The Parodic Paratext : Marcel Aymé’s prières d’insérer

Abstract

The prière d’insérer represents an element of great interest, above all when it adopts, as it does in Marcel Aymé, an almost prologal and manifestly parodic form. Instead of using the prière d’insérer, as is usual, to bring out the value of the book and offer the reader interpretative clues, Aymé uses it for a very different purpose: denouncing the very prière d’insérer as an editorial practice. Aymé deploys a number of strategies to this end: playing down or denying the qualities of the text, admitting the occurrence in the book of completely random elements, or using a pompous and pseudo-intellectual discourse to mock pedanticism. Paradoxically, through these strategies Aymé manages to raise a simple editorial genre to the category of a literary genre.