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INTERTEXTUALITY
Since Julia Kristeva first coined the term in the 1960s,
intertextuality has been a dominant idea within literary and
cultural studies, taken up by practically every theoretical
movement. Yet intertextuality remains the subject of such a
diversity of interpretations and is defined so variously, that it is
anything but a transparent, commonly understood term.
This book, the first full-length study of intertextuality in
English, follows all the major moves in the term’s history and
clearly explains how intertextuality is employed in structuralist,
post-structuralist, semiotic, deconstructive, postcolonial,
Marxist, feminist and psychoanalytic theories. With a wealth of
illuminating examples from literary and cultural texts, including
special examination of the World Wide Web, this book will prove
invaluable for any student of literature and culture.
Graham Allen lectures on eighteenth-century literature,
Romantic and Victorian literature, and literary theory at
University College, Cork. He is author of Harold Bloom: A
Poetics of Conflict.
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THE NEW CRITICAL IDIOM
SERIES EDITOR: JOHN DRAKAKIS, UNIVERSITY OF STIRLING
The New Critical Idiom is an invaluable series of introductory
guides to today’s critical terminology. Each book:
· provides a handy, explanatory guide to the use (and abuse)
of the term
· offers an original and distinctive overview by a leading literary
and cultural critic
· relates the term to the larger field of cultural representation.
With a strong emphasis on clarity, lively debate and the widest
possible breadth of examples, The New Critical Idiom is an
indispensable approach to key topics in literary studies.
· Other books in this series:
Interdisciplinarity by Joe Moran
Autobiography by Linda Anderson
Class by Gary Day
Colonialism/Postcolonialism by
Ania Loomba
Culture/Metaculture by Francis
Mulhern
Discourse by Sara Mills Cora
Kaplan
Gothic by Fred Botting
Historicism by Paul Hamilton
Humanism by Tony Davies
Ideology by David Hawkes
Literature by Peter Widdowson
Metre, Rhythm and Verse Form by
Philip Hobsbaum
Modernism by Peter Childs
Myth by Laurence Coupe
Narrative Laurence Coupe
Parody by Simon Dentith
Pastoral by Terry Gifford
Romanticism by Aidan Day
Science Fiction by Aidan Day
Roberts
Sexuality by Joseph Bristow
Stylistics by Richard Bradford
The Unconscious by Antony
Easthope
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INTERTEXTUALITY
Graham Allen
LONDON AND NEW YORK
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First published 2000
by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2006.
“To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or
Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to
www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.”
© 2000 Graham Allen
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced
or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means,
now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording,
or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Allen, Graham
Intertextuality / Graham Allen.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Intertextuality.
I. Title.
PN98.158 A45
809–dc21
2000
99-055504
ISBN 0-203-13103-7 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-203-18028-3 (Adobe eReader Format)
ISBN 0-415-17474-0 (hbk)
ISBN 0-415-17475-9 (pbk)
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To my father, Arthur George Allen
In your retirement year, Dad, I’m very proud to be your son
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CONTENTS
SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE
ix
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
x
Introduction
1
1 Origins: Saussure, Bakhtin, Kristeva
8
The relational word: Saussure 8
The social word: Bakhtin 14
Dialogism 21
Tel Quel, production: Kristeva 30
Dialogism to intertextuality 35
Transposition 47
Bakhtin or Kristeva? 56
2 The text unbound: Barthes
61
From work to text 61
The death of the Author 70
Readerly and writerly texts 76
The paradoxical text 89
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3 Structuralist approaches: Genette and Riffaterre 95
Structuralist poetics: Genette 97
Transtextuality 101
Paratextuality 103
Hypertextuality 107
Structuralist hermeneutics: Riffaterre 115
Literary competence 125
4 Situated readers: Bloom, feminism, postcolonialism 133
Influence revisited: Bloom 133
Mapping misreading 135
Gynocriticism and intertextuality 144
The return of the female author 154
The return to Bakhtin: feminism and
postcolonialism 159
5 Postmodern conclusions
174
Intertextuality in the non-literary arts 174
Postmodernism and intertextuality 181
Postmodernism and the return of history 188
Intertextuality, hypertextuality and the
World Wide Web 199
Conclusion
209
GLOSSARY
210
BIBLIOGRAPHY
222
INDEX
233
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SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE
The New Critical Idiom is a series of introductory books which
seeks to extend the lexicon of literary terms, in order to address
the radical changes which have taken place in the study of
literature during the last decades of the twentieth century. The
aim is to provide clear, well-illustrated accounts of the full range
of terminology currently in use, and to evolve histories of its
changing usage.
The current state of the discipline of literary studies is one
where there is considerable debate concerning basic questions
of terminology. This involves, among other things, the
boundaries which distinguish the literary from the non-literary;
the position of literature within the larger sphere of culture; the
relationship between literatures of different cultures; and
questions concerning the relation of literary to other cultural
forms within the context of interdisciplinary studies.
It is clear that the field of literary criticism and theory is a
dynamic and heterogeneous one. The present need is for
individual volumes on terms which combine clarity of exposition
with an adventurousness of perspective and a breadth of
application. Each volume will contain as part of its apparatus
some indication of the direction in which the definition of
particular terms is likely to move, as well as expanding the
disciplinary boundaries within which some of these terms have
been traditionally contained. This will involve some re-situation
of terms within the larger field of cultural representation, and
will introduce examples from the area of film and the modern
media in addition to examples from a variety of literary texts.
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
In writing this book I have benefited from the advice, support
and example of a number of people: Ellen Beardsley, Padraig
Bambury, Michael Brown, Liz Brown, Margaret Connolly, David
Coughlan, Pat Coughlan, Alex Davis, Gail Davis, John Drakakis,
David Duff, Anne Fitzgerald, Paul Hegarty, Lee Jenkins, Colbert
Kearney, Pam Morris, Samantha Mullaney, Sinéad Murphy,
Michele O’Connor, Talia Rodgers. Many friends have helped
me over the period of writing this book and, apart from the above,
I would like also to express my gratitude to the following:
Deborah Amberson, Gary Baker, Jackie Clarke, Bernie Cronin,
David Pickles, Catherine Twomey, Wendy Stewart, and, certainly
not least, my mother, Daphne Allen. Thanks to Gail Davis for
the quotation of Elizabeth Gaskell on p. 55. To Dani and Chrissie
I would just say: thank you for being who you are.
I am grateful for the following permissions to quote copyright
material:
Faber and Faber Ltd for ‘Mary’s Song’ from Sylvia Plath, Col-
lected Poems, ed. Ted Hughes (Faber and Faber: 1981), and
HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. for ‘Mary’s Song’ from Ariel by
Sylvia Plath, copyright © 1963 by Ted Hughes; Carcanet Press
Limited for ‘The Red Wheelbarrow’ from William Carlos Will-
iams, Collected Poems, ed. A. Walton Litz and Christopher
MacGowan (Carcarnet: 1987) and New Directions Publishing
Corporation for ‘The Red Wheelbarrow’ by William Carlos
Williams from Collected Poems: 1909–1939, volume 1, ed.
Christopher MacGowan (New Directions: 1938), copyright ©
1938 by New Directions Publishing Corp.
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INTRODUCTION
The idea that when we read a work of literature we are seeking
to find a meaning which lies inside that work seems completely
commonsensical. Literary texts possess meaning; readers ex-
tract that meaning from them. We call the process of extracting
meaning from texts reading or interpretation. Despite their ap-
parent obviousness, such ideas have been radically challenged
in contemporary literary and cultural theory. Works of litera-
ture, after all, are built from systems, codes and traditions es-
tablished by previous works of literature. The systems, codes
and traditions of other art forms and of culture in general are
also crucial to the meaning of a work of literature. Texts, whether
they be literary or non-literary, are viewed by modern theorists
as lacking in any kind of independent meaning. They are what
theorists now call intertextual. The act of reading, theorists claim,
plunges us into a network of textual relations. To interpret a
text, to discover its meaning, or meanings, is to trace those rela-
tions. Reading thus becomes a process of moving between texts.
Meaning becomes something which exists between a text and
all the other texts to which it refers and relates, moving out
from the independent text into a network of textual relations.
The text becomes the intertext.
Intertextuality is one of the most commonly used and mis-
used terms in contemporary critical vocabulary. ‘An Intertextual
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2 INTRODUCTION
Study of ... ’ or ‘Intertextuality and ... ’ are such commonplace
constructions in the titles of critical works that one might be
forgiven for assuming that intertextuality is a term that is gener-
ally understood and provides a stable set of critical procedures
for interpretation. Nothing, in fact, could be further from the
truth. The term is defined so variously that it is, currently, akin
to such terms as ‘the Imagination’, ‘history’, or
‘Postmodernism’: terms which are, to employ a phrase from the
work of the US critic Harold Bloom, underdetermined in mean-
ing and overdetermined in figuration. Intertextuality, one of the
central ideas in contemporary literary theory, is not a transpar-
ent term and so, despite its confident utilization by many theo-
rists and critics, cannot be evoked in an uncomplicated manner.
Such a term is in danger of meaning nothing more than what-
ever each particular critic wishes it to mean.
This book does not seek to rectify this confusion by
uncovering a fundamental definition of the term. Such a project
would be doomed to failure. What is required is for us to return
to the term’s history and to remind ourselves of how and why it
has taken on its current meanings and applications. The need to
engage in such a project is a pressing one for literary critics and
theorists as well as those wishing to learn about the term for the
first time. The project which is undertaken by this book can
thus be described as both a theoretical intervention and an
introduction to a crucial area of theoretical debate.
Intertextuality, like modern literary and cultural theory itself,
can be said to have its origins in twentieth-century linguistics,
particularly in the seminal work of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand
de Saussure. The first chapter of this study, therefore, will explain
the ways in which Saussurean linguistics promotes notions of
intertextuality. For readers unfamiliar with the field, beginning
with the linguistic theories of Saussure has the added advantage
of establishing some of the basic principles of modern literary
theory. As we will see, Saussure’s emphasis on the systematic
features of language establishes the relational nature of meaning
and thus of texts. However, intertextuality also emerges from
theories which are more concerned than Saussure seems to be
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INTRODUCTION 3
with the existence of language within specific social situations.
The work of the Russian literary theorist M. M. Bakhtin is crucial
here, and we will also explore Bakhtin’s influential theories of
literature and language. As readers move through this book they
will find that Bakhtin’s theories continually return to inform
different theories of intertextuality. Julia Kristeva’s attempt to
combine Saussurean and Bakhtinian theories of language and
literature produced the first articulation of intertextual theory,
in the late 1960s, and an examination of her work in this area
forms a necessary part in our survey of the origins of the term.
Kristeva’s work on Bakhtin occurred during a transitional
period in modern literary and cultural theory. This transition is
usually described in terms of a move from structuralism to
poststructuralism. What this move involves will form part of
the analysis of Kristeva’s work in Chapter 1. This transition is
often characterized as one in which assertions of objectivity,
scientific rigour, methodological stability and other highly ra-
tionalistic-sounding terms are replaced by an emphasis on un-
certainty, indeterminacy, incommunicability, subjectivity, desire,
pleasure and play. If structuralist literary critics believe that
Saussurean linguistics can help criticism become objective, even
scientific in nature, then poststructuralist critics of the 1960s
and beyond have argued that criticism, like literature itself, is
inherently unstable, the product of subjective desires and drives.
The term intertextuality was initially employed by
poststructuralist theorists and critics in their attempt to disrupt
notions of stable meaning and objective interpretation. The sec-
ond chapter of this study will move from Kristeva to one of the
most famous exponents of poststructuralist theory, the French
theorist Roland Barthes.
As Chapter 2 will demonstrate, Barthes employs intertextual
theory to challenge long-held assumptions concerning the role
of the author in the production of meaning and the very nature
of literary meaning itself. For Barthes, literary meaning can never
be fully stabilized by the reader, since the literary work’s
intertextual nature always leads readers on to new textual rela-
tions. Authors, therefore, cannot be held responsible for the
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4 INTRODUCTION
multiple meanings readers can discover within literary texts.
Barthes views such a situation as a liberation for readers; a lib-
eration from the traditional power and authority of the figure of
the ‘author’, who is now ‘dead’. By the end of Chapter 2 read-
ers unfamiliar with modern literary theory should have a much
firmer grasp of the part intertextuality plays in poststructuralism,
and indeed a much firmer grasp of what characterizes
poststructuralism itself.
Barthes’s deployment of intertextuality, his celebration of plu-
rality and the freedom from constraint of all readers, is charac-
teristically poststructuralist. There has, however, been another
strand within theories of intertextuality which has taken a very
different approach to the relationship between readers and the
literary texts they read. Grouping such critics and theorists un-
der the broad heading of ‘Structuralist Approaches’, Chapter 3
explores how intertextuality can be used to argue for critical
positions at times diametrically opposed to those of Kristeva
and Barthes. Despite differences between them, the French lit-
erary critics Gérard Genette and Michael Riffaterre both em-
ploy intertextual theory to argue for critical certainty, or at least
for the possibility of saying definite, stable and incontrovertible
things about literary texts.
That poststructuralist critics employ the term intertexuality
to disrupt notions of meaning, whilst structuralist critics em-
ploy the same term to locate and even fix literary meaning, is
proof enough of its flexibility as a concept. Chapter 4, however,
will demonstrate that the different ways in which intertextuality
has been used often stem from specific social and ideological
agendas and perspectives. Harold Bloom’s interest in the moti-
vations behind poetic production directs him towards intertextual
theory, but to a version of it which seems far from Barthes’s
celebration of the ‘death of the Author’. As we will discover,
other theorists and critics, working from feminist and
postcolonial positions, have also attempted to deploy intertextual
theory without necessarily embracing the celebration of plural-
ity and the ‘death of the Author’ that poststructuralism would
associate with that term. To feminist and postcolonial critics,
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INTRODUCTION 5
concerned with marginalized and oppressed communities and
individuals, the ‘death of the Author’ and the celebration of in-
terpretive uncertainty are not as obviously liberatory as they
appear to be to critics such as Barthes.
As we move through the various critical positions which
intertextuality has inspired we will frequently observe that it is
a term by no means exclusively related to literary works, or
even simply to written communication. Chapter 5 will explore
ways in which intertextuality has been adapted by critics of non-
literary art forms such as painting, music and architecture. Hav-
ing reached this chapter, readers will be aware of the manner in
which accounts of intertextuality reflect visions of society and
human relations. A concept such as this can be employed to
make comments on, or even capture the characteristics of, a
section of society or even a period of history. Many theorists
style our current historical period in terms of the concept of
Postmodernism. As a cultural and historical term, this is often
associated with notions of pastiche, imitation and the mixing of
already established styles and practices. Anyone aware of con-
temporary cultural trends will be familiar with discussions of
the derivativeness of modern music, or the manner in which the
film industry seems so dependent upon classic literary texts such
as those by Shakespeare, or Jane Austen. Contemporary paint-
ing seems constantly to rely on recognizable images from past
classic paintings; even contemporary literature seems concerned
with echoing and playing with previous stories, classic texts
and long-established genres such as the romance and the detec-
tive story. Intertextuality, as the discussion of Postmodern theory
in Chapter 5 will demonstrate, is a major concept within discus-
sions of contemporary culture.
Intertextuality seems such a useful term because it fore-
grounds notions of relationality, interconnectedness and inter-
dependence in modern cultural life. In the Postmodern epoch,
theorists often claim, it is not possible any longer to speak of
originality or the uniqueness of the artistic object, be it a paint-
ing or a novel, since every artistic object is so clearly assembled
from bits and pieces of already existent art. Intertextuality, as a
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6 INTRODUCTION
term, stands at the centre of such contemporary conceptions of
art and cultural production generally. As Barthes reminds us,
the very word ‘text’ is, if we remember its original meanings, ‘a
tissue, a woven fabric’ (Barthes, 1977a: 159). The idea of the
text, and thus of intertextuality, depends, as Barthes argues, on
the figure of the web, the weave, the garment (text) woven from
the threads of the ‘already written’ and the ‘already read’. Ev-
ery text has its meaning, therefore, in relation to other texts. As
we shall see throughout this study, this relationality can itself
be figured in various ways: it can involve the radical plurality
of the sign, the relation between signs and texts and the cultural
text, the relation between a text and the literary system, or the
transformative relation between one text and another text. How-
ever it is used, the term intertextuality promotes a new vision of
meaning, and thus of authorship and reading: a vision resistant
to ingrained notions of originality, uniqueness, singularity and
autonomy. That such a turn of vision, when first articulated,
looked forward to a world that in the 1960s and 1970s did not
yet quite exist, as well as to a world that did, can be registered
simply by switching our attention to the realm of the World
Wide Web.
This study, then, follows intertextuality through its major theo-
retical contexts, from its origins in Kristeva’s blending of
Saussure and Bakhtin, through its poststructuralist articulation
in the work of Barthes and its structuralist articulation in Genette
and Riffaterre, on to feminist and postcolonial adaptations of
the term, and finally to its application within the non-literary
arts, the current cultural epoch and modern computer technolo-
gies. The study mounts a coherent history of the term and dem-
onstrates links between the various approaches as well as the
differences between them. Readers of this study will probably
decide, therefore, to read it from beginning to end. Other read-
ers, who may already have a knowledge of particular theories,
may decide to begin with the chapters in which those approaches
are discussed before circling backwards to the beginning. Read-
ers unfamiliar with complex theoretical issues might find it more
useful to skip the most densely argued theories – principally,
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INTRODUCTION 7
those of Kristeva and Riffaterre – and to concentrate on the more
accessible aspects of the issue, returning later to those less imme
diately accessible sections. Readers with a particular concern
with one of the theoretical fields discussed might find that the
best reading strategy is to read the sections on Saussure and
Bakhtin and then to move directly to their specific area of inter-
est. Intertextual reading encourages us to resist a passive read-
ing of texts from cover to cover. There is never a single or cor-
rect way to read a text, since every reader brings with him or her
different expectations, interests, viewpoints and prior reading
experiences. Each reader of this study is encouraged to read it
in whatever order best suits his or her purpose.
This book is designed for those studying at undergraduate
levels, but also for those who have already passed through such
a course of study. Most of the chapters which make up this book
attempt to express the principal points involved in any particu-
lar area in the simplest way possible, before moving on to more
subtle and sometimes technical issues. This movement from sim-
plicity to complexity is particularly evident in Chapters 1, 2 and
3. Readers unfamiliar with modern theoretical debates might
therefore help themselves by bearing this fact in mind as they
read those initial chapters. To assist such readers a Glossary is
included. A Bibliography has also been included to assist fur-
ther reading in the field.
This study is written from a conviction that intertextuality is
and will remain a crucial element in the attempt to understand
literature and culture in general. Without a working knowledge
of intertextual theory and practice, readers are likely to retain
traditional notions of writing and reading, notions which have
been radically challenged since the 1960s. The term
intertextuality, however, emerges from the complex history of
modern literary theory. Its very meaning contains this history,
and cannot be grasped unless we have some knowledge of that
history. To begin our study of the term, therefore, we must re-
turn to its origins, the linguistic theories of Saussure and Bakhtin.
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1
ORIGINS: SAUSSURE, BAKHTIN,
KRISTEVA
THE RELATIONAL WORD: SAUSSURE
Literary and cultural theory is often viewed as taking its ori-
gins from the birth of modern linguistics: a discipline which
can be said to emerge in the work of Ferdinand de Saussure.
In his Course in General Linguistics, a collection of his lec-
tures first published in 1915, Saussure looked again at the
fundamental question: what is a linguistic sign? Dividing the
sign into parts, Saussure produced a definition in which a
sign can be imagined as a two-sided coin combining a signi-
fied (concept) and a signifier (sound-image). This notion of
the linguistic sign emphasizes that its meaning is non-refer-
ential: 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. In the English language we em-
ploy the word ‘tree’ not because it literally points to certain
tree-like objects in the world but because the signifier ‘tree’
is associated with a certain concept. In Latin we would em-
ploy the signifier ‘arbor’ to refer to the same concept; in
Saussure’s original French it would be designated by the word
‘arbre’. Signs are arbitrary, possessing meaning not because
of a referential function but because of their function within
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ORIGINS 9
a linguistic system as it exists at any one moment of time.
Language as it exists at any moment of time is referred to as
the synchronic system of language, rather than the diachronic
element of language, which evolves through time. When hu-
mans write or speak they may believe they are being referen-
tial, but in fact they are producing specific acts of linguistic
communication (parole) out of the available synchronic sys-
tem of language (langue). The reference of the sign is to the
system, not directly to the world.
