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Informed by Saussurean linguistics and its theoretical legacy, Barthes announces the death of the Author on the basis of a recognition of the relational nature of the word. Barthes refers to that traditional notion of the author in theological terms. We might remember here the opening of the Gospel of John: ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God’. In the religious traditions of the West, God is viewed as the originary author of two books: the Bible and the Book of Nature. In a comparable manner, the human author has traditionally been seen as the origin of the meaning of the work. Saussure’s work allows us to question the understanding of the Word, or the sign, implied by such traditions. The meaning of the author’s words, Barthes suggests, does not originate from the author’s own unique consciousness but from their place within linguistic-cultural systems. The author is placed in the role of a compiler or arranger of pre-existent possibilities within the language system. Each word the author employs, each sentence, paragraph or whole text s/he produces takes its origins from, and thus has its meaning in terms of, the language system out of which it was produced. The view of language expressed in these lines by Barthes is what theorists since the period in which his essay was produced have termed intertextual. Although Barthes’s examination of this single sentence from Balzac’s Sarrasine is a good example of the influence of Saussurean notions on modern literary theory, Barthes is also employing perspectives which derive from Bakhtin, and par- ticularly from Julia Kristeva’s poststructuralist work on Bakhtin. To go any further in our understanding of intertextual theories, we need to examine Bakhtin’s major theories, and also what Kristeva does with them in her work of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

THE SOCIAL WORD: BAKHTIN

The term intertextuality first enters into the French language in Julia Kristeva’s early work of the middle to late 1960s. In es-

structuralism was being hotly debated, leading to the emergence of what subsequently has been styled poststructuralism. Kristeva’s work stands beside the work of many other seminal poststructuralist thinkers such as Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault and Louis Althusser. All these theorists worked and wrote in a context, the France of the late 1960s, which was dominated by a political and social crisis culminating in the revolutionary events of 1968. Paris, in 1968, saw a student uprising, temporarily combined with a worker’s uprising, which for a brief time threatened the author- ity of the French government. In the Russia of the late 1960s and early 1970s the previous Stalinist censorship of certain for- mal brands of literary and cultural theory began to fade, and Bakhtin’s works, though themselves fundamentally anti-formal- ist, were finally being rediscovered, republished or published for the first time. We come to Bakhtin in very different histori- cal and political contexts, and confronting a great deal of work, by Bakhtin and on Bakhtin, unknown to Kristeva in the 1960s. Various languages (Russian, French, English) act as less than neutral channels for the transmission of these contexts and ideas. Our Bakhtin is not Kristeva’s, though her early discussions of his work helped to forge what we now have. From our perspec- tive, Bakhtin can seem less an author from whose works a no- tion of intertextuality can be derived than a major theorist of intertextuality itself. The starting point for any understanding of Bakhtin and intertextuality must be found in the work of the 1920s. In the book on the Formalist school of Russian literary theory associ- ated with Medvedev (Bakhtin/Medvedev, 1978), and in the books associated with Volosinov (Bakhtin/Volosinov, 1986 and 1987), we find an alternative to the Saussurean theory of language we have just discussed. Whilst Bakhtin/Medvedev recognize the importance of the formalist method in Russian literary theory and practice, they criticize its ‘fear of meaning in art’ (Bakhtin/ Medvedev, 1978: 118). Whilst formalism seeks to explain the general ‘literariness’ of literary works, and Saussurean linguis- tics seeks to explain language as a synchronic system, what is

missed by both approaches is that language exists in specific social situations and is thus bound up with specific social evalu- ations. Without such an attention to social specificity, argue Bakhtin/Volosinov, in Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, Saussurean linguistics remains something describable as ‘ab- stract objectivism’. To produce an abstract account of literary language or any language is to forget that language is utilized by individuals in specific social contexts. The crucial word here is utterance, a word which captures the human-centred and so- cially specific aspect of language lacking in formalism and Saussurean linguistics. As Bakhtin/Medvedev write:

Not only the meaning of the utterance but also the very fact of its performance is of historical and social significance, as, in general, is the fact of its realization in the here and now, in given circumstances, at a certain historical moment, under the conditions of the given social situation. The very presence of the utterance is historically and socially sig- nificant. (Bakhtin/Medvedev, 1978: 120)

