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Allen Intertextuality
FERDINAND DE SAUSSURE
Literary theory has originated from modern linguistics, which emerged from Ferdinand De Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics. In his Course in General Linguistics Saussure asks himself what is a linguistic sign. He affirms that a sign can be imagined as two-sided coin combining a signified (concept) and a signifier (sound-image). This notion emphasizes that the linguistic sign’s meaning is non-referential: it’s the combination between a signifier and signified (conveniently sanctioned). A sign is not a word’s reference to some object in the world but the combination, conveniently sanctioned, between a signifier and a signified. Example: In the English language we employ the word ‘tree’ not because it points to certain tree-like objects but because the signifier ‘tree’ is associated with a certain concept. Signs are arbitrary, they possess meaning not because of a referential function but because of their function within a linguistic system as it exists at any moment of the time. This is the synchronic system of language, while the diachronic one evolves through time. When humans write or speak, they may believe they are being referential, but they’re producing specific acts of linguistic communication, parole, out of the available synchronic system of language, langue. For Saussure the linguistic sign is not only arbitrary, but also differential: the sign ‘tree’ has its place in the system of language because of its positions with regard to sets of related sounds and words. To write the sentence ‘The tree is green’ is to select the word ‘tree’ out of a set of related sounds – ‘sea’ or ‘bee’ – and related words – ‘bush’, ‘trunk’, ‘branch’ and all the particular names of trees, like oak or ash. The meanings we produce are relational, they depend upon processes of combination and association within the differential system of language itself. Signs are not referential, no sign has a meaning of its own. They exist within a system and produce meaning through their similarity to and difference from other signs. This vision of languages and signs in general, have affected every area of the human sciences: Saussure imagines a new science, the semiology, which studies “the life of signs within society”. Structuralism is a critical, philosophical and cultural movement that originates from the notions of Saussurean semiology, which implicates the origin of the theory of intertextuality. This revolution in thought, which has been styled the ‘linguistic turn’ in the human sciences, can be understood as one origin of the theory of intertextuality.
The 1st basis for intertextuality’s theories is Saussure’s notion of differential signs: if all signs are differential they can be understood as shadowed by a vast number of possible relations. Authors of literary works do not just select words from a language system, they select plots, aspects of characters, images, ways of narrating, phrases and sentences from previous literary texts and literary tradition. If we imagine literary tradition as a synchronic system, then the literary author becomes a figure working with 2 systems: language one and literary one.
M.M. BAKHTIN
He is the originator, if not of the term ‘intertextuality’, then at least of the specific view of language which helped others articulate theories of intertextuality. Bakhtin takes a very different approach to language and is far more concerned than Saussure with the social contexts within which words are exchanged. Human beings perceive the self as dialogic, always conflicting and dialoguing multientities, which try to negotiate their truth about the world. If the relational nature of the word for Saussure stems from a vision of language seen as a generalized and abstract system, for Bakhtin it stems from the word’s existence within specific social sites, specific social registers and specific moments of utterance and reception. Our self-definition, then, is dialogic and unstable. Bakhtin’s dialogic vision of human consciousness, subjectivity and communication is based, then, on a vision in which language embodies an on-going dialogic clash of ideologies, world-views, opinions and interpretation. For Bakhtin, ‘language for the individual consciousness, lies on the borderline between oneself and the other. The word becomes one’s own through an act of ‘appropriation’, which means that it is never wholly one’s own, is always already permeated with traces of other words, other uses. In his opinion, the novel has been forged by revolutionary forces. The origins of the novel must be posited in the parody of the higher traditional forms. Realist texts generate their meaning out of their relation to literary and cultural systems, rather than out of any direct representation of the physical world. The literary work is viewed as a space in which a potentially vast number of relations combine. Bakhtin wasn’t known well until Kristeva talked about him in the 1960s, period in which he was rediscovered and republished in Russia, after the Stalinist censorship.
