The Architext: An Introduction. - book reviews

Among Anglo-American theorists of criticism, Gerard Genette is no doubt chiefly known as a narratologist: his Narrative Discourse (1972) has become the standard reference in the field, synthesizing as it does virtually all work on formal theories of narrative that preceded it, and providing a starting-point for all narratological study since then.(1) This side of the language barrier, unfortunately, there is less awareness of Genette's equally fundamental contributions to other areas of literary theory.(2) Now, however, his important study in the theory of genres has appeared in English, finally, more than a decade after its publication as a book, Introduction a l'architexte (1979), which reprinted in revised and enlarged form an essay--"Genres, 'types,' modes"--which had appeared in the journal Poetique in 1977.

Though The Architext makes a contribution to genre-theory just as significant as the one that Narrative Discourse makes to narratology, it is not the same kind of book as the latter, largely because the theoretical situation in the two areas of poetics is so different. In narrative studies, a great deal of work (particularly on formal aspects of narrative) had already been done by the end of the 1960s, and the pressing need at the time was to provide, first, a critical synthesis of the ideas and discoveries arising from various, highly productive traditions of narrative analysis (formalist, structuralist, semiotic, Aristotelian, Jamesian, etc.) and, second, a new program of narratological research--a dual task which Narrative Discourse triumphantly fulfilled. In regard to the theory of genres, by contrast, the prospect offering itself to a theorist is not the same at all, involving as it does a widespread, deeply entrenched practice of using (or appealing to) terms like "genre" alongside an extensive but disconnected series of theoretical reflections attempting to systematize and justify this practice, without much success.(3) Therefore the theory of genre remains in a much less developed state than does the theory of narrative, and the first job facing a theorist of genre is the very basic one of conceptual ground-clearing, of sorting out and exposing the myths and confusions that have arisen regarding the terminology and, for that matter, the very idea of literary genres: only after this task is accomplished will there be any realistic prospect of developing a fruitful program of genre-study. Though this is not the way that Genette presents his approach to the topic,(4) I offer it as an explanation for the obvious difference between Narrative Discourse and The Architext, the one being devoted to construction and the other, almost entirely, to critique.

The primary objects of Genette's critique are two. One is the attribution of the venerable triadic distinction between epic, drama, and lyric to ancient poetics (i.e., those of Aristotle and Plato), which has become so deeply entrenched in later literary theorizing as to be taken, in the modern era, as virtually a com-mon-sense assumption (and The Architext starts with some striking specimens of how this ascription is taken for granted in literary discourse as diverse as Joyce's Stephen Hero and Wellek and Warren's Theory of Literature). Nevertheless, in the historical survey of genre-theories constituting the first eight sections of his study, Genette reveals this assumption to be a mistake, the product of a "retrospective illusion" (5), due largely--though not solely--to Romantic theorists. In fact, as Genette reminds us forcefully, neither Plato nor Aristotle allows for any such category as the lyric in their reflections on poetry in Republic 2-3 or The Poetics (both texts concerning themselves solely with the comparison of epic and tragic poetry)--nor could they have done so even had their concerns been wider, for the simple reason that the very category of the lyric was unrecognized in the Western tradition of poetics until at least the seventeenth century,(5) when a gradual loosening and broadening of the system of accepted literary genres began, partly under the pressure of the need to take official notice of so many newly emergent forms, such as that of the novel. (This loosening of generic categories recognized by critical theorists remains ongoing today, in fact, not only because literary forms continue to mutate under the relatively new requirement of creative innovation accepted by most literary artists as a norm, but also because of a general shift in theorists' conception of poetics from a primarily prescriptive discipline to a descriptive one, which thus needs to remain as open and flexible as possible, if it is to remain empirically adequate to the literary phenomena it aims to describe; in this perspective, The Architext, like all of Genette's work, can be read as an attempt to cleanse modern poetics of the last residues of prescriptivism, a point to which I will return below.) Genette's historical critique is stunning and incontestable, as Robert Scholes--one of the modern exemplars cited for this mistake--admits in his generous foreword to the translation (viii).

