Genette’s Architext
Today’s been good for the thesis. After playing around a bit with XML structures, I decided that, although I am flailing around with XML, XSLT and relateds, it shouldn’t be that hard to actually encode my texts. The trick will be building the interface, complete with the “views” of the corpus that I’d like to present and perhaps even a visualization or two. Not impossible.
Then I went back to Gérard Genette’s The Architext: An Introduction, which I read last winter and liked for its conciseness and fluidity of concept. Slightly sketchy notes below.
The back cover summary has Genette “assert[ing] that the object of poetics is not the text, but the architext—the transcendent categories (literary gentres, modes of enunciation, and types of discourse, among others) to which each individual text belongs.” At my prelims, one of my committee members wondered whether there is an ur-Roland, a superset that can be defined. It seems that yes, such a superset exists – it is what makes Roland a corpus – and, in Genette’s terms, this idea of A Roland which unifies art works into a corpus is the architext which contains individual works.
Genette’s concern with the misattribution of the epic/lyric/dramatic triad to Aristotle is unimportant to me. It doesn’t matter who developed the “system of genres” (8). What matters is that such a system exists. Even its specific details are not hugely important, in this case: classification schemes I have seen deal exclusively with text-based art, whereas the Roland corpus includes visual art and instrumental music, as well.
Important are not separations of each form from the others according to characteristics specific to only that form, but the characteristics themselves, and their interplay within each work of the corpus and between the works as well.
INTERCULTURAL BORROWING. If work A (from culture A’) borrows from work B (from culture B’), how are their characteristics similar? how are they different? what can be extrapolated from that and our knowledge of the relationship between cultures A’ and B’?
INTRACULTURAL BORROWING. If work A (from socio-temporal circumstance A’) borrows from work B (from socio-temporal circumstance B’), how are their characteristics similar? how are they different? what can be extrapolated from that and our knowledge of the relationship between circumstances A’ and B’?
To answer the above questions, the more useful unit of measure is a work, not a genre. Genres have always been superimposed on a much more complex body of artistic production. To wit: “So the tragic can exist apart from tragedy, just as there are doubtless tragedies that lack the tragic or that in any case are less tragic than others.” (Genette 19) So doing away with genres altogether for the moment doesn’t seem disastrous.
To wit #2: “The unrestricted range [of books of chivalry] enables the author to show his powers, epic, lyric, tragic, or comic.” (Cervantes/Don Quixote, quoted in Genette 29). Notice: no attempt to specify a single genre (tragedy, comedy, epic), or a single form (poetry rhymed/unrhymed, novelistic prose, sermon).
Hell, Shakespearean tragedy almost ubiquitously involves some sort of comic relief.
RolandHT is a move from “all-embracing, hierarchical systems” (Genette 49) to recombinant ones. Systems of what? Of inquiry, of cognitive filtering through which to view art, no filter being given more or less value than another.