guides the apprentice to mysterious lands: ‘durant le voyage, vos valises
se rempliront peu à peu’.51 For, if writing is ‘un challenge, un défi qu’on se
lance à soi-même’, it is also ‘une fabuleuse aventure’.52
The preface expands further on this theme: writing is not simply a
journey into self; instead, it is directed outwards, a movement into the
world:

[ J]e vous invite à voyager, en toute liberté : vous pouvez suivre page après page ce
voyage organisé, et/ou bien, au gré de votre humeur et de votre indépendance, faire
de grands bonds d’un monde à l’autre, ignorant ceci, visitant cela, mais toujours,
toujours, enthousiaste, vous qui venez là, décidé au voyage avec pour tout bagage,
et comme c’est immense et précieux, tout ce que vous êtes aujourd’hui. Vous, penché
sur la page, attentif. Vous cet inconnu avec lequel je vais voyager tout au long de ces
470 pages.53
It can be seen how the adventure changes rather quickly into a pleasure
cruise. And this navigation from A to B is made all the easier because
the spaces evoked are instantly recognizable. The writing compass reveals
haikus to the east and, to the south, the ‘archipels des thématiques’ and,
‘cinq petites îles à visiter’, including of course, ‘celle d’Eros’.54 The rather
paradoxical result is part cruise, part perilous journey, with a destination
whose familiar landmarks speak of sunny, Mediterranean skies. A voyage
of rediscovery, then, mapped and signposted by other travellers in whose
footsteps one must follow.
The extracts of text provided as models are identified as fellow travel-
lers, and the manual becomes for the aspiring writer something akin to a
Lonely planet guide.55 Right down to the vocabulary used (territoire, bagages,
arpenter), the blend is wilfully intrepid and reassuring. These vectors and
trajectories make for a discourse that is profoundly optimistic but also
selective. Skilful negotiation of these two ostensibly opposed registers is
achieved through the introduction of a regimen worthy of the school room:
selective teaching is supported by strict adherence to the rules imposed
by the manuals and writing teachers. As Stachak’s work makes clears,
‘[c]haque territoire est construit de parties, et chaque partie se divise en
plusieurs itinéraires. En cheminant ainsi, de l’un à l’autre, vous fortifierez
votre écriture, pas à pas. Pour ce faire, chaque itinéraire comprend un
carnet de route dans lequel vous trouverez de nombreuses propositions
d’écriture’.56 Timbal-Duclaux’s text, on the other hand, adopts a far more

directive approach: ‘tous les exercices que je préconise, ou seulement cer-

tains, peuvent faire l’objet de devoirs écrits et notés, ce qui rentre aussi dans
la norme scolaire ou universitaire’.57
Just as the instructions for putting together a garden shed or baking
a cake require that certain steps be followed, the ‘novel’ also demands a
signposted pathway made up of concrete rules and technical instructions.
Adventure disappears beneath injunctions and commands illustrated by
methods, all of which recommend preparation (note-taking and system-
atic plot construction) followed by a methodical putting of pen to paper
(one chapter per day, for example). The authors insist on a learning pro-
cess made up of conscientious steps carefully designed to take the project
to its conclusion.
The demands of thematic and methodological unity are such that
most of the manuals conceive of writing as a strongly structured pathway,
including chapter and chapter-section plans, and a set of rules for the
composition itself. Much emphasis is placed on the need for a contract
with the students who are then bound to do the exercises and to obey
the instructions in order to obtain the object, the book, that will be their
reward and the logical end-point of an architecture put in place by the
manual itself. The tables of contents are telling in this regard: they cut
the creative work into sections along a precise chronological axis, from
conception to realization. Whether you prefer the traditional approach
or the cinematographic method advocated by Timbal-Duclaux,58 there
is no divergence from a solid work plan worthy of a time and motion
study: ‘A chaque proposition correspond un temps d’écriture.’59 Ef fort is
captured over time and in real time, to such an extent that a stop-watch is
almost as important as pen and paper. Indeed, one of the strongest cases
put forward by the manuals is that they ‘save you time’. Bad students are
57 Timbal-Duclaux, J’écris mon premier roman, p. 8.

58 This emphasis on the cinema allows the author to make the case for teamwork:
‘[C]ette méthode permet aussi bien de travailler seul, à deux ou en groupe’ (p. 8).
Indeed, distribution of tasks (props, set design, editor, scriptwriter, screenwriter, and
so on) is part of the author’s role and, as such, is well suited to a group scenario. In
all, seven roles are identified in Timbal-Duclaux’s plan.
therefore those who do not apply themselves, who either do not do the
daily exercises or who do not do them regularly. Without this consistent
ef fort, publication is not possible, and timewasters are not invited to apply.
Dilettanti, for example, are not welcome because prioritizing information
is the very antithesis of their desire to taste a little of everything and to
do nothing in depth. The book, the manual stresses, is a serious business,
which must be taken one step at a time and demands concentration and
commitment. But this is, of course, not without its contradictions, as the
authors themselves occasionally point out: ‘écrire en temps “minuté” (et
moi qui vous parlais à peine trois lignes au-dessus de briser les cadres!), c’est
vous obliger à ne pas rester le crayon suspendu et le regard au plafond à la
recherche du “quoi dire” et “comment le dire”’.60
The notion of time features heavily on the cover of J’écris mon pre-
mier roman, which brings together three familiar symbols of writing: a
computer keyboard, an open exercise book showing two white pages and
an expensive-looking fountain pen. This mise en abyme (tools of the book
on the book) picks up the book’s sub-title (‘depuis le désir d’écrire jusqu’à
la conception, la création et la publication’), with the pen and the exer-
cise book in the foreground suggesting a hand-written preparatory phase
before the realization of the typed document and onwards to formatting
for a future publication. The movement – from desire to the act itself –
also draws a clear distinction. There is no place here for daydreaming or
fickleness: writing is an active choice, centred around an idea, a project, an
objective. Intellectual curiosity takes second place to the regular produc-
tion of material.
Here again, the manual of fers its eulogy to this work ethic dating
back to the nineteenth century. Goulemot and Oster toe the same line:
‘Les stigmates de la bohème et les grands idéaux dégradés du romantisme
font place à un nouvel exhibitionnisme, celui du travail. L’emploi du temps
devient le fondement essentiel de la nouvelle éthique littéraire. Flaubert
“travaille décidément quatorze heures par jour. Ce n’est plus du travail,
60 Stachak, Ecrire, p. 5 (my emphasis).

c’est la Trappe”’.61 The establishment of a plan is the cornerstone of this

ascetic approach to regular work. And it is precisely this initial planning
stage that is disdained by so many writers today, who consider it, if not an
overhang of the Naturalists, then at least a constraint on their creativity.62
This is not put to the test in the manuals, in which a single, monologic way
of thinking is, with few exceptions, a strong unifying theme. The question
arises as to the extent to which the naturalist framework, from which the
genre of the novel emerged, has become the norm, perhaps even the defi-
nition of writing itself.
Certainly, it has been shown here how a writing mould has become
established around the novel, which, with its adherence to the strictures
of a clearly planned storyline, has become the dominant force of the lit-
erary marketplace.63 The model espoused by the writing manuals corre-
sponds more or less to the methods and ef fects of the realist canon. This
is a model of the author as ‘écrivain pour le temps court’, to use Bourdieu’s
expression, one which follows the ‘canons d’une esthétique éprouvée (lit-
térature de “prix”, romans à succès, etc.)’.64 Unsurprisingly then, J’écris mon
premier roman pays tribute to Georges Simenon as the ‘travailleur acharné
et méthodique’ who managed to ‘publier plus de 400 titres, à être traduit
en des dizaines de langues, à être sans cesse réédité, porté à l’écran, en salle
61 Goulemot and Oster, Gens de lettres, écrivains et bohèmes, pp. 149–50. They continue
as follows: ‘Le romancier réaliste, un Champf leury par exemple, est le type même de
ces écrivains désormais sous le contrôle du temps. Chaque page s’aligne sur le temps,
contre lui, rarement avec lui. La progression d’une œuvre se mesure non à celle de
l’intrigue, mais à la capacité de l’écrivain d’organiser au mieux son emploi du temps’
(p. 150).
62 Take Pierre Michon on this subject, for example: ‘Non, pas de plan de travail, jamais,
c’est une catastrophe, ce serait une sorte de travail, de contrat avec soi-même qu’il
s’agirait d’honorer’. Pierre Michon, Le Roi vient quand il veut (Paris: Albin Michel,
2007), p. 125.
63 Appendix four of Comment écrire votre premier livre reveals the preparatory work
of four novelists all chosen from the century of the novel: Balzac, Hugo, Stendhal
and Zola.
64 Bourdieu, ‘La Production de la croyance’, p. 25.
ou à la télévision’.65 The tribute, then, is to the novel as product, ‘un roman

grand public, de 180 pages au format de poche’, which can be read in a
single sitting ‘en une soirée, ou encore dans le train entre Paris et Nancy’.
Indeed, if we consider that a well-run business must lead to a product, then
the book, which you can finally hold in your hand, is the best concrete
example of productive writing.
Learning to write is the realization of a lifelong project, which can also
be sold and make money. Ideally, if writing manuals are to justify the price
of their purchase and the ef fort invested in them, they should draw on an
understanding of the genres and sub-genres that sell: biography, autobi-
ography, autofiction, action-adventure novels, and so on. The result must
be judged marketable. As Schlanger notes, ‘l’entreprise intellectuelle de
connaissance est devenue également, au même titre que l’entreprise artis-
tique, le type supérieur de l’entreprise libérale’.66 If the book is the product
of an ‘I’, it is an I modelled to fit within strict commercial parameters; this
is the economic and financial logic behind the manuals’ regimentation of
intellectual life.
Conclusion
It is possible to consider the writing manuals appearing in ever greater

numbers on the marketplace in terms of the bourgeois compromise so
eloquently discussed by Nathalie Heinich.67 It certainly signals the ten-
sion in the artistic field between a residual aristocratic elitism (the artist
as chosen one) and a democratization along community lines. The writers
who criticize writing workshops for standardizing tastes and styles do so out
of a belief in the values of excellence, a hang-over from a time when tastes
were ranked according to a hierarchy. For such critics, writing workshops
emphasize equality of opportunity and the availability of culture for all.
65 Timbal-Duclaux, J’écris mon premier roman, p. 8.

67 Heinich, L’Elite artiste, p. 348.
The manuals ref lect the ambiguities of a world which, according to

Schlanger, ‘garde des nostalgies aristocratiques, mais dont les critères pro-
fessionnels explicites sont essentiellement productivistes’.68 While they
are indeed predicated on an opening up of writing (‘tout le monde peut
apprendre à écrire’), this imperative is, as has been shown, reined in by a
series of didactic conditions (control, work, strict plan, dedication, note-
taking). All traces of singularity, and the idea of inspiration, are not, how-
ever, entirely dispensed with: the belief in that quasi-magical thing that is
natural talent coexists with the creed of hard work. And this same para-
doxical arrangement has existed for almost two hundred years. But it is
not the only one. Oscillating between internally focused contemplation
and the more dynamic project (life as book, and vice versa), the manuals
of fer an organization of time and work broken down into equal parts but
which draw also on the metaphor of the journey, of the creative thrust,
which for its part cannot be controlled.
In this context, existential and economic interests coincide. All readers
are potential producers; they contribute to culture as it is their right to do
so. Thus, the distinction between specialist producers and the consuming
public is presented as a thing of the past. Yet, as we have seen, this dream of
an opening up of culture, which is shared by the writing workshop, comes
with the reminder that transcendence still has a role to play at several stages
of the production process. Talent, like divine grace, strikes at random. The
writing manuals remain conscious of the unpredictable course of lives and
careers. By of fering the names of well-known and successful published
authors as examples, they also acknowledge the process by which the system
selects its heroes. By doing so, by advocating a technique that eschews nei-
ther the values nor the emotions of transcendence, they simultaneously
make writing familiar, thereby bringing it within reach, and maintain its
mystery, putting it on the horizon. Because writing is you. It could be you.
For, what separates us from Michel Tournier or Marguerite Duras if not
the unfathomable distance of destiny?

