Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 12 Number 2, August 2011
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Analyses of the Problem of Intertextuality
by
Georgian Technical University
One of the main standards of textuality is intertextuality. It concerns the factors which make the utilization of one text dependent upon knowledge of one or more previously encountered texts. Intertextuality is responsible for the evolution of text types as classes of texts with typical patterns of characteristics and is one of the central standards of text construction, which determines our perception of a definite text and explains to a large extent the principles of its function. Perception and understanding of a particular text is largely dependent upon experience of other texts we have encountered. This includes making sense of analogies, identifying genres or forms, and recognizable social conventions. This notion can be extended to include our prior experience with language itself.
The question of how texts interact with one another within a cultural tradition and context has attracted much attention since it was realized that no work of literature or art can exist independently. As T.S.Eliot wrote in his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1920, 1):
No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead…. what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new. Whoever has approved this idea of order, of the form of European, of English literature, will not find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past.
The question of conforming and fitting in is sometimes treated as a problem of intertextuality. The fact of fitting in indicates to a separate world of the text within a cultural system that has created its own world and has the life, which to a large extend is different from the real life, but is perceived as “more real” by the people who share the same cultural heritage.
The term intertextuality was coined by poststructuralist Julia Kristeva in her essay “Word, Dialogue and Novel” (1969) and was based on mainly two theories. The first was a response to Ferdinand de Saussure's claim that signs gain their meaning through structure in a particular text, implying that meaning is transmitted directly from writer to reader. Kristeva argued that because of the influence of other texts on readers' consciousnesses, texts are always filtered through "codes" which bring the weight of other, previous meanings with them. We are, then, already included in a web of meaning created by other texts and the connotations surrounding them as opposed to deriving meaning directly from the structure of signs.
Defining the specific status of the word as signifier for different modes of literary interaction within different genres or texts puts poetic analysis at the centre of contemporary "human" sciences at the intersection of language (the true practice of thought) with space (the volume within which signification, through a joining of differences, articulates itself). Confronted with this spatial conception of language's poetic operation, there may be defined the three dimensions of textual space where various semic sets and poetic sequences function. (In linguistics and semiotics, a "seme", from the Greek word "semeion," sign, is a minimal unit of meaning that can be strung together in words or images or any medium that carries meaning in a culture. The notion of "intersemic" describes the interdependence and implies relation of any unit of signs to a network of other texts, genres, artifacts, documents, and symbolic works in a culture.
The three dimensions or coordinates of dialogue are writing subject, addressee, and exterior texts. The word's status is thus defined horizontally (the word in the text belongs to both writing subject and addressee) as well as vertically (the word in the text is oriented toward an anterior or synchronic literary corpus. Within this textual space, horizontal and vertical axes intersect and J.Kristeva notes that, each word (text) is an intersection of words (texts) where at least one other word (text) can be read...any text is the absorption and transformation of another. (Kristeva, J. 1986, 34-61)
The other theory on which J.Kristeva based her concept of intertextuality was given in M.Bakhtin’s “Rabelais and his World”, (Bakhtin M. 1941, 1965) in his theory of carnival and other aspects of dialogic account of language and literature. It is to designate the various relationships that a given text may have with other texts. It designates relating to or deriving meaning from the interdependent ways in which texts stand in relation to each other, the shaping of texts' meanings by other texts. It can refer to an author’s borrowing and transformation of a prior text or to a reader’s referencing of one text in reading another. Bakhtin replaced the static aspect of texts with a model where literary structure does not simply exist but is generated in relation to another structure.(Bakhtin M. 1981, 1941,1965) What allows a dynamic dimension to structuralism is his conception of the “literary word” as an intersection of textual surfaces rather than a point (a fixed meaning), as a dialogue among several writings: that of the writer, the addressee (or the character), and the contemporary or earlier cultural context. By introducing the status of the word as a minimal structural unit, Bakhtin situates the text within history and society, which are then seen as texts read by the writer, and into which he inserts himself by rewriting them. Diachrony is transformed into synchrony, and in light of this transformation, linear history appears as abstraction. The only way a writer can participate in history is by transgressing this abstraction, through a process of reading-writing. Bakhtin considers writing as a reading of the anterior literary corpus and the text as an absorption of and a reply to another text: dialogue and ambivalence are born out as the only approach that permits the writer to enter history by espousing an ambivalent ethics: negation as affirmation. This implies that the minimal unit of poetic language is at least double, in terms of one and other. (Bakhtin M. 1981)
Bakhtin's term “dialogism” thus implies the double, language, and another logic: the logic of distance and relationship between the different units of a sentence or narrative structure, indicating a becoming (in opposition to the level of continuity and substance), both of which obey the logic of being and are thus monological. Secondly, it is a logic of analogy and nonexclusive opposition, opposed to monological levels of causality and identifying determination. The novel's ambivalent space thus can be seen as regulated by two formative principles: monological (each following sequence is determined by the preceding one), and dialogical.
