The Paratext of Marguerite Yourcenar

Abstract

Paratextual writings represent an almost constant practice of Marguerite Yourcenar: apart from the fact that the author, through such texts, provides the reader with the insight into the genesis of the text itself, as well as numerous pieces of information on their own intentions as a writer, paratext is rich with skillfully interwoven data on the writer’s private life, on their ideological, aesthetic, conceptual and other guidelines. The indisputable porosity of the limits of the very text, as well as of that what Genette calls ‘out-text’, provides us with an opportunity to get a more complete picture of not only of one of the greatest writers of the last century, but also of her in her private life, starting from the most trivial daily experiences to the intellectual, public and other engagements that do not exclusively include her literary preoccupations. In other words, despite the author’s proverbial negative attitude towards anything mildly resembling confiding in someone or alluding to her private life, the numerous texts that could be labeled as paratext often reveal to us a new, more complete interpretation of certain pieces of writing, as well as of some episodes from her private life. The autobiographical discourse is thus occasionally realized through the fabric of these ‘border texts’, as is, generally, the case with the most of her writings stricto sensu. Finally, given the fact that it forms a unity with the writers oeuvre, the paratext of Marguerite Yourcenar  has the effect of ‘inclined mirror’, which offers us, in palimpsest, two images merging into one through the prism of the third, receptive instance: the image of a writer and the image of a human being who shares unique destiny with others.