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August 01, 2005
The Prologue and Epilogue as Performance
Last week we discussed notions of "narrative" in class, the privileged layers and organization of texts, the eternal search for the implicit in the explicit in language. As I reflected on the discussion, my mind began to return to an increasing frustration of mine. We throw around our theories of modern and postmodern approaches to "narrative," yet we fail to hold scholars accountable for their own positioning of themselves within their writing.
While prologues and epilogues offer a formal space and place for authors' positioning of themselves within a book, the prologue and epilogue continue to be peripheral to the privileged chapters of a book and should undermine the trust of the reader when a less than worthy account of that author's positioning is offered. Roman numerals or alternative symbolic marks seem to implore with the reader that the chapters of a book are its primary text and that the prologue and epilogue are secondary, at best. A Table of Contents can further reinforce the isolation of these sections in various ways, perhaps allocating a unique font for their headings or other symbol of division such as a line, indentation, or sequence of asterisks. As a result of these visual cues, a prologue and epilogue’s peripheral status occurs on two significant physical levels—first, through the emptiness of space normally reserved on the beginning page for the prestigious stamp of a chapter marker, and second, through the prominence of place revoked during textual organization, squished almost as a nuisance at the beginning and the end of the book. On a metaphorical level, this disadvantage of physical space and place in the ultimate text implies that while the framing prologue and epilogue perhaps complement the primary chapters, they retain their limited role as a frame—a frame peripheral to the narrative core which clearly begins with the strict, ceremonial chapter count. Yet prologues and epilogues have not always been regarded as peripheral.
In the first prologue, or prologos, introduced into Greek drama by Euripides in the 400’s B.C., a deity would emerge from a machine and explain the background events leading up to the beginning of the drama. Greek theatre that followed treated the prologos as a significant, almost distinct theatrical episode prior to the acts, whose function was essential to the entire dramatic performance. But in contrast to the prologos performed over two thousand years ago, current conceptions of the prologue tend to surround the question of textual authority. Modern themes often suggest that language is objective, involving a rational and transparent process of constructed word sequences that could then be dissected and categorized. But the assumption that a text could be unquestionably objective left a bad taste in the mouth of the postmodern palate.
Recent scholars such as Jacque Derridá, Vladimir Nabokov, and Miguél de Unamuno have challenged the belief that an objective, omnipotent viewpoint of the author exists within the narrative of the prologue, approaching it instead as an apparition-like web of subjectivity. Derridá writes, “From the viewpoint of the fore-word, which recreates the intention-to-say after the fact, the text exists as something written—a past—which under the false appearance of a present, a hidden omnipotent author (in full mastery of his product) is presenting to the reader as his future” (Dissemination). Accordingly, his critique of the prologue as a convention moves past the limitations I mention of space and place. Instead, he highlights the problem that it conveys a false sense of time since it was authored after the text, but structurally situated before the text. Ultimately, through this fictional organization of a literary composition, he contends, “History itself is thus prescribed.” Derridá even contended that the prologos could be entirely dismissed as a tradition of antiquity: “The preface to a philosophical work runs out of breath on the threshold of science. It is the site of a kind of chit-chat external to the very thing it appears to be talking about, reducing the thing itself.” While the prologos’ of today rarely boast a deified author who emerges from the objective machine of knowledge, they have become a foggy arena in which the author appears as a subjective apparition in the periphery, cryptically gesturing to the audience behind a ruffled stage curtain.
If we continue to employ the prologue and epilogue as conventions, then problematizing them to the point of periphery in modern and postmodern traditions calls for a renaissance of their original function in Greek theatre as a performance essential to the story. Although the entire text is necessarily considered a performance in this argument, the prologue and epilogue, in practice, remain intimate arenas in which the author often positions him or herself within the text by using anecdotes and biographical details. By conceptualizing these arenas as performance, the prologue and epilogue thus translate into a process in which the author uniquely negotiates his or her history through selecting “acts” of remembrance and transforming into narrative—regardless of whether those “acts” are considered fiction or nonfiction, ascribed or prescribed, subjective or objective, or ancient, modern, or postmodern. This process of transformation ultimately appears as embodied history in the form of a book to be consumed and incorporated into the negotiated histories of its audiences. For a book is not just a text about an isolated author, it is a social exchange between an author and an audience through material culture across time and space.
By reinstating the value of the prologue and epilogue as a performed act, perhaps then we could gaze more closely at how the author situates his or her own nuanced and conflicted position in the intimate realm of social and political relations. Perhaps then we could more aptly critique the underperformance of authors who fail to socially position themselves within the text and scold readers who fail to recognize the absence or weakness of their positioning. Perhaps then we could peer more deeply into the visceral beliefs and dreams of the author, hidden behind this performance on the forgotten stage of our imagined histories that we create, form, perform, exchange, and extinguish in the evolution of human experience and interaction.
Posted by Jennifer at August 1, 2005 01:29 AM