Bakhtin’s book on Rabelais, for example, examines the manner in which ancient traditions of the carnival act as a centrifugal force promoting ‘unofficial’ dimensions of society and human life and does so through a profane language and drama of ‘the lower bodily stratum’: images of huge bodies, bloated stomachs, orifices, debauchery, drunkenness and promiscuity are all ‘carnivalesque’ images. Centripetal forces represent the drive for unitary language, standardisation and linguistic hegemony; centrifugal forces represent the presence of heteroglossia, stratification and decentralisation. Other concepts, such as “polyphony”, “heteroglossia”, “double-voiced discourse” and “hybridization”, emerge to complement the term, dialogism. Attention to these terms and to his arguments about the novel can extend our understanding of Bakhtin’s view of language and of its essentially intertextual nature. In Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, he talks about polyphony, heteroglossia and double- voiced discourse. Heteroglossia is a diversity of voices, styles of discourse, or points of view in a literary work and especially a novel. Polyphony is the simultaneous combination of parts or elements or voices. The novels of Dostoevsky are the apotheosis of dialogic literary creation. Polyphony is a term which dominates much of Bakhtin’s analysis of the novels of Dostoevsky, who for Bakhtin represents the apotheosis of dialogic literary creation. A double-voiced or polyphonic discourse is “directed both towards the referential object of speech as in ordinary discourse, and toward another's. discourse, towards someone else's speech”. Hybridization is “the mixing, within a single concrete utterance, of two or more different linguistic consciousnesses, often widely separated in time and social space”. Dialogism is not literally the dialogue between characters in a novel, every character in the dialogic novel has a specific personality, which involves that character’s world view, speech, ideologies and social position, which are expressed through his/her words. In the polyphonic novel, we find a world in which all characters, even the narrator, are possessed of their own discursive consciousnesses. It presents a world in which no individual discourse can stand above any other discourse, all of them are interpretations of the world. For Bakhtin the author stands behind his novel, but he doesn’t enter into it as a guiding authoritative voice. The polyphonic novel fights against any view of the world which would valorise one official point of view, one ideological position or one discourse above all others.
In this sense, the novel presents to us a world which is literally dialogic, dialogism doesn’t concern simply the clash between different character-centred discourses, it is a central feature of each character’s own individual discourse. Language embodies an on-going dialogic clash of ideologies, world-views, opinions and interpretations. The word becomes one’s own through an act of appropriation, which means that is always already permeated with traces of other words, other uses. This vision of language is what Kristeva talks about, with a new term ‘intertextuality’.
KRISTEVA
She’s the real inventor of intertextuality and she’s influenced by both Bakhtin and Saussure’s theories. Kristeva used the term for the first time in a 1966 essay (“Word, Dialogue and Novel”). The French intellectual scene into which Kristeva arrived in the mid-1960s was one in which an array of established positions within philosophy, political theory and psychoanalytic theory were being transformed by a structuralism dependent on Saussurean linguistics and, increasingly, by a critique of Saussurean linguistics which would become known, after the fact, as poststructuralism. An attention to the role of literature and literary language was crucial to the rise of poststructuralist theory, nowhere more so than in the journal Tel Quel. Most of the major theorists associated with the emergence of poststructuralism in France, including Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Philippe Sollers and Michel Foucault, contributed to Tel Quel’s investigation of literature’s radical relation to political and philosophical thought. If the theory of the text and of textuality can be said to be at the centre of these writers’ work, then Tel Quel can be said to give that often divergent set of theories a common site, a place to perform “writing-thinking”, as Kristeva puts it (1998b: 7–11). Kristeva’s position within this “place” is, as Barthes wrote, paradoxically both that of ‘l’étranger’ (a woman, a literal foreigner) and of central theorist of textuality. In ‘The Bounded Text’ Kristeva is concerned with establishing the manner in which a text is constructed out of already existent discourse. Authors do not create their texts from their own original minds, but rather compile them from preexistent texts, so that, as Kristeva writes, a text is “a permutation of texts, an intertextuality in the space of a given text”, in which ‘several utterances, taken from other texts, intersect and neutralize one another’. Texts are made up of what is at times styled “the cultural (or social) text”, all the different discourses, ways of speaking and saying, institutionally sanctioned structures and systems which make up what we call culture.