This historical error would be one of purely historical interest were it not indicative of a persistent theoretical confusion, which is the second and deeper object of Genette's critique: namely, the tendency among theorists to confuse genre with what Genette, along with others, calls mode. By this he means, to start with, what Aristotle distinguishes, at the beginning of the Poetics, as the manner of imitative presentation in a poem--of whether, for instance, the poetic discourse is narrated or dramatized (1448a, drawing the celebrated diegesis/mimesis distinction). Further on in The Architext, when he turns from the historical survey of its early sections to the general reflections on which the last three sections turn, Genetic characterizes modes more generally in terms of those "modes of verbal enunciation" (64) which constitute the "pragmatic" aspect of discourse (roughly synonymous, when specifically literary discourse is in question, with what Northrop Frye calls "radicals of presentation" in the Fourth Essay of his Anatomy of Criticism, on "The Theory of Genres"(6)). Genette proposes no complete or definitive list of modes, any more than he does for genres, since to attempt such a thing would entail the kind of constructive theorizing which, given the primitive state of genre-theory (and what I have argued is the resultingly critical aim of The Architext), could only be premature. What he does warn against, however, is the temptation--to which the Romantics were, again, especially prone--to define genres in terms of modes, a temptation which Genetic diagnoses as the result of a desire to naturalize what are, after all, conventions (60-70). The distinction upon which Genette insists, in any case, remains clear enough: modes (of verbal expression) are properly linguistic properties and, to this extent, transhistorical--that is, they are properties of any language, in any historical state; genres (of literary discourse, e.g.) are by contrast aesthetic categories, and thus are eminently historical--as products of transitory, evolving systems of classification. This large critical thesis suggests two subsidiary ones, both of which Genette touches upon at various points in his analysis (which is perhaps not so clearly organized as it could be, this being the one respect in which The Architext suffers in comparison with Narrative Discourse). The first is that there can be no "natural" hierarchy among genres, whose interrelations are always contingent and historical. Here Genette is in effect following up on a point established long ago by the Russian Formalists (and likewise extending the antiprescriptivist approach which, beginning with their work, marked a fundamental break in the history of Western poetics). A second consequence or subthesis of this critical claim is that there can be no inherent pattern to the interrelation or evolution of genres and families of genres. This is an especially important negative consequence of Genette's analysis, because it cuts against the quality which becomes quite comically salient in the brief history of genre-theories which takes up the first two-thirds of The Architext: an absolute mania for patterns, regularities, and symmetrical design among theorists of genre, typified by the Romantic obsession with triads--such as, precisely, that of epic, drama, and lyric (44). The very bare, modest conclusion to which Genette's critique thus brings him, after rediscovering and re-examining so many exuberant, grandiose genre-systems, is that a classification of genres should never aspire to be more than a temporarily valid extrapolation from an empirical, inductive categorization of literary forms (66).

If there is one positive point that emerges from The Architext, it lies in Genette's emphasis on the fact that even the most self-effacingly flexible and empirical approach to the classification of genres will depend on the theorist or historian's recognition and acceptance of category-defining constants, whether relatively constant ones, belonging to the longue duree of a genre-system, or outright transhistorical ones, like the various linguistic modes. Genette's argument for this claim is the familiar (but nonetheless valid) structuralist one that, without a framework of analytic constants held relatively stable against a range of diachronic phenomena, shifting however kaleidoscopically as they may be, no consistent description or comparison of these phenomena will be possible. This argument is thrashed out--yet again--in the most interesting section of The Architext, namely its eleventh and final one, which is cast in the form of a dialogue. One speaker, who is identified at the end as "Sir Poetician" (85; the original is "Monsieur le poeticien" [90]), articulates a theoretical position whereby literary study must involve what Aristotle called universals in addition to particulars. His interlocutor, a skeptic of this position, insists that literary facts are always and only particular ones, and thus that criticism should limit itself to particulars (this being the Crocean position so influential in the era before structuralism, to which it is obviously antithetical). What is at stake in such a debate is the very admissibility of poetics as a valid sector of literary study. As one might expect in a book on poetics, "Mr. Poetician's" views predominate: among other things, Genette utilizes this character to outline an important list of potential branches of poetics, differentiated according to the kinds of relationship that they study between texts (81-83), in which perspective "architextuality" is defined as the study which would focus on "that relationship of inclusion that links each text to the various types of discourse it belongs to" (82). But the fascinating thing in this section is that both discussants are apparently intended to represent Genette, if this is how we are to interpret the fact that the skeptical, neo-Crocean speaker is revealed to bear Genette's own nickname.(7) Evidently, consistently as he may endorse the ideal of poetics--to illuminate the particularities of literature by linking them via universal concepts--and enthusiastically as he may have pursued this ideal in the monumental series of studies to which The Architext adds just one chapter, Genette feels the need to rejustify his choice of theoretical aims and procedures each time he chooses.