Such a recognition of the arbitrary or non-referential nature
of linguistic communication has many implications for tradi-
tional ideas about what it means to employ language. If tradi-
tional notions present us with a vision of a human speaker origi-
nating the meanings contained in his or her chosen words, then
Saussure’s linguistics replaces that vision with the recognition
that all acts of communication stem from choices made within
a system which pre-exists any speaker. As Barthes writes, clari-
fying the idea of la langue:
It [la langue] is the social part of language, the individual cannot him-
self either create or modify it; it is essentially a collective constraint
which one must accept in its entirety if one wishes to communicate.
(Barthes, 1984: 82)
For Saussure, the linguistic sign is not simply arbitrary, it is
also differential. The sign ‘tree’ has its place in the system of
language (la langue) because of its position 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 placing of
words together in sentences involves what is termed the
syntagmatic (combinatory) axis of language; the selection of
certain words out of sets of possible words involves what is
termed the paradigmatic (selection) axis of language. Any piece
of language (parole) is produced by processes of combination
along the syntagmatic axis and of selection along the paradig-
matic axis.
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10 ORIGINS
The meanings we produce and find within language, then,
are relational; they depend upon processes of combination and
association within the differential system of language itself. This
relational aspect of language cannot be avoided or overcome.
Saussure, in the Course, writes the following:
in language there are only differences. Even more important: a differ-
ence generally implies positive terms between which the difference is
set up; but in language there are only differences without positive terms.
Whether we take the signified or the signifier, language has neither
ideas nor sounds that existed before the linguistic system, but only
conceptual and phonic differences that have issued from the system.
(Saussure, 1974: 120)
Signs are not ‘positive terms’; they are not referential, they only
possess what meaning they do possess because of their
combinatory and associative relation to other signs. No sign
has a meaning of its own. Signs exist within a system and pro-
duce meaning through their similarity to and difference from
other signs. The implications of such a vision of the sign, and of
language generally, can be said to have affected all areas of the
human sciences in the twentieth century. Saussure, in the Course,
imagines a new science which would study ‘the life of signs
within society’ which he calls semiology (Saussure, 1974: 16).
Structuralism, a critical, philosophical and cultural movement
based on the notions of Saussurean semiology sought, from the
1950s onwards, to produce a revolutionary redescription of hu-
man culture in terms of sign-systems modelled on Saussure’s
redefinitions of sign and linguistic structure. This revolution in
thought, which has been styled the ‘linguistic turn’ in the hu-
man sciences, can be understood as one origin of the theory of
intertextuality.
To cite Saussure as the origin of ideas concerning
intertextuality is a move not without its problems, however. It is
as viable to cite the Russian literary theorist M. M. Bakhtin as
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, as we will see, takes a very
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ORIGINS 11
different approach to language and is far more concerned than
Saussure with the social contexts within which words are ex-
changed. 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 mo-
ments of utterance and reception. Since neither Saussure nor
Bakhtin actually employs the term, most people would wish to
credit Julia Kristeva with being the inventor of ‘intertextuality’.
Kristeva, as we shall observe, is influenced by both Bakhtinian
and Saussurean models and attempts to combine their insights
and major theories.
Despite the above points, it is true enough to say that the
basis upon which many of the major theories of intertextuality
are developed takes us back to Saussure’s notion of the differ-
ential sign. If all signs are in some way differential, they can be
understood not only as non-referential in nature but also as shad-
owed by a vast number of possible relations. The linguistic sign
is, after Saussure, a non-unitary, non-stable, relational unit, the
understanding of which leads us out into the vast network of
relations, of similarity and difference, which constitutes the
synchronic system of language. If this is true of linguistic signs
in general, then, as many after Saussure have argued, it is dou-
bly true of the literary sign. Authors of literary works do not
just select words from a language system, they select plots, ge-
neric features, aspects of character, images, ways of narrating,
even phrases and sentences from previous literary texts and from
the literary tradition. If we imagine the literary tradition as it-
self a synchronic system, then the literary author becomes a
figure working with at least two systems, those of language in
general and of the literary system in particular. Such a point
reinforces Saussure’s stress on the non-referential nature of signs,
since in reading literature we become intensely aware that the
signs deployed in any particular text have their reference not to
objects in the world but to the literary system out of which the
text is produced. If a modern author, for example, presents a
characterization of Satan in their text they are far more likely to
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12 ORIGINS
have in mind John Milton’s representation of Satan in his epic
poem Paradise Lost than any literal notion of the Christian Devil.
Similarly, if we read a novel in which a young heroine is pur-
sued by supernatural forces before being imprisoned by an evil
uncle in a ruined castle, our thoughts will be less of what actu-
ally happens in the world than of the tradition of the Gothic
novel, popular since the eighteenth century. As Barthes and oth-
ers have argued, even apparently ‘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.
Such recognitions about the linguistic and the literary sign
force us to reconsider the nature of literary works themselves.
No longer the product of an author’s original thoughts, and no
longer perceived as referential in function, the literary work is
viewed not as the container of meaning but as a space in which
a potentially vast number of relations coalesce. A site of words
and sentences shadowed by multiple potentialities of meaning,
the literary work can now only be understood in a comparative
way, the reader moving outwards from the work’s apparent struc-
ture into the relations it possesses with other works and other
linguistic structures. Comparison is, perhaps, the wrong word
here, since we are talking not so much of the placing of one
work in relation to others as of the registering of the relational
position of signs and works within systems of meaning.
Perhaps the most famous expression of such a view of the
literary work, now called a text, comes in Roland Barthes’s es-
say of 1968, ‘The Death of the Author’. The title of this short
essay articulates neatly what the emergence of the concept of
intertextuality frequently does to the concept of the author. At
the beginning of his essay Barthes quotes a line from Balzac’s
short story Sarrasine in which we find this description of a
‘castrato disguised as a woman’: ‘This was woman herself, with
her sudden fears, her irrational whims, her instinctive worries,
her impetuous boldness, her fussings and her delicious sensi-
bility’. Barthes, in discussing the line, foregrounds the fact that
its reader remains uncertain of who is speaking: is the speaker
the hero of the story? or Balzac as author? or some notion of
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ORIGINS 13
general cultural wisdom? These questions also highlight the fact
that in such a sentence we do not know precisely what kind of
language is being used. Barthes here is also concerned with the
notion of discourse, the idea that within society at any one time
there are many different ways of speaking or writing. In the
sentence, for example, Barthes lists various possible ways of
speaking, various discourses: a universal wisdom concerning
women? the personal experience of the author? a brand of Ro-
mantic psychology? literary conventions about gender differ-
ence? and so on (Barthes, 1977a: 142). Balzac’s sentence does
not express a single meaning stemming from an originary au-
thor; rather, it leads its reader into a network of possible dis-
courses and seems to emanate from a number of possible per-
spectives. Certain single signs within the sentence, for example
the word ‘sensibility’, have a potentially vast array of cultural
and literary resonances. In French and in English, though dif-
ferences between the two languages complicate things even fur-
ther, sensibility can relate to psychology, eighteenth-century
medical discourses, notions of Romantic love, of ethical and
social concerns, ideological commitments and conflicts, liter-
ary conventions such as the novel of sentiment and sensibility
and so on. Sensibility, as a single word within just one sentence
of Balzac’s short story, has an intertextual dimension far be-
yond any possible authorial intention. In that same essay, Barthes
writes:
We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single
‘theological’ meaning (the ‘message’ of the Author-God) but a
multidimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them
original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn
from the innumerable centres of culture ... the writer can only imitate
a gesture that is always anterior, never original. His only power is to
mix writings, to counter the ones with the others, in such a way as
never to rest on any one of them. Did he wish to express himself, he
ought at least to know that the inner ‘thing’ he thinks to ‘translate’ is
only a ready-formed dictionary, its words only explainable through
other words, and so on indefinitely.
(Barthes, 1977a: 146–7)
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14 ORIGINS
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-
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ORIGINS 15
says such as ‘The Bounded Text’ (Kristeva, 1980: 36–63) and
‘Word, Dialogue, Novel’ (ibid.: 64–91) Kristeva introduces the
work of the Russian literary theorist M. M. Bakhtin to the French-
speaking world. Bakhtin’s work is, today, extraordinarily influ-
ential within the fields of literary theory and criticism, and in
linguistics, political and social theory, philosophy and many
other disciplines. However, in the 1960s his work was relatively
unknown, much of it still unpublished. We have then, in the
study of intertextuality, a highly charged moment of emergence
connected directly to Kristeva’s ‘Word, Dialogue, and Novel’
and the related essays she published during this period. Not only
does Kristeva coin the term intertexuality, but in doing so she
introduces a figure who has since been styled the most impor-
tant literary theorist of the twentieth century. Intertextuality and
the work of Bakhtin are not, that is to say, separable, and in
understanding the former we clearly must understand something
of the latter.
The history of the composition and publication of Bakhtin’s
work is complex, fascinating and at times frustrating. Certainly
Bakhtin’s life-long insistence that all linguistic communication
occurs in specific social situations and between specific classes
and groups of language-users is borne out by the impossible
tangle of his still hotly debated philosophical and critical oeuvre.
I do not intend to go into the disputes over whether Bakhtin
authored, co-authored, or did not author the texts of the 1920s:
The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship, Freudianism, Marx-
ism and the Philosophy of Language. Nor will I suggest an an-
swer to the thorny question of whether an adherence or resis-
tance to Marxism characterizes his works of the 1930s and be-
yond. There are now a good number of critical accounts which
discuss these topics directly (see Todorov, 1984; Clark and
Holquist, 1984; Morris, 1994; Pearce, 1994; Dentith, 1995; Vice,
1997).
What we need to bear in mind is that Kristeva’s initial dis-
cussions of Bakhtin occurred at a specific historical moment. In
our Introduction we noted that the term intertextuality emerged
during a period of transition. In the middle to late 1960s in France
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16 ORIGINS
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
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ORIGINS 17
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
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18 ORIGINS
utterance in the same way as does that which is social to that which is
individual. The utterance, therefore, is considered a thoroughly
individual entity.
(Bakhtin/Volosinov, 1986: 60–1)
Saussure, in other words, in order to find some generalizable rules
within the study of language, argues that only language in its
abstract sense, only the norms and conventions presumed to struc-
ture a language at any moment of historical time, can become the
object of linguistic study. Such a vision of language (langue) is
said by Saussure to provide the possibility for the potentially in-
finite amount of possible utterances (parole) within that language.
And yet, as Bakhtin/Volosinov argue, such an account actually
loses sight of the social specificity of language and confines it to
something as abstract as a lexicon or dictionary. As a recent scholar
of Bakhtin, Simon Dentith, writes: ‘Dictionaries are the grave-
yards of language’ (Dentith, 1995: 24).
Bakhtin/Volosinov argue against Saussure that ‘there is no
real moment in time when a synchronic system of language could
be constructed’ (1986: 66). This is because language is always
in a ‘ceaseless flow of becoming’. Language, seen in its social
dimension, is constantly reflecting and transforming class, in-
stitutional, national and group interests. No word or utterance,
from this perspective, is ever neutral. Though the meaning of
utterances may be unique, they still derive from already estab-
lished patterns of meaning recognizable by the addressee and
adapted by the addresser. But these established patterns are not
the abstract ones of Saussure’s langue, they are rather the man-
ner in which language embodies and reflects constantly chang-
ing social values and positions. As Bakhtin/Medvedev put it,
the unique discursive event connects to the class relations be-
tween addresser and addressee, but also to ‘the more immediate
and brief phenomena of social life and, finally, with the news of
the day, hour, and minute’ (1978: 121). To say, for example, in
1994 ‘I agree with you completely, not!’ would have seemed (to
many) an intelligible sentence, given the popularity of the film
Wayne’s World and its characters’ tendency to negate fully ar-
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ORIGINS 19
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)
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20 ORIGINS
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
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ORIGINS 21
perfectly acceptable way in which to greet a close friend; one
would hardly employ it in a formal introduction to a local dig-
nitary. The words we select in any specific situation have an
‘otherness’ about them: they belong to specific speech genres,
they bear the traces of previous utterances. They are also di-
rected towards specific ‘others’, specific addressees. As Bakhtin
writes, in his essay on speech genres:
The speaker is not the biblical Adam, dealing only with virgin and still
unnamed objects, giving them names for the first time .... In reality
.... any utterance, in addition to its own theme, always responds (in
the broad sense of the word) in one form or another to others’
utterances that precede it. The speaker is not Adam, and therefore
the subject of his speech itself inevitably becomes the arena where
his opinions meet those of his partners (in a conversation or dispute
about some everyday event) or other viewpoints, world views, trends,
theories, and so forth (in the sphere of cultural communication). World
views, trends, viewpoints, and opinions always have verbal expression.
All this is others’ speech (in personal or impersonal form), and cannot
but be reflected in the utterance. The utterance is addressed not
only to its object, but also to others’ speech about it.
(Bakhtin, 1986: 93–4)
It is this sense of the otherness of language which explains
Bakhtin’s most important concept, dialogism, and begins to
demonstrate that concept’s intertextual nature.
Dialogism
Dialogism, for Bakhtin, is a constitutive element of all language.
However, these radically social and interpersonal dimensions
can be promoted or repressed. If the dialogic aspect of language
foregrounds class, ideological and other conflicts, divisions and
hierarchies within society, then society, manifested in state power
and those elements of society which serve state power, will fre-
quently attempt to put the lid on such aspects. In Marxism and
the Philosophy of Language, for example, Bakhtin/Volosinov
speak of the manner in which ‘the ruling class strives to .... ex-
tinguish or drive inward the struggle between social value judge-
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22 ORIGINS
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
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ORIGINS 23
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
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24 ORIGINS
the vast array of voices, interpretations, world-views, opinions
and responses presented in the novel. Esther Summerson, the
novel’s first-person narrator, is clearly only another subjective
voice. Even the third-person narrator, who might appear to some
as acting in the position of objective narrator, has idiosyncratic
opinions, gets angry, sides with some issues and rejects others,
uses distinct images and turns of phrase. As in Bakhtin’s ac-
count of Dostoevsky’s polyphonic novel, Dickens’s Bleak House
presents us with a world crammed full of individual voices, shar-
ing, competing and clashing over different ways of speaking;
yet the novel presents no overall voice, no controlling and om-
nipotent narrator. The fact that the novel is itself split into the
two dominant narrative modes of the novel tradition, first-per-
son and third-person narratorial voice, merely serves to high-
light its polyphonic quality in Bakhtin’s sense of this term.
Bakhtin does not seek to announce the death of the Author.
The author, for Bakhtin, we might say, still stands behind his or
her novel, but s/he does not enter into it as a guiding authoritative
voice. Bakhtin’s author also cannot be said to spin his or her
characters out of an original imagination. Much of Dostoevsky’s
speech, according to Bakhtin’s description, exists as reiterations,
parodies, transformations and other kinds of appropriation of
existing speech genres, utterances and words associated with
particular ideological, class and other distinct social and cultural
positions.
Like the tradition of the carnival, the polyphonic novel fights
against any view of the world which would valorize one ‘official’
point-of-view, one ideological position, and thus one discourse,
above all others. The novel, in this sense, presents to us a world
which is literally dialogic. And yet it is important to note that
dialogism does not concern simply the clash between different
character-centred discourses; dialogism is also a central feature
of each character’s own individual discourse. As Bakhtin states:
‘dialogic relationships can permeate inside the utterance, even
inside the individual word, as long as two voices collide within
it dialogically’ (1984a: 184). This is what Bakhtin means by
double-voiced discourse and is what he eventually studies in
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ORIGINS 25
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.
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26 ORIGINS
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)
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ORIGINS 27
Scottish literary tradition and a growing interest in local dia-
lects and literary traditions pitted precisely against both English
cultural and linguistic domination and any notion of a homog-
enous, monologic culture. Burns’s words are double-voiced, all
of them sound a clash between different ideological, class and
literary positions.
With this notion of double-voiced discourse and its powerful
place within the dialogic novel, and for us, in all dialogic texts,
we begin to come close to what must appear a major theory of
intertextuality. All utterances depend on or call to other utter-
ances; no utterance itself is singular; all utterances are shot
through with other, competing and conflicting voices. As Bakhtin
writes:
the word is not a material thing but rather the eternally mobile, eter-
nally fickle medium of dialogic interaction. It never gravitates toward
a single consciousness or a single voice. The life of the word is con-
tained in its transfer from one mouth to another, from one context
to another context, from one social collective to another, from one
generation to another generation. In this process the word does not
forget its own path and cannot completely free itself from the power
of those concrete contexts into which it has entered.
When a member of a speaking collective comes upon a word, it is
not as a neutral word of language, not as a word free from the aspi-
rations and evaluations of others, uninhabited by others’ voices. No,
he receives the word from another’s voice and filled with that other
voice. The word enters his context from another context, perme-
ated with the interpretations of others. His own thought finds the
word already inhabited.
(Bakhtin, 1984a: 201)
Bakhtin’s stress on otherness, like his stress on polyphony,
double-voiced discourse, dialogism and a host of other concepts
we have not touched on here, all stem from a recognition that
language is never our own, that there is no single human subject
who could possibly be the object of psychological investiga-
tion, that no interpretation is ever complete because every word
is a response to previous words and elicits further responses. As
Todorov writes: ‘The most important feature of the utterance,
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28 ORIGINS
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
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ORIGINS 29
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
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30 ORIGINS
at any one time and to employ other terms, such as ‘hybridity’
and ‘hybridization’, to refer more specifically to a clash of
‘languages’ occurring within the same utterance (see also Clark
and Holquist 1981: 428–9; Morris 1994: 248–9). Heteroglossia
is at times in Bakhtin’s work pitted against monoglossia, a term
which brings us back to the recognition of the centrifugal and
centripetal forces of language and to the fact that the dominant
ideology within society frequently argues that there is only one
unified and unifying language.
At the heart of Bakhtin’s work is an argument that the dialogic,
heteroglot aspects of language are essentially threatening to any
unitary, authoritarian and hierarchical conception of society, art
and life. If language is socially specific and thus embodies the
stratifications, unfinalized interpretations, ideological positions
and class conflicts at work in society in any epoch, and indeed
at any specific moment, then no attempt to explain language or
art through an abstract system of generalizable relations is viable
for those wishing to understand language, art, even speech acts.
It is this vision of human society and communication which
stands behind the term ‘intertextuality’ which Kristeva coins as
part of her account of Bakhtin’s work, and it is this vision which
she incorporates into the apparently methodologically rigorous
and systematic field of structuralist theory.
TEL QUEL, PRODUCTION: KRISTEVA
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. The late 1960s in Paris can justifiably
be styled, to employ Patrick Ffrench’s term, ‘the time of theory’.
The political turmoil of 1968 and its aftermath brought the
process of debate to a climax and can be said to have consolidated
a poststructuralist critique of methodology, traditional notions
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ORIGINS 31
of au thorship and even the criterion of meaningfulness (see
Kristeva, 1984b: 263–70).
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. Yet such a
paradoxical position, as Barthes adds, is characteristic of the
unsettling nature of Kristeva’s work:
Julia Kristeva changes the place of things: she always destroys the last
prejudice, the one you thought you could be reassured by, could take
pride in; what she displaces is the already-said, the déjà-dit, i.e., the
instance of the signified, i.e., stupidity; what she subverts is authority
– the authority of the monologic science, of filiation.
(Barthes, 1986: 168)
Barthes chooses his words very carefully here, characterizing
through them not merely the impact of Kristeva’s work but more
importantly its major theoretical tenets. The ‘signified’ Barthes
refers to is the stable meaning or concept which any method of
analysis requires if it is to present itself as scientific or objec-
tive. Kristeva’s attack on notions of stable signification centred
on the transformation of Saussure’s idea of semiology, or what
was increasingly called semiotics. Semiotics in mid-1960s
France argued for its own objectivity by employing Saussurean
concepts such as langue (the system) to stabilize the ‘signifieds’
it studied. Myths, oral cultural traditions, literary texts, indeed
any cultural text, can be scientifically analysed, so structuralist
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32 ORIGINS
semiotics argued, because at any one moment signifiers exist
and function within a synchronic system which provides deter-
minable signifieds for those signifiers. What such an approach
needs to avoid, in order to maintain such an objectivity, is any
attention to the human subject who performs the utterance un-
der consideration. It must also evade the fact that signifiers are
plural, replete with historical meaning, directed not so much to
stable signifieds as to a host of other signifiers. These are the
hidden spaces within which Kristeva works and from which
emerges her theory of intertextuality.