Accordingly, Julia Kristeva`s theory of intertextuality assumes that meaning and intelligibility in discourse and texts are based on a network of prior and concurrent discourse and texts. Every text (and any cultural object) is a mosaic of references to other texts, genres, and discourses. Every text or set of signs presupposes a network of relationships to other signs like strings of quotations that have lost their exact references. The principle of intertextuality is a ground or precondition for meaning beyond "texts". It describes the foundational activity behind interpreting cultural meaning in any significant unit of a cultural object: whatever meaning we discover or posit can only occur through a network of prior "texts" that provide the context of possible meanings and our recognition of meaning at all. Any text is constructed as a combination of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another.
The term “intertextuality” has taken on a variety of meanings. On its most basic level, intertextuality is the concept of texts' borrowing of each others' words and concepts. This could mean as much as an entire ideological concept and as little as a word or phrase. As authors borrow from previous texts, their work gains layers of meaning. Another feature of intertextuality reveals itself when a text is read in light of another text, in which case all of the assumptions and implications surrounding the other text shed light on and shape the way a text is interpreted (e.g. retelling of the story of Genesis in Milton's “Paradise Lost”, or retelling of Homer's “Odyssey”, set in Dublin in “Ulysses” (1918) by James Joyce).
Direct intertextual relationships can be explicit or implied and may include a variety of literary devices (e.g., allusion, metonymy, synecdoche) or represent examples of anagram, adaptation, translation, parody, pastiche, imitation, and other kinds of transformation. Gerard Genette proposed the term 'transtextuality' as a more inclusive term than “intertextuality” (Genette 1997). He listed five subtypes:
-- intertextuality: quotation, plagiarism, allusion;
-- paratextuality: the relation between a text and its 'paratext' - that which surrounds the main body of the text - such as titles, headings, prefaces, epigraphs, dedications, acknowledgements, footnotes, illustrations, dust jackets, etc.;
-- architextuality: designation of a text as part of a genre or genres (Genette refers to designation by the text itself, but this could also be applied to its framing by readers);
-- metatextuality: explicit or implicit critical commentary of one text on another text;
-- hypertextuality: the relation between a text and a preceding 'hypotext' - a text or genre on which it is based but which it transforms, modifies, elaborates or extends (including parody, spoof, sequel, translation).
Besides these obvious examples of intertextuality we can speak about more complex relations among texts. Texts are considered to belong to a certain cultural code where no text has its meaning alone; all texts have their meaning in relation to other texts.
Intertextuality is located in the text itself when explicit or implied reference is made to another text as well as is in the person who interacts with the target text when he brings to the interaction with the text previous texts and his or her experience with them. The person may use these previous texts to create meanings for the target text or to help with the process of comprehending the text. If these two locations coincide and work in the same direction according to the same cultural code and educational background of the producer and receiver of the text, we can speak about approximation to adequate receiving of the message.
The two locations of intertextuality are connected with the phenomenon that T. S. Eliot called “consciousness of the past” in his essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1920) where he stated the relations between a poet and tradition as the frame within which any writer creates his works.
Tradition … cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour. It involves, in the first place, the historical sense,…; and the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it, the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his contemporaneity. … No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. (T. S. Eliot's. 1922, 1)
The importance of the second location of intertextuality inspired R.Barthes to write “The Death of the Author”(1968) in which he announced a metaphorical event: the "death" of the author as an authentic source of meaning for a given text. Barthes argued that any literary text has multiple meanings, and that the author was not the prime source of the work's semantic content. The "Death of the Author," Barthes maintained, was the "Birth of the Reader," as the source of the proliferation of meanings of the text. The foundation for development in text reading is experience itself.
Roland Barthes speaks of intertextual codes as a “mirage of citations,” likely to prove evasive and insubstantial as soon as one attempts to grasp them. The codes are nothing other than the “deja lu,” and readers, in whom these codes dwell, may be thought of as the representatives of a general intertextuality. “I,” writes Barthes, “is not an innocent subject that is anterior to texts.... The I that approaches the text is itself already a plurality of other texts, of infinite or, more precisely, lost codes.” (Barthes R. 1981)
In his
famous work “Writing and Difference” Jacques Derrida defines texts as
the “chains, the systems of traces emerging out of and constituted by
differences” (Derrida J. 1978, 65). Lacking “a master-word”
différance
finds itself enmeshed in the work that pulls it through a chain of other
“concepts”…other textual configurations. These chains/writing are constructed
and articulated by both temporal and spatial deferment and by differentiation.