Aside from the foreword by Scholes already mentioned, the translation adds an index (helpful even in a very small book like this one), and a few judicious translator's notes. Jane Lewin's English rendering is fluent and accurate, which is impressive considering the rather crabbed nature of Genette's style, full of long parentheses and digressions as it is, and varying abruptly in tone from severely analytical to lightheartedly sly: still Lewin manages to bring these qualities across without being unfaithful to the original. Another difficulty facing any translation of The Architext has to do with the large number of (often lengthy) notes, in disproportion to the body of this brief work, which they frequently threaten to interrupt: Lewin has managed to render the notes as concisely as possible, despite the need to cite English translations in addition to Genette's original citations (at least of French and Classical works). I do find some cases where existing English translations seem to have gone undiscovered by Lewin, but these are hardly numerous, or crucial. Genette evidently assisted in the task of keeping the translation fluid by modifying his text in a few places (see Translator's Note, xi).(8) I might also note that the translation misspells "Euripides," in what is evidently not a typo (17; see also the Index entry, 88), and that it preserves a mistake by Genette, who cites Aristotle's Homeric Problems--a lost work!--when meaning to refer to the (pseudo-)Aristotelian Problems (7 and 7n7; see also the Index entry under "Aristotle"(9)).

David Gorman Northern Illinois University

Notes

1 Some of this later work is surveyed by Genette in Narrative Discourse Revisited (1983); further reflections and addenda are to be found in "Fictional Narrative, Factual Narrative" (1990) and in Genette's "Narratological Exchange" with Dorrit Cohn (1985).

2 Hopefully this situation will be rectified by forthcoming translations of Genette's major works since Narrative Discourse, namely his chronicle of theories of poetic language, Mimologiques (1976), his typology of forms of intertextual relation, Palimpsestes (1982), and his study of such "framing" aspects of literary works as titles and prefaces, Seuils (1987).

3 The situation for contemporary poetics remains aptly characterized by Northrop Frye in the "Polemical Introduction" to Anatomy of Criticism:

[T]he critical theory of genres is stuck precisely where Aristotle left it. . . . Most critical efforts to handle such generic terms as "epic" and "novel" are chiefly interesting as examples of the psychology of rumor, Thanks to the Greeks, we can distinguish tragedy from comedy in drama, and so we still tend to assume that each is the half of drama that is not the other half. When we come to deal with such forms as the masque, opera, movie, ballet, puppet-play, mystery-play, morality, commedia dell' arte, and Zauberspiel, we find ourselves in the position of the Renaissance doctors who refused to treat syphilis because Galen said nothing about it.(13)

Except for their tone--which is, after all, polemical--these comments express Genette's outlook closely enough.

4 Genette describes his undertaking in the following (laconic) terms: "This knot of confusions, quid pro quos, and unnoticed substitutions [regarding the three so-called "major genres"] that has lain at the heart of Western poetics is what I want to try to untangle a bit" (3); in fact, The Architext ends up doing a good deal more than that.