ALISTAIR ROLLS and MARIE-LAURE VUAILLE-BARCAN
Postface: Paratextuality, Self-Alterity

and the Becoming-Text
Et sous mon ciel de faïence

Je ne vois briller que les correspondances
– Serge Gainsbourg, Le Poinçonneur des Lilas
The aim of this book has been, and is, to generate fresh ideas around the
paratext both as a phenomenon and a concept. The individual chapters
have, by and large, taken Genette’s classification of paratextual elements as
a starting point for examining dif ferent aspects of a text’s relationship with
its readers and/or its publishers. By way of a postface, we wish to test the
perversity of the paratext a little further, to stretch its limits and to chal-
lenge the accepted understanding of what can reasonably be understood
by the paratext as compared to the text. In particular, we shall examine
how the beginnings of certain books extend the paratext into the diegesis
proper. In short, this concluding chapter will of fer something of an exit
via the incipit. And so to beginnings…
Locating the beginning of this ‘chapter proper’ is itself a paratextual
exercise. It may have begun with the previous, introductory paragraph;
alternatively, it may only be getting underway now. There is also a title
here, which probably, or at least relatively unproblematically, forms part
of the chapter itself more closely than do the authors’ names, which sug-
gest ownership rather than identity. And what of the epigraph? The ques-
tion of its belonging, and indeed of its ownership, is if not our beginning
then at least our starting point here. This is a highly conventional opening
gambit, for even academic articles often begin with epigraphs, and the
above is, according to Genette, the most common kind: it is an allographic
160 ALISTAIR ROLLS and MARIE-LAURE VUAILLE-BARCAN
epigraph, which is to say that it is written by another author (in this case,
Serge Gainsbourg) and imported into the text by the author (or authors,
in this case) of the text under discussion.1 And yet, the distinction made
by Genette between this most common type of epigraph and the auto-
graphic variety, which is an epigraph written by the author of the work
into whose peritext it is inserted, seems to us rather hazy.2 In the case of
our epigraph above, it may not immediately be clear to the reader why it
is here. Indeed, it is quite usual for the inclusion of the epigraph to pass
without comment (although this is more likely to be the case for a work of
fiction than in an academic essay), which suggests that there is something
transparently meaningful about this inclusion, that is to say that there is
a tacit agreement between the writer and reader as to the meaning of this
particular epigraph (in this particular text), which in turn implies that the
epigraph is drawn from a text whose meaning is equally in no doubt. So, if
this act of transposition, or translation, from one text to another functions
similarly to Brian Nelson’s understanding of literary translation, and thus
as a reading of the text,3 then in order for the epigraph to be meaningful
the text being translated must be a readerly one (in the sense of Roland
Barthes’s texte lisible),4 or what a deconstructionist might consider to be
the metaphysical reading of the text, which coincides exactly with the
words on the page.5
1 Gérard Genette, Seuils (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1987), p. 140.

2 Genette groups under the heading of the péritexte those elements that fall outside
the ‘text’ within the same published volume, including the title, preface and epi-
graph; for their part, the cover and outer layers of the work form part of the épitexte
(Seuils, pp. 10–11). For the purposes of the present chapter, we shall prefer the more
generic term, ‘paratext’, which we shall, furthermore, infuse with varying degrees of
poststructuralist textuality, hence our own peritextual choice of ‘paratextuality’.
3 See Brian Nelson, ‘Preface: Translation Lost and Found’, In Other Words: The Art
of Translation, special edition of Australian Journal of French Studies, 47.1 (2010),
pp. 3–7.
4 Roland Barthes, S/Z (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1973).
5 See, for example, the work of the Yale School. We might think of the essays by Harold
Bloom, Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, Geof frey H. Hartman and J. Hillis Miller in
Deconstruction and Criticism (New York: Seabury, Continuum, 1979).
So, what is the meaning of the epigraph above? If this partial transla-
tion brings with it the metaphysical reading of Gainsbourg’s Les Poinçon-
neurs des Lilas, then it must have something to do with the monotony of
everyday life or the unjust working conditions for employees of the RATP.
And yet, we chose this epigraph on the basis of these lines alone. This is a
deliberate de-contextualization of these lines, whose force here is derived
not from their metonymic value as representatives of the absent whole (in
this case, a famous popular song) but from a new transplanted metonymy,
from their recontextualization as representatives of a new metonymy or
a metonymy of newness; as such, they function here as exemplars of lit-
erature in a much wider context, or the Intertext itself (as coined by Julia
Kristeva).6 In this (new) context, these lines suggest the penetrability of the
impenetrable; they of fer the hardness of a ceramic cover as an always-already
penetrated surface, an interface that actually facilitates communication with
that space beyond. To use these lines to convey such a renewal or othering of
meaning is to suggest that the allographic epigraph is inevitably, to a lesser
or greater degree, autographic, because it expresses either the intentions of
the author who appropriates the lines or the discourse-producing power
of the reader of the new context as writerly text. In such a case, this ef fet-
épigraphe as an act of literary translation appears closer to Jacques Derrida’s
recontextualization, which expresses the self-alterity present necessarily
in all textual communication, than to Genette’s taxonomy, with all that
the latter implies in terms of stability and fixity of meaning.7 And yet, as
Richard Macksey points out,
[Genette’s] provisional definition of the work itself [in L’Œuvre de l’art], is rigorously
intentional: ‘a work of art is an intentional aesthetic object, or, which amounts to the
same thing: a work of art is an artifact (or human product) [enlisted] to an aesthetic
6 Julia Kristeva, Séméiotikè. Recherches pour une sémanalyse (Paris: Éditions du Seuil,
1978).
7 On this, see ‘Afterword: Toward and Ethic of Discussion’, trans. Samuel Weber, in
Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988),
pp. 111–60.
function.’ He underscores the viewer’s or reader’s share in this intentional process:

one never sees the same painting twice; one never reads the same book twice.8
And so for Genette too, the work of the work of art, and perhaps espe-
cially the literary work, is to include within itself the keys to the writing
of its own otherness; and the devices used to frame it serve equally to
mark its intentionality, its situatedness within a wider textual space.9 In
this chapter, it is our aim to present a number of texts, all of which will be
familiar to the reader of twentieth-century French literature, and which
use the recontextualizing force of the epigraph to locate their texts firmly,
yet ambivalently, even duplicitously, both inside and outside themselves.
In the case of these texts, whose paratextual layers are multiple and com-
plex, the impact of the addition of dermal layers to the body of the text
is, perversely, to unseal it and, to appropriate Gainsbourg’s lyrics, to make
the connecting lines shine.
Voyage au bout de la nuit
We shall begin our study of famous paratexts with Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s

Voyage au bout de la nuit, and more particularly with Nicholas Hewitt’s
ground-breaking analysis of its epigraph and introductory sections. It will
be our contention that Céline’s novel of fers a powerful model for twentieth-
8 Richard Macksey, forward to Jane E. Lewin’s translation of Gérard Genette, Paratexts:

Thresholds of Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. xi–
xxii (pp. xvi–xvii).
9 If we are guilty of twisting Genette’s paratextuality to fit our own schema, we hope
to do so within the play of his own work. We should point out that the intertextual-
ity that we are going highlight in the paratextual elements of a number of seminal
French texts corresponds more precisely to what Genette, in his work on the archi-
texte, terms ‘trans-textuality’. This is clearly much closer to Kristeva’s understanding
of intertextuality than Genette’s own, which is no more than a system of explicit
referencing and quotation.
century paratextuality, both in the way in which it draws on previously

written literature and in which it is subsequently drawn on by later works.
As an Ur-paratext, if you will, Voyage au bout de la nuit couches its textual
ambivalence in its autographic appropriation of a seemingly (approximately,
deceptively) allographic epigraph. As Hewitt writes, ‘[w]hat is important
[…] is the way in which Céline systematically chooses to subvert his own
source material’.10 Thus, the epigraph, which for Genette sells the book
to the reader, grounds the story in distortion and partial fabrication. For
Hewitt, this is the sign that the text that follows is itself a distortion of
itself, or at least only part of the story. What takes place, he suggests, is an
inversion: ‘In the fairy-story become novel, the real becomes imaginary
and the imaginary real.’11 That we are dealing with an inversion of terms
here, rather than a replacement by one of the other, is important; it takes
us back to J. Hillis Miller’s concept of the critic as host and the nihilis-
tic otherness lying in wait inside all text.12 Voyage au bout de la nuit will
therefore remain for Hewitt what it is (the story of a journey around the
world) while at the same time also being its opposite (a story that never
leaves Paris): the words on the page, which the paratext tells us is a journey
of pure imagination, evoke a reality that is present physically only in the
paratext but which will become the ghost in the machine, dogging the
imagined journey throughout its course. For the novel begins as it ends, in
Paris: ‘[D]escription of Montmartre may be limited, though by no means
absent, but it is questionable whether the action really is elsewhere.’13
10 Nicholas Hewitt, The Golden Age of Louis-Ferdinand Céline (Leamington Spa,
Hamburg and New York: Berg, 1987), p. 83.
11 Hewitt, The Golden Age of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, p. 63.
12 See J. Hillis Miller, ‘The Critic as Host’, in Bloom et al., Deconstruction and Criticism,
pp. 217–53.
13 Hewitt, The Golden Age of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, p. 63. Hewitt’s work redresses
the balance (between real-absent and imaginary-present) in Céline’s work, whose
vast scale gives precedence to the imaginary journey over the real location and, as
such, uses Paris as a privileged place for dream-work. This recalls the projects of the
French Surrealists, who believed in the equal importance of reality and the dream
but who devoted themselves nonetheless, and logically enough, to the latter.
While an extensive paratext (including a series of introductory texts)

is used to couch the imaginary journey in a real Paris while appearing to
do the opposite, the carefully balanced coexistence of the two is contained
within the epigraph, which is itself an oscillation between the autographic
and allographic regimes. What Hewitt reveals in his work on Céline’s
exergue – ‘Chanson des Gardes Suisses 1793’ – is that this poem is not,
as previously thought, a pure fiction; rather, ‘the “Chanson des Gardes
Suisses” does exist and is not the product of Céline’s imagination.’ In fact,
‘[…] it is the result of a radical rewriting of the source material: in this case,
a transposition of the Chant de la Bérésina’.14 The paratext, that part of the
text that speaks most powerfully to the reader, as the very sales pitch of the
novel, speaks an absence that will haunt the text throughout the course
of the journey (the introduction is pointedly about what Arthur and Bar-
damu said but its position in the paratext serves to highlight what is not
said, the absent lyrics of the real military song)15 until the very end when
the novel retreats into the famous concluding words of silencing speech
(‘qu’on n’en parle plus’);16 as such, the whole text becomes what Hewitt
describes as a ‘ghostly limbo’.17 Certainly, the transition from paratext to
text lies in a deliberately grey area, to the extent that it is debatable, as it
is for the journey itself, whether or not it actually takes place at all. After
a dedication on page seven (to Elisabeth Craig), there is the epigraph dis-
cussed above (page nine); on page eleven comes the italicized passage that
suggests the whole text (of which this is, then, already a part, despite the
use of italics to give a paratextual appearance) is signed under the voyage
14 Hewitt, The Golden Age of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, p. 63. The importance of Hewitt’s
research into the epigraph is recognized by Henri Godard in his essay ‘Voyage au bout
de la nuit’ de Louis-Ferdinand Céline (Paris: Gallimard, 1991), p. 169.
15 For Hewitt, Bardamu’s journey, in the sense that it is a voyage imaginaire as laid out
in the paratext, recalls Alice’s journey into Wonderland; it ‘crystallises the uncon-
scious traces of the conversation between Bardamu and Arthur Ganate and creates
an imaginary world for them’ (p. 64).
16 Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Voyage au bout de la nuit (Paris: Gallimard, 1952 [1992]),
p. 636.
17 Hewitt, The Golden Age of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, p. 84.
imaginaire; on page thirteen there follows the passage described by Henri