Poststructuralist theory in general, and the key writers associ-
ated with the Tel Quel group in particular, view notions of a stable
relationship between signifier and signified as the principal way
in which dominant ideology maintains its power and represses
revolutionary, or at least unorthodox, thought. Derrida, for ex-
ample, argues that all major ideological discourses and appar-
ently scientific or objective discourses rely on the illusion of the
‘transcendental signified’. The transcendental signified would,
as he remarks in an interview with Julia Kristeva, ‘in and of itself,
in its essence, ... refer to no signified, would exceed the chain of
signs, and would no longer itself function as a signifier’ (Derrida,
1987a: 19–20). God, for example, functions as a transcendental
signified in most dominant religions; the role of this signifier is
to refer only and always to itself, to the signified, the concept of
the deity. To view the signified ‘God’ as a signifier in a chain of
signifiers is highly unsettling for dominant religions. To ask the
question ‘to what does the sign “God” refer?’, is to undermine
the position of ‘God’ as a transcendental signified. Yet, religions
inevitably do provide answers to such a question and so under-
mine the transcendental – central, single, ultimate, unquestion-
able – position of the sign ‘God’. To answer the question is to set
up a series of new signifieds which are themselves subject to ques-
tions concerning their reference and so to becoming signifiers for
other signifieds. Creator, Father, Spirit, Supreme Being, Prime
Mover and so on: all such answers to the initial question merely
provide other signifieds which themselves become signifiers. The
fact that signified concepts become, in the differential system of
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ORIGINS 33
language, signifiers for other signifieds, which themselves be-
come signi fiers, must be erased if official, or what Bakhtin calls
monological, discourse is to do its ideological work. Yet if we
take almost any discourse which aspires to the condition of truth-
fulness or objectivity we find the same linguistic phenomenon.
‘Justice’ in legal institutions, ‘equality’ or ‘the nation’ in varieties
of political discourse, ‘truth’ in scientific or educational institu-
tions, all function in their specific contexts as ‘transcendental
signifieds’. Thus, almost all discourses attempt to stabilize the
system of language by erasing the fact that language is always
differential and cannot be stabilized or viewed as a coherent and
ordered system (see Derrida, 1978: 278–93). And yet, in all these
cases the movement from signified to signifier undermines the
apparent centrality and transparency of meaning of the major signs
which are meant to stabilize the discursive system in question.
In the work of the Tel Quel group the text becomes the site of
a resistance to stable signification. There is an attack within Tel
Quel theory on the very foundations of meaning and
communication, a celebration and investigation of that which
resists the stabilization of the signifier/signified relation. This
is understood in Marxist terms as an attack on the
commodification of thought and writing. As Barthes writes,
placing Kristeva at the vanguard of such a movement:
what Julia Kristeva produces is a critique of communication (the first,
I believe, since that of psychoanalysis). Communication, she shows,
the darling of the positive sciences (such as linguistics), of the
philosophies and the politics of ‘dialogue’, of ‘participation’, and of
‘exchange’ – communication is merchandise.
(Barthes, 1986: 170)
Communication and meaning, in other words, present knowledge
and intellectual work as a product, a commodifiable and
exchangeable object of value. Most people, it would be fair to
say, believe that knowledge, if it exists, can be clearly
communicated, and because of this it can be bought and sold in
books, in educational courses and so on. The belief in the clear
communication of ideas plugs intellectual work into a capitalist
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34 ORIGINS
market system in which things are only of value if they can be
bought and sold. In such a system, we might say, ideas are only
valuable if they are consumable.
With this attack on notions of communication in her mind,
Kristeva sets out to establish a new mode of semiotics, which
she calls semianalysis. She attempts to capture in this approach
a vision of texts as always in a state of production, rather than
being products to be quickly consumed. This new semianalysis
recognizes its productive role in constructing the ‘object’ of its
study, and thus stresses its status as ‘production’ or ‘productiv-
ity’. Combining a Marxist attention to production or ‘work’ with
the Freudian analysis of (dream)-‘work’, Kristeva stresses that
it is not merely the object of study that is ‘in process’, the pro-
cess of being produced, but also the subject, the author, reader
or analyst. Author, reader or analyst join a process of continual
production, are ‘in process/on trial’ (le sujet-en-procès), over
the text. Kristeva, in a move amplified within Tel Quel gener-
ally, posits literary Modernism, from Lautréamont, Mallarmé,
Joyce, through Bataille and Artaud, on to Sollers himself, as the
site of the emergence of a self-consciously textual production:
‘a production that cannot be reduced to representation’ (Kristeva,
1986: 86). In such work, Kristeva implies, ideas are not pre-
sented as finished, consumable products, but are presented in
such a way as to encourage readers themselves to step into the
production of meaning. It is, therefore, to this tradition that this
new semiotics of productivity will most directly address itself.
As Kristeva writes:
Developed from and in relation to these modern texts the new
semiotic models then turn to the social text, to those social practices
of which ‘literature’ is only one unvalorized variant, in order to
conceive of them as so many ongoing transformations and/or
productions.
(Kristeva, 1986: 87)
Literature cannot be the privileged site of this radical mode of
semiotic production. Such a vision of literature would retain a
hierarchy of discourses and at the same time bracket off the
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ORIGINS 35
disturbing force of textual productivity to the field of the fic-
tional and the imaginary. Such a move would also reinforce the
traditional opposition between science (objective discourse) and
fiction (creative, literary discourse), whereas for Kristeva the
point is that communication and that which breaks communica-
tion apart – what Kristeva calls signifiance – are in a constantly
antagonistic relationship with each other. The text is the site of
this struggle, and Kristeva’s new semiotics seeks to analyse it at
the same time as being subjected to it. Kristeva, in this new
semiotics, constantly places scientific and logical discourses
within artistic and fictional contexts, thus self-consciously blur-
ring the distinction and staging the struggle between science, or
the logical, and the language or force of imagination and desire.
To understand how intertextuality emerges as a crucial
concept within Kristeva’s semiotic practice, and to understand
this practice more fully, we must first examine her introduction
of the writings of Bakhtin into Parisian theory. We must then
chart the trajectory such a semiotics takes during the ‘time of
theory’ which Ffrench dates between 1966 and 1975, or, in the
case of Kristeva, between her earliest publications in the 1960s
and her monumental study Revolution in Poetic Language, first
published in 1974.
Dialogism to intertextuality
Two texts in the English translation of Kristeva’s early work
Desire in Language complement each other in demonstrating
the influence of Bakhtin on Kristeva and the manner in which
she transforms, revises and redirects his work: ‘The Bounded
Text’ (Kristeva, 1980: 36–63) and ‘Word, Dialogue, Novel’ (ibid:
64–91). 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 pre-
existent 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
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36 ORIGINS
neutralize one another’ (ibid: 36). 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 this sense, the text is not an individual, isolated object
but, rather, a compilation of cultural textuality. Individual text
and the cultural text are made from the same textual material
and cannot be separated from each other. We see here how the
Bakhtinian notion of the dialogic has been rephrased within
Kristeva’s semiotic attention to text, textuality and their relation
to ideological structures. Whilst Bakhtin’s work centres on actual
human subjects employing language in specific social situations,
Kristeva’s way of expressing these points seems to evade human
subjects in favour of the more abstract terms, text and textuality.
Bakhtin and Kristeva share, however, an insistence that texts
cannot be separated from the larger cultural or social textuality
out of which they are constructed. All texts, therefore, contain
within them the ideological structures and struggles expressed
in society through discourse. This means, for Kristeva, that the
intertextual dimensions of a text cannot be studied as mere
‘sources’ or ‘influences’ stemming from what traditionally has
been styled ‘background’ or ‘context’ (ibid: 36–7).
The text is a practice and a productivity, its intertextual status
represents its structuration of words and utterances that existed
before, will go on after the moment of utterance, and so are, in
Bakhtin’s terms, ‘double-voiced’. If texts are made up of bits and
pieces of the social text, then the on-going ideological struggles
and tensions which characterize language and discourse in society
will continue to reverberate in the text itself. This is what Kristeva
means by the words ‘practice’ and ‘productivity’. Texts do not
present clear and stable meanings; they embody society’s dialogic
conflict over the meaning of words. If a novelist, for example,
uses the words ‘natural’ or ‘artificial’ or ‘God’ or ‘justice’ they
cannot help but incorporate into their novel society’s conflict over
the meanings of these words. Such words and utterances retain
an ‘otherness’ within the text itself. Intertextuality, here, concerns
a text’s emergence from the ‘social text’ but also its continued
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ORIGINS 37
existence within society and history. A text’s structures and
meanings are not specific to itself, and to emphasize this point
Kristeva views the text, or at least each of its constituent parts, as
an ideologeme. If we accept that words such as ‘natural’ or ‘justice’
are the subject of immense social conflicts and tensions, then
their existence in a text will represent an ideologeme. One of the
consequences of this way of describing texts is that we must give
up the notion that texts present a unified meaning and begin to
view them as the combination and compilation of sections of the
social text. As such, texts have no unity or unified meaning on
their own, they are thoroughly connected to on-going cultural
and social processes. Kristeva writes:
The concept of text as ideologeme determines the very procedure of
a semiotics that, by studying the text as intertextuality, considers it as
such within (the text of) society and history. The ideologeme of a
text is the focus where knowing rationality grasps the transformation
of utterances (to which the text is irreducible) into a totality (the text)
as well as the insertions of this totality into the historical and social
text.
(Kristeva, 1980: 37)
Kristeva, in her characteristically complex mode of presenta-
tion, refers here to our tendency to presume that texts possess a
meaning unique to themselves. Such an appearance of unity is
illusory, however. The text’s appearance of unity and indepen-
dent existence is, in fact, part of its momentary arrangement of
words and utterances which have complex social significance
‘outside’ the text in question. Kristeva’s semiotic approach seeks
to study the text as a textual arrangement of elements which
possess a double meaning: a meaning in the text itself and a
meaning in what she calls ‘the historical and social text’. Such
an approach blows apart notions of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ with
regard to the text. A text’s meaning is understood as its tempo-
rary rearrangement of elements with socially pre-existent mean-
ings. Meaning, we might say, is always at one and the same
time ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ the text. One of the sentences which
begins Mary Shelley’s novel The Last Man (1826), for example,
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38 ORIGINS
reads: ‘England, seated far north in the turbid sea, now visits
my dreams in the semblance of a vast and well-manned ship,
which mastered the winds and rode proudly over the waves’
(Shelley, 1994: 9). To gauge the meaning of this sentence ‘in-
side’ Shelley’s text would involve establishing the position of
the fictional speaker, of describing the manner in which the novel
dramatizes a futuristic England which, on the verge of social
and political perfection, is sucked into a global catastrophe in
which a plague wipes out the human race save for the speaker
of this sentence. Images concerned with dreams, mastery and
the natural world also figure throughout the novel and might be
said to help generate an internal meaning emanating from this
sentence. However, it is impossible to remain ‘inside’ this novel
when dealing with such a sentence. Ideas of England as a proud
nation with mastery over the natural world and its own special
destiny amongst the nations of the world is an ideologeme in
the sentence, and the novel generally, which immediately takes
readers ‘outside’ of the text to the ideological representations of
England on the verge of the Victorian age. This proto-Imperial-
istic rhetoric is hardly Mary Shelley’s own invention; the
sentence’s reference is to a discourse very much part of nine-
teenth-century English culture and society. A relatively simple
sentence such as this one is enough to demonstrate the manner
in which the meaning of texts is always at one and the same
time ‘inside’ and yet ‘outside’ that text.
Kristeva’s analysis moves on to the Bakhtinian theory of the
novel, as that form of text which most expressly embodies these
intertextual processes of appropriation and restructuration; a
move enlarged upon in the essay, ‘Word, Dialogue, Novel’.
Kristeva is, in fact, interested less in the genre of the novel than
in what she calls poetic language, something found by Bakhtin
in the novel but which can be equally discovered in poetic genres
and, as she will argue in later work, in other kinds of texts.
What distinguishes Bakhtin’s novel or Kristeva’s poetic language
is the dynamic 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
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ORIGINS 39
writer, the addressee (or the character), and the contemporary
or earlier cultural context’ (Kristeva, 1980: 65). Kristeva
incorporates Bakhtin’s dialogism, his insistence on the social
and double-voiced nature of language, into her new semiotics.
She defines the dynamic literary word in terms of a horizontal
dimension and a vertical dimension. In the horizontal dimension
‘the word in the text belongs to both writing subject and
addressee’; in the vertical dimension ‘the word in the text is
oriented toward an anterior or synchronic literary corpus’ (ibid.:
66). The communication between author and reader is always
partnered by a communication or intertextual relation between
poetic words and their prior existence in past poetic texts.
Authors communicate to readers at the same moment as their
words or texts communicate the existence of past texts within
them. This recognition, that the horizontal and vertical axis of
the text coincide within the work’s textual space, leads on to a
major redescription of Bakhtin’s theory of the dialogic text which
culminates in the new term, intertextuality:
horizontal axis (subject–addressee) and vertical axis (text–context)
coincide, bringing to light an important fact: each word (text) is an
intersection of word (texts) where at least one other word (text) can
be read. In Bakhtin’s work, these two axes, which he calls dialogue
and ambivalence, are not clearly distinguished. Yet, what appears as a
lack of rigour is in fact an insight first introduced into literary theory
by Bakhtin: any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any text
is the absorption and transformation of another. The notion of
intertextuality replaces that of intersubjectivity, and poetic language is
read as at least double.
(Kristeva, 1980: 66)
Kristeva brings into play here a focus on subject position, that is
the position of author, of character and of the pronouns – ‘I’, ‘we’,
‘they’ – by which subjects (human speakers) refer to themselves
and to those they address. Influenced by the French linguist Émile
Benveniste, along with Roman Jakobson’s theory of shifters,
Kristeva introduces the concepts of subject of enunciation and sub-
ject of utterance to clarify and extend Bakhtinian theory. Jeremy
Hawthorne gives the following definition of these terms:
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What is central ... is a distinction between the particular, time-bound
act of making a statement, and the verbal result of that act, a result
which escapes from the moment of time and from the possession of
the person responsible for the act. We can note that the important
distinction between utterance and [enunciation] is that the former
term links that uttered to its human originator, whereas the latter
term concentrates attention on to the verbal entity itself ... [utterance]
calls to mind the act of producing a form of words which involves a
human subject ... [enunciation] is used when the intention is normally
to consider a form of words independently from their association
with a human subject.
(Hawthorne, 1992: 57)
If the ‘subject of utterance’ is best conceived of as a character
speaking or thinking, then the ‘subject of enunciation’ is the
subject of a narrative act. When I speak directly to someone
else my words are, apparently, linked to me as a subject (of
utterance); when I write those words down and they are read,
perhaps years later, by someone else my position as a subject is
no longer directly involved. ‘I’ have become merely a subject of
enunciation. The subject, as poststructuralists like Kristeva and
Barthes are fond of declaring, is lost in writing.
Poststructuralists go further than this, however, and refer to a
loss of the subject in language generally. This concerns the
‘apersonal’ nature of language in general; a feature highlighted
if we attend to the pronouns we are forced to employ when
referring to ourselves and to others. As J. A. Cuddon writes:
[Benveniste] distinguishes between the ‘personal’ and ‘apersonal’
aspects of language. In one sense ‘I’ is personal; in another, apersonal.
When apersonal, ‘I’ is nothing other than ‘the person who utters the
present instance of discourse containing the linguistic instance ‘I”.
(Cuddon, 1992: 928)
When a dignitary utters the words ‘I name this ship so-and-so’,
they may believe that it matters that it is they themselves that
are speaking. However, the reality is that, so long as someone
of appropriate social stature says these words, then the words
will have the same effect upon reality. The meaning and effect
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ORIGINS 41
of the ‘I’ in that sentence is not dependent upon the particular
subject who utters them. What matters is that the clichéd phrase
has been spoken, as it has many times before, and the fact that it
is addressed to an audience, who are taking up a position of
witnesses to an event (naming a ship) which has occurred many
times previously and will occur countless times in the future. If
a member of the audience with sufficient social standing were
to change places with the specific speaker of the sentence, it
would not at all affect the act of naming the ship.
The example of naming a ship might appear to involve a rather
uncommon event, and thus not to be of particular relevance to
language in its everyday use. However, poststructuralists argue
that a similar substitutability occurs in all language use.
Whenever subjects enter language they enter into situations in
which their personal subjectivity is lost. Perhaps the reason we
tend to say ‘I really love you’ or ‘I really do like your shoes’ is
that even these common phrases are haunted by the same kind
of substitutability as the sentence in which someone names a
ship. ‘I love you’ is a cliché, said millions of times before, and
we cannot perhaps but be nervous about a loss of the very
subjectivity we would express by these words when we utter
them. The ‘I’ in the sentence ‘I love you’ is rather less expressive
of our own personal feelings and subjecthood than we would
like to believe.
What is clear is that when we are dealing with literary forms
of writing we cannot presume that the language we are dealing
with gives us direct access to the subject who wrote it. Even in
confessional modes of writing, the ‘I’ of the text cannot be
identical to the authorial ‘I’, as we are dealing with a subject of
enunciation rather than a subject of utterance. Authors can write
narratives using the first person pronoun ‘I,’ or the ‘nonperson
pronoun’ (Kristeva, 1980: 87) ‘he/she,’ or in a collective ‘we’,
or through their own or another proper name. Roland Barthes,
in his critical memoir Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes,
exploits these points by referring to himself throughout the text
in the third-person ‘he’. Such a technique foregrounds the point
that the person who speaks or acts and the person who writes
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42 ORIGINS
are never identical. The subject, ‘he’, represented in Roland
Barthes by Roland Barthes, cannot, linguistically, be identical
to the subject (Roland Barthes) who performs the act of
representation in that text. The very title of the text, ‘doubling’
the name of the author/subject, makes this point. We might
believe that our name always refers to the individual, unique
person that we are, but the pronouns we use to refer to ourselves
frequently shift our positions, from personal (‘I’) to collective
(‘we’) to third-person (‘he’ or ‘she’). In language, our subject
positions shift; in writing, the subject is lost.
In the above senses then, the word but also the subject-position
of the person who speaks in literary language is double-voiced.
The pronominal ‘I’ is always directed towards an ‘other’, and
employs words that are themselves directed towards and contain
within themselves ‘other words’ and ‘other utterances’. It is also
itself double, the product of a subject ‘outside’ the text and the
pronominal subject of the text itself. For Kristeva, the ‘outside’
subject is not at issue, since in writing all we can know is the
apersonal, constantly shifting, pronominal subject. The subject in
writing is always double because the words that subject utters are
intertextual (clichéd, already written), and the pronominal signifiers
which refer to that subject are always changing and have no stable
signified (‘outside’ subject) to which they can be referred.
Kristeva’s use of the word ‘ambivalence’ represents one of the
many intertextual revisions to be found in her reading of Bakhtin.
The Bakhtinian terms standing behind Kristeva’s new term are
‘heteroglossia’ and ‘hybridity’, and yet the new terminology
implies a refocusing on logical criteria. Kristeva writes:
Dialogue and ambivalence lead me to conclude that, within the interior
space of the text as well as within the space of texts, poetic language
is a ‘double’. Saussure’s poetic paragram (‘Anagrams’) extends from
zero to two: the unit ‘one’ (definition, ‘truth’) does not exist in this
field. Consequently, the notions of definition, determination, the sign
‘=’ and the very concept of the sign, which presupposes a vertical
(hierarchical) division between signifier and signified, cannot be applied
to poetic language – by definition an infinity of pairings and
combinations.
(Kristeva, 1980: 69)
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ORIGINS 43
Kristeva thus employs Bakhtin’s emphasis on the doubleness or
dialogic quality of words and utterances to attack notions of
unity, which she associates with claims to authoritativeness,
unquestionable truth, unproblematic communication and
society’s desire to repress plurality. Kristeva’s attack, in other
words, is against the foundations of Western logic. Such a logic,
stemming from Aristotle, works on the principle of non-
contradiction. As Aristotle asserts, something cannot at one and
the same time be something (A) and something else (not-A). If
A, for example, represents ‘here’, and if not-A represents ‘there’,
then, such logic would argue, a person cannot at one and the
same time occupy space A and space not-A. Kristeva’s point is
that, with Bakhtin’s view of the word or utterance, we find a
fundamental challenge to Aristotelian logic and its notions of
singularity. The dialogic word or utterance is double-voiced,
heteroglot, and possesses a meaning (A) at the same moment
that it possesses an alternative meaning or meanings (not-A).
Mary Shelley’s sentence about England, for example, refers to
a fictional narrative at the same moment as it refers to an actual
country’s ideological representations of itself; it is at once her
own utterance and the utterance of a fictional character. As such,
the meaning of Shelley’s sentence defies Aristotelian logic, since
it at one and the same time has an ‘inside’ and an ‘outside’
referent, and is the utterance of at least two linguistic subjects.
It is, in this sense, ‘A’ and ‘not-A’.