5 This claim needs to be asserted a bit vaguely, because although it is clear that the lyric did not attain a securely recognized place in the theoretical system of Western literature until the Romantic period, it cannot be ruled out that precursors of this recognition may appear--and in fact Genette notices at least two such examples: the Abbe Batteaux, in the eighteenth century, who includes a chapter "Sur la poesie lyrique" in his essay on Les Beaux-Arts (Architext 31-36; see also 5-7); and, even earlier, Milton, who provides what Genette calls "the earliest example, to my knowledge" of the misattribution of a distinction between epic, dramatic, and lyric poetry to Aristotle, in his Of Education of 1644 (29).

6 For Frye's definition of "mode of presentation," see Anatomy (246-51, cited at Architext 70n76). Along with Claudio Guillen, Frye is the only theorist of genre cited consistently favorably by Genette, incidentally: see especially Guillen's essay on "Literature as System."

7 "Frederic": see translator's note (85n84) for this fact, which however remains unexplained.

8 I will cite one illustration of this. In the original of L 'Architexte, Genette quotes from Tzvetan Todorov's entry on literary genres in the Dictionnaire encyclopedique of language and literature that Todorov published with Oswald Ducrot in 1972, in which Todorov clearly misattributes the epic/dramatic/lyric triad to Aristotle and other ancient poeticians(10); but this passage is modified in the 1979 English translation of the Encyclopedic Dictionary, clearly in response to Genette's critique (the translated entry repeatedly cites "Genres, 'types,' modes"). In the end, the English version of The Architext quotes-equally effectively--from Todorov's modified English text, suggesting that Genette okayed a substitution to circumvent what would otherwise have constituted a serious obstacle to the translation.

9 See also French text 13 and 13n2; Genette's reference seems inexact, actually: I make it out to be to Problems 19.15 (918b)--in Complete Works, ed. Jonathan Barnes, see 2.1431.

Works Cited

Aristotle [Pseudo-Aristotle]. Problems. Trans. E. S. Forster. The Complete Works of Aristotle. Revised Oxford Translation. Ed. Jonathan Barnes. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1984. 2 vols. Bollingen Series, 71.2.1319-1527.

Cohn, Dorrit, and Gerard Genette. "A Narratological Exchange." 1985. Trans. Cohn. Never-ending Stories: Toward a Critical Narratology. Ed. Ann Fehn, Ingeborg Hoesterey, and Maria Tatar. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992. 258-66.

Ducrot, Oswald, and Tzvetan Todorov. Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Sciences of Language. 1972; 2nd ed., 1973. Trans. Catherine Porter. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1979.

Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1957.

Genette, Gerard. "Fictional Narrative, Factual Narrative." Trans. Nitsa Ben-Ari, with Brian McHale. Poetics Today 11 (1990): 755-74. Rpt. as ch. 3. of Fiction and Diction. By Genette. 1991. Trans. Catherine Porter. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1993.54-84.

-----. "Genres, 'types,' modes." Poetique 32 (1977): 389-421. Revised, exp. as Introduction a l'architexte. Pads: Seuil, 1979. Rpt. in Theorie des genres. [Ed. Genette and Tzvetan Todorov.] Paris: Scull, 1986. 89-159. Trans. Jane E. Lewin, The Architext: An Introduction. Berkeley: U of California P, 1992.

-----. Mimologiques: Voyage en Cratylie. Paris: Seuil, 1976. Trans. forthcoming. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P.

-----. Narrative Discourse. 1972. Trans. Jane E. Lewin. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1980.

-----. Narrative Discourse Revisited. 1983. Trans. Jane E. Lewin. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1988.

-----. Palimpsestes: La litterature au second degre. Paris: Seuil, 1982.

-----. Seuils. Paris: Seuil, 1987.

Guillen, Claudio. "Literature as System." Literature as System: Essays toward the Theory of Literary History. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1971. 375-419.

Todorov, Tzvetan. "Literary Genres." Ducrot and Todorov 149-56.

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