(Derrida. 1978, 40, 81). The other emerges from the play of other in the same.
The former unified system, now equivocal, suggestive of hierarchical
configurations, gives rise to a double reading and a double writing, thus
avoiding any fencing-in dialectically constructed synthesis as “One”. (Derrida.
1988, 264).
Différance, neither word nor concept “is not, does not exist” having “neither existence nor essence”, being “neither simply active nor simply passive”, “is no more an effect than it has a cause”. Différance thus announces itself as “unthinkable”, and “unnameable” (Derrida. 1982, 6- 26) since any words which could conceivably describe it already involve concepts such as being and presence, and these are the very concepts it seeks to undermine. “Archi-themes”, that are not so much a structure of a theme, but rather pertain to a textual structure/process/ a structurality emerge parergonally. Thus a theme of supplementarity cannot itself be substituted because “it happens that this theme describes the chain itself, the being-chain of a textual chain, the structure of substitution”. (Derrida 1979, 163).
A textual system then is always already contaminated by the traces of other discourses and languages. The discourse resonates with discussion of intertextuality. The system is one of difference rather than one of presence. Infrastructurally, différance makes possible not only binary opposition and the double but also determines oneness since “the subject is constituted only in being divided from itself” (Derrida 1978, 29). Thus in order for a meaning to emerge there must be the movement of difference or rather différance within the linguistic system. The presentation of self to self, and to others, is always that representation marked by the movement of difference. The truth or presence of the subject is not revealed at all. What comes to be revealed is the writing which marks and is traced in textuality, speech, the subject. The notions of presence, truth or meaning thus rely on structures of concealment and the concealing of their written structures.
Derrida draws on the Saussure of the linguistic system of differences. He believes that no comprehensible communication is possible unless it can be repeated or cited: the graphic mark needs neither author/ audience: “by definition a written signature implies the actual or empirical non-presence of the signer” (Derrida 1978, 20). The signature, for instance, despite being unique, must be repeatable to function, to be readable. Thus the act of citation, which involves detaching an utterance from its context, is a characteristic of any sign and not an aberrant use of language. In other words, the act of citation is neither parasitic nor unusual but rather an explication, that any text is inevitably quoting and quotable.
Meaning and value are therefore never intrinsic or imminent in the written sign; they only become possible by the chance of their representation in ways that allow a glimmer of the other. That is to say that thoughts, ideas and concepts are all impure, haunted, contaminated and infected. ‘‘There is no outside-the-text” or “nothing outside context” or even “there are only contexts without centre or absolute meaning” (Derrida J. 1988, 32). Meaning appears as an effect of text relating to text without reference to an external real unlike mimesis. The reader takes on a new identity to that of a traditional reader. Thus any reading involves other readings, the “ground” of reading is always already intertextual, trans-positioning a reader as writer when reading.
“Intertextuality” thus has a double focus. On the one hand, it calls our attention to the importance of prior texts, insisting that the autonomy of texts is a misleading notion and that a work has the meaning it does only because certain things have previously been written. Yet in so far as it focuses on intelligibility, on meaning, “intertextuality” leads us to consider prior texts as contributions to a code which makes possible the various effects of signification. Intertextuality thus becomes less a name for a work's relation to particular prior texts than a designation of its participation in the discursive space of a culture: the relationship between a text and the various languages or signifying practices of a culture and its relation to those texts which articulate for it the possibilities of that culture.
In the article "The Text within the Text" I.Lotman gives a different sidelight on the problem of intertextuality. He states that a text is a coded message. The very fact of code existence means that something preceded it. He bases his argument on L.Hjelmslev`s definition of a text as everything that was, is or will be said in a given language which presupposes that text is considered to be an enclosed, growing with time system. On the other hand, text may be considered as a limited, enclosed in itself entity. One of its basic signs is the presence of specific immanent structure, which entails the high significance of the category of border (“beginning”, “end”, “frame” and so on). If in the first case its extent in real time is the essential sign of text, then in the second, text tends towards panchronism (for example, the iconic texts of painting and sculpture), or forms its internal time, whose relation to real time is capable of generating diverse semantic effects. The relationship of text and (language) code changes. The presumption of a code enters into the concept of text. However, the code must be reconstructed according to a text. For a reader, a text comes first, followed by language as a secondary abstraction.
