This review of Show Sold Separately tells us that media paratexts can be as important as the texts themselves. Jonathan Gray’s book provides an expansive model of peritexts, epitexts, and other media paratexts, but seems to leave out the contexts of paratexts, especially audience-created works.^⏴Marginnote gloss1⏴this is a test peer review.
— Sandy Baldwin (Oct 2012) ↩

In Show Sold Separately, Jonathan Gray sets out to shift the primacy of the “original” text in the theoretical and analytical focuses of media studies. His new model is one concerned with the value and effects of paratexts, which are the textual marginalia that exist around, before, and after the text itself. The notion of paratextuality was originally discussed by Gerard Genette, who noted that paratexts create the liminal space between the inside and outside of the text. For Genette, paratexts are essential to texts, and our study of the latter must come through an investigation of the former. Although Gray expands this model, Genette understood paratexts as either “peritexts,” which are the inter-textual paratexts (covers, dedications, marginalia, etc), or “epitexts,” which are the extra-textual paratexts (interviews, advertisements, audience responses, etc). Media studies should, Gray argues, take a larger interest in the mechanics and operations of paratexts (especially the epitextual half of paratexts) if we are to have any hope of understanding how meaning and value are created in the textual landscape of our mediated world. In his introduction, Gray does the standard work of outlining the rest of the book, and he notes that, because of their centrality to textuality, “no single book can do more than scratch the surface of [paratexts’] overall importance to a better understanding of media and culture” (16). Although this statement is likely meant to emphasize the importance of paratextual study, it actually functions nicely to illuminate the scope of Gray’s text, which, for the very reason he recognizes, ultimately serves better as a larger theoretical model (plus justification) than as an execution of that model’s potential. By the nature of the ground he needs to cover, Gray has to move from point to point with a brevity that allows him to fully inflate his theoretical model but prevents him from doing much more.

Gray’s first chapter uses a definitional approach, focusing on the terminology and meaning of “paratext” and “text” in order to finally establish a working, rough understanding of the relation between the two. Unfortunately, much of this first chapter is spent emphasizing the importance of paratextual study, which may be frustrating to more experienced scholars who are familiar with the work of scholars like Janet Staiger, Karen Hellekson, and Henry Jenkins (to name just a few) who have already explored this area, though certainly not in the detail or explicit method employed by Gray. Of course, this is not to say that the larger gesture of Show Sold Separately is unimportant; Gray does the vital work of giving us a useful and significant analytical model that has heretofore never been made this visible. However, the importance of such a model will be overstated for anyone familiar with the shape and scope of media studies and its literature. That being said, the second and third chapters quickly move into the specific effects of paratexts; chapter two examines how meaning is created for a text, sometimes even before that text actually exists, through (mostly industry-created) paratexts. In this section, Gray cleverly recognizes the ways in which our ideas of audience and the consumer are necessarily expanded as we broaden our scope of research to include the paratextual. Chapter three moves on to explore the ways in which paratexts create value for a text. Here, Gray rejects both Barthes’ “death of the author” and Benjamin’s “loss of the aura” for a Foucauldian model in which author and audience interact through the paratext in order to generate value for the text.

Chapter four shows the ways in which paratextuality can sometimes function intertextually; that is, the ways in which other primary texts (TV shows, movies, books, etc) can come to exist as paratexts for another text. Gray’s example here is The Lord of The Rings film franchise, which he argues fell under the long shadow of Tolkein’s texts. This shadowing effect then happened when The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe came out and was compared, to its own detriment, to The Lord of the Rings. The conversation moves from industry-created paratexts to audience-created content, which is the focus of chapter five. Gray covers a lot of ground here, moving from spoiler communities for Lost to a partial picture of fan videos (vids) to press reviews as audience-created paratexts. From this point, Gray, in chapter six, moves to paratexts like Star Wars action figures in order to more directly challenge the primary/secondary binary so easily associated with texts and paratexts. However, this challenge is done to inspect the second half of the binary (paratexts as secondary texts) without any substantive consideration of the first half (texts as primary texts). Gray’s conclusion ends the book with a discussion of integration that begins to explore potentially successful (or unsuccessful) venues for intentional collaboration and integration between texts and paratexts.