Godard, as we shall see, as prefatory, which was inserted by Céline after
the novel’s initial publication. What follows on page fifteen, then, seems to
the reader to be the opening of the diegesis proper. Its opening sentences,
however, constitute an undoing of narrative voice: ‘Ça a débuté comme ça.
Moi, j’avais jamais rien dit.’18 Moi, to all intents and purposes, stands as the
voice of the diegesis, an unspeaking voice that of fers a stark contrast to the
grandiloquence of the paratext that has come before it, and which prolep-
tically references the call for silence that is the last line of the novel. And
yet, the logorrhoea of this diegesis speaks this unspeaking too volubly, thus
unspeaking it and unspeaking itself as text. For, as the reader soon discovers,
this five-page passage is situated historically in the pre-war years whereas
the voyage of the novel’s title appears to get underway ‘properly’ only on
page twenty-one, on the battlefields of the First World War. Here, then, the
text speaks itself again: ‘Une fois qu’on y est, on y est bien.’ We are, indeed,
well inside the text, both because it has now started and also because it has
the potential to have already begun in the course of the previous layers. The
text, in other words, is always already begun and beginning.
To return to the paratext as limbo, it is this initial casting of Bardamu
as a summoner of and companion to ghosts that gives his journey such
mythical status. Hence the importance of the interpenetration of reality
and fiction in the paratext: Céline uses it to sell his story in his name but
also to replace himself by this ghost. Reality and the imaginary become
fellow travellers, each the vehicle for the other. As Godard notes apropos
of the genesis of Voyage au bout de la nuit, ‘[l]e nom même de Bardamu,
qui maintient le personnage à distance de celui de Céline, contribue à
faire de lui une des figures mythiques du XXe siècle’.19 As we have already
seen (in chapter three above), the force of the paratext can be likened to
Roland Barthes’s understanding of myth, which calls out to the reader or
viewer and, as demonstrated in his essay on the Parisian striptease, signs
18 Céline, Voyage au bout de la nuit, p. 15.

19 Godard, ‘Voyage au bout de la nuit’ de Louis-Ferdinand Céline, p. 150.
the whole spectacle (here, of the novel) in the name of Art.20 In this case,
the artistry that will underpin the whole journey is one of otherness within
self. In this way, a novel, whose diegesis proper unfolds in time with the
First World War (although Voyage au bout de la nuit does as much as any
text to obscure the starting point of the text as opposed to the paratext),
begins in an earlier era. As Hewitt notes, the introduction locates the ‘work’s
centre of gravity […] firmly in the pre-war era’ and in so doing sets up a
consistent pattern of inconsistency, ‘a lack of logical transition which will
come to characterise the links between episodes throughout the work’.21
The ambivalence of the whole novel is predicated on that of the paratext.
It is precisely this power of the paratext which, for us, makes Voyage au bout
de la nuit exemplary of what we shall call a becoming-text. These texts will
all stage, in the most ref lexive manner, their nihilistic otherness, and to do
so they will deliberately seek to confuse the borders between paratext and
text. These extended dermal layers will thus be the site par excellence of the
work’s self-deconstruction (where unspeaking is spoken, and vice versa);
and as the interface of author and reader, of reality and imagination, the
zone where text and paratext coincide will necessarily recall the myth of
Bardamu and the critic as (g)host.
As we shall demonstrate, this paratextual haunting, of which Voyage au
bout de la nuit is iconic, has had a traceable impact on other texts; interest-
ingly, its inf luence has also extended, or tended inwards, to the dermal layers
of subsequent editions of Voyage au bout de la nuit itself. Godard notes,
for example, how the text that confronts the contemporary reader of the
‘original French’ now contains within its text what was once quite clearly
a peritextual element: ‘Le texte de la préface à la réédition de 1949, donné
dans la collection Folio aux pages 13–14, entre l’avis liminaire de 1932 et le
20 Roland Barthes, Mythologies (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1957), p. 148.

21 Hewitt, The Golden Age of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, p. 58. The paratextual establish-
ment of the novel as voyage imaginaire allows a number of sections in the book to
stand as metonyms for the whole (other, unconscious, non-real) story. For Hewitt
(p. 67), the otherwise unclassifiable episode of the Infanta Combitta is just such an
example: ‘[i]t indicates how to read the rest of the novel and it reinforces the con-
ventions of the genre [of the voyage imaginaire].’
texte du roman,’ he points out, ‘permet de mesurer l’évolution stylistique

de Céline entre ces deux moments.’22 Thus, via what Philippe Lane refers
to as the paratexte éditorial,23 Céline is reinserted into his own text with
ambivalent ef fect: on the one hand, he adds authorial voice to the text in a
move that might otherwise strengthen its coincidence with a metaphysical
reading (making it a readerly text); but, on the other hand, the inclusion
of this voice in the duplicitous dermal layers of the novel tends to infuse
Céline’s words with the imaginary (and thus the author himself endorses
the reader’s production of the writerly text).
This folding of the paratext into the text, via a thickening and dis-
placement of dermal layers, has the ef fect of extending the paratext right
through the novel. Not only is this picked up intermittently in the form of
transitions from one section to another, transitions which of course serve as
much to fragment the narrative as to smooth the reader’s passage through
it, but it also, as we have seen, drives the whole novel, to the extent that
the text arguably functions paratextually throughout its length. In other
words, there is in the becoming-text a folding of paratextual skin beneath
the dermal layer of the work, with the result that the whole text self-ref lex-
ively aligns itself with its other side. The self-alterity of these texts is not,
then, simply announced in an introduction; rather, the whole text becomes
one with the paratext, and its outside is ultimately internalized.
22 Godard, ‘Voyage au bout de la nuit’ de Louis-Ferdinand Céline, p. 147.

23 Philippe Lane, La Périphérie du texte (Paris: Nathan, 1992). Lane’s term picks up
Genette’s prescriptive definition of the péritexte éditorial in Seuils (pp. 20–37).
Zazie dans le métro
A good example of such an internalized paratext can be found in Raymond

Queneau’s novel Zazie dans le métro.24 This novel appears to have a most
brutal entry-into-the-text: the reader is plunged directly into the voice of
the principal male character Gabriel, which in turn becomes that of the
novel itself (in these opening paragraphs at least). For, Gabriel opens the
text with direct speech, speech that seeks to emulate, directly and closely,
the language of the Parisian populous at the time of the novel’s writing.
The famous opening word, ‘Doukipudonktan’, is, however, immediately
othered as it turns out to be not direct speech but Gabriel’s inner thoughts;
it presents itself as a literal question about the odour of Paris’s residents and a
metonym (it is itself a series of words compounded into one item of speech)
for the whole novel. As such, it gives voice to a Célinian-style paradox: the
text is both a written novel and vehicle for popular language, both itself
and other. This allows us to ref lect on the presence of an epigraph, whose
alienating appearance at first functions to understate its own presence (it
is easy to pass over as it is impenetrable to most readers since it is taken
from Aristotle and is given in Greek) and which also constitutes a parallel
speaking and unspeaking. The reference is to the story of Atlantis, which
Aristotle denounces as a myth, both raised and destroyed by its author, in
this case Plato. The epigraph, both a celebration and denunciation of the
classics, mirrors the text’s opening word (itself a celebration and critique
of popular language as speech and novel), thereby extending the paratext
into this most directly unintroduced of texts and couching the whole
novel under the sign of patratextual ambiguity.25 Indeed, Gabriel’s word is
24 Raymond Queneau, Zazie dans le métro (Paris: Gallimard, 1959).

25 Furthermore, Zazie’s status as becoming-text is only compounded by its intertextual
relationship with Didier Daeninckx’s contribution in 1998 to the series of novels star-
ring the famous detective known as le Poulpe, Nazis dans le métro (Paris: J’ai lu [Librio
noir], 1998), in which the only tangible signs of intertextuality (in Genette’s sense of
the term) are the pun in the title and a reworking of the initial word of Queneau’s
novel. On page seventy-two of the Gallimard edition (2007), Daeninckx’s own
uttered (and simultaneously kept silent) in what turns out to be a liminal

space – he is waiting for his niece, Zazie, on the platform at the Gare de
Lyon. Moreover, her arrival at this railway station is followed immediately
by her failure to undertake the one journey that she wants to take (on the
métro), and which takes on mythical importance by the end of the novel.26
The ambiguous structure of the novel therefore parallels the ambiguous
plotline, which is one of taking and not taking the métro.
Truismes
A more recent example of this kind of ambiguity can be found in Marie
Darrieussecq’s first novel,27 which picks up Céline’s introduction and its
reference to a ‘cochon avec des ailes d’or qui retombe partout [including,
apparently, in Darrieussecq’s novel], le ventre en l’air, prêt aux caresses’.28
Truismes was received, both critically and popularly, as the story of a wom-
an’s gradual metamorphosis into a pig. This metaphysical reading of the
transformation text is, however, belied by the novel’s paratextual apparatus,
which, if read closely, can be seen to of fer a circular frame to the linear
progression (of woman to pig), suggesting instead that this is the story of a
pig who becomes woman only to become pig again by the end but without
Gabriel (le Poulpe’s full name is Gabriel Lecouvreur) poses the following question
of a young vet in the provinces (thereby reversing the Paris-provinces dichotomy in
Zazie dans le métro, in which Zazie is a provincial interloper in Paris): ‘Mais d’où ça
pue donc tant?’. The vet acknowledges this with a smile, ‘pour montrer qu’elle avait
compris’.
26 For a more detailed reading of the paradox of Zazie’s journey on the métro, see
Alistair Rolls, ‘Into and out of the Metro? Defining a Carrollinian Space in Raymond
Queneau and Louis Malle’s Zazie dans le métro’, Nottingham French Studies, 43.3
(2004), pp. 11–22.
27 Marie Darrieussecq, Truismes (Paris: POL, 1996).
28 Céline, Voyage au bout de la nuit, p. 17.
abandoning her aspirations to humanity. As we have argued elsewhere, from

this perspective the novel is a tale of anamorphosis and thus of continuous
becoming: never either entirely woman or entirely pig, the protagonist
follows a Deleuzian line of f light towards otherness as, alternately and
by degree, a woman-becoming-pig and a pig-becoming-woman.29 As in
Céline’s dermal layers, Darrieussecq’s novel is shown to operate in exactly
the same way as her protagonist, and, for this is the point, vice versa. The
text’s dynamics of auto-dif ferentiation are established in the epigraph and
an extended dermal layer, which is of fered up as a sort of avertissement de
la femme-truie auteur.
Truismes thus opens with a quotation about the butchering of a boar.
While this epigraph functions as a neat inversion of the novel’s protagonist
along gender lines, an inversion that is later echoed by the latter’s escape
from butchery at the end of the novel, Darrieussecq’s use of quotation at
this point of the paratext is perhaps most closely aligned to the mechanics
of the becoming-text in its confusion of the autographic and allographic
regimes. For, while the author is given as being Knut Hamsun, the reader is
not told in which of Hamsun’s texts to look for it. And given the overtones
of charcuterie in Hamsun’s name and Darrieussecq’s own association with
Bayonne, the reader may well be tempted to consider that the epigraph is
a trick, an autographic epigraph pretending to be allographic. In fact, the
quotation is taken from one of Hamsun’s lesser-known novels, Benoni,30
but its function in Truismes appears (at least to us, who can claim little
credibility as Hamsun scholars) to be an autographic appropriation, or
nihilistic recontextualization, of Hamsun’s lines, which then take on a
new metonymic function in their new, host text. The epigraph depicts
the moment when the pig feels the butcher’s knife piercing its skin, which
of fers some tough resistance, and thence passing into the sub-dermal layers
29 See Alistair Rolls and Marie-Laure Vuaille-Barcan, ‘Une seule ou plusieurs femmes-
truies? Une lecture virtualisante de Truismes de Marie Darrieussecq’, Australian
Journal of French Studies, 46.1–2 (2009), pp. 31–44.
30 For Régis Boyer’s French translation, see Knut Hamsun, Benoni (Paris: Gallimard, 1994
[initially Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1980]). The quotation that serves as Darrieussecq’s
epigraph can be found on p. 180 of Gallimard’s Folio edition.
of its body, at which point the knife sinks in more easily. Importantly, the
quotation showcases an act of killing that is in train (neither beginning
nor ending) and the realization of death but not the moment itself. This
has clear ramifications for the paratextual status of the epigraph, whose
contents appear to belie its position on the outside of the text; or rather,
the epigraph reveals itself to be also moving into the body of the text itself.
This is then picked up by the dermal layer beneath the epidermis-epigraph,
which of fers itself to the caresses of the reader with all the ambivalence
of Céline’s golden-winged pig. The readers will, the narrator announces,
find the going tough at first, but there is a promise that we shall get used
to it as we go. The butcher’s knife will inoculate and indeed already has
inoculated us against the barbarity of the novel’s plot. Reader and text are
shown to be complicit in their sharing of this ambivalent (liberating and
murdering, writerly and readerly, circular and linear) caress.
La Nausée
Whereas in Truismes it is the reader who is apparently inoculated by the

injection of the paratext against the anguish that the novel is likely to
inspire, for Genette the title of a work – the outermost of its dermal layers
– produces a similar ef fect on the author, for whom the writing act is
enabled by the salvatory call of its end-point: ‘[A]nticiper le ‘produit fini’
est sans doute l’un des (rares) moyens de conjurer la nausée de l’écriture.’31
This is, of course, in accordance with his understanding of the paratext’s
ef fect upon the reader.32 Reader and writer alike benefit from this para-
textual process of ‘becoming book’, however opposed this may be to our
own understanding of the paratext’s role in the work’s status as becoming-