Meaning, Bakhtin/Medvedev argue, is unique, to the extent that it belongs to the linguistic interaction of specific individu- als or groups within specific social contexts. It was partly this uniqueness, or infinite potential, of spoken language which led Saussure to focus his analysis of language on langue at the ex- pense of parole and of langage. Langage, a term taken from Saussure, is understood by Bakhtin/Volosinov as ‘language- speech ... the sum total of all manifestations of the verbal fac- ulty’ (Bakhtin/Volosinov, 1986: 59). If parole concerns the act of utterance, then langage concerns every conceivable parole generatable from the system of language ( langue ). However, as Bakhtin/Volosinov write in Marxism and the Philosophy of Language :

Linguistics, as Saussure conceives it, cannot have the utterance as its object of study. What constitutes the linguistic element in the utterance are the normatively identical forms of language present in it. Everything else is ‘accessory and random’ .... language stands in opposition to

ticulated statements. Whether such a sentence would be so in- telligible in 2000 is less certain. At times, as in the first days after the bombing in August 1998 of the high street in Omagh, Northern Ireland, an event can so dominate collective, social thought that it seems to shadow almost any possible utterance. Aspects of spoken language, like intonation, clearly become important in such dimensions of language-use. The single word ‘well’ or ‘so’, or sounds such as ‘oohh’, lacking in meaning for other varieties of linguistics, can possess many specific mean- ings when we look at the concrete situation between addresser and addressee in which they are uttered. The most crucial aspect of language, from this perspective, is that all language responds to previous utterances and to pre- existent patterns of meaning and evaluation, but also promotes and seeks to promote further responses. One cannot understand an utterance or even a written work as if it were singular in meaning, unconnected to previous and future utterances or works. No utterance or work, as Bakhtin/Volosinov argue, is independent or what they term ‘monumental’ (1986: 72). From the simplest utterance to the most complex work of scientific or literary discourse, no utterance exists alone. An ut- terance, such as a scholarly work, may present itself as an inde- pendent entity, as monologic (possessing singular meaning and logic), yet it emerges from a complex history of previous works and addresses itself to, seeks for active response from, a com- plex institutional and social context: peers, reviewers, students, promotion boards and so on. All utterances are dialogic, their meaning and logic dependent upon what has previously been said and on how they will be received by others. The abstract linguistics of Saussure strips language of its dialogic nature, which includes its social, ideological, subject-centred and sub- ject-addressed nature. Bakhtin/Volosinov summarize as follows:

Language acquires life and historically evolves ... in concrete verbal communication, and not in the abstract linguistic system of language, nor in the individual psyche of speakers. (Bakhtin/Volosinov, 1986: 95)

If words, for Bakhtin, Medvedev and Volosinov, are relational, it is not simply because of their place within an abstract system of language, but because of the nature of all language viewed in its concrete social situatedness. All utterances are responses to previous utterances and are addressed to specific addressees. It is this addressivity of the word and utterance, as Bakhtin will later term it, which must be the central focus of the study of language. As Bakhtin/Volosinov argue:

Orientation of the word towards the addressee has an extremely high significance. In point of fact, word is a two-sided act. It is determined equally by whose word it is and for whom it is meant. As word, it is precisely the product of the reciprocal relationship between speaker and listener, addresser and addressee. Each and every word expresses ‘one’ in relation to the ‘other’. I give myself verbal shape from another’s point of view, ultimately, from the point of view of the community to which I belong. A word is a bridge thrown between myself and another. If one end of the bridge depends on me, then the other depends upon my addressee. A word is territory shared by both addresser and addressee, by the speaker and his interlocutor. ( ibid. : 86)

Lynne Pearce’s reference to telephone conversations is a useful example of this argument about language (Pearce, 1994: 1–6). In telephone conversations, which take place between speakers unable to interpret physical signs, the nature of the intonations used, or the kinds of words employed, is crucial in establishing the meaning of the communicative act. Overhearing someone else’s telephone conversation is often such a confusing experi- ence because the dialogic nature of the conversation involved can only fully be understood by those participants who in effect are creating it. The manner in which I address my lover, my colleague, my bank manager will vary immensely in intonation and in what Bakhtin would later call speech genre. I will em- ploy different phrases when speaking or writing to such differ- ent addressees, partly because they will expect the use of ap- propriate speech genres. ‘Re. your letter of the 14th’ is a fine opening for a letter to one’s bank manager, but hardly appropri- ate in a letter home to one’s parents. ‘Hello darling!’ might be a

