“Ways of Knowing” Episode 2: Paratext

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Ways of Knowing

The World According to Sound

Season 2, Episode 1

Paratext

Sam Harnett: Unlike most professors of literature, the primary focus for Richard Watts is not the text itself, but everything else around it: the paratext.

Richard Watts: It’s essentially everything that surrounds the text proper: the book cover, titles, chapter headings, author photos, author bios, blurbs, little paper inserts that describe the prizes the text has won, if those happened after the text was published.Everything that turns the text into a book. This is a pretty unexamined part, or aspect, of the circulation of literature.

SH: Rich is a professor of French at the University of Washington.

RW: What’s most important of all of this is mediation. Paratext allows you to see how the information and the narratives that we receive don’t come to us by happenstance. They don’t come to us uninterpreted, or without a frame. Everything we receive has some kind of accompanying discourse. We are always already preconditioned to receive text in a particular way. You can extend the kind of reflections that Marshall McLuhan makes: The medium is the message.

SH: Often paratext is part of an attempt to make a book more enticing or palatable to a particular target audience. In doing so, it does what Rich calls “pre-interpretive work.” Decisions have already been made about what a text means and how readers should think and feel about it. The paratext is constructed to urge readers to accept those predetermined interpretations.

RW: The text is being predigested for a readership or for an audience, with the idea of sanding off the sharpest corners and just making it a little more palatable, making it a little more domestic, and therefore recognizable to the target audience whatever the medium may be — whether it’s literature or cinema or some other medium.

SH: Most of the time, we are totally unaware of the paratext and the effect it’s having on us.

RW: We don’t think about it much. We think of it in maybe a functional way. It indicates who wrote the book, what the title is. There’s the publisher’s colophon. There’s copyright information. This is in a way what allows you to come to the text. And it also is a space where what you could call pre-interpretive work takes place. Whether you engage consciously the paratext or not, there is a kind of disposition toward the text that gets created by the paratext.

SH: The different elements of paratext one could analyze are vast. You could consider the font, book size, paper weight and color, price, how it is categorized at libraries, marketed at bookstores, analyzed by literary critics, summarized online. Everything from the material qualities and design of the text to the environment and context you encounter it in.

RW: I am interested in the stories that these mediations tell over time, right? What do they tell us about how we understand others, how we understand ourselves? How much is literature bound up with politics, economies, national self-understandings?

[instrumental music plays]

SH: Paratext doesn’t just apply to literature, but to any media: movies, TV, film, newspapers and even beyond that. One could think about paratext in everyday life: the way a present is wrapped, the clothes one chooses to wear, the tone of a person’s voice when they talk to you. We are constantly trying to pre-interpret ­— trying to control or at least influence what those around us will think and feel about whatever it is we’re presenting to them.

RW: I think that this kind of work extends well beyond the study of literature. This is about understanding mediation’s effect? on our lives in a more general way. I think a lot about mediation. I think a lot about translation. The paratext translates the text for a readership. It makes it legible even if it is some sense or understood to be illegible, hard to access, hard to understand, foreign, other, different, whatever it is. I think that we are surrounded by phenomena of translation and are not very alert to them, right? There are all sorts of ways in which we come to information, but this information has already been passed through a kind of filter. That filter constitutes some kind of translation.

[instrumental music fades]

[voice reads the poem “Notebook to a Return to the Native Land” begins]

[recording fades]

SH: This poem is what sparked Rich’s interest in the paratext. It’s titled “Notebook of a Return to the Native Land.” It was written by the Martinican poet Aimé Césaire [Aye-ME Says-AIR]. This is an excerpt of the poem being read at Césaire’s funeral.

[reading of the poem “Notebook to a Return to the Native Land” continues]

SH: This was part of a 1948 anthology of poems by writers from former French colonies, who were just starting to be published for the first time in Paris. Rich encountered it in his first semester of graduate school. It had a preface written by one of the most famous writers in France at the time.

RW: Jean-Paul Sartre.

SH: This was a big deal.

RW: Sartre was, in the post-war period, France’s most exportable intellectual commodity.

SH: It was an immediate stamp of approval. Something that would make French readers curious to buy and read the anthology.

RW: These paratextual elements and especially prefaces by well-known metropolitan French writers were absolutely determinate in the creation of a new literary field, which came to be known as francophone literature, or francophone colonial literature, or francophone postcolonial literature.

[instrumental music begins]

SH: In his preface, Sartre wrote the most about Césaire’s poem. He called Césaire the future of militant poetry. As Rich began studying the poem and preface, he remembered he’d actually seen the whole anthology somewhere before.

RW: It rang a bell

SH: It had been on the shelf in the house he grew up in. It wasn’t a coincidence. By the 1980s, this poem had become part of the canon of French literature taught in the United States. And Rich’s father had been a high school French teacher.