32 ‘Le paratexte est [donc] pour nous ce par quoi un texte se fait livre et se propose
comme tel à ses lecteurs, et plus généralement au public’, Genette, Seuils, p. 7.
text. And it is perhaps in that most famous of nauseous-nauseating works,

and most especially in its paratextual layers, that the confrontation of the
becoming-book and the becoming-text is at its most telling. For not only
does Jean-Paul Sartre’s La Nausée constitute the tension between a novel
that is trying to present itself as a living text unfurling in the present and
a philosophy of the reality of the present that is trying to become a novel,
but it also lays out a veritable ontology of paratextuality, a coming-to-the-
world made inevitable, and yet always presented as something to be made
freely, via perhaps the twentieth century’s most famous philosophical limen
– nothingness. In such a schema, man as book exists independently of his
situation while, as text, he is inescapably situated.33 Sartre’s very concept
of freedom is, indeed, predicated on this paradoxically situated autonomy.
As a living (written, as it were, in real time) and dead (published and thus
fixed in time) account of a dawning awareness of the phenomenological
truths of human existence, La Nausée is both itself (a novel) and what it
is not (it is also home to its own nihilistic deconstruction as text); it both
alludes to and undermines its own salvation through its self as to-be-read.
Ultimately, then, it is what it is not and is not what it is; and as a being for-
itself (a book that speaks to the reader and is thus invested by us with the
trappings of consciousness),34 La Nausée is an ambiguous becoming-text. In
33 In chapter three above, it is seen how Derrida famously denies any existence beyond
the text (‘il n’y a pas de hors-texte’, he writes in Limited Inc (Evanston, IL: Northwestern
University Press, 1988), p. 137), which in no way opposes his elaboration of the ‘hors
livre’, as Lane points out in his definition of the paratext (p. 13). As we are also sug-
gesting, Genette himself privileges the book (as that which is published and read)
over the text (that which the author conceives, and certainly that which the reader
produces) in Seuils only to produce what appear to be moments of poststructuralist
theorizing in, for example, L’Œuvre de l’art.
34 That is to say that the book that we look at does not simply call to mind an object
containing words; rather, the book’s presentation of itself as text – its textness, to
draw on Still and Worton’s terminology – coincides with its textuality or its tendency
to extend beyond itself, via the paratext, into the intertext, in exactly the same way
as human consciousness continuously leaks out of the human body onto the world
around it while simultaneously being reclaimed by the body, whose autonomy is
not compromised by this permeability. For more on textness and textuality, see the
short, it exists the juxtaposition of the opposing currents that are philosophy
and novel, and coincides by virtue of its inherent auto-dif ferentiation with
that same metaphysical reading which has, since its publication in 1938,
seen it cast, oxymoronically, as a ‘philosophical novel’.35
From the perspective of the paratext as becoming-book, the opening of
La Nausée serves to ground the novel, to put a statement on the blank page,
of which Sartre was notoriously afraid. But this grounding function of the
paratext is also clearly integral to the dynamics of the becoming-text. In this
respect, Genette’s comments on collectively produced works, performed
before an audience, are of interest: ‘[L]e caractère collectif y est beaucoup
plus nécessaire et agissant que pour le “public” d’une œuvre littéraire ou
même picturale, qui n’est guère qu’une collection d’individus.’36 Two things
here will immediately resonate with the reader of La Nausée: first, the novel’s
ambiguity hinges on the perversity of diaries in general (which presuppose
a reader, even if they appear to be the ne plus ultra of an author’s writing
for self, hence their importance in modernist literature where the reader’s
complicity in the production of meaning is intensified through the sugges-
introduction to Judith Still and Michael Worton (eds), Textuality and Sexuality:
Reading Theories and Practices (Manchester and New York: Manchester University
Press, 1993), pp. 1–68 (especially, pp. 4–6).
35 Traditionally, this expression is used to describe the way in which the novel is part
philosophy part novel, as though it is in fact not really one or the other. For us, La
Nausée, to borrow Sartre’s expression, ‘exists’ the philosophical novel, by which we
understand that it is both philosophy and novel in the same way that the Sartrean
être pour-soi is both body and consciousness, tensely, inescapably and in f luctuating
proportions but always both. In this way, La Nausée is a philosophical novel in the
same way as Charles Baudelaire’s Le Spleen de Paris is prose poetry – instead of being
poetic prose or prosaic poetry, Baudelairean prose poetry brings together, under
tension, the two mutually exclusive modes of poetry and prose. As a ‘genre’, prose
poetry exhibits the same paradoxical currents as the becoming-text; indeed, with its
extensive dedication (the famous ‘À Arsène Houssaye’) and short, yet deeply, even
schizophrenically, polarized opening poem ‘L’Étranger’, which stands metonymically
for the whole collection, Les Petits poèmes en prose are exemplary of the paratextual
phenomenon that we are describing here.
36 Gérard Genette, L’Œuvre de l’art: Immanence et transcendance (Paris: Éditions du
Seuil, 1994), pp. 66–7.
tion of a broken bond of intimacy) and of Roquentin’s diary in particular,

which clearly pays lip service to this mode, its own use of dated sheets
appearing variously either coy or satirical; second, Genette’s turn of phrase
recalls Sartre’s epigraph, which ‘predates’ the dated sheets in the novel and
ensures that the diary will function, self-consciously, as something more
than a personal record of events, and more even than a diary read in the
intimate act of discovery by a solitary reader. For not only is Roquentin’s
diary published, and therefore produced as a performance, but its epigraph,
in its own perverse endorsement of Genette’s categorization of the literary
work as something less collective than a musical recital or piece of theatre,
actually undoes its own words, suggesting the very opposite is true: ‘C’est
un garcon sans importance collective, c’est tout juste un individu.’37 The
liminal position of the epigraph has the ef fect of connecting this quotation
with La Nausée’s own reader in an initial and disingenuous breach of the
diary compact (where its Modernism is ef ficiently condensed in this one
line – this has all the appearance of a signal to the reader to begin reading
the novel, disguised as a warning that it is the work of an author whose
words are not worth reading). Clearly, this is a reminder of the paratext’s
inevitable intersection with intertextuality, whereby the epigraph extends
beyond the novel’s own skin into that of other texts. Thus, it is what it is
not: it is a collective work, and it is important as a performance (of this
interconnection). Moreover, as Genette notes in Seuils, the epigraph ef fect
is further enhanced by the association with the author of the allographic
epigraph.38 In this case, the author of Sartre’s epigraph is of the utmost
paratextual importance because it is none other than Céline.
The reference to Céline’s play L’Église, if at first surprising because so
many of us readers know him for his two major novels or his pamphlets,
appears logical when one realises that it was in this play that Bardamu first
came to life. Interestingly therefore, Sartre’s epigraph not only references
the extremely important unimportance of Bardamu, within the French
37 Jean-Paul Sartre, La Nausée (Paris: Gallimard, 1938 [2002]), p. 9.

38 ‘[Aussi] l’important dans un grand nombre d’épigraphes est[-il] simplement le nom
de l’auteur cité’, Genette, Seuils, p. 147.
canon, but it also establishes Roquentin’s diary mode in the context of Bar-
damu as theatrical performance and thus very much as part of a collective
experience in Genette’s sense. Intertextually, of course, this also serves to
couch the entire novel in the ambivalence of Céline’s voyage imaginaire.
Thus, before we even get beyond the epidermal layer, we are assured that
Sartre’s text will always be both itself and other.
In addition to the intertextual specificity of the paratextual reference
to Céline, the existential nature of the becoming-text is also suggested by
certain resonances with Sartrean ontology in Genette’s own description
of the way that the paratext presents its work to readers as a book. As we
have shown, the paradox of Sartre’s own presentation of La Nausée as
book is steeped in ambiguity inasmuch as it is very much not the work
of literature aspired to by Roquentin as a means of salvation from the
anguish of existence. This book is pointedly not an être en-soi; it does not
coincide with itself. Genette continues his discussion of the ‘bookness’
that the paratext sells in the following terms: ‘Plus que d’une limite ou
d’une frontière étanche, il s’agit ici d’un seuil’, which he understands as a
‘“[z]one indécise” entre le dedans et le dehors, elle-même sans limite rigou-
reuse, ni vers l’intérieur (le texte) ni vers l’extérieur (le discours du monde
sur le texte), lisière’.39 This suggests that for Genette himself the book’s
deconstruction lies in this paratextual link to its readership-as-facticity:
the two-way permeability of the book’s borders indicates that its readers
endow it with a non-coinciding identity, which is directly comparable to
the consciousness that we humans assume to be present in our fellow beings.
Where La Nausée dif fers from most of its literary peers, and what it has
in common with our other becoming-texts, is its exaggerated celebration
of this double-sidedness.
In terms of its paratextual structure, La Nausée is perhaps the most
complex of our becoming-texts. Like Truismes, it showcases its oppos-
ing (virtualizing and actualizing) currents throughout its length – with
each instance of the nausea functioning to reveal the fundamental real-
ity not only of the world but also of the text. And yet, La Nausée’s linear
39 Genette, Seuils, pp. 7–8.

