The Statics of the Threshold

The Limits of the Preface from Cervantes to Marivaux

Abstract

The paper is a narratological study that problematizes the graphic or textual demarcation between the preface to the novel as a secondary text and the novel as a primary text. Methodologically, it draws on the study Thresholds (Seuils, 1987) and attempts to explain Genette’s structural and functional definition of prefaces, especially those that the French structuralist labels as pseudo-editorial, through more recent studies on the frame narrative (e.g. Abbot 2004, Fludernik 2009, Wolf 2006). On one hand, it outlines the possibilities of the above-mentioned structural categories coinciding, while on the other hand it points to the presence of an independent, broader fabula in both the preface and the frame narrative.
In particular, it focuses on the problem of the functional image of certain prefaces in the Enlightenment novel, analysing the prefaces to Prévost’s Manon Lescaut and Marivaux’s The Life of Marianne, while taking Cervantes’s Don Quixote as a historical starting point. The chosen examples demonstrate how and why the boundary between the preface and the novel became blurred in the 18th century, a time when the novel as a narrative genre was articulated and established. One of the main, if not the only, functions of the pseudo-editorial preface, which is per definitionem fictional, is to create the impression of authenticity, with the preface-writer most often using the topos of a found manuscript. However, it turns out that its “dramatization” goes beyond the textual boundaries of the preface and continues in the novel itself, proving that the graphic image of the preface as a paratext no longer corresponds to its functional image.
Even if we can trace a similar narrative strategy in both Baroque and Enlightenment novels, it is necessary to distinguish between the reasons for it application. Don Quixote is an example of artful, dynamic, “ingenious” composition and parodies the preface as a rhetorical convention. The fictional nature of the Enlightenment novel, however, inevitably rests on an impression of verisimilitude, and consequently the preface, the privileged place where these two characteristics meet, becomes a full-fledged literary component of the narrative work.