Book Reviews -- the Architext: An Introduction by Gerard Genette and Translated by Jane E. Lewin

Gerard Genette. The Architext: An Introduction. Trans. Jane E. Lewin. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. xi + 91 pp. $24.95 cloth; $13.00 paper.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 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 common-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. …