development is arguably even more self-ref lexive: it is from diary to novel

form. As the diary form cedes before the text’s increasing becoming-book-
ness, so too its paratextual apparatus (there are increasingly fewer uses of
dated sheets) fades into a narrative that is more like a diegesis proper. This
aside, there are also grounds for of fering the beginning of the dated sheets
of the diary (p. 17) as the first sub-dermal layer of the text. Prior to this
are a dedication (Au Castor, p. 7), the epigraph (p. 9), the publishers’ note
(p. 11) and the undated sheet (pp. 13–16). As we have seen, the epigraph’s
intertextuality immediately suggests a double text; its grammatical structure
also reinforces the liminality that is the nothingness that embeds the text
within this collective context while allowing it freedom of self-definition.
The impersonal pronoun, ce, that is twice repeated in the epigraph is itself
suggestive of double movement. It is used to introduce the nouns (un garçon
and un individu) since they have, for obvious reasons, not been previously
referenced (in the host text). Furthermore, it is a non-gendered pronoun,
used precisely to introduce nouns, whose context will be provided by the
expression of their gender through the accompanying article. Ce is there-
fore used when the nouns that it introduces have no grammatical context.
And yet at the same time, it can only be used because there is a context
that makes the utterance meaningful – in this case, the source text of the
allographic epigraph. Ce does two things, then: on the one hand, it picks
up the context of the (absent) source and, on the other, stands for what
is to come. In this case, the nouns garçon and, perhaps more interestingly,
individu – with all the latter term entails in terms of body and conscious-
ness, and solipsistic, inner activity – stand for the text. The epigraph thus
describes the novel itself: ‘it’ is an individual and thus extends beyond
itself, just like the epigraph, unlike a simple object made of sheets of paper
bound together. Clearly, this is also the case for the opening line of Céline’s
diegesis proper, with its lower-register form of what is ef fectively the same
pronoun (Ça a débuté comme ça), where the emphasis on beginning also
picks up, linguistically, what has gone before. And as we shall see presently,
it also serves to locate La Nausée within a poetics of ambiguity that goes
back to the previous century.
The role of the famous avertissement des éditeurs has been well docu-
mented.40 It functions proleptically to suggest that the whole novel is to be
read with caution: just like a publishers’ note claiming the diary’s authen-
ticity while at the same time protesting the novel’s place in a long line of
novels-posing-as-diaries, the meaning of the text will always be both in
and beneath its own lines.41 The feuillet sans date, for its part, extends the
more obviously paratextual elements into the murky ground of the text
itself. It also builds the tension of the philosophical novel by simultane-
ously suggesting the need to unfurl in the present, both to see and be seen
clearly (the famous ‘pour y voir clair’, page thirteen), and the presence of
another side to the story (the allegorical underside of the pebble, page
fourteen). Interestingly, it also uses its mimicry of Voyage au bout de la
nuit’s paratextual structure to align itself with the voyage imaginaire: the
novel very clearly establishes its location at the other end of the railway
line from Paris, but in such an ambiguous text, where one side of a pebble
peut en cacher un autre, it is tempting to read into this position its polar
opposite. Perhaps, like Bardamu’s voyage, Roquentin’s journey (he claims,
in a thoroughly unconvincing account, already to have done his travelling)
never leaves Paris.
The proof of the plausibility, at least, of such an hypothesis is, again as
in the self-alterity of Voyage au bout de la nuit, all in a song. In Sartre’s case,
‘Some of These Days’ replaces the ‘Chanson des Gardes Suisses’. As early
as 1970 Eugenia Noik Zimmerman noted Sartre’s reversal in La Nausée
of the black singer and the white, Jewish composer, who in the parallel
40 Hewitt, for example, notes the duplicity of the eighteenth-century literary conceit,
which belies the manifest statement that the novel is a genuine diary. Nicholas Hewitt,
‘“Looking for Annie”: Sartre’s La Nausée and the Inter-War Years’, The Journal of
European Studies, 12 (1982), pp. 96–112.
41 Perhaps the best-known example of this conceit is Pierre-Ambroise Choderlos de
Laclos’s Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782), whose own avertissement de l’éditeur plays
a double game, revealing that the letters that follow it are in fact an epistolary novel
(and thus the opposite of Sartre’s note) with nonetheless (like Céline’s epigraph)
‘un fond de vérité’: Choderlos de Laclos, Les Liaisons dangereuses (Paris: Garnier-
Flammarion, 1964), p. 14.
world of reality correspond to the white, Jewish diva Sophie Tucker and
the black composer Shelton Brooks.42 Zimmerman reads this reversal of
identity through the lens of jazz:
[I]n the final analysis, when we leave the question of the genesis of Sartre’s novel
and consider its significance, it matters little which of the two people involved with
the song Sartre chose to be a Negro and which he chose to be a Jew. […] He has
fused the notion of the creative artist as outsider with the notion of the Jew and the
Negro as outsider.43
Given that our perspective here is that of the paratext and, therefore, of
the simultaneous movement towards, or double presence of, the inside and
outside, we should add to this conclusion the importance of the presence
in La Nausée of both this inversion and its uninverted ‘real’ configuration.
For, only six pages into Sartre’s diegesis proper, as Roquentin goes into his
first fetishistic absenting of himself from the sex act with la patronne (which
replaces, and is replaced by, the image of the missing Anny) and before the
notes of ‘Some of These Days’ take on this same delusional function, we are
treated to the ‘imaginary’ spectacle of a white woman running backwards
into a black man’s arms on a railway station platform.44 This vignette tells
two stories: first, it puts the real history of the song into the novel, balanc-
ing outsiders with insiders; second, it points to the veiled underside of the
song, whose verse alone is given voice in the novel. The song as outsider
is the story of love lost and the repeated missing of loved ones at railway
platforms, as played out, appropriately, in reverse by the union of the black
man and white woman. The ‘whole story’ of ‘Some of These Days’ is absent-
present throughout the novel, always partial, always veiled and symbolically
referenced. It is the song of Anny’s departure from the gare Saint-Lazare
and the song of Roquentin’s return to, or absence from, Paris.45 Insofar
42 Eugenia Noik Zimmerman, ‘“Some of These Days”: Sartre’s “Petite Phrase”’,
Contemporary Literature, 11.3 (1970), pp. 375–81.
43 Zimmerman, ‘“Some of These Days”’, p. 380.
44 Sartre, La Nausée, p. 22.
45 Sartre, La Nausée, p. 219. For a more detailed reading of the song’s ‘other side’ in the
novel, see Alistair Rolls, ‘“This Lovely Sweet Refrain”: Reading the Fiction back into
Nausea’, Literature and Aesthetics, 13.2 (2003), pp. 57–72.
as it operates at the nexus of Genette’s opposed performantial fields of

realization and improvisation, it is also throughout the novel’s length the
double-sided song of the paratext.46
‘Le Dormeur du val’
Clearly, this double-sidedness is not new to poststructuralist text or even

twentieth-century literature. On the contrary, a textuality formed in the
space between the construction and dissolution of identity can be straight-
forwardly mapped onto the Parisian poetics of Charles Baudelaire’s mid-
nineteenth-century expression of a new, critical modernity. Indeed, our
reading of ‘L’Étranger’ as both paratext and metonym for the whole prose
poetic text that is Le Spleen de Paris demonstrates how the poetic gaze
and voice of the traditional verse form are problematized in the modern
metropolis,47 where the limen that was previously a gateway for the reader
into the poet’s vision (as objective and at a distance in space and time from
both the author’s contact with the muse and the reading experience48) now
constitutes the experience itself, for poet and reader alike. In other words,
in modernist poetry, and perhaps especially prose poetry, attempts to dis-
tinguish between text and paratext are rendered almost redundant.
46 The association of Sartre’s vieux ragtime with jazz may at first appear incorrect. In his
study of the work of the work of art, however, Genette is careful to establish jazz’s
liminal position between rehearsed performance, or composition, and improvisation.
‘[L’]autonomie d’une improvisation ne peut être absolue’, he notes. ‘En pratique […]
une improvisation, musicale ou autre, s’appuie toujours soit sur un thème prééxistant,
sur le mode de la variation ou de la paraphrase, soit sur un certain nombre de formules
ou de clichés’ (L’Œuvre de l’art, p. 68). In this way, Sartre’s paratext and jazz text are
one and the same: both are predicated on the interpenetration of the improvised or
autographic, on the one hand, and, on the other, the referenced or allographic.
47 See n. 35 above.
48 For compelling readings of this poetics of modernity, see Ross Chambers’s Loiterature
(Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1999) and Michel Covin’s
L’Homme de la rue: Essai sur la poétique baudelairiennne (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2000).
Chambers refers to this distancing ef fect as ‘belatedness’.
Despite this tendency for the dermal layers of the paratext to become
folded into the body of the poetic text, French poetry of the nineteenth
century is rich with examples of the poem’s paradoxical whole (or its ten-
dency to become un-whole, to un-read itself even as it is read) being show-
cased in its dermal layers. Given our discussion of impersonal pronouns in
the paratextual apparatus of La Nausée and Voyage au bout de la nuit, the
opening words of Arthur Rimbaud’s ‘Le Dormeur du val’ are particularly
interesting: ‘C’est un trou de verdure’.49 Just as this ce pushes forwards into
the poem that ‘Le Dormeur du val’ will become, it also refers back to the
poetic context of its articulation: the poem is both verdant and a hole, in
other words a paradox in which the baseness of trou is opposed to the self-
referentially poetic term verdure. Paratextually, this initial oxymoron estab-
lishes the whole text within a poetics of self-alterity, which includes other
paradoxical similes, such as ‘des haillons d’argent’, and which undermines
the poem’s apparently linear decay (from life to death). The green hole is
also echoed by the two red holes of the final line. This use of inverted terms
to frame the poem emphasizes that life and death are always co-present in
a cycle of becoming.
Such inherent self-alterity is ref lected in poststructuralist theory by
the closure and opening of text that are simultaneously produced in the
reading experienced. The impersonal nature of Rimbaud’s pronoun is in
this way made personal, both as the voice of the poet and the reader (as
producer of the writerly text). Consider Richard Machin and Christopher
Norris’s discussion of the situatedness of poetic meaning and identity:
The source of meaning always used to be an author. But it might be the reader (just
another author), language (the medium as the message), or ideology (a mixture of
all three). We do always require a source, a centre around which we can coordinate
strategies to ‘make sense’ of a piece of writing – much as we require the subject for
a verb. (In this sense, ‘It’s great’, said of a poem, is akin to ‘It’s raining’, said of the
weather.) Within the ensuing discourse a new subjectivity emerges, which the text
then claims and reproduces as its own. Since, without enlisting the help of power-
ful rhetoric, we can’t attribute will to an (often departed) author, and since we get
49 Arthur Rimbaud, Œuvres poétiques (Paris: Editions Atlas, 1991), p. 63 (our
emphasis).
the feeling that, no matter how partisan we are, significance within the text is not
solely our own responsibility, on many occasions the text’s usurpation of a strictly
human capacity to make meaning takes place by default. There is certainly a sort of
f loating subjectivity around when we talk about literature, an ‘it’ waiting to seize its
chance to become an ‘I’.50
The place of the pronoun ‘it’ in the statement ‘it’s raining’ is directly com-
parable to that of the paratext in relation to the text that it presents; it is
arguably both inside and outside (the meaning of ) this statement. If we
follow Machin and Norris’s line, then, the contextualization of the other-
wise f loating subjectivity of poetic text, in an attempt to produce meaning,
is per se a paratextual act. From this perspective, the apparently limited scope
for paratextuality in a verse poem (there is less room in a short poem for
the dermal layers of the text to be replicated as sub-dermal folds inside it)
can be reconfigured as an equivalence of poetics and paratextuality. Cer-
tainly, we have tried to demonstrate in this chapter how this impersonal
subjectivity is given a personal voice via the paratext, albeit sotto voce or
vicariously, as absence – through the signposting of its presence in the ‘other’
text. In the case of ‘Le Dormeur du val’ this folding of the opening gambit
into a succession of oxymoronic similes ef fectively occupies the whole
poetic space. The ‘it’, or poem, is therefore both itself and the voice that it
is not, that is to say whence it came (the muse or voice of its inspiration)
or whither it is destined (the voice of the reader or of its interpretation).
This internalization of the paratext, then, is the expression of ‘it’ as always
already becoming-I.
50 Richard Machin and Christopher Norris (eds), Post-structuralist Readings of English

Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). This quotation is taken from
p. 4 of the editors’ introduction.
Paroles
Our final example of the becoming-text is the poetry of Jacques Prévert,
whose Paroles are a twentieth-century example of this same paratextual
folding.51 While we might think immediately of the dual voice of ‘Le Cancre’,
with its chiasmatic opening lines (‘Il dit non avec la tête / mais il dit oui
avec le cœur’), or ‘Déjeuner du matin’, where a lamenting of the suppres-
sion of words beneath the weight of everyday gestures ultimately stands as
an expression – in everyday words – of the ethereal (this is the non-poetic
poem as elevation to poetry), the poem that perhaps best expresses the
meeting of opposed ‘becoming-I’s at the interface of text and non-text is
‘Rue de Seine’.52
Although this poem appears at first glance to be the story of two
lovers talking at cross-purposes on the rue de Seine as their relationship
decays, the opening lines set up an ambiguity suggestive of a relationship
breakdown of another, more ref lexive type:
Rue de Seine dix heures et demie

le soir
au coin d’une autre rue53
When considered paratextually, these lines announce a double space. Like

the chiasmatic double (‘yes’ and ‘no’) poem that is ‘Le Cancre’, ‘Rue de Seine’
of fers itself as a site of mobility. It seems to take place both in rue de Seine and
at the corner of another street. And yet what is the poem if not rue de Seine,
its eponymous locale? That is to say that ‘Rue de Seine’ is a street that bears
its name and another one; it is itself and the site of its own otherness.
51 Jacques Prévert, Paroles (Paris: Gallimard, 1949). The edition quoted here is the
1993 Folio edition. These poems were very much a product of the end of the Second
World War and were first published in Paris by Le Point du Jour in 1945. The original
anthology was added to in 1947 before its publication by Gallimard.
52 These three poems, ‘Le Cancre’, ‘Déjeuner du matin’ and ‘Rue de Seine’ can be found
in Paroles, pp. 63, 148–9 and 60–2, respectively.
53 Prévert, Paroles, p. 60.
The departure from Paris of this particular becoming-text is less dramatic

than the imaginary journeys of Voyage au bout de la nuit and La Nausée.
In this case, the other space does not even feign non-Parisianness. In terms
of its doubly Parisian structure, the poem’s becoming-I echoes the opposi-
tion of presentation and representation (or re-presentation) on which Ross
Chambers and Michel Covin’s understanding of the poetics of modernity are
predicated. The Parisian streets along which one walks in real time (which
are present to us) are always ghosted by the streets of the city past (for Cham-
bers) and our mental representations of that same city (for Covin). This is the
power of la f lânerie: walking in the city activates a double space of familiarity
and unfamiliarity;54 each city street is somehow both here and there. If ‘Rue
de Seine’ announces itself to the reader as poem (and more than just a scène
de rue in reverse), and as a poem constructed on the tension between rue de
Seine and another street, it is because this is the paradoxical, prose-poetic
identity of rue de Seine itself. In addition to being a continuous double
actualization as street and poem, when considered from a poststructuralist
perspective, ‘Rue de Seine’ is a double street-poem because it is simultaneously
of fered (by the poet, as becoming-book) and de-/re-constructed (by the
reader, as becoming-text). For, reading itself operates the same defamiliari-
zation as walking in Paris: as Chambers suggests, ‘reading a text is a matter
of activating the split between “saying” and “meaning”’.55 Despite its more
familiar verse structure, Prévert’s poetry is auto-antonymically Parisian in the
same way as Baudelaire’s Le Spleen de Paris; it gives voice to words unsaid by
recalling the absence that is the constant underside of presence.56
54 Chambers, Loiterature, p. 217.

55 Chambers, Loiterature, p. 217. And as Covin (L’Homme de la rue, passim) stresses,
Paris is prose poem.
56 While we should not personally hesitate to identify Prévert’s Paroles as prose poetry
on the basis of their self-ref lexively, and specifically Parisian, embodiment of the auto-
dif ferentiation of modernity, the question of their generic classification is a vexed
one indeed. In a famous article in 1958 Jacques Poujol, having himself hesitated over
the categorization of this ‘poésie nouvelle qui se moque de la poésie’, finally decided
that ‘les écrits de Prévert sont de la poésie et non de la prose’. Jacques Poujol, ‘Jacques
Prévert ou le langage en procès’, French Review, 31.5 (1958), pp. 387–95 (pp. 391, 392).
This is symptomatic, we should suggest, of the popular understanding of this popu-
lar, and popularizing, work; it also speaks volumes for the way in which Baudelaire’s
The lines that follow position a human character, a ghost to haunt the
eponymous, geo-poetic protagonist: ‘au coin d’une autre rue /un homme
titube… un homme jeune’. And like the street itself, the man is an oscillation,
quite literally. The hesitation that both man and street (re)present is punc-
tuated periodically by a demand for truth – ‘Pierre dis-moi la vérité’. This
is the poem’s second – or other – leitmotiv; as such, it parallels the mantric
recurrence of the eponymous street within the poem. This call for truth,
in the abstract sense, that which is opposed to the existential reality of the
present, underscores the dissection of ‘Rue de Seine’ into itself and its other,
rue de Seine, and in so doing, it takes on the paratextual status of the title.
Both elements – title as expression of prose-poetic self-alterity and leitmotiv
as, arguably disingenuous, demand for clarity – cut into and integrate the
body of the poem, functioning like the sub-dermal folds of the paratextual
song in La Nausée or the periodic dreams within the dream of Voyage au
bout de la nuit. In other words, the poem stages the breakdown of that most
amorous of literary ménages à trois – that between the poet and his muse,
on the one hand, and the poet and the blank page, on the other.57
The hesitation of the poem recalls what Covin considers ‘l’indétermination
du poète’.58 But it also, of course, parallels the foundational hesitation of the
paratext, oscillating between text and non-text. This takes us some way to
explaining the airing of dirty linen in ‘Rue de Seine’. Not only are internal
(domestic) matters aired publically, and thus taken outside, but the outside is
also taken in (in this case, the muse, the poet and the threat of the publishing
house are all brought inside the text). Thus, the personal voice of the poem
(the je of ‘je veux tout savoir’) is an expression of the desire to know (how
its inner workings play ‘out’) as well as a desire to be known (by the reader).
auto-antonymic form has been misunderstood, and put aside, as a sort of mixture of
poetry and prose.
57 Covin’s description of the way in which the self-alterity of Baudelaire’s prose poetry is
established in Le Spleen de Paris is an uncanny evocation of the paratextual dynamics
of ‘Rue de Seine’. Prévert then, like Baudelaire before him, is ‘partagé entre le souci
de faire apparaître, dans le titre, le motif parisien, et celui de montrer explicitement
que le traitement de ce motif [exige] désormais une forme nouvelle: le petit poème
en prose’ (Covin, L’Homme de la rue, p. 51). The title of ‘Rue de Seine’ performs both
these functions throughout the poem.
58 Covin, L’Homme de la rue, p. 51.
The poem is a series of self-ref lexive lines of poetry, all of which function as

sub-dermal folds, taking the outside in and the inside out. Rather than an
impersonal pronoun (the seemingly ubiquitous ce), which grounds the per-
sonal narrative that follows in an intertextual, and depersonalized, mechan-
ics, Prévert elects to proliferate personal pronouns in order to expose the
impersonal mechanics at work in ‘Rue de Seine’ (in addition to the je of the
poem, there are also the il of the poet – the desire to give structure to abstract
thought – and the elle of the muse – the will to become, to be structured
as poem). Thus, when il puts on his imperméable, it is to dress himself as a
typical line in a poem by Prévert; and when the poet is left at the end of the
poem, locked in hesitation before his typewriter, he of fers a mise en abyme of
the writing process. Once again, as in so many of the Paroles – Prévert’s little
acts of speech becoming capitalized as poetry – but perhaps more ref lexively
staged here than in the others, the inability to write poetry is broken down
into its constituent (anti-)parts until it has become its own antithesis. The
poem is not only the voice, but the proof of the impossibility of the non-
poem. ‘Rue de Seine’ is quite simply its own other, almost to the exclusion
of its more obviously present self as absence.
By folding the paratextual layers of the poetic text into the body of
the poem, Prévert inoculates his work against the nausea of the blank
page. As was demonstrated in David Gascoigne’s opening chapter above,
the paratext, the will of the text to become book and/or the will of the
book to become text, is no longer left on the edge, between here and there;
instead, its power is mobilized and infused throughout the text. In the end,
in the infinite regress of the typewriter within the typewriter, the power of
Prévert’s poetry lies in the poignancy of its failure to coincide with itself.
In this last becoming-text, the point of separation of paratext and text is
abandoned, and the poem (in this case, ‘Déjeuner du matin’) becomes a
lovers’ lament, one more song of separation:
Et moi j’ai pris
Ma tête dans ma main
Et j’ai pleuré59
Here, at the end, the paratext is all there is.
59 Prévert, Paroles, p. 149.

Notes on Contributors
Jean Fornasiero and John West-Sooby work in French Studies at

the University of Adelaide. Jean has worked on the literary resonances of
the French utopian movement of the nineteenth century, and also pub-
lishes in the area of contemporary French fiction. John has a long-standing
interest in the nineteenth-century French novel, with a particular focus
on the Napoleonic period and the works of Stendhal. Together they have
published on French crime fiction and its nineteenth-century origins.
Their joint interests also extend to the literary and historical connections
between France and Australia, and include French translations of Austral-
ian crime fiction, but also French exploration of the Pacific. Their work
on the Baudin expedition, Encountering Terra Australis: The Australian
Voyages of Nicolas Baudin and Matthew Flinders (co-authored with Peter
Monteath, 2004), was awarded the Frank Broeze Memorial Maritime
History Prize in 2005.
David Gascoigne is Honorary Senior Lecturer in French at the Uni-

versity of St Andrews. His research has centred on later twentieth-century
French narrative, including books on Michel Tournier and on Georges
Perec and ludic fiction. His retirement was honoured by colleagues and
friends with a Festschrift (Lorna Milne and Mary Orr (eds), Narratives of
French Modernity: Themes, Forms and Metamorphoses, Peter Lang, 2011).
Since retirement he has been happily exploring the work of contemporary
writers such as Christian Gailly, Marie Nimier and Pascal Bruckner, and
in a recent article for the journal Paragraph he has even ventured as far
of f-piste as Dadaist poetry.
Françoise Grauby is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of French

Studies at the University of Sydney. She is the author of two books on
nineteenth-century French literature, La création mythique à l’époque du
Symbolisme (1994) and Le Corps de l’Artiste (2001), and the co-editor of two
188 Notes on Contributors
volumes of the Australian Journal of French Studies, ‘Embodying Words
and Images’ (2007) and ‘Writers at Work’ (2011). She has also published
articles on Hervé Guibert, the roman noir, and French popular culture
and literature. She is currently working on an examination of the impact
of creative writing classes in France.
Hélène Jaccomard is Professor in French Studies at the University

of Western Australia, where she researches theory and practice of French
contemporary autobiographies, fiction and plays. Her interest in matters
relating to the paratext stems from a 1992 analysis of French experimental
autobiographies in the light of reader response theory. Her research on
Yasmina Reza’s plays has resulted in a number of articles and a monograph
(to be published by Flammarion in 2012).
Gemma Le Mesurier has a research interest in Stendhal and poststruc-

turalism. Appropriately, given the oulipian f lavour of much of this volume,
Gemma is also a professional cruciverbalist. Her background at the Uni-
versity of Newcastle is (poorly) concealed by the editors in the following
clue: Gaul pays singular tribute impersonally (6, 7, 3).*
Murray Pratt is Professor of French and International Studies at Not-

tingham Trent University, where he is Dean of the School of Arts and
Humanities and has responsibility for promoting and managing interna-
tional af fairs for the College of Arts and Science. He has previously worked
at universities in Oxford, Coventry and Sydney and has travelled extensively
in Asia and Europe. He researches French and European cultural identi-
ties and has edited books and special issues of journals, as well as being the
author of articles and chapters on film, literature, comics, theory, society
and culture. With Jo McCormack and Alistair Rolls he is the co-editor
of, and a major contributor to, Hexagonal Variations: Diversity, Plurality
and Reinvention in Contemporary France (2011).
* Answer: French Honours One

Notes on Contributors 189
Alistair Rolls and Marie-Laure Vuaille-Barcan both teach

French at the University of Newcastle, Australia. While Alistair is perhaps
best known for his work on Boris Vian and Marie-Laure for hers in the
area of la didactique du français langue étrangère and translation studies,
both are currently interested in the translation into French of Australian
crime fiction. The present volume represents one important aspect of their
current research, as does a special issue of Essays in French Literature and
Culture, again on the paratext, which they are guest-editing for publica-
tion in 2012. Their recent publications include the following: French and
American Noir: Dark Crossings (2009), which Alistair co-authored with
Deborah Walker; Marie-Laure’s Transfert de langue, transfert de culture: La
Traduction en français du roman Southern Steel de l’Australienne Dymphna
Cusack (Peter Lang, 2011); and Hexagonal Variations: Diversity, Plurality
and Reinvention in Contemporary France (2011), which Alistair co-edited
with Jo McCormack and Murray Pratt. Within the Modern French Identi-
ties series, Alistair is also the editor of Mostly French: French (in) Detective
Fiction (2009).
Index
Alayrac, Vanessa 54 n Boulé, Jean-Pierre 1 n, 86 n

