Читать книгу Show Sold Separately - Jonathan Gray - Страница 19

Nevertheless, paratexts sometimes take over their texts. A child can, for instance, eat the Disney movie Happy Meal, buy the toys and the coloring books, and play the game with his or her friends without actually watching the film. Similarly, some fans recount the experience of falling more heavily for a text’s fan discussion site than for the text itself. If today’s television and film paratextuality extends the horizons of the narrative universe well beyond what “the text itself” offers, surely some audience members will find that the universe is more interesting at its horizons. In such cases, these audience members may still consider themselves fans or at least viewers of the text, but here rather than simply modify or inflect the text, the paratexts may in time become the text, as the audience members take their cues regarding what a text means from the paratext’s images, signs, symbols, and words, rather than from the film or program’s. As analysts, we might be tempted to think of the paratexts here as mere residue, or a long shadow, of the show, but individual audience members may not care to make the distinction between paratext and show. Precisely because the language of “paratextuality” is absent from everyday talk of film and television, and because the desire to delineate exactly what is and is not “the text” is often an analyst’s alone, not an average audience member’s, frequently we may find that audience talk of and reaction to a text may have originated with the paratext, yet been integrated into the individual audience member’s conception of “the text itself.”

Shunning the text in favor of the paratext may appear a somewhat anomalous practice, but as we have said, any given individual speculatively consumes thousands of texts over the course of his or her life. We cannot watch every show in order to choose what we would prefer to watch, and thus, by force of necessity, we all regularly allow paratexts to stand in for texts. As I have written elsewhere, non-fan and anti-fan texts in particular are often only partially consumed, therefore shifting the burden of textuality to the paratext.⁵⁶ If all paratexts were accurate depictions of their related texts, and if no paratexts introduced any meaning other than those meanings which are in the related shows, paratexts would be unremarkable. However, since paratexts have, as I have argued and as the remaining chapters will show, considerable power to amplify, reduce, erase, or add meaning, much of the textuality that exists in the world is paratext-driven.