RW: This poem had been on the reading list for the AP exam, the Advanced Placement exam, in French.

SH: In the 1980s, this poem by a Martinican writer was arguably more read and revered in the U.S. than it was in France. A big part of the reason was that it had been endorsed by Sartre, who in the U.S. was one of the most well-known and studied French writers.

[instrumental music fades]

RW: I came to reflect on the fact that this text existed in our home. It existed in circulation in anglophone context and francophone context in part because of Sartre’s preface. So all of this got me thinking about the role of prefaces specifically and the paratext in general.

SH: Rich decided to write his dissertation on the way that paratext, like the Sartre preface, influenced francophone literature.

RW: I then spent 18 months at the French National Library digging up all kinds of obscure, unknown, virtually vanished, invisible text — as well as some very popular ones — to study how they were presented to a French-language readership.

SH: What he discovered is not too surprising.

RW: Almost all this literature passed through Paris, and as a result it passed through the kind of aesthetic and political filter that is the Paris publishing world. How do you make this literature resonate to a French readership? You often do so through the old tools of exoticization and currying to pre-existing markets for a certain kind of understanding of the ethnic other. These are sort of the logics that are at play, and that you see again in book covers, in prefaces.

SH: If you look at paratext going back to the first publications in the 30s and 40s, you can clearly see the colonial power dynamics at play. On the one hand, the publishing industry in Paris is using the paratext to try and sell this new literature to the public while at the same time making sure to undercut it and distance it from literature produced in France.

RW: So, you see it more in the early history that I was just describing. You see it more in prefaces. In the 1930s, many colonial administrators were the patrons of this new emerging literature from West Africa and the Caribbean and the Maghreb, to a certain extent. In those prefaces, they very explicitly say, “We are responsible for the products you’re seeing here.” In one line, they trumpet their intellectual conquests, as they call them. And then in the next line, they say, “But of course, this is not literature exactly as we understand it. It’s more documentary. It has this ethnographic quality.” So, it’s both admitting these works into the cannon and at the same time saying they don’t quite make it.

SH: A recurring set of tropes began to show up in the paratext. How the books are prefaced, blurbed, and the cover art — which often portrayed stereotypical ideas readers in France had about former colonies. Some of these tropes are still used today by Parisian publishers.

RW: Typically, in the second print run in the kind of cheaper paperback edition that they allow the kind of id of the publishing industry to become visible. And it’s there that you get palm trees, straw hats — just everything that conjures up a particular image of the past of the past of the Caribbean, even if the work is oriented toward the present, toward contemporary issues.

SH: Whether or not we choose to pay attention to this kind of paratext, it’s communicating to us, pre-interpreting and pre-digesting whatever is in the text itself. Perhaps it’s working to introduce us to something new, something we wouldn’t have decided to engage with otherwise. But it also could be seeding our minds with a whole host of biases and stereotypes. Rich says the solution is not to try and evade paratext, which is not even possible. But instead to teach ourselves to be aware of it and to attempt to understand how it is working on us.

RW: There can be no such thing as an unmediated text. And two, for me the real action is in the mediation. That’s what interests me. That’s where I think we can begin to understand how it is we relate to others, how it is we relate to ourselves.

SH: The paratext is anything outside of the text, from the material aspects and design to the way the book is marketed, reviewed and read. All media has paratext, things outside of the actual content that influence our understanding and experience of it. You can never totally get around paratext, only learn how to be aware of it and try to understand how it is working on you.

SH: Here are five sources that will help you learn more about paratext and colonial French literature.

Paratexts: “Thresholds of interpretation,” by Gérard Genette

SH: Genette was a big influence on Richard Watts. This book is one of the seminal works in the whole field of paratext.

“Translation and Paratexts,” by Kathryn Batchelor

SH: Batchelor is another major figure in the field. Her book looks more particularly at the role of paratext on translation

“The Digital Griotte: Bessora’s Para/Textual Discourses on Identity Politics and Neocolonialism in Contemporary France,” by Claire Mouflard

SH: An article about the writer Bessora and how her text, and paratext, critique neocolonialism in France today.

“Politics and Paratext: On Translating Arwa Salih’s al-Mubtasarun,” by Samah Selim

SH: An example of the role of paratext and translation in a different cultural context: Egypt in the 1990s.

“Packaging Post/Coloniality: The Manufacture of Literary Identity in the Francophone World,” by Richard Watts

SH: Watts turned that dissertation project he began after encountering Césaire’s poem into this book.

SH: Ways of Knowing is a production of The World According to Sound. This season is about the different interpretative and analytical methods in the humanities. It was made in collaboration with the University of Washington. Music provided by Ketsa, Aldous Ichnite, Nuisance and our friends, Matmos.

The World according to Sound is made by Chris Hoff and Sam Harnett.

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