ments which occurs [in the sign], to make the sign uniaccentual’ (1986: 23). There is, as Bakhtin argues elsewhere, an on-going struggle between centripetal and centrifugal forces of language which can be symbolized by the opposition between monologic and dialogic utterance. Bakhtin’s book on Rabelais (Bakhtin, 1984b), 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 stra- tum’: images of huge bodies, bloated stomachs, orifices, de- bauchery, drunkenness and promiscuity are all ‘carnivalesque’ images. Carnival, through such images, celebrates the unoffi- cial collective body of the people and stands against the official ideology and discourse of religious and state power. We see the carnivalesque most explicitly in the medieval and Renaissance holidays and feast days in which the dominant order of society is overturned, fools dressing as nobles, nobles dressing as fools and so on. The modern inheritor of this unofficial, highly satiri- cal and parodic, dialogical tradition of the carnivalesque is found, Bakhtin argues, in the novel. In Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (Bakhtin, 1984a), and the essays collected in The Dialogic Imagination (Bakhtin, 1981), the reader will find Bakhtin’s most sustained arguments concerning the novel’s dialogical character. 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. Polyphony, literally the simultaneous combination of parts or elements or, here, voices, 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. As Bakhtin writes: ‘Dostoevsky could hear dialogic relationships every- where, in all manifestations of conscious and intelligent human life; where consciousness began, there dialogue began for him as well’ (1984a: 40). This dialogic element of Dostoevsky’s work

is not simply to do with ‘mere rejoinders in a dialogue, laid out compositionally in the text’ ( ibid. ). Dialogism is not literally the dialogues between characters within a novel. Every charac- ter in the dialogic novel has a specific, in some senses unique, personality. This ‘personality’ involves that character’s world- view, typical mode of speech, ideological and social position- ing, all of which are expressed through the character’s words. Bakhtin speaks of characters as expressing an idea or ‘world- view’ and of the image of voice associated with that character’s consciousness. Each character in a Dostoevsky novel interprets the world for him- or herself and expresses this interpretation through his or her own specific discourse. But this means that the author, as Bakhtin states:

constructs the hero [character] not out of words foreign to the hero, not out of neutral definitions; he constructs not a character, nor a type, nor a temperament, in fact he constructs no objectified image of the hero at all, but rather the hero’s discourse about himself and his world. Dostoevsky’s hero is not an objectified image but an autonomous discourse, pure voice ; we do not see him, we hear him; everything that we see and know apart from his discourse is nonessential and is swallowed up by discourse as its raw material, or else remains out- side it as something that stimulates and provokes. (Bakhtin, 1984a: 53)

In the polyphonic novel we find not an objective, authorial voice presenting the relations and dialogues between characters but a world in which all characters, and even the narrator him- or herself, are possessed of their own discursive consciousnesses. The polyphonic novel presents a world in which no individual discourse can stand objectively above any other discourse; all discourses are interpretations of the world, responses to and calls to other discourses. A novelist in the English tradition often compared in these senses to Dostoevsky is Charles Dickens. Dickens’s Bleak House, to take one example, is concerned not to comment upon but to present each character’s discursive po- sition. There is no objective narratorial voice to guide us through

terms of the concepts of heteroglossia and hybridization. Bakhtin employs the opening passages of Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground in which the character-narrator’s opening comments gradually begin to display an ‘internal polemic with the other’ ( ibid. : 228). Dostoevsky’s character’s speech increasingly shows marks of its addressivity – anticipating the comments of ‘other’ speakers, arguing, criticizing, refuting words

• which increasingly demonstrate the dependence of his own discourse on other people’s utterances. The fact that the dialogic address with the other can occur within the utterance of a single speaker, is perhaps nowhere better demonstrated than in the Modernist ‘stream-of-conscious- ness’ technique of novelists such as Virginia Woolf and James Joyce. In the following paragraph from the ‘Hades’ section of Joyce’s Ulysses, first published in 1922, Leopold Bloom’s ‘in- ternal monologue’ is thoroughly double-voiced in this sense. Not only does Bloom direct his utterance towards different ad- dressees here, he also includes within his thoughts sections from texts he has previously read, along with the ritual discourses from religious contexts and other discursive snippets, clichés, recognizable sayings, opinions. The overall effect is to demon- strate how Bloom’s thoughts comprise a network of utterances, texts and cultural commonplaces. His thoughts are not simply his own, they emerge from his dialogic place within spoken and written culture:

One of those chaps would make short work of a fellow. Pick the bones clean no matter who it was. Ordinary meat for them. A corpse is meat gone bad. Well and what’s cheese? Corpse of milk. I read in that Voyages in China that the Chinese say a white man smells like a corpse. Cremation better. Priests dead against it. Devilling for the other firm. Wholesale burners and Dutch oven dealers. Time of the plague. Quicklime fever pits to eat them. Lethal chamber. Ashes to ashes. Or bury at sea. Where is that Parsee tower of silence? Eaten by birds. Earth, fire, water. Drowning they say is the pleasantest. See your whole life in a flash. But being brought back to life no. Can’t bury in the air however. Out of a flying machine. Wonder does the news go about whenever a fresh one is let down. Underground communication. We learned that from them. Wouldn’t be surprised.