Saussure’s work on anagrams marks a fascinatingly
undiscussed element in the development of poststructuralist theo-
ries of textuality and intertextuality. The unfinished work re-
mained in manuscript form until it began to be rediscovered by
certain theorists, the French theorist Jean Starobinski in par-
ticular. Starobinski’s research on the project was published in
Mercure de France in 1964 and in Tel Quel (37, spring 1969),
finally emerging as a partial translation and commentary (see
Starobinski, 1979). Julia Kristeva first used Saussure’s theory
in an article in Tel Quel in 1967 (see Kristeva, 1998a). Working
on mainly Greek and Latin poetry, Saussure argued – but never
finally proved to his own satisfaction – that these texts worked
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44 ORIGINS
on non-representational levels in which groups of letters and
phonemes (sounds), such as the first and last letters of consecu-
tive lines, arranged themselves into deep textual units, often the
names of Gods or heroes. So that, for example, in studying the
arrangement of phonemes within a piece of poetry mentioned
by the Roman poet Livy, Saussure discovers the name of the
Greek and Roman sungod Apollo, despite the fact that Apollo is
never literally (directly through the signifier ‘Apollo’) mentioned
in the text. Saussure, as he discovered more and more varieties
of such coded patterns, coined more and more cognate terms to
capture such processes. As Kristeva and Derrida both recog-
nize, Saussure’s work on the ‘gram’ foreshadows their own work
on the manner in which signifiers in the text exist in relation to
chains of further signifiers, rather than in relation to transparent
and stable signifieds. Saussure’s work on anagrams is seen by
Kristeva and Derrida as foreshadowing their own focus on how
the signifier resists notions of direct or logical communication
and thus meaning.
It may well seem perverse on Kristeva’s part to conduct a
reading of Bakhtinian notions ‘insofar as they are congruent
with the conceptions of Ferdinand de Saussure as related to his
“anagrams”’ (1980: 90). Kristeva rewrites Bakhtin’s work,
however, directing it towards a language conceived as beyond
logic. If logic is based on Aristotle’s assertion that something is
either ‘A’ or ‘not-A’, then we might say that logic presumes that
things cannot be more than one thing at a time. Something is
what it is, or it is nothing. Kristeva’s way of expressing this is to
use the numerical expression (0 - 1): ‘0’ here equals ‘nothing’,
‘1’ here equals a singular element. On this basis, Kristeva sees a
similarity between Bakhtin’s view of language and Saussure’s
work on anagrams, a similarity which for her connects them to
Freud’s work on the non-logical language of dreams, or what
Freud calls dream-work. Saussure’s theory of anagrams functions
as one more apparently scientifically-oriented discursive practice
that can be strategically addressed to a kind of language which
remains unassimilable within any science or logic; a kind of
language that is ambivalent. Poetic language, as Kristeva stresses,
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ORIGINS 45
works on the principal of 0 - 2, it is ‘double’, both ‘A’ and ‘not-
A’. Here, ‘0’ equals ‘nothing’, whilst ‘2’ equals an element which
is at least ‘double’; that which equals a single element, ‘1’, has
been omitted. Kristeva writes:
the minimal unit of poetic language is at least double, not in the sense
of the signifier/signified dyad, but rather, in terms of one and other
.... The double would be the minimal sequence of a paragrammatic
semiotics to be worked out starting from the work of Saussure ...
and Bakhtin.
(Kristeva, 1980: 69)
Poetic language, Kristeva argues, foregrounds the ‘inability of
any logical system based on a zero-one sequence (true-false,
nothingness-notation)’ (1980: 70). A whole host of additional
vocabularies, linguistic, psychoanalytic and mathematical, al-
lows Kristeva to appropriate Bakhtinian dialogism and to re-
establish it upon the opposition between the monologic (0 - 1)
and the dialogic (0 - 2). As she writes: ‘Within this “power of
the continuum” from 0 to a specifically poetic double, the lin-
guistic, psychic, and social “prohibition” is 1 (God, Law, Defi-
nition). The only linguistic practice to “escape” this prohibition
is poetic discourse’ (ibid.: 70). If we accept Bakhtin’s vision of
society as always exhibiting a conflict between monologic and
dialogic forces, then the monologic forces will argue for what it
takes to be logical (0 - 1), whilst dialogic forces, for Kristeva
‘poetic language’, will constantly struggle to express the non-
logical (0 - 2). Notions of unquestionable authority and singu-
larity – ‘God, Law, Definition’ – always work on the side of
monologic power.
If intertextuality stands as the ultimate term for the kind of
poetic language Kristeva is attempting to describe, then we can
see that from its beginning the concept of intertextuality is meant
to designate a kind of language which, because of its embodi-
ment of otherness, is against, beyond and resistant to
(mono)logic. Such language is socially disruptive, revolution-
ary even. Intertextuality encompasses that aspect of literary and
other kinds of texts which struggles against and subverts rea-
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46 ORIGINS
son, the belief in unity of meaning or of the human subject, and
which is therefore subversive to all ideas of the logical and the
unquestionable. We can register how far Kristeva’s version of
dialogism pushes this attack on unity and reason by referring to
her reading of Bakhtin in relation to dialectics, an idea associ-
ated with the German Romantic philosopher G. W. F. Hegel.
Hegelian dialectics depends upon the production of a synthesis
out of the clash between a thesis and an antithesis. The synthe-
sis is a ‘third term’, which not only resolves the clash between
thesis and antithesis but takes us to a new, ‘higher’ position or
state of consciousness or knowledge. Dialectics, therefore, im-
plies that human thought and society can transcend or leap to a
totality of knowledge, a third position, which resolves prior con-
flicts and ambivalences. In less totalized fashion, it at least sug-
gests that the kind of ‘doubleness’ Kristeva finds in Bakhtin’s
work and in what she calls ‘poetic language’, can be resolved
by a ‘progression’ to a new, resolved, position. In Hegelian dia-
lectics, we might say, following Kristeva’s arguments, since the
clash between thesis and antithesis is resolved by the emergence
of a synthesis, the notion of the monologic, of the restoration of
singularity and unity is restored. What Bakhtin calls the dia-
logic is cancelled in dialectics by the move to a new, transcen-
dent monological position. Marx famously adapted dialectics
to argue that the clash of the proletariat and the owners of capi-
tal would bring a revolutionary third position, a social order
beyond the power-struggles between workers and capitalists. It
should be noted, as a fact not without interest to Kristeva’s ar-
guments, that Marx gradually incorporated a notion of counter-
revolution, of the revolutionary transcendence of conflict lead-
ing to renewed conflict, within his political theories. When
Kristeva directs her Bakhtin-inspired semiotics against Hegel,
as in the following passage, she is, then, also attacking a much
debated feature of Marxist thought:
The notion of dialogism, which owes much to Hegel, must not be
confused with Hegelian dialectics, based on a triad and thus on struggle
and projection (a movement of transcendence), which does not
transgress the Aristotelian tradition founded on substance and
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ORIGINS 47
causality. Dialogism replaces these concepts by absorbing them within
the concept of relation. It does not strive towards transcen dence but
rather toward harmony, all the while implying an idea of rupture (of
opposition and analogy) as a modality of transformation.
(Kristeva, 1980: 88–9)
Kristeva’s vision is not of transcendence but of production. The
language of logic, reason and Law (0 - 1) is constantly ruptured,
transformed and repositioned by that which cannot be confined
within the logical, the meaningful or the literally communicable
(0 - 2). As she writes elsewhere, paraphrasing Bakhtin on the
polyphonic novel: ‘Dostoevsky’s “model” lacks unity of speaker
and of meaning; it is plural, anti-totalitarian and anti-theological.
It thus exemplifies permanent contradiction, and could never have
anything in common with Hegelian dialectic’ (Kristeva, 1973:
110; see also Todorov, 1984: 104). To understand further what
Kristeva does with such a position, and what implications it has
for her account of the text and of intertextuality, we need to move
away from her engagement with Bakhtin towards her develop-
ment of semianalysis, a practice increasingly dependent on a psy-
choanalytical theory of the subject in language.
Transposition
In their introduction to the collection of essays on intertextuality
Michael Worton and Judith Still remind us that for Kristeva
‘intertextual relations are passionate ones’ (Worton and Still, 1990:
18). Intertextuality has to do, for Kristeva, with desire and with
the psychological drives of the split subject. For Kristeva, the
subject is split between the conscious and the unconscious, reason
and desire, the rational and the irrational, the social and the pre-
social, the communicable and the incommunicable. This aspect
of Kristeva’s work signals more than any other the fruitful process
of influence which existed, during the ‘moment of theory’,
between Kristeva and Roland Barthes. In her essay on Barthes,
for example (see Kristeva, 1980: 92–123), she praises his placing
of desire at the centre of critical language, and writes: ‘The network
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48 ORIGINS
to be deciphered seems to be split in half. Desire, where the subject
is implicated (body and history), and symbolic order, reason,
intelligibility’ (1980: 116).
The ‘symbolic order’ here refers to the work of the influential
theorist of psychoanalysis, Jacques Lacan and the distinction
he makes between the Imaginary and the Symbolic. The
‘Imaginary’ concerns the child’s early fragmented and yet
heavily symbolized sense or map of the body. Infants, at this
early stage, do not make clear distinctions between themselves
and those around them, principally the mother. The ‘Symbolic’
concerns the state, after the full acquisition of language, which
Lacan calls the ‘Symbolic order’. With the acquisition of
language, the subject enters into all the social positions and rules
and relations which underpin society: the acquisition of language
is associated by Lacan with the Father, the Law and ideas of
unity, since language is always trying, if always failing, to fix
subjects in specific linguistic and social positions. Unlike the
infans (child before speech), which cannot tell the difference
between its own body and the mother’s body, the subject in
language is always being temporarily fixed and positioned as
an ‘I’ or a ‘you’ or as part of a collective ‘we’.
Kristeva is greatly influenced by Lacanian psychoanalytical
theory, as are many other members of the Tel Quel group. As
with all her theoretical influences, however, she takes a critical,
revisionary attitude towards his model. In the place of Lacan’s
‘Imaginary’ she returns to Freud’s work on ‘primary process’
and the pre-symbolic stage of the infans. Kristeva, through these
moves, develops the concept of the semiotic, a state characterized
by pre-symbolic drives, impulses, bodily ‘pulsions’ (rhythms
and movements) and an initial total identification with the
mother’s body which is finally shattered but not completely
effaced in what she terms ‘the thetic phase’. By the ‘thetic phase’
Kristeva means that point at which human subjects enter the
social world, governed, as it is, by monological notions of
language. It marks, then, a phase dominated by social norms in
which language is presumed capable of presenting a thesis, a
singular, unitary meaning.
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As one of her editors, Leon S. Roudiez, reminds us, Kristeva’s
focus is double: ‘Her concern does lie with the field of la sémio
tique (i.e., “semiotics” as a general science of signs) but it
involves a more specific domain that she calls le sémiotique
(“the semiotic”) seen as one of the two components of the
signifying process – the other being “the symbolic”’(Kristeva,
1984a: 4). The subject, for Kristeva, is thus split between two
signifying fields. The symbolic field involves socially signifying
language operating under the banners of reason, communication
and the ideal of singularity and unity. The semiotic involves the
‘language’ of drives, erotic impulses, bodily rhythms and
movements retained from the infant stage prior to the subject’s
splitting during the thetic phase. At the heart of the semiotic is
the chora, a word Kristeva takes from Plato’s Timaeus and which
refers to a ‘receptacle’ associated with the maternal body. This
receptacle or chora is ‘unnameable, improbable, hybrid, anterior
to naming, to the One, and to the father’. The semiotic chora, as
Kristeva writes, ‘designates that we are dealing with a disposition
that is definitely heterogeneous to meaning but always in sight
of it in either a negative or surplus relationship to it’ (1980:
133). We do not, as adults, that is, lose completely our relation
to the pre-speech infant fluidity of self. That fluidity of self,
registered in Kristeva’s notion of the chora, prior to language,
logic and the fixing of identity and subject position, bubbles up
in poetic language disturbing the monologic order of the
symbolic field. Kristeva’s concern is again with what disrupts
and temporarily dismantles stable meaning, communication,
notions of singularity, unity and order.
This new model of the split subject in language describes
the tension between a socialized, symbolic discourse and an
unassimilable, anti-rational and anti-social semiotic language
of instinctual and sexual drives. With this model Kristeva can
rearticulate her account of ‘poetic language’, which is now
viewed as existing in the symbolic whilst being shot through
with traces of the semiotic. The language of logic and clear
communication is disrupted by traces of the pre-logical and the
uncommunicable. In her work on Bakhtin, Kristeva follows the
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50 ORIGINS
general canon of the Tel Quel group by arguing that Dostoevsky,
though responsible for a move to the polyphonic novel, remained
within a ‘representational’, and thus essentially uncomplicatedly
symbolic, discourse (1980: 71). For Kristeva, the moment in
which Western art and literature begins to self-consciously
unleash the force of the semiotic occurs at the end of the
nineteenth century with the rise of Modernism. This break –
Kristeva mentions Joyce, Proust, and Kafka – coincides with
the rise of self-consciously intertextual art. She writes:
‘Beginning with this break – not only literary but also social,
political, and philosophical in nature – the problem of
intertextuality (intertextual dialogue) appears as such’ (ibid.: 71).
This association between intertextuality and a radical form of
writing which unleashes the pre-logical force of the semiotic is
important to register. It follows an observable trend among the
theorists associated with the Tel Quel group to attempt to fix a
moment in literary history in which a self-consciously intertextual
writing first emerges. Kristeva’s work on intertextuality focuses
heavily on late nineteenth-century and early twentiethcentury
avant-garde writing. Barthes argues that explicitly intertextual
writing comes to the fore in twentieth-century Modernism and
avant-garde movements. Such explicitly intertextual forms of
literature, Kristeva and Barthes argue, foreground the fact that
they are not original works written by unique authors of great
genius, but rather that they are the product of split subjects.
What is the relation between intertextuality and Kristeva’s
description of the subject split between the symbolic and the
semiotic fields? The answer seems to be that texts follow the same
split movement between logical and alogical, symbolic and
semiotic forces. No text, however radical, is purely semiotic; the
semiotic always manifests itself within the symbolic. To mark
this split nature of texts, Kristeva introduces two new terms: the
phenotext and the genotext. The ‘phenotext’ is that part of the text
bound up with the language of communication, the ‘thetic-thesis’,
which displays definable structure and appears to present the voice
of a singular, unified subject (1984a: 87). The ‘genotext’ is that
part of the text which stems from the ‘drive energy’ emanating
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ORIGINS 51
from the unconscious and which is recognizable in terms of
‘phonematic devices’ such as rhythm and intonation, melody, rep
etition and even kinds of narrative arrangement (Kristeva, 1984a:
86). Remembering the etymological connection of the text to
woven cloth, Roudiez remarks that a text can be woven of ‘threads’
from or ‘within the semiotic disposition’ (genotext) but also from
threads ‘that issue from societal, cultural, syntactical, and other
grammatical constraints’ (phenotext) (ibid.: 5). The genotext
disturbs, ruptures and undercuts the phenotext and thus articulates
the drives and desires of a pre-linguistic subjectivity. This pre-
linguistic subjectivity, although it does not itself possess a
language, uses the languages of the symbolic order (thetic
language) to make itself heard and felt.
In some texts – rational, scientific or legalistic texts, for example
– the traces of the genotext will be almost completely obliterated.
In others, such as the Modernist writing of Mallarmé, Joyce,
Artaud, Beckett and Sollers, the potential of the genotext is
unleashed and the text reaches near the semiotic chora. The
language of Joyce’s Molly Bloom, at the end of his Ulysses,
lacking in regular syntax, extraordinarily musical and so expressive
of the body and bodily drives and desires of its speaker, provides
us with a clear example of what Kristeva is describing:
O that awful deep-down torrent O and the sea the sea crimson
sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the
Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and pink and blue
and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums
and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain
yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall
I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I
thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes
to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain
flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to
me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going
like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.
(Joyce, 1971: 704)
It is significant to note that Kristeva’s semianalytical practice
extends beyond the literary text and includes other art forms,
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52 ORIGINS
such as music, painting and dance. Barthes’s essay ‘The Grain
of the Voice’ consolidates this point by employing phenotext
and genotext in an analysis of musical performance (Barthes,
1977a: 179–89). There he contrasts the experience of hearing
technically proficient professional singers with more individu-
alistic, idiosyncratic or less technically proficient singers. The
‘grain of the voice’ of the latter kind of singer allows us, Barthes
argues, to hear the genotext emerging.
Kristeva’s approach is concerned, then, not with ‘sense’, or
‘signification’, but with what she calls ‘signifiance’, the manner
in which the text, in Roudiez’s words, ‘signif[ies] what
representative and communicative speech does not say’
(Kristeva, 1980: 18). What after all, we might ask, does Molly
Bloom’s ‘poetic language’ directly communicate (say)? As
Barthes writes:
‘Signifiance’, unlike signification, cannot be reduced to communication,
to representation, to expression: it puts the (writing or reading) subject
into the text, not as a projection, not even as a fantasmatic one ... but
as a ‘loss’.
(Barthes, 1981a: 38)
The subject is ‘lost’ in the text in the manner in which, as I have
discussed, the subject in writing is never identical to the subject
itself. The linguistic subject is always split, determined (posited,
constructed, structured) by the signifying system within which
it speaks. In this sense Kristeva’s work places a psychological
dimension onto Bakhtin’s analysis of double-voiced discourse,
dialogism, heteroglossia and hybridity. However, as has been
implied, the pre-symbolic subject, the subject of drives rather
than of thetic language, constantly announces itself in poetic
language by breaking apart, or restructuring, the signifying
systems within which it speaks and writes. It is at this point that
a theory of intertextuality is rearticulated in Kristeva’s work.
Freud, in his analysis of dreams, argued that they tend to
function through condensation and displacement. In
condensation one sign collects into itself a host of meanings or
signifiers; in displacement a sign from another area of
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ORIGINS 53
signification stands in for the real content of the dream. A ring
in a dream might symboli cally condense ideas and desires
concerning a host of aspects of life: marriage, religious faith,
sexual desire, economic stability or instability. A surreal dream
centring on a cake might be a symbolically displaced working-
through of the dreamer’s desires for a person associated in the
unconscious with cakes. Condensation and displacement can,
then, be seen as two operations in the semiotic process. Kristeva,
in Revolution in Poetic Language, styles intertextuality as a third
operation within the semiotic process. Intertextuality is thus
understood as ‘the passage from one sign system to another’
which involves ‘an altering of the thetic position – the destruction
of the old position and the formation of a new one’ (1984a: 59).
Keen to avoid the reduction of intertextuality to the traditional
notions of influence, source-study and simple ‘context’, Kristeva
now drops the term intertextuality in favour of a new term,
transposition (ibid.: 59–60).
Whether we use the term ‘intertextuality’ or ‘transposition’
would seem to be less important, however, than recognizing
that texts do not just utilize previous textual units but that they
transform them and give them what Kristeva terms new thetic
positions. We might understand this by comparing Kristeva’s
own discussion of these issues with the attempt to explain
Kristeva’s work you are reading in this Chapter. The text you
are reading attempts to be as clear as it can possibly be. However,
the numerous signifying systems used by Kristeva – Bakhtin,
other accounts of textuality, structuralism, psychoanalytical
theory, Marxism, and so on – often pull against that attempt at
communication and produce what we might call an ‘otherness’
within the text. The analysis you are reading attempts to
transpose complex, often extremely difficult signifying systems
into a communicable and logical structure: in this analysis, the
phenotext dominates. Kristeva’s own work represents a
signifying practice which seeks not only to account for other
texts but, in transposing them into her textual practice, also to
unleash a semiotic force (the genotext) which disrupts
communication, or more particularly over-monologic thought.
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54 ORIGINS
The ‘otherness’ which pulls against this Chapter’s attempt to
communicate clearly, stems from Kristeva’s far more radical
attempt to unleash the genotext. My attempt to pull Kristeva’s
work into the phenotext does not completely succeed, and an
element of the polysemy (multiple meaning) of her texts remains
in my description of her work. What Kristeva calls transposition
directly concerns this struggle to employ pre-existent signifying
practices for different purposes. Kristeva employs Freud’s notion
of ‘representability’ to explain this fundamental dimension of
intertextual or transpositional practice:
We shall call transposition the signifying process’ ability to pass from
one sign system to another, to exchange and permutate them; and
representability the specific articulation of the semiotic and the thetic
for a sign system. Transposition plays an essential role here inasmuch
as it implies the abandonment of a former sign system, the passage to
a second via an instinctual intermediary common to the two systems,
and the articulation of the new system with its new representability.
(Kristeva, 1984a: 60)
Although Kristeva has her eye on specifically poetic language
here, her model can also be referred to the example of
intertextual/transpositional practice I have just been outlining.
