Gerard Genette wrote a book several years back called Paratexts. While I have not waded through the whole thing (yet) I have through other avenues gained some sense of his arguments/ideas. They are core components of literary theory these days, particularly when thinking about texts and reader-response to those texts. Under the rubric “paratext” one can include such things as cover art, cover copy (including reviews, citations from the text, classifications (FICTION/LITERATURE on upper-left corner of back cover), tables of contents, litanies of glowing praise, dedications, epigraphs . . . anything, in essence, that might “control” the way a reader reads the core text.
Imagine being handed a book with a plain white cover: no text on it, no publisher information, no table of contents, no chapter “titles” or headings, nothing but the story text. How would/could that affect your reading? Are such things necessary for achieving a particular aesthetic effect? Are they necessary to the telling of the story (the mechanics of telling, I mean)?
I would suggest that at least the chapter headings are necessary for this particular book (Atwood’s The Blind Assassin). Much as with Stoker’s Dracula, which shifts from diary entries to letters to newspaper clippings, the chapter headings are necessary to identify the shifts among the diegetic levels and parallel narrative threads in the text. Without them, the reader would experience not a little cognitive overload as (s)he struggled to piece together the “story,” as a whole. But to say such a thing smacks of that old nemesis “authorial intent” or, worse, “editorial intent.” (Interestingly, there was a paper given at the SSNL (now the ISSN) Conference in Austin which intended to challenge the longstanding and related issues of Implied Author and Authorial Intent)
I will be interested to see which of the paratextual elements (words and pictures) actually stands up to MY reading of the text.
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Nine times out of ten I am reading the back cover to see if I have read the book before. I know that sounds silly but its the truth.
In The Blind Assassin, it is not an issue of labeling the sections contextually, which does help, but why build such an elaborate table of contents? Will you use it for reference? It is after all fiction.
Another: There is a by-line for “hand lettering”; do you suppose it is the word “The” on the cover?
And one more: “The first great novel of the new millennium.” Not the only one — surely! — and since it was published in 2000 it is best to hedge all bets.
I see the apparently elaborate TOC as a consequence of at least two things (which may or may not be related): (1) the “need” to tag the chapters so that the reader can sort out the relations among the various contributors to the “whole story,” and (2) the creation of a table at the front of the book that is a convention in publishing which identifies which pages are associated with what part of the story. Take a look for instance at the TsOC for books from the 18th Century (Robinson Crusoe, Tom Jones, etc.): Chapter 1, in which our hero commits act X against person Y, etc. The Beatles parodied this in one of the songs on the White Album: “Chapter 7 (?) . . . in which Doris gets her oats”?
The hand lettering thing caught my eye, as well. Looking at the cover through the eyes of a calligrapher, I suspect that the entire title AND the author’s name were hand lettered. The prize medallion is a font which approximates the hand lettered name. Then again, it could all be a lie; a paratextual red herring to make the exterior consistent with the time of the interior. Conspiracy Theorists UNITE!!
As for the appellation as “the first great novel of the new millennium,” THAT takes some serious cojones. Is it first in that it was “born,” like our (anti)hero from Midnight’s Children, just after the stroke of midnight on the first morning of the first day of the new year? Or, does “great” refer to the size of the text (521 pages in the age of novels that are comic books by comparison)? I suspect neither, but they are worth considering. It is not unlike Peter telling me that There Will be Blood is being called the GREATEST film since Citizen Kane. It remains to be seen . . . in more ways than one.
But in terms of paratexts, all of these insinuations affect the way we read the text.