Gray’s method to uncover the meaning-making that occurs via paratexts is a theoretical framework based on semiotics. Although he quotes Barthes for other purposes, Gray seems to miss out on the important connection between the two-fold signification that occurs between paratext and text (if the paratext signifies a certain value and the paratext also serves as a signifier for the text, then the value signified by the paratext becomes part of the semiotic process of the text itself) and the Barthesian process of mythmaking. On its own, this missed connection is nothing more than a passed up chance to create another intertextual moment, but within the larger context of Show Sold Separately, Gray’s omission is significant. Especially important in the Barthesian myth is the uncovering of the absence of any sort of intrinsic meaning/value in both the signified and the signifier. That is, to use Gray’s terminology, the text (the TV show, the film, etc) is just as devoid of intrinsic, fundamental meaning as the paratext - or, conversely, the paratext is just as intrinsically full of independent meaning as the text. Gray is keen, and rightly so, to point out the important role paratexts play in the existence of the text, but he misses the second half of this argument by not accessing Barthes’ ideas on myths: texts are just as much paratextual entities as the ads, promos, trailers, and fan-works Gray examines. For instance, when discussing ABC’s Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, Gray notes that Sears sponsored the show in an attempt to “become synonymous with good deeds, family values, great and selfless service, and a strong presence in local communities” (29). For Gray, Sears serves as the paratextual entity, existing on the margins of the text and benefiting from the intrinsic meaning Extreme Makeover seems to have, but there is a way in which we might instead argue that this process of meaning-/myth-making is a two-way street. This means dethroning the primacy of the text in a way that Gray appears to be slightly uncomfortable with, but it is the same semiotic model the author proposes that allows this two-way street to be established.

Gray’s implicit reification of the text’s primacy comes to a head in his treatment of audience-created paratexts in chapter five. Scholars new to fan studies will almost definitely find this chapter useful; Gray gives fan vids more thought than they usually receive, and his inclusion of so many fannish voices is a wonderfully beneficial tool. Unfortunately, Gray’s argument here, despite his making the distinction between the industry-created (and, therefore, for-profit) paratexts of the earlier chapters and the fan-created (and, therefore and conversely, not-for-profit) paratexts, pushes forward a relationship between paratext and text that is both completely harmonious and ultimately beneficial to the project of the text. In his argument that “vids help the film or show to communicate more clearly,” Gray simultaneously runs the risk of homogenizing the place of all vids as text-supplements and erasing the fraught, often-contentious relationship fans have long had with the TV/film industries (159). The vids Gray examines are certainly all viable texts, in and of themselves, but he might just as well have included works like sisabet’s oft-discussed “Ring Them Bells” or the hilarious “I Swear,” by dualbunny, greensilver, and sweetestdrain. “Ring Them Bells” quite explicitly works against the textual primacy of Kill Bill, and anyone watching “I Swear” will quickly realize it’s a vid so far away from the canon of Smallville that the only possible solution is to place it in its own canon. Although Gray might not have had access to or known about these vids, there is certainly no paucity of vids that challenge, rewrite, or subvert the source material so completely that their overall effect is anything but the supplemental one suggested by the author.

Show Sold Separately is ultimately a useful text that suffers from its ambitious goals and the breadth that accompanies them. However, there is no question that Gray’s book will have a significant bearing on the trajectory of media studies in the future; his theoretical apparatus is both provocative and practical, especially in a world where paratexts can be easily circulated and consumed via devices like the iPad or smartphones. The scholarship and thought presented here offer us a tool for understanding how meaning and value are created in our ever-changing, increasingly digital world, and for that reason alone Show Sold Separately is a must-read for scholars in the field.

Works Cited

Gray, Jonathan. Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratext. New York, NY: New York University Press, 2010. Print.