This current analysis and Kristeva’s texts share, naturally, some
of the same sign systems: Marxist, Freudian, structuralist,
Kristeva’s own. However, the ‘trans-position’ (exchange and
permutation, repositioning) of these sign systems is radically
different in both cases, due to different representational objec-
tives. Bakhtin’s vision of the utterance or the dialogic word as
stemming from and being filled with previous utterances and
words and yet also directed towards an Other, an addressee, is
still recognizable here. But what Kristeva’s approach also em-
phasizes is the manner in which the speaking subject itself forms
part of the transpositional practice we are discussing. The sub-
ject which speaks in a text is constructed in and by the specific
transposition of signifying systems which make up the text. The
‘I’ that speaks in the study you are currently reading depends
upon the transposition (arrangement, appropriation, structuring)
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ORIGINS 55
of the threads of previous signifying systems which it weaves
into this text, and it also depends on the manner in which the
text of this study is oriented (re-presented) towards its address-
ees. The ‘I’ that speaks in this book is not the same ‘I’ that speaks
in other texts by ‘Graham Allen’, such as research articles or
scholarly reviews, nor is it the same ‘I’ which speaks in the
many different signifying situations within which that subject
finds himself: pub, classroom, family party, telephone conver-
sation with a publisher. The subject position which any speaker
or writer takes up is largely dependent upon the context in which
that subject speaks or writes. Bakhtin’s notion of speech genres
is recognizable here. Kristeva’s contribution is to focus far more
than Bakhtin does on the changes and transpositions this in-
volves for the subject who speaks or writes.
Kristeva argues that it is in Modernist texts that this
transpositional aspect begins to be self-consciously exploited.
However, a recognition that the subject is not identical to the ‘I’
which speaks, and that the same words can mean different things
in the context of different signifying systems, can be found in
writers of earlier periods. Elizabeth Gaskell, the Victorian realist
novelist, writes, for example, of her many ‘mes’:
for I have a great number and that’s the plague. One of my mes is, I
do believe, a true Christian – [only people call her socialist and
communist], another of my mes is a wife and mother, and highly
delighted at the delight of everyone else in the house .... Now that’s
my ‘social’ self I suppose. Then again I’ve another self with a full taste
for beauty and convenience whh [sic] is pleased on its own account.
How am I to reconcile all these warring members? I try to drown
myself (my first self), by saying it’s Wm [William Gaskell] who is to
decide on all these things, and his feeling it right ought to be my rule.
And so it is – only that it does not quite do.
(Gaskell, 1966: 108)
Gaskell’s remarks highlight the manner in which the ‘I’ is con-
structed and positioned by and within different signifying sys-
tems: Christianity, socialism, communism, the Victorian ideal of
the female domestic sphere, the Romantic artist. However, her
remarks also remind us of Kristeva’s point that this positioning of
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56 ORIGINS
the subject in language has to do with desire. Gaskell searches
here for her authentic ‘I’ whilst recognizing its socially split ex-
istence, a quest which clearly relates to her production of realist
novels and the psychological motives which, along with socio-
cultural pressures, produced those novels. Modernist writers, ac-
cording to Kristeva and other members of the Tel Quel group,
celebrate the dissolution of the unitary ‘I’ in a signifying practice
shot through with semiotic and intertextual forces. A realist writer
such as Gaskell might bemoan her ‘many mes’; Modernist writ-
ers, according to Tel Quel theory, exploit and celebrate the vari-
ety of subject positions into which writing forces them. This can
reach a point in Modernism and avant-garde writing where the
very notion of a singular self, of a coherent identity for the au-
thor, is abandoned. Intertextuality, or transposition, becomes that
which foregrounds, celebrates and plays with the dissolution or
abandonment of the single subject, a play which in the most radi-
cal texts reaches a stage or state styled by Kristeva and Barthes as
jouissance. As the poststructuralist critic Robert Young puts it:
‘“Jouissance” means enjoyment in the sense of enjoyment of a
right, of a pleasure, and, most of all, of sexual climax. “Jouissance”
and “signifiance” invoke the sense of an ecstatic loss of the sub-
ject in a sexual or textual coming – a textasy’ (Young, 1981: 32).
What for Gaskell represents an anxiety-inducing lack of stable
subject positioning becomes for Tel Quel theorists a liberatory
release from the shackles of singular, monologic notions of iden-
tity and of meaning. Plurality, of self as well as of meaning, is
seen as the source of liberation and joy.
BAKHTIN OR KRISTEVA?
The question of whether jouissance occurs only in work from
the late nineteenth century onwards or can be found in earlier
writers opens up the issue of how Kristeva’s theorizing of the
text relates to history and society. John Frow argues that in
assimilating Bakhtinian dialogism into French semiotics Kristeva
loses sight of the precise manner in which a literary text relates
to social ideological structures: that is, by transforming the
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ORIGINS 57
ideologically significant norms of the literary canon (Frow, 1986:
127–9). Frow’s point is that to talk merely of the transposition
of ‘signifying practices’ is insufficient, since in literature it is
essentially the available literary genres and dominant formal
practices, which new writers transpose and attempt to transform.
Clayton and Rothstein also write of a ‘vagueness’ in Kristeva’s
work ‘about the relation of the social text to the literary text’
(Clayton and Rothstein, 1991: 20). David Duff has recently
developed this critique by examining the manner in which
attention to literary genre evaporates as we move from the work
of Bakhtin to Kristeva’s and other poststructuralists’ work (Duff,
1997). Jill Felicity Durey also sees Kristeva’s work as a
misrepresentation of Bakhtin, particularly in its evaporation of
the author-writer into purely linguistic and textual processes
(Durey, 1991).
The ideological force in Dostoevsky’s novels as read by
Bakhtin, Frow argues, lies in their dialogic or intertextual
transformation of dominant norms within the novel tradition. It
also resides in their incorporation of residual literary conventions
outside the current novelistic norm, such as the dialogic forms
of Menippean satire and carnivalesque forms generally.
Dostoevsky’s transpositions are essentially of the dominant
literary norms of his time, and the importance Bakhtin ascribes
to his novels concerns their development of the novel as a
specifically literary genre, his creation of a form of novel better
suited to the ideological climate within which he lived.
According to Frow Kristeva’s semiotic focus, which views the
whole of social and cultural life in terms of signifying systems,
does not recognize this evolutionary ‘interplay of norm and
transformation, because the point of reference (the material
which is to be transformed) lies outside the literary system’
(Frow, 1986: 127). Kristeva is guilty, according to Frow, of
describing literary transpositions in non-literary terms and
therefore cannot do justice to the manner in which
transformations of genres and forms within the ‘literary system’
reflect literature’s response to society and history. Kristeva, that
is, makes literature part of general cultural discourse and ends
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58 ORIGINS
up unable to describe literature, its history and its response to
ideological and cultural conflicts and debates.
These critiques of Kristeva’s appropriation of Bakhtin centre,
then, on the question of whether her semiotic approach erases
the specific social situation, including specific literary situations,
within which, Bakhtin argues, all dialogic utterance occurs. As
Simon Dentith argues:
Kristeva effectively deracinates the signifying process, tearing it out of
the dialogic encounter which is its only imaginable context for Bakhtin
... the production of meaning happens as a result of purely textual
operations independent of historical location; the multiplicity of
possible meanings in a text spring from that text and not from the
multiplicity of possible occasions in which the text can be read.
(Dentith, 1995: 98)
Dentith argues that the clash between Bakhtin and Kristeva has
to do with two distinct notions of social liberation. Whilst
Bakhtin’s vision concerns a process of constant struggle, a con-
stant unfinished dialogue within specific social situations, the vi-
sion of Tel Quel theorists such as Kristeva and Barthes, Dentith
writes, is of ‘a version of liberation which takes you out of the
historical process altogether’. Bakhtin, unlike Kristeva and
Barthes, he argues: ‘is the philosopher, not of coming, but of be-
coming’ (ibid.: 98). Yet we might object that we can find ways in
which both of these apparent ‘sides’ are accurate representations
of, and vital responses to, the specificities of social and historical
forces and trends. The post-Revolutionary Russia of the 1920s,
1930s and beyond understandably produced different visions of
liberation from that imagined in the heady days of communal
revolt in late 1960s Paris. What Manfred Pfister styles as Bakhtin’s
revolt against ‘the increasing rigidity of post-revolutionary So-
viet cultural politics and the doctrinary canonization of Soviet
Realism’ is inevitably distinct from Tel Quel’s ‘struggle against
the “bourgeois” ideology of the autonomy and unity of individual
consciousness and the self-contained meaning of texts’ (Pfister,
1991: 212). Intertextuality, as a concept, has a history of different
articulations which reflect the distinct historical situations out of
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ORIGINS 59
which it has emerged. The important task, at least for a study
such as this, is not to choose between theorists of intertextuality.
It is, rather, to understand that term in its specific historical and
cultural manifestations, knowing that any application of it now
will itself be an intertextual or transpositional event. We can make
this point even clearer by recognizing that intertextuality as a
concept with a complex history presents us with a series of oppo-
sitions between which we cannot simply decide. The oppositions
offer us a series of questions:
Is intertextuality an historically informing term, or is it essentially
ahistorical?
Does intertextuality open the text to history, or to yet more textuality?
Is intertextuality a manageable term, or is it essentially
unmanageable, concerned with finite or infinite and
overwhelming dimensions of meaning?
Does intertextuality provide us with a form of knowledge, or does
it destroy what was previously considered to be knowledge?
Is the centre of intertextuality in the author, the reader or the text itself?
Does intertextuality aid the practice of interpretation, or resist
notions of interpretation?
We could devise more questions than are contained in this list.
It should be clear, however, that they all bear upon a fundamen-
tal distinction between knowledge, including socio-historical
knowledge, and the rejection of the very idea of stable knowl-
edge. A second dimension concerns the kind of frame we con-
struct for the intertextual field: does intertextuality possess a
definite frame of reference, or, in covering all signifying prac-
tices – what ultimately gets called ‘the social or general text’ –
is it beyond any possible framework?
To study intertextuality and intertextual processes is to
confront these and similar questions, which is perhaps why the
term has spawned such a plethora of definitions and redefinitions.
Each theorist comes to intertextuality hoping it will provide an
informing tool or model for interpretation, but each theorist soon
realizes that, as a concept, intertextuality plunges one into a
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60 ORIGINS
series of oppositions and questions. Our task is to engage with
it as a split, multiple concept, which poses questions and requires
one to engage with them rather than forcing one to produce
definite answers. No theorist of intertextuality accepts this
challenge more completely than Roland Barthes.
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2
THE TEXT UNBOUND: BARTHES
FROM WORK TO TEXT
A critic and theorist who, like Kristeva, has always attacked
notions of the ‘natural’, stable meaning and unquestionable truth,
Roland Barthes remains the most articulate of all writers on the
concept of intertextuality. Bearing in mind our analysis of the
work of Kristeva, we need to ask what Barthes means by the
term ‘text’, and thus ‘intertextuality’. In his essay ‘Theory of
the Text’ (Barthes, 1981a: 31–47) he produces an answer to that
question which begins by describing the traditional notions of
work and text but ends by practically reversing the relations usu-
ally ascribed to them. In traditional terms, as Barthes “explains,
a text is ‘the phenomenal surface of the literary work’ (ibid.:
32). A textual scholar is still considered to be someone con-
cerned with manuscript studies, with ascertaining a true text.
The textual scholar searches for as complete a version as pos-
sible of the author’s intended structure, individual sentences,
paragraphing, and so forth. A text is the material inscription of
a work. It is that which gives a work permanence, repeatability
and thus readability. Barthes puts the case as follows:
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62 THE TEXT UNBOUND
it [the text] is the fabric of the words which make up the work and
which are arranged in such a way as to impose a meaning which is
stable and as far as possible unique. In spite of the partial and
modest character of the notion (it is, after all, only an object,
perceptible to the visual sense), the text partakes of the spiritual
glory of the work, of which it is the prosaic but necessary servant
... the text is, in the work, what secures the guarantee of the
written object, bringing together its safe-guarding functions: on
the one hand the stability and permanence of inscription, designed
to correct the fragility and imprecision of the memory, and on the
other hand the legality of the letter, that incontrovertible and
indelible trace, supposedly, of the meaning which the author has
intentionally placed in his work; the text is a weapon against time,
oblivion and the trickery of speech, which is so easily taken back,
altered, denied.
(Barthes, 1981a: 32)
Barthes is setting up the traditional viewpoint in order to open it
to a new semiotic approach which will dramatically challenge
the entire set of premises it contains. The work of Jacques Derrida
is just as vital as Kristeva’s to Barthes’s account and ironic
strategy, and can be heard echoing through this account of the
text and the work traditionally conceived.
The fundamental tension Barthes is referring to concerns
notions of stability and security. This security, he goes on to
assert, is based on the ‘civilization of the sign’. That is to say,
everything in Barthes’s account appears commonsensical
because of our long-standing Western understanding of the
sign and of signification. Saussurean linguistics and the
structuralism is engendered are the logical endpoint of this
understanding. The text, as material writing, gives stability
and security to the work, as intended meaning, because it stands
in the relation of material signifier to the work as signified. As
Barthes writes:
The notion of text implies that the written message is articulated like
the sign: on one side the signifier (the materiality of the letters and of
their connection into words, sentences, paragraphs, chapters), and
on the other side the signified, a meaning which is at once original,
univocal, and definitive, determined by the correctness of the signs
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THE TEXT UNBOUND 63
which carry it. The classical sign is a sealed unit, whose closure ar-
rests meaning, prevents it from trembling or becoming double, or
wandering. The same goes for the classical text: it closes the work,
chains it to its letter, rivets it to its signified.
(ibid.: 33)
The clash of verbs and of notions of action and hierarchy
observable within these passages, alert us to a paradox ex-
plored within Derrida’s deconstructive writing. The paradox
concerns the relationship between speech and writing, the
manner in which the latter is supposed to be subservient to
the former and yet continually struggles free from such a
subservient position. Derrida articulates this in his Of
Grammatology:
Writing in the common sense is the dead letter, it is the carrier of
death. It exhausts life. On the other hand, on the other face of the
same proposition, writing in the metaphoric sense, natural, divine,
and living writing, is venerated; it is equal in dignity to the origin of
value, to the voice of conscience as divine law, to the heart, to
sentiment, and so forth.
(1976: 17)
We see this tension, for example, in Christian attitudes towards
the Bible. The Bible is a material record of God’s Word, the
Logos, and thus secondary. And yet, conceived as existing on a
par with nature itself (God’s two Books being Nature and the
Bible) and not merely recording but constituting the Divine
Logos, the writing which constitutes the Bible is also viewed as
primary, Divine itself. Are the Ten Commandments, as presented
in Genesis, a record of Divine Law or Divine Law itself? Does
Moses merely inscribe God’s commandments in the physical
form of writing, or does that writing itself contain God’s com-
mandments? Questions of the translation, or transcription, of
thoughts into writing become crucial here. Derrida’s work is
particularly attentive to notions of loss, surplus force or value
and the violence of transforming the apparently spiritual into
brute materiality which revolve around traditional ideas con-
cerning speech, thought and writing.
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64 THE TEXT UNBOUND
On the ‘common’ logic of the sign which Barthes invokes,
the work is primary, the text secondary. The text exists to give
stability to something which is presumed to come before it;
writing merely helps the thought of the author to gain
permanence. To call the text a ‘servant’ of the work’s ‘spiritual
glory’ is, no doubt intentionally, to portray the relationship
between the two, and thus the relation of signified to signifier,
in a manner reminiscent of the bourgeois household: writing
here takes the position of the ‘servant’ whose primary function
is ‘correctness’, whilst the signified of that writing, the work,
takes the place of patriarch, ‘original, univocal, and definitive’.
The signified/work has priority, in the sense of firstness but also
of authority and agency, over the signifier/text. Writing, home
of the material signifier, is the signified’s servant/slave; writing
follows the orders and at the same time protects and preserves
the ‘transcendental signified’, which Derrida and Barthes both
gloss in terms of ‘God, Law and Father’.
Throughout Western philosophical tradition, as Derrida
argues in a series of ground-breaking works in the late 1960s,
this hierarchical division of the sign has been affirmed. It
constitutes the basis of notions of meaning, of communication,
but also of the self-presence of the human subject. In a manner
encapsulated in the seventeenth-century philosopher
Descartes’s famous phrase ‘I think, therefore I am’, the subject
declares its existence, its self-presence, by proving that its
thoughts and its speech occur simultaneously. In that phrase
the subject combines the signifier (thought, speech) with the
signified (the existence of the thinker) and by so doing proves
its ability to produce meaning, and thus proves the uniqueness
and the presence in the world of its meaning-making
consciousness. Notions of unity, presence, autonomy,
originality and Being, notions which can apply to the work,
the sign and to the human speaker/thinker, all depend upon
this hierarchy. Derrida studies this tradition particularly in
terms of the hierarchy established between speech and writing.
At the very beginning of Of Grammatology, he defines writing
in terms of the ‘signifier of the signifier’. Writing represents
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THE TEXT UNBOUND 65
the fact which must be erased if the hierarchical division
between work and text, speech and writing, signified and
signifier is to be established. This fact is that all signifiers refer
to signifieds which themselves function as signifiers within
language conceived, after Saussure, as a system of differences
without positive terms. If language is a differential system in
which meaning is generated by the relationship of signifiers
within that system, then writing, rather than speech (thought,
intended meaning), is its appropriate and primary
characteristic. Taking a phrase from the work of the eighteenth-
century philosopher Rousseau, Derrida declares that writing,
écriture, is that ‘dangerous supplement’ which appears
secondary, and yet is in actual fact necessary for speech to
exist at all, and is thus disturbingly primary.
Derrida coins the term différance to consolidate this point
about speech and writing, signifier and signified (see Derrida,
1973: 129–60). As Christopher Norris writes, the sense of this
neologism ‘sets up a disturbance at the level of the signifier’
since it ‘remains suspended between the two French verbs “to
differ” and “to defer”’ (Norris, 1982: 32). The play of signifiers
within différance opens it up to the force of writing, the play of
signifiers leading to no stable signified. One cannot tell, when
Derrida employs the term différance, whether he means
‘difference’ or ‘deferral’ or both. Even if Derrida were to speak
his text we would not be able to decide between these meanings.
Différance exhibits the fact that speech does not come before,
have priority and authority over, writing. Like ‘writing’, then,
différance is not a stable concept, cannot function as a stable
signified and thus disrupts and deconstructs the hierarchy
traditionally established between signified and signifier, speech
and writing, work and text. Writing, in this sense, belongs to
Kristeva’s notion of ‘productivity’. As Barthes writes: ‘the Text
is experienced only in an activity of production’ (1977a: 157).
A process of signifiance rather than a medium within which
meaning is secured and stabilized, writing opens the sign up to
an explosive, infinite and yet always already deferred dimension
of meaning. The meaning of the word différance is already
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66 THE TEXT UNBOUND
deferred, lost amongst possible meanings, before it is used either
in speech or in writing. The new vision of the text articulated in
Barthes’s essay is born out of this recognition of the disruptive,
unstabilizable, playful dimension of writing.
In Barthes’s account the traditional terms ‘work’ and ‘text’
are given new definitions. The term ‘work’ now stands where
‘text’ once stood, as the material book offering up the possibility
of meaning, of closure and thus of interpretation. The term ‘text’
now stands for the play of the signifier within the work, its
unleashing of the disruptive and yet playful force of writing.
We should not confuse text and work, writes Barthes:
A work is a finished object, something computable, which can occupy
a physical space (take its place, for example, on the shelves of a library);
the text is a methodological field. One cannot, therefore, count up
texts, at least not in any regular way; all one can say is that in such-
and-such a work, there is, or there isn’t, some text. ‘The work is held
in the hand, the text in language’.
(Barthes, 1981a: 39)
Barthes’s distinction clearly relates to Kristeva’s work on
phenotext and genotext, only now the ‘work’ stands not only
for the idea of stable meaning, communication and authorial
intention, but also for a physical object; the ‘text’, on the other
hand, stands for the force of writing which, although poten-
tially unleashed in some works, is in no sense the property of
those works. Barthes here combines various theories of language,
including Derrida’s account of writing and Kristeva’s transpo-
sition of Bakhtinian dialogism. The text is radically plural be-
cause of the force of writing seen in its differential sense. That
is, it is plural not in the sense of having ‘several meanings’ but
in terms of its accomplishment of ‘the very plural of meaning’
(Barthes, 1977a: 159). To have several meanings is merely to
exhibit an ambiguity which, because each meaning involved in
the ambiguity remains identifiable, ultimately can be resolved.
The plural meaning of the text involves the play of signifiers,
always leading on to other signifiers, and the ‘trace’ (Derrida’s
term) of signifying chains which disrupt and infinitely defer the
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meaning of each signifier. Every text depends on a language
within which is inscribed vast histories of meaning.
Meaning, in the text, according to Derrida’s account of
writing, is an ‘explosion, a dissemination’ of already existent
meaning. Bakhtin’s double-voiced discourse or dialogic word
gives way here to a vision of the text in which no word means
one thing alone, in which no signified stabilizes meaning, and
in which the reader no longer ‘discovers’ meaning but follows
the ‘passage’ of meaning as it flows, explodes, and/or regresses.