Regular square feed for them. Flies come before he’s well dead. Got wind of Dingham. They wouldn’t care about the smell of it. Saltwhite crumbling mush of corpse: smell, taste like raw white turnips. (Joyce, 1971: 116)

Bakhtin tends to argue that poetic forms like the epic and kinds of lyric are essentially monologic, they enforce a singular, au- thoritative voice upon the world. Only the novel, and indeed only certain kinds of novel, are, according to Bakhtin, truly dia- logic. This argument is on one level rather contradictory, since Bakhtin also discusses language in general in terms of dialogism. A simpler example of double-voiced discourse, which will also demonstrate the dialogic potentialities within lyric poetry, can be located in Robert Burns’s famous love poem ‘A Red, Red Rose’, the first two stanzas of which run as follows:

O my Luve’s like a red, red rose, That’s newly sprung in June; O my Luve’s like the melodie That’s sweetly play’d in tune. As fair art thou, my bonie lass, So deep in luve am I; And I will love thee still, my Dear, Till a’ the seas gang dry. (Burns, 1969: 582)

We have here only one lyric voice, which is why Bakhtin tends to style this kind of poetry monologic. And yet within that voice we discover a distinct clash between an official English lan- guage and a Scottish dialect. Certain lines or phrases bespeak the official, self-consciously literary language of Edinburgh society of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: ‘As fair art thou’, ‘And I will love thee still, my dear’. Other lines and phrases pull against that official literary language, plac- ing it alongside an al ternative dialect: ‘my bonie lass’, ‘Till a’ the seas gang dry’. Burns’s poem, seen from this perspective, stages the social tension within his native Scotland between an official society keen to classicize (others would say Englishify)

or at least the most neglected, is its dialogism, that is, its intertextual dimension. After Adam, there are no nameless ob- jects, nor any unused words’ (Todorov, 1984: x). Bakhtin’s vi- sion of what Todorov rightly calls intertextuality is social, as is his vision of human beings, and thus, as we shall see, it can be somewhat distinguished from a poststructuralist vision which, if it has a notion of agency, of the origins of meaning, attributes it to language itself rather than to human authors. There is agency but no individual psychology in Bakhtin’s work. Bakhtin’s dia- logic vision of human consciousness, subjectivity and commu- nication is based, then, on a vision in which language embodies an on-going dialogic clash of ideologies, world-views, opin- ions and interpretations. In his crucial essay ‘Discourse in the Novel’ Bakhtin writes:

any concrete discourse (utterance) finds the object at which it was directed already as it were overlain with qualification, open to dispute, charged with value, already enveloped in an obscuring mist – or, on the contrary, by the ‘light’ of alien words that have already been spoken about it. It is entangled, shot through with shared thoughts, points of view, alien value judgements and accents. The word, directed toward its object, enters a dialogically agitated and tensionfilled environment of alien words, value-judgements and accents, and weaves in and out of complex interrelationships, merges with some, recoils from others, intersects with a third group: and all this may crucially shape discourse, may leave a trace in all its semantic layers, may complicate its expression and influence its entire stylistic profile. (Bakhtin, 1981: 276)

For Bakhtin, ‘language for the individual consciousness, lies on the borderline between oneself and the other. The word in language is half someone else’s’ ( ibid. : 293). 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. This vision of language is what Kristeva highlights in her new term, intertextuality, and it brings us back to the issues of double-voiced discourse and speech genres, an area which in essays such as ‘Discourse in the Novel’ is given a new definition through the concept of

heteroglossia. Given that hetero stems from the Greek word meaning ‘other’ and that glot stems from the Greek for ‘tongue’ or ‘voice’, we can define heteroglossia as language’s ability to contain within it many voices, one’s own and other voices. As Bakhtin writes:

at any given moment of its historical existence, language is heteroglot from top to bottom: it represents the co-existence of socio-ideological contradictions between the present and the past, between differing epochs of the past, between different socio-ideological groups in the present, between tendencies, schools, circles and so forth, all given a bodily form. These ‘languages’ of heteroglossia intersect each other in a variety of ways, forming new typifying ‘languages’. ( ibid. : 291)