In that sense, it ruptures the literary canon as presented by a long tradition. The role of the reader becomes central as well as that of the contemporary writer, who can orientate our reading of past masterpieces. Bachktin’s lesson on polyphony makes us aware of the net of discourses (set of words which expresses diverse ideologies) that emerge in texts. Then, not only readers and writers are crucial to the construction of a new interpretation of the text, but also the forces which (consciously or not) they embody. Gerard Genette talks about the way in which signs and texts function within and are generated by describable systems, code, cultural practices and rituals. Literary works are not original, unique, but particular articulations of an enclosed system. The literary work might not display its relation to the system, but the function of criticism is to do precisely that by rearranging the work back into its relation to the closed literary system. Genette states that literary production is the parole, while the consumption of it by society is the langue. The author takes elements of the enclosed literary system or structure and arranges them into the work, obscuring the work’s relation to the system. Literature, like any other activity of the mind, is based on conventions of which is not aware. In The Architext, Genette talks about tragedies, epic, lyric and dramatic, but especially on Aristotle. From the point of view of Aristotle, tragedies are partly defined through the representation of socially high characters (Hamlet), but the question is if it can include some novelistic examples like Wuthering Heights which deal with the themes of unrealizable love, jealousy, abuse of power and social estrangement. Genette talks also about the general confusion between modes and genres. The 1st ones are natural forms, aspects of language itself, and can be dived into narrative and discourse: narrative concerns recounting of facts or events without attention being place on the person who is doing that recounting; discourse places its focus on the person who speaks and the situation from within which that person is speaking. Genres are literary categories.
TRANSTEXTUALITY
In Palimpsests , Genette writes that a text should be considered as the rewriting of an archetype, a matrix which contains in itself many tales. He goes further on to define transtextuality, ‘a text interpreted in relation to other texts’. It allows for an endlessly forming and reforming poetics, whose object is not the text but the architext.
Transtextuality is Genette’s version of intertextuality and it has some types of it, 3 specific categories:
- Intertextuality: relationship of copresence between 2 texts or among several texts, it’s the actual presence of one text within another.
- Metatextuality: when a text takes up a relation of commentary on another text. 3.Architextuality: has to do with the reader’s expectations and their reception of the work. Novels may indicate their relation to other text in their subtitles. (A biography; a diary; a romance etc.).
PARATEXTUALITY
Genette finds another type of transtextuality, paratextuality. The paratext is what lies on the threshold of the text and which help to direct and control the reception of a text by its readers. It consists of a peritext, which can be a title, chapter titles, prefaces and notes. Epigraphs are a type of peritext too, they are taken from other texts, which the author indicates as the cultural matrix to which he refers, or his/her archetypes… The epitext is whatever is generated around (and about) the text: interviews, letters. Peritext includes elements that surround the body of the text, such as the foreword, table of contents, index, and source notes. Paratext = peritext+epitext So the paratext consists of all those things which contribute to present the text by making it into a book. A paratext can be autographic, by the author, or allographic, by someone other than the author.
HYPERTEXTUALITY
Is a type of transtextuality. It involves any relationship uniting an hypertext (B) with an hypotext (A, an earlier one). The new writing is written on the old text. The reader is continually reminded of the previous drama, even though the drama he is watching is new, in a sense. Epigraphs Gerard Genette defines epigraphs as a quotation placed in the exergue (off), generally at the head of the work, or at the edge, but generally closest to the text.
- Dialogue between different genres and classes;
- Long dialogues;
- Wanted to perform the struggle between social groups/classes. The novel is a dialogic genre, the writer doesn’t exclude the intentions and voices of others: we can hear different voices of them in every passage. It wanted to puzzle his readers, to question their beliefs and, because of this, it’s subversive and liberating like theatre. In the modernist novel the narrator is present, there’s a democratisation of literature, because the novel lessens the narrator’s role, it is weaker.
IN THE MODERNIST NOVEL
The narrator is present, but much less than in Victorian or eighteenth-century novels. It is an instance of the democratisation of literature. The world is polyphonous and the novel lessens the role of the narrator, a unifying, ordering figure which encloses the various materials in a coherent portrayal of society. In modernist and postmodernist novels, the role of the narrator is weaker than in the eighteenth and nineteenth-century novels.