Barthes writes:
The plural of the Text depends ... not on the ambiguity of its contents
but on what might be called the stereographic plurality of its weave of
signifiers (etymologically, the text is a tissue, a woven fabric). The
reader of the Text may be compared to someone at a loose end.
(Barthes, 1977a: 159)
The theory of the text, therefore, involves a theory of
intertextuality, since the text not only sets going a plurality of
meanings but is also woven out of numerous discourses and
spun from already existent meaning. The text’s plurality is neither
wholly an ‘inside’ nor an ‘outside’, since the text itself is not a
unified, isolated object upon which an ‘inside’ and an ‘outside’
can be fixed. This point needs stressing, because without it
Barthes’s statements about the text can at times seem
contradictory.
Following an account of literary history very much associated
with the Tel Quel group, Barthes frequently confirms Kristeva’s
sense of a break in literature and other signifying practices at
the end of the nineteenth century. In ‘From Work to-Text’, for
example, Barthes argues that although one can ‘delight’ in
reading Proust, Flaubert, Balzac and even Alexandre Dumas,
one cannot ‘re-write them ... and this knowledge, depressing
enough, suffices to cut me off from the production of these works’
(1977a: 163). It would appear that for Barthes, as for Kristeva,
only Modernist and Postmodernist literature give us examples
of the text; examples, that is, of texts which, because they self-
consciously put into play the power of the signifier and of
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writing, can be re-written, rather than simply read, by the reader.
Only literature after the emergence of Modernism allows the
reader to become fully active in the production of meaning; a
fundamental characteristic, it would appear, of what Barthes
and Kristeva mean by the ‘text’. However, near the beginning
of the same essay, Barthes seemed to distance himself from this
account of literary history:
the tendency must be avoided to say that the work is classic, the text
avant-garde; it is not a question of drawing up a crude honours list in
the name of modernity and declaring certain literary productions ‘in’
and others ‘out’ by virtue of their chronological situation: there may
be a ‘text’ in a very ancient work, while many products of
contemporary literature are in no way texts.
(Barthes, 1977a: 156)
Whilst many would see a tension between a theory of literary
history and a theory of reading here, Barthes argues that the
tension is generated by the text’s and intertextuality’s distur-
bance of apparently stable oppositions: reading and writing,
author and critic, meaning and interpretation, inside and out-
side. As a recent commentator on Barthes, Michael Moriarty,
stresses, readers of Barthes should not give in to the temptation
to solidify the text, to imagine it as a determinate object: ‘It
[text] is used in a highly fluid fashion, both as a general term
for the object of an act of reading and in particular contrast with
the term “work”’ (Moriarty, 1991: 143). Annette Lavers, an-
other commentator, employing a terminology of scriptible
(writerly) and lisible (readerly) that we shall presently exam-
ine, confirms this point:
Strictly speaking, the scriptible text, when seen in terms of
structuration, is not an object as such (although some texts contain
more scriptible than others); it is ‘ourselves writing’ ... Like the genotext,
it has to be created anew in each reader, the observer being part of
the observed.
(Lavers, 1982: 202)
The ‘text’ is that which is potentially released within a ‘work’
and yet that which exists between that text and other texts. It is
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intertextual to the core and, in Barthes’s hands, it foregrounds
dramatically the productive role of the reader. Intertextuality, as
Kristeva has asserted, has nothing to do with influence, sources,
or even the stabilized model favoured in historical work of ‘text’
and ‘context’. In this model, ‘context’ might explain ‘text’ but
remains, ultimately, distinct from it. Since there is no end to the
text’s signifiance, inside and outside are merely products of any
particular reading of the text, which itself can always proceed
further, ceases arbitrarily, never comes to the end of the text’s
threads. Barthes describes the text as:
woven entirely with citations, references, echoes, cultural languages
(what language is not?) antecedent or contemporary, which cut across
it through and through in a vast stereophony. The intertextual in
which every text is held, it itself being the text-between of another
text, is not to be confused with some origin of the text: to try to find
the ‘sources’, the ‘influences’ of a work, is to fall in with the myth of
filiation; the citations which go to make up a text are anonymous,
untraceable, and yet already read: they are quotations without inverted
commas.
(Barthes, 1977a: 160)
Within Barthes’s work we can hear Bakhtin’s attack on
monologism. The work, he writes, ‘has nothing disturbing for
any monistic philosophy’, whilst the text, from a monological
viewpoint, seems ‘demoniacal’ since it asserts the ‘evil’ of plu-
rality. Barthes employs the words of the possessed man in Mark
5: 9 to encapsulate this aspect of the text, so threatening to
monologic society: ‘My name is Legion: for we are many’ (ibid.:
160). As in the work of Kristeva, text and intertextuality func-
tion here as part of an attack on monological conceptions of
meaning and communicability; an attack exhibiting Barthes’s
relation to the politics, theory and aesthetics of Tel Quel.
Barthes’s contribution to this poststructuralist project, however,
is to emphasize explicitly the role of the reader in the produc-
tion of the anti-monologic text.
Barthes distinguishes between two kinds of readers:
‘consumers’ who read the work for stable meaning, and
‘readers’ of the text who are productive in their reading, or, to
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put it in Barthes’s terms, are themselves ‘writers’ of the text.
Barthes styles this second kind of reading ‘textual analysis’
and contrasts it to more traditional ‘criticism’. He writes:
‘Textual analysis is pluralist’, ‘There are no more critics, only
writers’ (1981a: 43–4).
The theory of the text, as Barthes puts it in his ‘From Work
to Text’, produces a disciplinary and even generic shift
comparable to the shift from Newtonian to Einsteinian physics.
Just as Einsteinian physics demands that ‘the relativity of the
frames of reference be included in the object studied’, so the
new theory of the text demands a wholesale ‘relativization of
the relations of writer, reader, and observer (critic)’ (1977a: 156).
If we are to understand what Barthes has in mind by this
relativization we need to progress somewhat further in our
understanding of the text and of its consequence for the
traditional site of authority and origination of the superseded
work, the author. We also need to look at the textual analysis
Barthes creates and how this practice of reading conceived as
re-writing depends upon the developing theory of intertextuality.
Finally, we need to return to the questions posed at the end of
our discussion of Kristeva: is Barthes’s plural text, and thus also
his account of intertextuality, capable of registering the historical
and social situatedness of literary works?
THE DEATH OF THE AUTHOR
The fact that the theory of intertextuality propounded by Barthes
causes what he, in an essay of 1968, famously styled ‘the death
of the Author’ (Barthes, 1977a: 142–8) is perhaps one of the
more widely known features of intertextual theory. As an event,
if we can figure it as such, the death of the Author has been
much bemoaned by those wishing to hold on to the idea that
human beings retain a degree of agency, of choice, or at least
rational thought in history and society. It is an event, however,
which has frequently been misunderstood, and which needs to
be understood within the context of Barthes’s characteristic
disturbance of apparently ‘natural’ ideas. In an argument bearing
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many similarities to the one made by Michel Foucault, also in
1968, in his ‘What is an Author?’ (Foucault, 1977: 113–38 and
1979: 141–60), Barthes demonstrates that the figure of the author
is a modern one, in fact a capitalist one, which serves to
commodify works by attaching them to a name. In pre-capitalist
eras writing was not attached to the name of the author in the
manner that it has been in the ‘modern’ period. The ‘author
function’, to employ Foucault’s phrase, has a history, and
changes as one epoch follows another. The author might seem
an unquestionable or even a ‘natural’ figure; Barthes, like
Foucault, however, argues that the author is anything but
unquestionable or natural.
In the modern market system, the name of the author allows
the work to be an item of exchange value, but it also, Barthes
argues, promotes a view of interpretation, and of the relationship
between author, work and the reader-critic, in which reading is
a form of consumption. The author places meaning in the work,
so traditional accounts argue, and the reader-critic consumes
that meaning; once this process has been accomplished the reader
is free to move on to the next work. This process of interpretation
as it is normally understood fosters the capitalist market system
because it encourages us to view works as disposable, or at least
finite, commodities. As Moriarty puts it, paraphrasing Barthes’s
arguments in S/Z (see Barthes, 1974: 15–16): ‘a book reread is
one fewer sold’ (Moriarty, 1991: 127).
The author, or the name of the author, then, is what fosters
the ‘work’ as opposed to the ‘text’. As Barthes puts it: ‘The
explanation of a work is always sought in the man or woman
who produced it, as if it were always in the end, through the
more or less transparent allegory of the fiction, the voice of a
single person, the author “confiding” in us’ (1977a: 143).
The ideology of the author, that which argues that the author’s
dominance over the text is unquestionable, depends upon the
same kind of logic which we have already seen Barthes attacking
with regard to the idea of the ‘work’. Notions of paternity, of
authority, of filiation – fathership, ownership, giving birth,
familial power – all attach themselves to the name of the author
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in order to endorse it at the same moment as they express through
it dominant social structures of power. Barthes writes:
The Author, when believed in, is always conceived of as the past of
his own book: book and author stand automatically on a single line
divided into a before and an after. The Author is thought to nourish
the book, which is to say that he exists before it, thinks, suffers, lives
for it, is in the same relation of antecedence to his work as a father to
his child.
(Barthes, 1977a: 145)
The author’s delivery of the finished work is a commonplace in
literature which can take us all the way from the epic poet’s offering
up of his poem to the Muse, an act which rhetorically transfers
parentage from the author to a spiritual deity, to more
psychologically complex and modern forms, such as Mary Shelley’s
offering to her readers of Frankenstein, in her 1831 preface, as if it
were a deformed or disturbing baby, ‘my hideous progeny’. Yet all
such references to the rhetoric of filiation reinforce the illusion that
a text possesses and conveys a meaning imparted to it by its author,
and thus that the text has a unity which stems directly from the
unified and original thought of its creator.
Against such a naturalized image of the author Barthes pits
the theory of the text. Like his Tel Quel colleagues, Barthes
constructs this theory out of a number of different discourses:
psychoanalytic, linguistic, structural, deconstructive, Marxist.
Like Kristeva, for example, he combines psychoanalytical and
linguistic accounts of the subject to argue that the subject always
suffers a loss when entering into writing: writing, as Barthes
puts it, ‘knows a “subject”, not a person’ (1977a: 145). Influenced
by Kristeva’s work on Bakhtin, Barthes develops this point into
a recognition that the origin of the text is not a unified authorial
consciousness but a plurality of voices, of other words, other
utterances and other texts. If we were able to look inside the
head of the author – something traditional literary criticism
believes is possible by interpreting the literary work – then,
Barthes’s argument implies, we would not discover original
thought or even uniquely intended meaning, but what he styles
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as the ‘alreadyread’, the ‘already-written’. The French author
La Rochefoucauld (1613–80) once argued that if there were no
novels, no one would ever fall in love (see Barthes, 1974: ix). In
S/Z, Barthes produces a modern paraphrase of La
Rochefoucauld’s maxim:
Without the – always anterior – Book and Code, no desire, no
jealousy: Pygmalion is in love with a link in the code of statuary; Paolo
and Francesca love each other according to the passion of Lancelot
and Guinevere (Dante, Inferno, V): itself a lost origin, writing becomes
the origin of emotion.
(Barthes, 1974: 73–4)
There are, in Barthes’s intertextual world, no emotions before
the textual description of emotions, no thoughts before the textual
representation of thoughts, no significant actions which do not
signify outside of already textualized and encoded actions; we
feel and think and act in codes, in the cultural space of the déjà,
the already spoken, written, read (see Barthes, 1987: 47). The
modern author, whom Barthes styles the ‘modern scriptor’, does
not, in writing the book, release ‘a single “theological” meaning
(the “message” of the Author-God)’ but rather arranges and
compiles the always already written, spoken, and read into a
‘multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none
of them original, blend and clash’. The text is, then, ‘a tissue of
quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture’
(Barthes, 1977a: 146).
Let us be clear about this concept of the déjà, the ‘always
already written or read’. To recognize that the text’s meaning
does not spring from an author combining a signifier (writing)
with a signified (concept), but springs in fact from the
intertextual, does not mean we can simply move to the
intertextual level to unite signifier and signified. To say that the
text is constructed from a mosaic of quotations does not mean
we can find the text’s intertexts and then view them as the
signified of the text’s signifiers. The inter-texts, other works of
literature, other kinds of texts, are themselves intertextual
constructs, are themselves able to offer us nothing more than
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signifiers. Although many subsequent users of intertextuality
have employed the concept in this manner, a use which Barthes
and Kristeva view as tied to traditional concepts of ‘source’ and
‘influence’, in Barthes the intertextual has less to do with specific
inter-texts than with the entire cultural code, comprised, as it is,
of discourses, stereotypes, clichés, ways of saying.
Intertextuality, viewed in this way, means that for Barthes, as
for Derrida, ‘nothing exists outside the text’ (Barthes, 1974: 6;
1975: 36); text here meaning the intertextual. For this reason
Barthes, following Derrida’s critique of the notion of ‘origins’,
states that meaning is always ‘anterior’ and always ‘deferred’.
Meaning occurs because of the play of signifiers, not because a
signified can be found to stabilize a signifier; the signified is
always, as it were, over the horizon.
Barthes’s use of textual and intertextual theory destroys,
therefore, the ‘myth of filiation’: the idea that meaning comes
from and is, metaphorically at least, the property of the individual
authorial consciousness. The modern scriptor, when s/he writes,
is always already in a process of reading and of re-writing.
Meaning comes not from the author but from language viewed
intertextually. As Barthes puts it in ‘The Death of the Author’:
In France, Mallarmé was doubtless the first to see and to foresee in all
its full extent the necessity to substitute language itself for the person
who until then had been supposed to be its owner. For him, for us
too, it is language which speaks, not the author; to write is, through
a prerequisite impersonality (not at all to be confused with the
castrating objectivity of the realistic novelist), to reach that point where
only language acts, ‘performs’, and not ‘me’.
(Barthes, 1977a: 143)
Such pronouncements have caused many to argue against
Barthes, believing it fatuous to transfer all agency to language
itself (see Bloom, 1975a: 60). Yet such reactions do not recog-
nize the tension we have noted within Barthes’s work between
an historical and a theoretical approach. Such theoretical state-
ments as the above appear to give all agency to language viewed
intertextually. Yet at the very moment that Barthes makes that
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move he is citing Mallarmé as an authorial point not of origin
but at least of conscious determination. Mallarmé’s writing, for
Barthes, evinces a choice within that author to become a mod-
ern scriptor. Likewise, as we have noted, Barthes recognizes
that not every modern author chooses to become a scriptor.
Clearly the ‘death of the Author’ does not murder all forms
of authorial agency, and Barthes in The Pleasure of the Text
even writes of a certain desire for the author (1975: 27). The
tension between theory and history is clearly a persistent one,
and we will return to it at the end of this Chapter. Whatever we
decide about that issue, however, it is indisputable that Barthes’s
account of the text and of intertextuality disturbs the previously
hierarchized, filial relationship between author and reader. The
intertextual nature of writing and of the text turns both terms of
the traditional model, author and critic, into readers. As Barthes
asserts at the conclusion of ‘The Death of the Author’:
a text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and
entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation, but
there is one place where this multiplicity is focused, and that place is
the reader, not, as was hitherto said, the author. The reader is the
space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed
without any of them being lost; a text’s unity lies not in its origin but
in its destination. Yet this destination cannot any longer be personal:
the reader is without history, biography, psychology; he is simply that
someone who holds together in a single field all the traces by which
the written text is constituted ... the birth of the reader must be at
the cost of the death of the Author.
(Barthes, 1977a: 148)
There are questions generated even here, however. If language
viewed intertextually is ‘infinite’, as Barthes frequently states,
and if this fact is part of the reason for the death of the Author,
then does not Barthes here merely replace one figure of mythi-
cal authority with another? If the author dies as an authority for
meaning because s/he cannot control the meaning s/he unleashes
in the act of writing, then how can the reader be said to ‘hold
together’ all the traces which make up the text? Whether we
take ‘reader’ to refer to the subject traditionally designated by
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that term or whether we also now include the previously au-
thoritative ‘author’ within that term, there seems to be a prob-
lem here with regard the new ‘reader’s’ possession and recogni-
tion of ‘all the [intertextual] traces by which the text is consti-
tuted’. The poststructuralism of Barthes, Kristeva and Derrida
moves away from structuralism, with its belief in the possibility
of a totalizing or scientific methodology, by privileging and pro-
moting notions of difference. Is not the reader, lost amongst
difference, writing, intertextuality, the figure which
poststructuralism posits against earlier totalized visions of mean-
ing? And, if so, is not Barthes’s figuration of the reader here
contrary to that approach, standing as a totalized figure pos-
sessing and containing all differences?
Barthes’s writing might be said to generate the appearance
of contradiction, or at least of tension, because he is prone to
more programmatic and more strident statements than theorists
such as Kristeva or Derrida. Yet, the tensions and contradictions
stem from a recognition, shared by all three, of the never-resolved
struggle between truth and its subversion, between myth and its
critique, between what Kristeva calls the phenotext and the
genotext and what Barthes calls the doxa and the para-doxa.
Barthes’s texts explore, but also self-consciously embody, the
constant struggle between doxa and para-doxa. To fully engage
with his texts, it is insufficient to merely locate contradictions
and tensions and then to make choices within them. These tensions
and contradictions are confirmations of the struggle and clash
between discourses and between ideological positions which
Barthes’s texts explore and embody. It is crucial for us, therefore,
to understand intertextuality’s place within the on-going clash
between doxa and para-doxa. However, before we come on to
that subject directly, we need to engage with the practice of textual
analysis developed by Barthes.
READERLY AND WRITERLY TEXTS
The structural analysis of narrative articulated by Barthes and
others during the 1960s sought to establish a model which could
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‘master’ the ‘numberless’ narratives of the world (see Barthes,
1977a: 79–124). Taking Saussurean linguistics as its model,
structural analysis proceeded to argue that all narratives function
by employing ‘elementary combinatory scheme[s]’ (ibid.: 81).
Each individual narrative, then, was seen as a parole, a particular
act of narration produced by operating the langue of the narrative
system itself. The task of structural analysis was to isolate the
‘units and rules’ which constitute the narrative langue and are set
in motion by each individual narrative act. The theory of the text,
however, caused Barthes and others to radically question the
objectives and the methodology of structural analysis which, in
searching for a common system, elided the ‘difference’ of the
text, reducing it to a reiteration of a totalized system. Structural
analysis did not, for Barthes, pay sufficient attention to the power
of the signifier or to the plurality of meaning which the text
unleashes. It also presumed a stable distinction between text and
reader which the theory of text and of intertextuality shatters.
Structural analysis tends to dispense with the question of the
meaning of texts in favour of an assessment of the text’s relation
to the system out of which it is presumed to have been produced.
The theory of the text refocused attention on meaning. As
opposed to the traditional search for a final meaning, however,
Barthes’s textual analysis seeks to trace the manner in which
the text ‘explodes and disperses’ (1981 b: 135).
Barthes’s most important discussions of textual analysis were
written during a period in which poststructuralism was emerging
from within structuralism: the late 1960s and early 1970s. Thus
textual analysis is often posited not as a critique of structuralism
but as something new within the structuralist movement. The
textual analysis Barthes developed retained a commitment to
the exploration of the structure of the text, its fundamental
elements and units of combination, but also put this structure
within the context not of a closed narrative system but of the
intertextual, within which no closure, no finite system, is
available. The intertextual nature of the text means that its
signifiers offer up the ‘always already written/read’; texts
produce meaning understood as always already anterior and
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always deferred. The text has a structure of definable elements,
and yet, woven from the threads of the social text, its intertextual
relations can never be stabilized, exhaustively located and listed.
The text combines structure and an infinity of meaning.
Does this mean that textual analysis as developed by Barthes
looks exclusively at ‘texts’ rather than ‘works’, at the productions
of the ‘modern scriptor’ rather than those of the traditional author?
The tension between an historical and a theoretical account of
intertextuality immediately returns when we consider Barthes’s
textual analysis. Some of the most impressive examples of textual
analysis produced by Barthes are based on readings of literary works
which are, on the historical argument, very much classifiable as
works rather than modern texts. In ‘The Struggle with the Angel:
Textual Analysis of Genesis 32: 22–32’ Barthes looks at a section
in Genesis in which Jacob, crossing the Jabbok, wrestles with ‘a
man’ and receives through this both a spiritual blessing and his
new name of ‘Israel’ but also a wound on his thigh. Employing the
techniques of structural analysis upon this text Barthes’s stated aim
is not, by that method, to discover the text’s singular meaning; it
does not possess one single meaning. His aim, rather, is to see the
text in its ‘difference’. This difference does not concern any notion
of the individuality of the text so much as the manner in which its
employment of ‘familiar codes’ implicates it in ‘the very infinity of
language, itself structured without closure’. Textual analysis in this
way: ‘tries to say no longer from where the text comes (historical
criticism), nor even how it is made (structural analysis), but how it
is unmade, how it explodes, disseminates – by what coded paths it
goes off’ (1977a: 126–7). As Rick Rylance states, there is perhaps
a certain ‘impishness in Barthes’s choice of the Bible to expose the
way language undermines truth and authority’ (Rylance, 1994: 73).