The term heteroglossia again reminds us of the fact that this clash of ideologies and past utterances within language is not simply to do with a dialogic clash between distinct, sepa- rate ‘languages’ but often exists within individual utterances and even within the same word. In the polyphonic novel, for example, the speech of individual characters is always heteroglot, double-voiced, in that, as Bakhtin puts it: ‘It serves two speakers at the same time and expresses simultaneously two different intentions: the direct intention of the character who is speaking, and the refracted intention of the author. In such discourse there are two voices, two meanings and two expressions’ (1981: 324). The discourse of characters in a polyphonic novel, we might say, exemplifies the intertextual or dialogic nature of language by always serving two speak- ers, two intentions, two ideological positions, but always within the single utterance. The attempt to understand and utilize such terms as heteroglossia is an example of the phenomenon to which I am referring. Bakhtin’s terms are fluid and come to us through various interpretive translations; so that, for example, it is possible to retain heteroglossia for the recognition of the numerous different ‘languages’, of social and professional groups, of classes and literary movements, operating in society

STRUCTURALIST APPROACHES 97

As we have seen, poststructuralists deny that any critical procedure can ever rearrange a text’s elements into their full signifying relations. Structuralists retain a belief in criticism’s ability to locate, describe and thus stabilize a text’s significance, even if that significance concerns an intertextual relation between a text and other texts. Thaïs Morgan makes the same point by dividing theorists into two camps: one camp, poststructuralist in nature, ‘emphasizes the ambiguity of the basic sign relation (signifier – signified) and the infinite regression or mise en abîme of signification’; the other, structuralist, camp ‘assumes that the signification of a text or corpus of texts can be contained and fully explicated by description of elementary units and their systematic or recurrent relations’ (Morgan, 1985: 9). For the theorists we are about to examine, placing a text back into its presumed system produces a form of knowledge and of stable reading which is unavailable in poststructuralist theories of intertextuality and the text.

STRUCTURALIST POETICS: GENETTE

Jonathan Culler, in his Structuralist Poetics, reminds us that poetics is essentially a theory of reading and thus has a very long history, going back particularly to Aristotle’s Poetics. Structuralism’s particular contribution to this tradition is to refocus attention away from the specificities of individual works to the systems out of which they can be said to have been constructed. Culler cites Genette’s statement that literature ‘like any other activity of the mind, is based on conventions of which, with some exceptions, it is not aware’ (quoted in Culler, 1975: 116). These systems, rather than individual works, are the object of study for structuralist poetics, their description constituting a mapping of the closed system of literature and thus providing the basis for any meaningful analysis of individual works. To slightly adapt Culler’s example, although a critical interpretation of a work might style it as a tragic novel, we need to understand how tragedy and the novel relate to each other and to all the other possible generic and modal elements which make up the

98 STRUCTURALIST APPROACHES

literary system before that statement can be fully meaningful. We might wish to call works such as Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles tragedies, but what do we mean when we use the word ‘tragedy’ to refer to such different texts? We might think we understand what tragedy is, but, unless we have proper knowledge of its position within the system of literary genres, we have at best an impressionistic sense of the term, reliant on our knowledge of individual examples named for us, by others. Poetics is primary; interpretation is secondary. Richard Macksey has described Gérard Genette as ‘the most intrepid and persistent explorer in our time of the relations between criticism and poetics’ (Genette, 1997b: xii). Such a reputation is dependent largely on Genette’s ground-breaking studies of the nature of narrative discourse and especially narrative fiction. This work is a significant part of Genette’s development of structuralist poetics, but our focus will be on three related works: The Architext, Palimpsests, and Paratexts. In this trilogy Genette pushes the practice of structuralist poetics into an arena which can be termed intertextual. In so doing, Genette not only makes major revisions in the practice of poetics, he also produces a coherent theory and map of what he terms ‘transtextuality’, which we might style ‘intertextuality from the viewpoint of structural poetics’. The first book in this trilogy, The Architext (Genette, 1992), is a revisiting of the history of poetics since Plato and Aristotle, astonishing for the manner in which Genette lays out, in less than one hundred pages, the major distortions and misconceptions which have bedevilled poetics since its inception a millennium ago. These misconceptions go back, Genette argues, to the definition of the three main genres – epic, lyric, dramatic – in Plato and especially in Aristotle’s Poetics. To re-employ our example, what do we mean when we say a work of literature is tragic? Genette, running through the argument in Aristotle’s Poetics, points to Aristotle’s rather lax use of the word tragedy to mean both a facet of a genre (in this case high drama) and a theme in volving tragic human situations. We need to note, then,