Allen, Robert 102 Bourdieu, Pierre 137–8, 140, 155
Antle, Martine 103 n Boyd, William 77
Anzaldúa, Gloria E. 5 n Boyer, Régis 170 n
Aragon, Louis 95 Brooks, Shelton 178
Archimedes 148 Brown, Carter 63, 127, 134
Arestrup, Niels 75 Brusq, Armelle 50 n
Aristotle 168 Burgess, Anthony 21
Arnaud, Noël 14 n Bushnell, Candace 62 n
Assaël, Jacqueline 147 n
Audiberti, Jacques 95 Calle-Gruber, Mireille 2 n
Auster, Paul 77 Camus, Renaud 91
Aveling, Harry 79 Caradec, François 13, 15 n, 19
Avery, Justin 54 Carlon, Patricia 124 n, 127–8, 130
Céline, Louis-Ferdinand 21, 162–7, 168,
Balzac, Honoré de 76, 155 n 169–71, 174–6, 177 n
Barnes, Julian 23 n Chambers, Ross 64 n, 65, 179 n, 183
Barthes, Roland 7, 8, 9, 30 n, 31, 33, 34, 36, Champf leury 155
48, 56, 60–6, 76, 105, 146, 147–8, Chase, James Hadley 63, 78
160, 165 Chekhov, Anton 105
Baudelaire, Charles 75, 76, 173 n, 179, Cheval, Catherine 49 n, 69, 82–3
183, 184 n Cheyney, Peter 63, 78, 132
Baudouin, Bernard 138 n, 141–7, 151 n Christie, Agatha 128
Beckett, Samuel 105, 119 n Cleary, Jon 127, 134
Beigbeder, Frédéric 10, 85–98 Cohen, Bernard 49 n, 69, 81–3
Bellemin-Noël, Jean 27 n Corris, Peter 54 n, 134
Bernhardt, Thomas 105 n Corvin, Michel 105
Berthier, Philippe 31, 32 n, 34 Covin, Michel 179 n, 183, 184
Bertrand, Philippe 87 n Craig, Elisabeth 164
Beyle, Henri see Stendhal
Bloom, Harold 48 n, 160 n, 163 n Daeninckx, Didier 168 n
Blot-Barrère, Christiane 105 Darrieussecq, Marie 169–71
Borges, Jorge Luis 105 David, Angie 86 n
Boulanger, Pier-Pascale 74 David, Gilbert 102
192 Index
Day, James T. 35, 42, 43 Gascoigne, David 8–9, 24 n, 49, 76 n, 185
Delaporte, Yves 59 Gavalda, Anna 103 n
Deleuze, Gilles 57, 170 Genette, Gérard 2, 4–7, 10, 12, 14, 24,
Demonchy, Anne Sophie 69 n 27–30, 33, 47–8, 51–2, 55, 60,
Deneuve, Catherine 75 70, 86, 99–102, 117, 119–20, 139,
Derrida, Jacques 5, 47, 48, 67, 160 n, 161, 159–62, 163, 168 n, 171, 172 n,
172 n 173–5, 178
Désalmand, Paul 138 n, 139 n, 147–8 Gide, André 33
Devaux, Nadège 138 n, 140 n, 142 n, Giguere, Amanda 106 n
144 n Godard, Henri 164 n, 165–7
Diaz, José-Luis 76 Goroll, Allan H. 42
Dionne, Ugo 14, 19 n, 70 Gouanvic, Jean-Marc 77, 78, 83
Djian, Philippe 149 Goulemot, Jean-Marie 140 n, 144 n,
Drewe, Robert 54 n 154–5
Dufresne, Oscar see Beigbeder, Frédéric Grauby, Françoise 11–12, 76, 138 n
Duhamel, Marcel 10, 63, 77 n, 78, 132 n Greenwood, Kerry 125, 135
Dujardin, Jean 90 Grumbert, Jean-Claude 105
Dunleavy, Maurice see Dunlevy, Maurice Guattari, Félix 57 n
Dunlevy, Maurice 55 n Guénoun, Denis 112 n
Dupeyron, Christian 107 Guibert, Hervé 86
Duras, Marguerite 13, 15–16, 19, 105, 157 Guidère, Mathieu 73
Duris, Romain 75
Duvignaud, Jean 104 n Haddad, Hubert 21
Hampton, Christopher 99 n
Eco, Umberto 139 Hamsun, Knut 170
Etienne Barnett, R.-L. 2 n Hartje, Hans 23 n
Even-Zohar, Itamar 72–3 Hartman, Geof frey H. 48 n, 160 n
Évrard, Franck 123 n, 127 n Heinich, Nathalie 140, 149 n, 156
Héliot, Armelle 107 n
Falco, Jean-Michel di 87 Helmlé, Eugen 116
Festis, Hugues 81 n Hemingway, Ernest 76
Fitzgerald, F. Scott 76, 105 Hewitt, Nicholas 162–4, 166, 177 n
Flaubert, Gustave 154 Hoog, Armand 27 n, 29–30, 32, 33
Foïs, Marina 75 Houellebecq, Michel 91, 111
Ford, Henry 93 Houssaye, Arsène 173 n
Fornasiero, Jean 11, 12, 55, 124 n Hubert, Jocelyne 114
Fournel, Paul 8–9, 13–26, 49 Hugo, Victor 155 n
Freud, Sigmund 57, 61, 94 n
Jaccomard, Hélène 10–11, 105 n, 106 n
Gainsbourg, Serge 159–62 Jacquard, Albert 143
Galmont. Alexis 81 n Jacquemond, Richard 79
Index 193
Jarry, Alfred 24 n Mariot, Laurent 81 n

Jay, Charlotte 124 n, 127–8 Marx, Groucho 130
Marx, Karl 129–30
Kavian, Eva 138 n, 143 Meakin, David 41 n
Kennedy, Douglas 9–10, 47–84 Mérimée, Prosper 27, 29–31, 32–3, 34,
Kertèsz, Imre 105 n 39, 43
King, Stephen 62 n Meyer, Stephenie 62 n
Knight, Stephen 121 n Michon, Pierre 155 n
Kounen, Jan 85 Miller, J. Hillis 5, 48, 54, 160 n, 163
Kristeva, Julia 48, 161–2 Miller, Richard 31 n
Mir-Samii, Reza 109
Laclos, Pierre Choderlos de 177 n Morello, Nathalie 105 n
Lagoutte, Jean 104 n Morrison, Donald 75, 77
Lahire, Bernard 149 Mouillaud, Geneviève 31
Lane, Philippe 2 n, 74, 119, 137, 167, 172 n Mulley, Albert G. 42
Latis (Emmanuel Peillet) 24 n
Laurens, Camille 111 Nabokov, Vladimir 23–4
le Carré, John 77 Nelson, Brian 51, 160
Lefevere, André 73–4 Newton, Isaac 148
Lejeune, Philippe 29, 76 Nord, Christiane 72 n
Le Mesurier 9 Norris, Christopher 180–1
Lévêque-Mingam, Paul-Jacques 81 n Nyssen, Hubert 70–1, 73
Levinas, Emmanuel 99, 112
Lévi-Strauss, Claude 148 Onfray, Michel 150 n
Lewin, Jane E. 29 n, 162 n Orr, David 101 n
Lingis, Alphonso 99 n Oster, Daniel 140 n, 144 n, 154–5
Livia, Anna 28 n
Louchard, Antonin 95 Parengo, Octave see Beigbeder, Frédéric
Lucchini, Fabrice 115 Pascal, Blaise 88
Pavis, Patrice 105, 117
McEwan, Ian 77 Peraya, Daniel 114, 115
McGregor, Andrew 58 n Perec, Georges 15 n, 19 n, 23–4
McIntosh, Amy G. 100 n Picasso, Pablo 113, 133
McNab, Claire 134 Pivot, Bernard 19
Machin, Richard 180–1 Plato 168
Macksey, Richard 28–9, 161–2 Poujol, Jacques 183 n
Magné, Bernard 14 n Pratt, Mary Louise 5 n
Maitland, Barry 129–30 Pratt, Murray 10
Malle, Louis 169 n Prévert, Jacques 182–5
Maloney, Shane 122–3, 128, 131–2 Proust, Marcel 100
Man, Paul de 48 n, 160 n Pullman, Philip 62 n
194 Index
Queneau, Raymond 80, 168–9 Stachak, Faly 138 n, 144–5, 147 n, 151–4
Stein, Gertrude 76
Ramsland, John and Marie 55 n Stendhal 9, 27–45, 155 n
Raynal, Patrick 78 Still, Judith 28 n, 172 n
Reiss, Katarina 71–2
Rendell, Ruth 128 Temple, Peter 54 n, 133
Reuter, Yves 139 n Timbal-Duclaux, Louis 138 n, 144 n,
Reza, Yasmina 10, 99–118 152–3, 156 n
Ricardou, Jean 25, 150 n Tournier, Michel 21, 157
Rimbaud, Arthur 180 Trif faux, Françoise 75
Rinaldi, Angelo 15 n Tucker, Sophie 178
Robbe-Grillet, Alain 150 n
Rodgers, Christine 105 n Upfield, Arthur 54 n, 125, 135
Rolls, Alistair 9–10, 54 n, 55 n, 57 n, 80 n,
123 n, 132, 169 n, 170 n, 178 n Valéry, Paul 112
Rosset, Clément 150 n Vermeer, Hans, J. 71–2
Rossum-Guyon, Françoise van 25 n Vuaille-Barcan, Marie-Laure 10, 15 n, 51,
Roussel, Raymond 22, 24 170 n
Rowling, J. K. 62 n
Wajcman, Gérard 21 n
Sarkozy, Nicolas 106 Walker, Deborah 57 n, 123 n
Sarraute, Nathalie 105 Weber, Samuel 47 n, 161 n
Sartre, Jean-Paul 140 n, 172–8, 179 n West-Sooby, John 11, 12, 55, 124 n
Schlanger, Judith 137, 140–4, 148, 150, Worton, Michael 28 n, 172 n
156–7
Schneider, Robert 105 n Zawiszka, Elisabeth 2 n
Sherf, Maxence 107 Zimmerman, Eugenia N. 177–8
Sillitoe, Alan 21 Zola, Émile 155 n
Simenon, Georges 155
Modern French Identities
Edited by Peter Collier
This series aims to publish monographs, editions or collections of

papers based on recent research into modern French Literature. It
welcomes contributions from academics, researchers and writers in
British and Irish universities in particular.
Modern French Identities focuses on the French and Francophone
writing of the twentieth century, whose formal experiments and
revisions of genre have combined to create an entirely new set of
literary forms, from the thematic autobiographies of Michel Leiris and
Bernard Noël to the magic realism of French Caribbean writers.
The idea that identities are constructed rather than found, and
that the self is an area to explore rather than a given pretext, runs
through much of modern French literature, from Proust, Gide and
Apollinaire to Kristeva, Barthes, Duras, Germain and Roubaud.
This series reflects a concern to explore the turn-of-the-
century turmoil in ideas and values that is expressed in the works of
theorists like Lacan, Irigaray and Bourdieu and to follow through the
impact of current ideologies such as feminism and postmodernism on
the literary and cultural interpretation and presentation of the self,
whether in terms of psychoanalytic theory, gender, autobiography,
cinema, fiction and poetry, or in newer forms like performance art.
The series publishes studies of individual authors and artists,
comparative studies, and interdisciplinary projects, including those
where art and cinema intersect with literature.
Volume 1 Victoria Best & Peter Collier (eds): Powerful Bodies.