It is also worthwhile considering Barthes’s choice of text in two
other instances of textual analysis: Poe’s ‘The Facts in the Case of
M. Valdemar’ (Poe, 1986: 350–9) and Balzac’s short story Sarrasine
(see Barthes, 1974: 221–54). We will look at these examples in
more detail.
In his study of Balzac’s Sarrasine Barthes employs a
distinction between what he calls the lisible (readerly) and the
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scriptible (writerly) text. This distinction gives a more specific
nomination to the opposition between ‘work’ and ‘text’. The
readerly text is oriented towards representation and, in Barthes’s
handling, is very much associated with the realist novel of the
nineteenth century; Barthes frequently classifies it as the ‘classic’
as opposed to the ‘modern’ text. This readerly text leads the
reader towards a meaning, it creates the illusion that it is
produced by a singular voice and underplays the force of the
intertextual (Barthes, 1974: 41). To call such a text ‘readerly’ is
to foreground the manner in which its reader is positioned as a
relatively passive receiver: the reader’s task is to follow the linear
development of the story until the truth, presumed to lie behind
the narrated events, is finally unfolded before him or her.
Readerly texts thus reinforce cultural myths and ideologies
which Barthes symbolizes through the term doxa. The doxa
suggests, and indeed embodies, the idea that stable meaning is
possible, that a signified can be found for the text’s signifiers,
that language can uncomplicatedly represent the world, that a
truth can finally be delivered by an author to a reader.
Readers of the classic, readerly text are, at best, detectives
shifting through the clues sequentially provided by a narrative
until the ‘answer’ is unveiled. It is not coincidental that Barthes
chooses to analyse texts which have for their main narrative plot
some kind of search for the truth. In Poe’s ‘The Facts in the Case
of M. Valdemar’, for example, a scientist concerned with the
nineteenth-century pseudo-science of mesmerism writes of how
a man on the brink of death becomes the subject of a mesmeric
experiment. The case, and its shocking details, have been leaked
to the public, we are informed at the tale’s beginning, and the
narrator now writes up the case to dispel the misconceptions,
scandal and misguided public interest it has produced. The
experiment had in fact succeeded in allowing M. Valdemar to
make a statement never before made in human history: in a
mesmeric state, after the time which his doctors had agreed would
see his death, M. Valdemar had said: ‘For God’s sake! – quick! –
quick! – put me to sleep – or, quick! – waken me! – quick! – I say
to you that I am dead!’ (Poe, 1986: 359). The doctor, whilst M.
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Valdemar reiterates ‘dead! dead!’, attempts to awaken his patient,
only to see him collapse into a ‘liquid mass of loathsome – of
detestable putridity’ (ibid.). Such a story leads us steadily towards
a truth which is literally impossible and undermines the very
notions of truth, certainty, science, meaning; the readerly text
explodes into a plurality which undermines its status as a readerly
text, which makes it, at least in its dénouement, writerly, plural,
structured and yet infinite.
Balzac’s Sarrasine contains a similarly disturbing narrative,
and again, as Barthes demonstrates, contains a potential for the
‘writerly’ within its apparent ‘readerly’ form. The story begins
with the narrator at a party given by the wealthy Lanty family.
The narrator is enamoured of a young woman. When she sees
and is shocked by the appearance of a man of extreme old age,
the narrator forms a contract with the young woman: he will
divulge to her the identity of the old man in exchange for one
night of passion. The story of Sarrasine is thus framed by certain
enigmas: not only is it concerned to explain the identity of the
old man, but in the answer to that enigma the origin of the wealth
of the Lanty family will also be divulged. The answer to both of
these enigmas is in the story of a sculptor, Sarrasine, who, in
visiting Rome falls in love with what he takes to be a beautiful
young female singer at the theatre. Sarrasine does not know
that women are banned from the Roman stage and that the singer,
Zambinella is in fact a castrato. Sarrasine’s infatuation with
Zambinella drives him to attempt to capture his beloved in
sculpture and to capture her heart. He makes a statue and is
finally driven, refusing to believe the growing evidence of the
real nature of his love, into a plot to kidnap Zambinella. Sarrasine
is eventually murdered during the unsuccessful kidnapping, and
Zambinella goes on to become a famous and wealthy castrato,
thus founding the Lanty family’s wealth.
The old man, so disgusting to the sight of the young woman,
is in fact Zambinella. The statue of female beauty created by
Sarrasine, and copied by painters subsequently, and the
disgusting old man at the party turn out to be the same person.
More shockingly still, the origin of the various enigmas is a
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case of castration – a nothingness, as Barthes, using
psychoanalytical theo ries concerning the fear of castration, puts
it. The young woman is so shocked by the truth (the nothingness)
that is revealed by the narrative that she breaks the contract with
the narrator and so, herself symbolically castrated by the story,
also symbolically castrates, or makes nothing of, the desire that
has driven the narrator to tell the story in the first place.
The text is a fantastically rich resource for Barthes to plunder.
The story of an artist, Sarrasine, attempting to find the truth
behind the appearance of Zambinella mirrors the ethos of the
realist novel and still dominant ideas concerning language. The
story seems to confirm that language can display a reality if we
can penetrate behind its surface appearance (Barthes, 1974: 122).
Balzac’s narrative repeats the structure that lies at the foundation
of traditional ideas concerning the work and the relationship it
establishes between an author, who delivers meaning, and a
reader, who interprets that meaning by progressing through to
the work’s presumed depth. However, the text also demonstrates
that at the centre of the rising French bourgeois society of the
nineteenth century – its wealth, its language, its art – is a shocking
nothingness, which threatens to throw all that culture’s values
into question. Again, as Barthes demonstrates, the readerly text
threatens to explode into something writerly, plural, paradoxical.
Barthes’s analysis of such texts as those by Poe and Balzac,
then, challenges the historical argument that intertextuality
emerges in literary works only with the rise of Modernism. The
modern avant-garde text, after Mallarmé, might be self-
consciously intertextual, yet we can discover the disruptive
power of the intertextual within earlier, apparently realist works.
It is important to note that for Barthes a pure text, in the sense
of a completely writerly text, is a utopian notion (see 1977b:
76– 7). Even a radically avant-garde text, Barthes suggests in
The Pleasure of the Text, needs ‘its shadow: this shadow is a bit
of ideology, a bit of representation, a bit of subject’ (1975: 32).
At the beginning of his textual analysis of Balzac’s story in S/Z
Barthes states that the totally writerly text is an ‘ideal’ (1974:
5–6). The bourgeois realism of Balzac is a perfect site for Barthes
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to demonstrate how intertextuality achieves a goal for which
Barthes always wrote: the exposure of the natural as cultural
and ideological.
In the contract between the narrator and the young woman,
Sarrasine thematizes the fact that narration, telling stories, is
always a contract; the narrative itself, that which is readerly, is
always an object of exchange-value. Intertextuality, the already
read, however, conflicts with the commercialism of the readerly,
and Barthes’s textual analysis strives to open up this aspect of
the text by cutting up its linear, sequential, readerly flow into
small segments. Barthes divides the text into 561 lexias, small
segments which can be a word, a phrase, a piece of action, one
sentence, or a small group of sentences. Each lexia contains a
limited number of meanings, sometimes only one, never more
than four. The name, Sarrasine, also functioning as the title, is a
lexia, as are other names including that of Zambinella or La
Zambinella (feminine) as Sarrasine calls ‘her’. Other lexias
include the first and every subsequent posing of the enigma of
the Lanty family’s wealth, or of the old man’s identity, or each
reference to the framing narrative contract. In the analysis of
the Poe story, each mention of mesmerism constitutes one of
the text’s lexias, but so does the fact that the dying man is
nominated as ‘M. Valdemar’ rather than simply ‘Valdemar’.
These lexias are arbitrary, they could be more or less in number,
they represent the reader’s establishment of an operating field
but also the productive manner in which the textual analyst treats
the text (Barthes, 1981b: 136).
In the structural analysis of narrative a text is cut up into
segments in order to demonstrate how those segments relate to
the rules of combination and association which are presumed to
form the langue of narrative. In Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler,
for example, the audience is made aware that there exists a gun
within the Gabler household. From a structuralist point of view
such an element, once noticed, must either be a functional
signifier of a set of signifieds (danger, threat) or ultimately
become part of the overall action; in the play Hedda Gabler
does, in fact, finally use the gun to devastating effect. In structural
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analysis every signifier, once isolated and cut away from the
linear flow of the narrative, is ultimately regrouped at a higher
level of analysis, in which the text’s component parts are related
to the rules of narrative langue. Meaning is not a question in
structural analysis of this variety, where every signifier is finally
provided with a signifying place in the total system. Barthes
cuts the text into lexias but, instead of explaining them,
regrouping them at a higher level and thus closing off their
meaning, he strives to detonate their meanings without any sense
that these meanings can be contained at some higher level of
analysis. The text, after all, is a plural phenomenon; it has
structure, yet also an infinity of meaning. As Barthes writes,
each lexia functions like a ‘minor earthquake’ (1974: 13), a minor
explosion of meaning which provides the reader with a window
not onto some ultimate structure or meaning but onto the realm
of the intertextual. Barthes’s cutting up of the text, in other words,
strives to register the manner in which it is woven from the
threads of the social text. Barthes strives to respect the text’s
non-linear, non-totalizable intertextuality.
For Barthes, both the traditional notion of the work and
structural analysis of narrative present the illusion of a text which
is finally ‘unreversible’. The unreversible here is associated with
all the myths encapsulated within Barthes’s term doxa: for
example, to raise the text into an explanatory higher model or
metalanguage (langue) is to repeat the ideology in which texts
are objects which can be consumed. However, for Barthes, the
text is reversible. Every lexia is a signifying point which leads us
out into the infinity of the social text, demonstrating the manner
in which intertextuality reverses narrative progression, explodes
and disperses within the text and shatters the illusion that narrative
can provide an ultimate meaning. Textual analysis becomes, on
this model, a ‘step-by-step’, ‘slow-motion’ procedure through
which the reader strives to capture the text’s detonation of meaning
or, to employ Kristeva’s term, of signifiance.
In his discussion of Kristeva in ‘Theory of the Text’ Barthes
associates the term signifiance with the ‘connotative’ meaning of
the text (1981a: 37–8). If we read a text and presume it has a
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stable meaning to offer us, then we read at the level of ‘denotation’.
Denotation concerns the notion that each signifier has a primary
signified. Connotation, on the other hand, involves ‘secondary
meaning’, meanings which are the intertextual threads of the
classic, readerly text’s lexias. As Barthes writes: ‘Connotation is
the way into the polysemy of the classic text, to that limited plural
on which the classic text is based’ (1974: 8). Connotation is that
aspect of the readerly text which allows meaning to break free
from a linear, consecutive order and to ‘spread like gold dust on
the apparent surface of the text’ (ibid.: 9). Thus connotation is a
‘deliberate static’ and establishes various ‘codes’ by which Barthes
attempts to register the intertextuality of the text’s connotative
meanings. Each connotation, ‘is the starting point of a code (which
will never be reconstituted), the articulation of a voice which is
woven into the text’ (ibid.).
These codes are not methodologically rigorous; they do not
collect the text’s lexias and meanings up into a higher system
(langue), rather they are the reader’s own way of registering the
intertextual avenues of meaning which break into the text’s
apparent sequential order. The hermeneutic code (HER) concerns
all those elements of the text, such as enigmas and questions,
which force the reader to interpret the events being narrated.
The code of the seme (SEM) concerns all the connotations which
help to build up the sense of the special quality of a character or
an action. Characters in a narrative are basically a collection of
semes which Barthes often defines through single words: often
next to mentions of ‘the Lanty family’ we find the singular
‘(SEM. Wealth)’ (Barthes, 1974: 18). Various characters build
up a set of recurrent semes as the analysis progresses, such as
‘childishness’ and ‘mechanicalness’. Characters are then names
to which groups of semes are attracted. As Barthes writes: ‘As
soon as a Name exists (even a pronoun) to flow toward and
fasten onto, the semes become predicates, inductors of truth,
and the Name becomes a subject’ (ibid.: 191). Names, such as
Zambinella, act as magnets, attracting to them various semes
(beauty, mystery, danger); it is this build-up of semes which
creates the impression of ‘depth’, and thus generates the illusion
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that these names refer to actual ‘characters’.
The symbolic code (SYM) involves all the recognizable sym
bolic patterns, including traditional oppositions such as male–
female or light and dark. The proairetic code (ACT) involves
the narrative’s various actions, which combine into sequences
and which Barthes provides titles for, such as ‘stroll, murder,
rendezvous’ (ibid.: 19). Some of these actions derive ‘from a
practical reservoir of trivial everyday acts (to knock at the door,
to arrange a rendezvous) and others from a written corpus of
novelistic models (the Abduction, the Declaration of Love, the
Murder)’ (ibid.: 204). Lastly, the cultural code (REF) involves
the ‘numerous codes of knowledge or wisdom to which the text
continually refers’. Despite recognizing that as part of the
intertextual all the codes can be called cultural, Barthes restricts
the cultural code to those elements which seem to refer directly
to cultural authorities and communal thinking.
In one sense the tragedy of Sarrasine stems from how badly he
plays the cultural code. Sarrasine convinces himself of
Zambinella’s femininity on the basis of a set of cultural
assumptions: a ‘narcissistic proof’: ‘I love her, therefore she is a
woman’; a ‘psychological proof’: ‘women are weak, La
Zambinella is weak, etc.’; and what Barthes styles ‘a kind of sorites
(or abridged syllogism): beauty is feminine; only an artist can
know beauty; I am an artist; therefore I know beauty and therefore
I know woman, etc.’. (ibid.: 167). The only flaw in this collection
of culturally encoded assumptions on the part of Sarrasine is that
he is ignorant of the Papal ban on women appearing on the stage.
That particular cultural code, shared by all the theatre-goers save
Sarrasine himself, will, through his ignorance of it, cause
Sarrasine’s death. Sarrasine dies, that is, from ‘a gap in knowledge’
of the cultural codes in operation (ibid.: 184–5).
The five codes, then, are Barthes’s non-systematic way of
marking intertextuality within Balzac’s text. As he puts it:
they are so many fragments of something that has always been already
read, done, experienced; the code is the wake of that already. Referring
to what has been written, i.e., to the Book (of culture, of life, of life
as culture), it makes the text into a prospectus of this Book. Or again:
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each code is one of the forces that can take over the text (of which
the text is the network), one of the voices out of which the text is
woven. Alongside each utterance, one might say that off-stage voices
(whose origin is ‘lost’ in the vast perspective of the already-written)
de-originate the utterance: the convergence of voices (of the codes)
becomes writing, a stereographic space where the five codes, the five
voices, intersect.
(Barthes, 1974: 20–1)
It is important to remind ourselves of the convenient, even
arbitrary, nature of Barthes’s codes and of his use of them. The
textual analysis of S/Z, as Barthes makes clear, is not an
exhaustive interpretation, but is one reader’s analysis, which is
necessarily, given the nature of intertextuality, incomplete.
Barthes’s codes allow for a further refinement of the distinction
between readerly and writerly texts. The readerly text contains
only a limited plural, since within it the proairetic and hermeneutic
codes remain very strong. These codes ‘constitute the strongest
armature of the readerly ... by their typically sequential nature’
(ibid.: 204). There is, to put it simply, in the classic, readerly text
a strong illusion of narrative progression which the textual analyst
can only seek to disturb, never completely overturn. Narrative,
like the sentence, Barthes argues, encourages the reader to move
from beginning to end. Both narrative and individual sentences
are essentially readerly, in that they encourage an unreversible
flow of reading. Readerly texts are, in this sense, sentential: based
on the linear, sequential nature of the sentence. One defining
feature of the modern writerly text, therefore, would be its attempt
to downplay, or even eradicate, the two linear codes in favour of
the other more nebulous, circulating codes. A good deal of modern
avant-garde writing, in fact, goes so far as to repudiate any
recognizably sentential order.
Mallarmé’s Un Coup De Dés is often cited by poststructuralist
theorists of the text, because in this work of the last years of the
nineteenth century Mallarmé writes a poetry within which
‘narrative is avoided’ (Mallarmé, 1994: 122). The poem sets up
a radical polysemy through its utilization of the spacing of words
and through the employment of different typefaces. Both
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techniques puncture any simple narrative or linear progression
from beginning to end. Various sentences run through the whole
poem, such as the full title sentence, ‘Un Coup De Dés Jamais
N’abolira Le Hasard’ (‘A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish
Chance’). Such sentences thus function as sentences whilst also
incorporating themselves into the meaning of the particular
words which surround them on the given page on which they
appear. As demonstrated in the following page from the text
(ibid.: 134), the poem offers the reader more than a single, linear
line of words, thus setting up multiple possibilities for
combination and thus for meaning:
AS IF
An insinuation
simple
in the silence
in some nearby
flutters
enrolled with irony
or
the mystery
hurled
howled
whirlpool of hilarity and horror
about the abyss
without strewing it
or fleeing
and out of it cradles the virgin sing
AS IF
Do we begin by reading the text ‘AS IF An insinuation simple
in the silence enrolled with irony ... ’? or do we begin by read-
ing two columns of simultaneous text: ‘AS IF An insinuation in
the silence ... ’ and ‘AS IF simple enrolled with irony ... ’? Such
questions confront the reader throughout the poem and gener-
ate numerous signifying combinations. This is a text which is
rich in what Barthes styles the symbolic and the cultural codes
but constantly resists any of the more narrative codes.
The codes presented in Barthes’s analysis of Sarrasine are,
however, as we have seen, arbitrary and convenient. Despite the
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declaration that ends ‘The Death of the Author’, no reader can
contain the social text and, just as importantly, every reader’s
relation to the social text mirrors that of Sarrasine, rich in places,
lacking in others. The experience of reading Barthes’s analysis
is to witness a reader taking certain lexias far beyond what one
would have previously imagined possible, but leaving others
less discussed than another reader would have done. The
comparison, for example, made between the Lanty family and
‘Lord Byron’s poems’ in lexia 25 seems to contain far more
potential connotative meaning than Barthes’s simple ‘REF.
Literature (Byron)’ (Barthes, 1974: 39). Was not Byron a man
who was wealthy, famous, and yet the subject of scandal and
mystery concerning his private life? The ‘figure of Byron’ as
we know it contains an ambiguity on the sexual level, the ethical
level and even the level of identity which might be interestingly
related to the story of the Lanty family. Byron after all lived a
life in which the artifice of his poetry and his actual self were
constantly confused. Does not Sarrasine confuse artifice and
substance? And does not Barthes himself demonstrate the
conflict between the realistic and the cultural throughout his
analysis? Similarly, the comparison of the Lanty family’s
mysteriousness to something out of the novels of Ann Radcliffe
seems to set up a reference to the Gothic which some readers
would feel deserves more attention than Barthes’s ‘REF.
Literature (Ann Radcliffe)’ (ibid.: 40). The textual analyst,
however, traces the explosion of signifiance rather than of
meaning as signification. This is a meaning within which both
narrative ‘I’ and the ‘I’ which reads find themselves lost,
overwhelmed, able merely to mark the points at which the
intertextual explodes and disseminates. Forgetting meanings is,
as Barthes reiterates, a part of reading.
Jonathan Culler, in a much read essay, has complained that
poststructuralist theorists of intertextuality reduce intertextuality,
when performing specific readings, to a restricted, manageable
level and so undermine the claims made for that new term. To
talk of the infinity of intertextuality but to then produce a
curtailed version of it when analysing specific texts seems, Culler
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argues, somewhat contradictory (see Culler, 1981: 100–18). Yet
Barthes’s textual analysis never sets out to explain the entirety
of the text’s connotative meanings; such a project is doomed,
since both writer and reader exist and work within an intertextual
field of cultural codes and meanings which can never be
contained within an analysis. The tension that remains in
Barthes’s work is not, then, one between theory and practice
but that tension we have associated with the clash between
historical and theoretical versions of intertextuality: namely, the
clash between doxa and para-doxa.
