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Paper Title:
The Second Annual Making Books, Shaping Readers Conference,
University College Cork, 2-4 April 2008
Shaping Readers: Selection and Editing
“How to Read What Isn’t There: The Transtextual Medium”
Abstract: With reference to such popular books as Stuart Kelly’s The Book of Lost Books: An
Incomplete History of All the Great Books You’ll Never Read and Pierre Bayard’s How to Talk
About Books You Haven’t Read, this paper is about the possibility of editions of works that do
not exist. It takes as its theoretical basis the work of Gérard Genette, whose transtextual
poetics, meaning “all that sets the text in a relationship, whether obvious or concealed, with
other texts,” includes the paratext, all that “enables a text to become a book.” Genette’s
observation is that, while a text without a paratext cannot exist, “paradoxically, paratexts without
texts do exist” (even if it is a title only), and he gives as an example Flaubert’s La Bataille des
Thermopyles. This paper is concerned with the ways in which these absent texts make
themselves present in the world, suggesting that the effective distribution of such lost works
provides a corresponding insight into the ability of readers to transtextually consume texts they
never see.
These arguments are illustrated using the work of the contemporary Canadian artist
Nathalie Melikian. Her short film Charlotte and Jules: The Melodrama is a remake of Jean-Luc
Godard's Charlotte et son Jules, and all the more remarkable for Melikian never having seen the
original. The aim is not to recreate Godard's text, but to recreate what it is that makes it a text by
Godard, those Godardisms, so that the key thematic and stylistic features are drawn from an
“imitated corpus” which is not that single unseen text but the whole body of Godard's
fragmentary, referential work. With the elision of the original text, all that remains is this
transtextual array which surrounds and traverses it, but this is all that is required. Melikian is at
no real disadvantage for having never seen Godard's first film, for, as Genette says, “it is
impossible to imitate a text . . . one can imitate only a style: that is to say, a genre;” once the
Godardian formula is mastered, the recreation of even an unseen text becomes a possibility.
In a later series of text-based video pieces composed of a sequence of pointed text
fragments, Melikian more explicitly explores the place of the editor as each work lists the
thematic and formal conventions of a familiar filmic genre, for example horror or war. Each piece
resists narration, and subverts its own identity as a work, choosing instead to map around the
work, detailing what Genette calls the architext by charting the points of contact between
generic texts and tracing the links between stories. The conditioned responses of shaped
readers, however, and the hermeneutical force of the shared transtextual array through which
they here travel, is evident in the way the recognition of familiar elements, despite their
alphabetical ordering, inevitably prompts the formation, projection, and interpretation of
narratives.
Submitted by:
Dr David Coughlan,
IRCHSS Post-Doctoral Fellow.
Address: Department of English, University College Cork, Cork, Ireland.
E-mail: d.coughlan@ucc.ie
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