Performance in French Cultural Studies.
220 pages. 1999. ISBN 3-906762-56-4 / US-ISBN 0-8204-4239-9
Volume 2 Julia Waters: Intersexual Rivalry.
A ‘Reading in Pairs’ of Marguerite Duras and Alain Robbe-Grillet.
Volume 3 Sarah Cooper: Relating to Queer Theory.
Rereading Sexual Self-Definition with Irigaray, Kristeva, Wittig
and Cixous.
231 pages. 2000. ISBN 3-906764-46-X / US-ISBN 0-8204-4636-X
Volume 4 Julia Prest & Hannah Thompson (eds): Corporeal Practices.
(Re)figuring the Body in French Studies.
Volume 5 Victoria Best: Critical Subjectivities.
Identity and Narrative in the Work
of Colette and Marguerite Duras.
Volume 6 David Houston Jones: The Body Abject: Self and Text in
Jean Genet and Samuel Beckett.
Volume 7 Robin MacKenzie: The Unconscious in Proust’s A la recherche
du temps perdu.
Volume 8 Rosemary Chapman: Siting the Quebec Novel.
The Representation of Space in Francophone Writing in Quebec.
Volume 9 Gill Rye: Reading for Change.
Interactions between Text Identity in Contemporary French
Women’s Writing (Baroche, Cixous, Constant).
Volume 10 Jonathan Paul Murphy: Proust’s Art.
Painting, Sculpture and Writing in A la recherche du temps perdu.
Volume 11 Julia Dobson: Hélène Cixous and the Theatre.
The Scene of Writing.
Volume 12 Emily Butterworth & Kathryn Robson (eds): Shifting Borders.
Theory and Identity in French Literature.
VIII + 208 pages. 2001.
ISBN 3-906766-86-1 / US-ISBN 0-8204-5602-0
Volume 13 Victoria Korzeniowska: The Heroine as Social Redeemer in
the Plays of Jean Giraudoux.
144 pages. 2001. ISBN 3-906766-92-6 / US-ISBN 0-8204-5608-X
Volume 14 Kay Chadwick: Alphonse de Châteaubriant:
Catholic Collaborator.
Volume 15 Nina Bastin: Queneau’s Fictional Worlds.
Volume 16 Sarah Fishwick: The Body in the Work of Simone de Beauvoir.
Volume 17 Simon Kemp & Libby Saxton (eds): Seeing Things.
Vision, Perception and Interpretation in French Studies.
Volume 18 Kamal Salhi (ed.): French in and out of France.
Language Policies, Intercultural Antagonisms and Dialogue.
Volume 19 Genevieve Shepherd: Simone de Beauvoir’s Fiction.
A Psychoanalytic Rereading.
Volume 20 Lucille Cairns (ed.): Gay and Lesbian Cultures in France.
Volume 21 Wendy Goolcharan-Kumeta: My Mother, My Country.
Reconstructing the Female Self in Guadeloupean Women’s Writing.
Volume 22 Patricia O’Flaherty: Henry de Montherlant (1895–1972).
A Philosophy of Failure.
Volume 23 Katherine Ashley (ed.): Prix Goncourt, 1903–2003: essais critiques.
Volume 24 Julia Horn & Lynsey Russell-Watts (eds): Possessions.
Essays in French Literature, Cinema and Theory.
223 pages. 2003. ISBN 3-03910-005-X / US-ISBN 0-8204-5924-0
Volume 25 Steve Wharton: Screening Reality.
French Documentary Film during the German Occupation.
Volume 26 Frédéric Royall (ed.): Contemporary French Cultures and Societies.
Volume 27 Tom Genrich: Authentic Fictions.
Cosmopolitan Writing of the Troisième République, 1908–1940.
Volume 28 Maeve Conrick & Vera Regan: French in Canada.
Language Issues.
186 pages. 2007. ISBN 978-3-03-910142-9
Volume 29 Kathryn Banks & Joseph Harris (eds): Exposure.
Revealing Bodies, Unveiling Representations.
Volume 30 Emma Gilby & Katja Haustein (eds): Space.
New Dimensions in French Studies.
Volume 31 Rachel Killick (ed.): Uncertain Relations.
Some Configurations of the ‘Third Space’ in Francophone Writings
of the Americas and of Europe.
Volume 32 Sarah F. Donachie & Kim Harrison (eds): Love and Sexuality.
New Approaches in French Studies.
Volume 33 Michaël Abecassis: The Representation of Parisian Speech in
the Cinema of the 1930s.
Volume 34 Benedict O’Donohoe: Sartre’s Theatre: Acts for Life.
Volume 35 Moya Longstaffe: The Fiction of Albert Camus. A Complex Simplicity.
Volume 36 Arnaud Beaujeu: Matière et lumière dans le théâtre de Samuel Beckett:
Autour des notions de trivialité, de spiritualité et d’« autre-là ».
377 pages. 2010. ISBN 978-3-0343-0206-8
Volume 37 Shirley Ann Jordan: Contemporary French Women’s Writing:
Women’s Visions, Women’s Voices, Women’s Lives.
Volume 38 Neil Foxlee: Albert Camus’s ‘The New Mediterranean Culture’:
A Text and its Contexts.
349 pages. 2010. ISBN 978-3-0343-0207-4
Volume 39 Michael O’Dwyer & Michèle Raclot: Le Journal de Julien Green:
Miroir d’une âme, miroir d’un siècle.
289 pages. 2005. ISBN 3-03910-319-9
Volume 40 Thomas Baldwin: The Material Object in the Work of Marcel Proust.
Volume 41 Charles Forsdick & Andrew Stafford (eds): The Modern Essay
in French: Genre, Sociology, Performance.
Volume 42 Peter Dunwoodie: Francophone Writing in Transition.
Algeria 1900–1945.
Volume 43 Emma Webb (ed.): Marie Cardinal: New Perspectives.
Volume 44 Jérôme Game (ed.): Porous Boundaries : Texts and Images in
Twentieth-Century French Culture.
164 pages. 2007. ISBN 978-3-03910-568-7
Volume 45 David Gascoigne: The Games of Fiction: Georges Perec and Modern
French Ludic Narrative.
Volume 46 Derek O’Regan: Postcolonial Echoes and Evocations:
The Intertextual Appeal of Maryse Condé.
329 pages. 2006. ISBN 3-03910-578-7
Volume 47 Jennifer Hatte: La langue secrète de Jean Cocteau: la mythologie
personnelle du poète et l’histoire cachée des Enfants terribles.
332 pages. 2007. ISBN 978-3-03910-707-0
Volume 48 Loraine Day: Writing Shame and Desire: The Work of Annie Ernaux.
315 pages. 2007. ISBN 978-3-03910-275-4
Volume 49 John Flower (éd.): François Mauriac, journaliste: les vingt premières
années, 1905–1925.
352 pages. 2011. ISBN 978-3-0343-0265-4
Volume 50 Miriam Heywood: Modernist Visions: Marcel Proust’s A la recherche
du temps perdu and Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma.
277 pages. 2012. ISBN 978-3-0343-0296-8
Volume 51 Isabelle McNeill & Bradley Stephens (eds): Transmissions:
Essays in French Literature, Thought and Cinema.
221 pages. 2007. ISBN 978-3-03910-734-6
Volume 52 Marie-Christine Lala: Georges Bataille, Poète du réel.
178 pages. 2010. ISBN 978-3-03910-738-4
Volume 53 Patrick Crowley: Pierre Michon: The Afterlife of Names.
242 pages. 2007. ISBN 978-3-03910-744-5
Volume 54 Nicole Thatcher & Ethel Tolansky (eds): Six Authors in Captivity.
Literary Responses to the Occupation of France during World War II.
Volume 55 Catherine Dousteyssier-Khoze & Floriane Place-Verghnes (eds):
Poétiques de la parodie et du pastiche de 1850 à nos jours.
361 pages. 2006. ISBN 3-03910-743-7
Volume 56 Forthcoming.
Volume 57 Helen Vassallo: Jeanne Hyvrard, Wounded Witness:
The Body Politic and the Illness Narrative.
243 pages. 2007. ISBN 978-3-03911-017-9
Volume 58 Marie-Claire Barnet, Eric Robertson and Nigel Saint (eds):
Robert Desnos. Surrealism in the Twenty-First Century.
390 pages. 2006. ISBN 3-03911-019-5
Volume 59 Michael O’Dwyer (ed.): Julien Green, Diariste et Essayiste.
259 pages. 2007. ISBN 978-3-03911-016-2
Volume 60 Kate Marsh: Fictions of 1947: Representations of Indian
Decolonization 1919–1962.
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Volume 99 Neil Archer and Andreea Weisl-Shaw (eds): Adaptation: Studies in
French and Francophone Culture.
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Modern French Identities 92 Modern French Identities

Rolls and Vuaille-Barcan (eds) • Masking Strategies

Alistair Rolls is Senior Lecturer in French Studies at the University of

Rolls and Vuaille-Barcan (eds) • Masking Strategies

Alistair Rolls is Senior Lecturer in French Studies at the University of

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

Masking strategies : unwrapping the French paratext / edited by Alistair

© Peter Lang AG, International Academic Publishers, Bern 2011

All rights reserved.

Alistair Rolls and Murray Pratt

Jean Fornasiero and John West-Sooby

Alistair Rolls and Marie-Laure Vuaille-Barcan

Notes on Contributors 187

At the University of Newcastle, we should like to thank Professor Kevin

Introduction: Unwrapping the French Paratext

As an introduction to an edited volume, this essay is a liminal space between

his scholarship speaks of a structuralist approach to text that must have

3 Genette, Seuils, p. 7.

its mechanics, which seems to problematize the ostensible aims made in

5 Genette, Seuils, p. 372.

paratext functioning as a paradoxical striptease, both pulling readers in and

instructs future writers on how to create any number of potential texts.

In 1990, the ‘secrétaire définitivement provisoire’ of OuLiPo (the Ouvroir

1 Paul Fournel, Banlieue, Bibliothèque oulipienne, 46, reprinted in Bibliothèque ouli-

‘On peut imaginer un texte sans paratexte – tout commentaire ne

The publication with which we are presented describes itself as a 1989

ou ayant existé serait fortuite et indépendante de la volonté de l’auteur’ (rather than

as a reminder of how far this kind of paratext, as a discourse conducted

– La banlieue: analysez les dif férentes définitions du concept.

On reading the Petit Robert’s seventeenth-century definition, one is imme-

1. To gloss elements of unfamiliar or non-conventional vocabulary (which

magistrat municipal (= édile?);

Another footnote suggests an extended exercise on these lines for students:

2. To draw attention to extreme features of the text, e.g.:

In context, we could be forgiven for discerning here a tendentious under-

3. To suggest avenues of ref lection deriving from the text, e.g.:

Montrez comment la dégringolade de Robert permet à Norbert de sortir de son

Etudiez la montée d’un sentiment humain dans le personnage de Norbert. Comment

Again, without the text to check against, it is the inspector-editor’s own

4. To evoke intertextual allusions, e.g.:

Corrections included in the concluding list of errata, however, undermine

p. 42 : au lieu de Phèdre, lire Le Cid;

Secondly, there are the promotional elements, the ‘espace de séduction’,7

7 Dionne, La Voie aux chapitres, p. 7.

weighted towards values which are intellectually, linguistically and morally

– Isolez les mots et syntagmes de faible occurrence littéraire.

Is the author responsible for or complicit in the suggested comparisons

Il y avait autrefois des rédacteurs spécialement af fectés à l’élaboration des quatrièmes;

This piquant frontier between literature and advertising copy probably

Syntactically and semantically, the main text is coherent, without the

10 Raymond Roussel, Nouvelles impressions d’Afrique, suivies de l’Ame de Victor Hugo

In Banlieue, the editorial remarks and analyses attributed to M. Garin

(of characters and of cultural artefacts), a dated chronology of events and,

hitherto considered as secondary and relatively unworthy of attention. It

Reading Against the Author:

Armance, a once-enigmatic text, now comes pre-furnished with an expla-

4 Richard Macksey, ‘Foreword’, in Gérard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation,

Besides the avant-propos, where Stendhal is himself trying to control

c’est bien pourquoi il est si naïf de s’en prendre à la naïveté d’autrui et de

12 See Philippe Berthier’s ‘notice’ in Stendhal, Œuvres romanesques complètes (Paris:

sérieuse de la prendre [la lettre], c’est de ne pas prendre au sérieux tout ce

The Role of the Writerly Reader

13 Barthes, S/Z, p. 4.