U.Eco similarly defines a work of art as not a mono-semantic message, but as a multitude of signified that coexist in one signifier (Eco U. 2004, 6). U.Eco understands a text as an object which possesses definite structural features, which allow, but at the same time coordinate different interpretations, a change of perspective.
In the general system of culture texts carry out, at least, two basic functions: adequate transfer of meanings and creation of new ones. The first function is best carried out when the codes of the speaker and listener coincide as in case of mono-semantic texts. The characteristic feature of a culture with mythological orientation is appearance of intermediate component - a text -code between language and texts. Such text can be based on and considered as the ideal model (cf., for example, the role of “The Aeneid” by Vergilius for the literature of Renaissance and Classicism) or remain in the sphere of subjective- unconscious mechanisms, which do not obtain direct expression, but are realized as form versions in texts of lower levels in the hierarchy of culture. A text -code represents a text. It is not an abstract collection of rules for constructing a text, but a syntagmatically constructed whole, an organized structure of signs. In the course of cultural functioning, in the process of text formation or its description, each sign of the text- code can represent a paradigm. However, on its intrinsic level, it is allotted not only by the unity of expression, but also by the unity of content. Diffuse, ambi-or polyvalent, decomposed into a paradigm of equivalent, but different meanings, or into a system of antonymous oppositions, it is monolithic, compact, mono-meaningful for an external observer. Entering into structural connections with the elements of its level, it forms a text, allotted by all signs of text reality even if it is not revealed anywhere, but only unconsciously exists in the head of a teller, folk improvisator, organizing his memory and prompting the limits of possible variations of text. This reality is described by the model of the fairy tale by V.Propp. (Lotman I.1981, 3-18)
The second function of text is creation of meanings. In this case a text ceases to be a passive component of transmission of a certain constant information between an “addresser” and an “addressee”. If in the first case the difference between the communication at the entrance and at the output of information circuit is possible only as a result of interferences in the communication channel and must be explained by technical imperfections of system, then in the second case it composes the very essence of text. What is a defect from the first point of view, represents a norm from the second, and vice versa. Obviously, a text must be organized differently in this case. A text now represents a system of different semiotic spaces, a continuum within which a certain message circulates. It is not a manifestation of any language, but requires at least two languages for its formation. In this case a certain background code, which has unconscious nature and, therefore, is usually imperceptible, is introduced into structural consciousness and acquires realized significance. (Lotman I.1981, 6) A text of this type is always richer than any separate language and cannot be automatically derived from it. It is a semiotic space, within which languages interact, interfere and are hierarchically self-organized.
Pragmatic relations between text and a reader are characterized by such degree of complexity, that it is always possible to activate one or another aspect of text structure and transform nuclear structures into peripheral, and peripheral -- into nuclear. Transformation of the bases of text structure signifies that it entered into interaction with heterogeneous to it consciousness and in the course of generation of new meanings reconstructed its immanent structure. The possibilities of such reconstructions are final, and this fact assumes the limit of life of a text in time, and delimits reconstruction of text in the process of changing of cultural context from arbitrarily attached meanings for expression of which it does not have any means. Pragmatic connections can activate peripheral or automatic structures, but are not capable of introducing non-existent codes into a text. (Lotman I.1981, 9)
The role of pragmatic function cannot be, however, brought to different kinds of text reconsideration - it composes the active side of text functioning as such. Text, as a generator of meanings, needs a collocutor in order to be activated. This demonstrates the dialogical nature of consciousness as such. In order to work consciousness needs consciousness, a text - another text, culture - another culture. (Lotman I.1981, 10) This is what U.Eco calls “an open text”. He understands openness as essentially complex in its meaning message, which is characteristic for any work of art at any time. ”Any work of art, even if it is not unfinished, requires a free, creative answer to it, at least because it cannot be really understood unless an interpreter discovers it anew in the act of creative thinking with the author”. (Eco U. 2004, 10, 29)
According to I.Lotman, culture, as a whole, can be considered as a text. However, it is an intricately arranged text, which is decomposed into an hierarchy “of texts within the text” that form a complex interlacings of texts. (The word “text” includes interlacing by etymology). (Lotman I. 1981, 18) Any text or connected series of signs presupposes a set of prior instances of the signs, which, function as an archive or encyclopedia of references, genres, background knowledge, and symbolic meaning through which we recognize meaning in what we are viewing, reading, interpreting. The generative meaning-making process is foundational to culture. It allows us to see culture as living process of meaning-making.
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