THE PARADOXICAL TEXT
In S/Z Barthes attempts to employ the readerly, classic text’s
intertextuality against that within it which would lead us towards
a singular truth or representation of reality. At times, however,
as the two linear or narrative codes begin to dominate, Barthes
can speak of ennui or nausea brought on by the ‘conformism,
and disgust with repetition that establishes them’ (Barthes, 1974:
139). Readerly texts, we might say, depend greatly on intertextual
codes which are so stereotypical that following them can create
a certain boredom in the reader. Even the cultural codes detected
in Sarrasine can reach this level of predictability. Barthes
imagines school-books within which could be arranged, for easy
learning, many of the cultural codes operative in a readerly text
such as Sarrasine. He goes on:
Although entirely derived from books, these codes, by a swivel
characteristic of bourgeois ideology, which turns culture into nature,
appear to establish reality, ‘Life’. ‘Life’ then, in the classic text, becomes a
nauseating mixture of common opinions, a smothering of received ideas.
(Barthes, 1974: 206)
We learn an important thing about Barthes’s employment of the
term intertextuality here which it is worth stating boldly: the
intertextual can be the source of ennui or boredom. Intertextuality
is not itself that which produces what Barthes and Kristeva call
jouissance, the loss of unity and even identity experienced by
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the reader when confronted by the plural, polysemous, non-uni-
fied text. Intertextuality is an important term for describing the
radically plural text, and is a crucial technique in the work of
those writers who eschew notions of the unified work, yet it is
also potentially what creates a sense of repetition, cultural satu-
ration, a dominance of cultural stereotypes and thus of doxa
over that which would resist and disturb the beliefs and forms
and codes of that culture, the para-doxa.
Barthes goes on to speak of a ‘Replete Literature’, very much
associated with the tradition of the bourgeois, realist novel, which
is ‘stalked by the army of stereotypes it contains’ (ibid: 206). In
this kind of literature, it would seem, intertextuality functions
in terms of the unavoidability, the apparent naturalness, of
literary and cultural codes, the only defence against them
appearing to be to employ them ironically. Against such a
saturated literature Barthes posits the radically plural text, which
does not allow one code to dominate over any other, and which
therefore liberates the disruptive force of the intertextual.
The opposition between the readerly and the writerly text is
transposed in Barthes’s essay-length book The Pleasure of the
Text. In this book Barthes meditates on two kinds of texts: the
‘text of bliss’ (jouissance) and the ‘text of pleasure’ (plaisir).
On first reading it might appear that Barthes’s two kinds of texts
correspond to the two kinds of uses of intertextuality, one
generating ennui because saturated by dominant cultural codes,
the other generating a pleasure analogous to sexual coming
(jouissance) because radically plural and functioning as a conduit
for the disruptive potential of intertextuality. Barthes explains
his two texts as follows:
Text of pleasure: the text that contents, fills, grants euphoria; the text
that comes from culture and does not break with it, is linked to a
comfortable practice of reading. Text of bliss: the text that imposes a
state of loss, the text that discomforts (perhaps to the point of a
certain boredom), unsettles the reader’s historical, cultural,
psychological assumptions, the consistency of his tastes, values,
memories, brings to a crisis his relation with language.
(Barthes, 1975: 14)
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With this definition we are immediately made aware that
Barthes associates the text of bliss rather than the text of pleasure
with ennui, along with its opposite state of jouissance. Why is
this? We return to the tension between historical and theoretical
descriptions of the text and of intertextuality. From a historical
perspective the text of pleasure appears to be related to the kind
of readerly text Barthes analyses in S/Z and the essay on Poe.
The text of bliss seems to correspond to modern, avant-garde
writing. On that basis, ennui would surely only occur with regard
to the former. Barthes, however, is not, through his distinctions,
attempting to make an historically oriented point; or, at least,
an historical account of the text is only one of the avenues, as he
puts it in S/Z, which might be explored from the basis of his
theory.
The purpose of The Pleasure of the Text, and indeed all
Barthes’s writings of the late 1960s and 1970s, is to articulate
para-doxa. As he states in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes:
‘The doxa is current opinion, meaning repeated as if nothing
had happened’ (1977: 122). The doxa is a stereotypical meaning,
a fragment from the intertextual environment of the social text,
constituted by established discourses, by the already written and
the already read. But doxa expresses the already written as if it
were literal, representational, denotative and, thus, as if it were
natural. For Barthes, as he makes clear in The Pleasure of the
Text, it is not just conservative, monological discourse which
relies on the doxa; left-wing, even Marxist discourses have their
own unquestionable signifieds. Doxa is ‘a kind of unconscious’
and as such is ‘the essence of ideology’ (1975: 29). When
politically right-wing people argue for the sanctity of the nuclear
family, or for heterosexuality as the only legitimate sexuality,
then we are clearly dealing with discursive arguments Barthes
would nominate in terms of the doxa. The doxa here is relatable
to Bakhtin’s concept of the monologic. However, when left-
wing groups argue that society can only be changed by a
revolution of the workers, or that all art which does not reflect
working-class conditions is elitist, then we are also dealing with
Barthes’s doxa. Barthes writes, in a fashion which is still at one
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level recognizably Bakhtinian, that the doxa is a cultural
stereotype, and thus a fiction, functioning as a jargon, an
unconscious or even lazy discourse:
each jargon (each fiction) fights for hegemony; if power is on its side,
it spreads everywhere in the general and daily occurrences of social
life, it becomes doxa, nature: this is the supposedly apolitical jargon of
politicians, of agents of the State, of the media, of conversation; but
even out of power, even when power is against it, the rivalry is reborn,
the jargons split and struggle among themselves. A ruthless topic rules
the life of language; language always comes from some place, it is a
warrior topos.
(Barthes, 1975: 28)
Barthes’s concepts of doxa and para-doxa may well be his un-
acknowledged transposition of the Bakhtinian notion of the clash
between monologic and dialogic discourse. We might object,
however, that Barthes’s conception of these forces remains un-
attached to the specific social and institutional sites within which
such utterances occur. As the US critics Clayton and Rothstein
point out, many critics and theorists, unhappy with the abstract
notions of language and discourse observable within
poststructuralist theories such as Barthes’s, have found a greater
attention to the social situatedness of language in the work of
Michel Foucault (Clayton and Rothstein, 1991: 27). In Foucault,
a textualized vision of the human subject leads increasingly to
an emphasis on social power relations. As Clayton and Rothstein
write:
Unlike Barthes and Derrida, with their boundless visions of textuality,
Foucault attends to the forces that restrict the free circulation of the
text. Although every text possesses countless points of intersection
with other texts, these connections situate a work within existing
networks of power, simultaneously creating and disciplining the text’s
ability to signify. Foucault insists that we analyse the role of power in
the production of textuality and of textuality in the production of
power. This entails looking closely at those social and political
institutions by which subjects are subjected, enabled and regulated in
forming textual meaning.
(Clayton and Rothstein, 1991: 27)
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It is one thing to discuss, we might say, a text’s intertextual
relation to cultural codes, but what kind of cultural codes are
we referring to? Where do they come from? What kind of
power relations are involved in their use? Bakhtinian
dialogism and Foucault’s account of discourse have seemed
to some to allow for a rejection of poststructuralist textual
theory and a return to a situated, historically specific account
of texts and textuality.
We find here, once again, a tension between an historically
oriented approach and an approach, such as Barthes’s, which is
concerned with the theoretical articulation of ‘novelty’, of a
mode of writing which attempts to liberate the speaking and
writing subject from the already said and the already written
(Barthes, 1975: 40–1). Whilst for some a Foucauldian attention
to the history of discourses and their place within institutional
sites of power such as the hospital, the university and the family
might appear to offer up the most politically radical theoretical
model, Barthes’s objective remains what he and his Tel Quel
colleagues style as a radical refusal to remain within any
dominant discourse, be it politically conservative or politically
left-wing. As Barthes writes, the text ‘is (should be) that
uninhibited person who shows his behind to the Political Father’
(ibid: 53). Barthes’s objective remains throughout his work to
challenge any doxa with para-doxa, to unleash the power of the
text and of the intertextual to unsettle all dominant discursive
positions, to unleash the paradoxical power of writing within
the apparently natural, the doxa.
In his self-analytical text Barthes recognizes that the doxa–
para-doxa opposition in his writing might itself have become
an unchallenged opposition, and thus a doxa. Using the third-
instead of the first-person pronoun, he writes of his own
approach:
Frequently he starts from the stereotype, from the banal opinion
which is in him. And it is because he does not want that stereotype (by
some aesthetic or individualist reflex) that he looks for something
else; habitually, being soon wearied, he halts at the mere contrary
opinion, at paradox, at what mechanically denies the prejudice (for
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94 THE TEXT UNBOUND
example: ‘there is no science except for the particular’). He sustains,
in short, counter-relations with the stereotype – familial relations.
(Barthes, 1977b: 162)
It is precisely because of the ability of doxa to return and to
solidify around a theoretical or critical style that Barthes, like
Kristeva, eschews methodological rigour, one all-encompass-
ing and explanatory metalanguage. Barthes is not a literary
critic but a modern scriptor. In the passage above, after all, he
is performing two apparently incompatible functions simulta-
neously. Interpreting existing texts (his own in this case), and
so apparently functioning as a critic, he is also producing a
new text. A writerly text itself, Roland Barthes by Roland
Barthes, is cut up into small fragments with headings of a word
or a phrase which are almost completely arranged upon the
arbitrary order of the alphabet. The text also includes photo-
graphs, small marginalia, and yet teasingly refers to a narra-
tive of writing the text one summer which is never fully incor-
porated into the text. The poststructuralist Barthes is a mod-
ern scriptor writing texts which are self-consciously intertextual
rather than works of critical interpretation. His books embody
the theory of textuality and intertextuality they articulate, and
they constantly seek to find new ways of countering doxa and
of unleashing the power of the plural text. His texts are an
immense source of intertextual theory, and yet, with the ex-
ception of S/Z, they refuse to develop a rigorous theory of how
intertextuality might be applied to other texts. Apart from S/Z,
Barthes’s poststructuralist texts are examples of a radical form
of intertextuality rather than intertextual theory as it might exist
in critical practice. It is perhaps no surprise that we have to
move away from the poststructuralism of the 1960s and 1970s
to discover examples of theorists committed to such a critical
application of the term.
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3
STRUCTURALIST APPROACHES:
GENETTE AND RIFFATERRE
Since its appearance in poststructuralist work of the late 1960s
intertextuality has been adopted and explored by theorists of a
more structuralist frame of mind. To speak of a decisive fork in
the river which flows from Kristeva’s initial engagement with
Bakhtin, a fork producing distinctly poststructuralist and distinctly
structuralist accounts of our term, would be a mistake. However,
it is still possible to locate what I will style a structuralist – by
which I mean a more circumscribed – rendition of intertextuality
in a number of theorists working from the late 1960s onwards.
We have already encountered the basic tenets of structuralism
in this study. To remind ourselves of the characteristics of
structuralist and semiological thought we might truncate a
statement by the contemporary French theorist and critic Gérard
Genette: ‘the ability to constitute a system is precisely the
characteristic of any set of signs, and it is this constitution that
marks the passage from pure symbolism to the strictly
semiological state’ (Genette, 1982: 30). Semiology and
structuralism appear to be defined by the desire to study the life
of cultural sign-systems. Genette’s statement concerns not
individual symbols or individual works but the ways in which
signs and texts function within and are generated by describable
systems, codes, cultural practices and rituals. In this sense, the
essential thrust of the structuralist project seems to be towards
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96 STRUCTURALIST APPROACHES
the intertextual, in that it denies the existence of unitary objects
and emphasizes their systematic and relational nature, be they
literary texts or other art works.
In his influential essay ‘Structuralism and Literary Criticism’,
Genette elaborates on Claude Lévi-Strauss’s notion of the
bricoleur in order to flesh out a structuralist account of the
practice of the literary critic (ibid.: 3–25). The bricoleur, states
Genette, whether he be one of Lévi-Strauss’s primitive myth-
makers or a Western literary critic, creates a structure out of a
previous structure by rearranging elements which are already
arranged within the objects of his or her study. The structure
created by this rearrangement is not identical to the original
structure, yet it functions as a description and explanation of
the original structure by its very act of rearrangement. To put
this simply, the bricoleur-critic breaks down literary works into
‘themes, motifs, key-words, obsessive metaphors, quotations,
index cards, and references’ (ibid.: 5); in other words, s/he
rearranges the original literary work into the terms of literary
criticism. The critic can then display the work’s relation to the
system of ‘themes, motifs, key-words’ which make up the literary
system out of which the work was constructed.
Literary works, for a theorist like Genette, are not original,
unique, unitary wholes, but particular articulations (selections
and combinations) 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. As Genette states:
‘literary “production” is a parole, in the Saussurean sense, a
series of partially autonomous and unpredictable individual acts;
but the “consumption” of this literature by society is a langue’.
Readers, that is, tend to order literary texts ‘into a coherent
system’ (ibid.: 18–19). Both critic and author, then, can be termed
bricoleurs, but with one difference. 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. The
critic takes the work and returns it to the system, illuminating
the relation between work and system obscured by the author.
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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
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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,
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STRUCTURALIST APPROACHES 99
something not always kept in view by post-Aristotelian poetics,
that there is a distinction between the generic and the thematic.
This can help us to answer our previous question concerning
Hamlet, Wuthering Heights and Tess. From a generic point of
view tragedies should concern characters from the highest rungs
of society. That at least was part of Aristotle’s definition of the
genre. From that generic definition, out of our examples only
Hamlet qualifies as a tragedy. If we switch to a thematic definition
of tragedy, however, Wuthering Heights and Tess can be included.
The question still remains, however, whether tragedy really is
partly defined through the representation of socially ‘high’
characters like Hamlet, or whether it can include our two novelistic
examples which deal with themes of unrealizable love, jealousy,
the abuse of power and social estrangement.
Genette’s second point is that there is a general ‘confusion
between modes and genres’ (ibid.: 61). Genres, he reminds us,
are essentially literary categories. Modes, on the other hand,
are ‘natural forms’, or at least aspects of language itself, and
can be divided into ‘narrative’ and ‘discourse’. Narrative here
concerns the recounting of facts or events without attention being
placed on the person who is doing that recounting. Discourse,
however, places its focus on the person who speaks and the
situation from within which that person is speaking. The two
modes, narrative and discourse, thus involve what Genette styles
as two distinct ‘modes of enunciation’ (see ‘Frontiers of
Narrative’ in Genette 1982). Genette’s main point here is that
the traditional modal triad of narrative, dramatic and epic can
be viewed either in terms of mode or in terms of generic
categorization. Once again, however, there is often a confusion
between generic and modal definitions. There may be, that is, a
good deal of narrative, in terms of a mode of enunciation, in a
dramatic text, but, unless we distinguish between modes and
genres, poetics will forever find itself unable to stabilize its
presentation of the system of literary conventions, including a
viable definition of the various generic and sub-generic classes.
The desire to establish a viable and stable poetics of theme,
genre and mode depends, as Genette argues, on the notion of
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100 STRUCTURALIST APPROACHES
architexts, basic, unchanging (or at least slowly evolving)
building blocks which underpin the entire literary system.
However, the issue of the slow evolution of such categories
means that eventually even Genette has to admit to an inability
to finally, and for all time, determine such ‘architextual’ building
blocks (1992: 78). At this juncture other critics might be tempted
to recast their work as a radical poststructuralist call for plurality,
or a deconstructive unravelling of a major Western tradition of
thought, but Genette attempts to save the notion of poetics by
moving to a higher field of examination. His resolution of these
problems is based on his decision to redescribe the entire field
of poetics from a new perspective: that of transtextuality.
Textual transcendence, or transtextuality, is, according to
Genette, precisely what poetics has been attempting to describe
via the confused and misleading tools so far discussed. It in-
cludes issues of imitation, transformation, the classification of
types of discourse, along with the thematic, modal, generic and
formal categories and categorizations of traditional poetics. This
change in perspective allows Genette to conclude his examina-
tion of the history and current state of poetics by moving to
what in his next work in this series of studies, Palimpsests
(Genette, 1997a), he will call an open structuralism. That is, a
poetics which gives up on the idea of establishing a stable,
ahistorical, irrefutable map or division of literary elements, but
which instead studies the relationships (sometimes fluid, never
unchanging) which link the text with the architextural network
out of which it produces its meaning (Genette, 1992: 83–4). As
Genette states, emphasizing the open nature of this vision of
poetics: ‘The architext is, then, everywhere – above, beneath,
around the text, which spins its web only by hooking it here and
there onto that network of architexture’ (ibid.: 83).
Transtextuality, and what he calls architextuality, allow for an
‘endlessly forming and reforming poetics, whose object, let us
firmly state, is not the text, but the architext’ (ibid.: 84). This, it
must be noted, is not a radical instability or pluralism à la Barthes
or Kristeva, but a pragmatic structuralism which Genette goes
on to exemplify in the two studies which succeed The Architext.
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STRUCTURALIST APPROACHES 101
Transtextuality
Genette begins his massive study Palimpsests by reaffirming his
new approach to poetics: ‘The subject of poetics,’ he writes, ‘is
not the text considered in its singularity .... but rather the architext
or, if one prefers, the architextuality of the text ... the entire set of
general or transcendent categories – types of discourse, modes of
enunciation, literary genres – from which emerges each singular
text’ (Genette, 1997a: 1). Never one to rest on a settled critical
vocabulary, Genette immediately refines such a point by
subsuming architextuality within what he now calls transtextuality
‘or the textual transcendence of the text, which I have already
defined roughly as “all that sets the text in a relationship, whether
obvious or concealed, with other texts”’ (ibid.). Transtextuality
is, basically, Genette’s version of intertextuality and architextuality
one of its types. However, since Genette wishes to employ this
concept to chart ways in which texts can be systematically
interpreted and understood, and since he wishes to distance his
approach from poststructural approaches, he coins the term
transtextuality to cover all instances of the phenomenon in question
and then subdivides it into five more specific categories.
Genette terms his first kind of transtextuality, perhaps a little
confusingly, intertextuality. Genette’s intertextuality is, however,
not the concept employed within poststructuralism, since he
reduces it to ‘a relationship of copresence between two texts or
among several texts’ and as ‘the actual presence of one text within
another’ (ibid.: 1–2). Reduced now to issues of quotation,
plagiarism and allusion, intertextuality thus defined is no longer
concerned with the semiotic processes of cultural and textual
signification. Genette’s redescription gives us a very pragmatic
and determinable intertextual relationship between specific
elements of individual texts. Acknowledging the change in focus
and theoretical vocabulary, Genette defends this transformation
of the term by pointing to the fact that previous theorists of the
term have tended to concentrate on ‘semantic-semiotic
microstructures, observed at the level of a sentence, a fragment,
or a short, generally poetic, text’ (ibid.: 2).
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102 STRUCTURALIST APPROACHES
Taking up an analogy with the pictorial arts, Genette writes:
‘The intertextual “trace” ... is therefore more akin (like the
allusion) to the limited figure (to the pictorial detail) than to the
work considered as a structural whole’ (ibid.: 2–3). It is the
‘structural whole’, the ‘total field of relevant relationships’ which
Genette directs his work towards. At stake here is a distinction
between the poststructuralist recognition of the text’s relation
to the entirety of cultural signification and a more restricted,
structuralist-inspired focus on the supposedly closed, or at least
semi-autonomous, field of literature. Such a distinction involves
a complex clash of critical and theoretical motivations, which
include a clash between a desire like Barthes’s to observe how
the text ‘explodes and disperses’ (Barthes, 1981a: 135) and a
desire like Genette’s to place any specific example of textuality
within a viable system. What is involved, we might say, is an
opposition between dissemination and rearrangement which is
certainly not resolvable, but which requires to be noted if we
are to be able to read Genette’s open structuralist approach within
the broader perimeters of modern literary and cultural theory.
Genette describes his varieties of transtextuality out of strict
numerical order. In order to follow his arguments I will do the
same. The third type concerns what Genette calls metatextuality;
that is, when a text takes up a relation of ‘commentary’ to another
text: ‘It unites a given text to another, of which it speaks without
necessarily citing it (without summoning it), in fact sometimes
even without naming it’ (Genette, 1997a: 4). The very practice
of literary criticism and poetics is clearly involved in this concept,
which remains rather underdeveloped by Genette.
We have already examined architextuality, the fifth type of
transtextuality in Genette’s map. This aspect of the text, he
suggests, has to do with ‘the reader’s expectations, and thus their
reception of a work’ (ibid.: 5). Novels may signpost their
architextual relation to certain genres, sub-genres or conventions
by including a subtitle, as in Anne Radcliffe’s Gothic novel The
Mysteries of Udolpho: A Romance; other works perform similar
functions, as in David Bowie’s rather excessively denominated
1995 album, 1. Outside. The Diary of Nathan Adler, or The Art-
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STRUCTURALIST APPROACHES 103
Ritual Murder of Baby Grace Blue: A Non-Linear Gothic Hyper-
Cycle. Other texts may obscure their architextual relations to such
genres, as is the practice in most realist novels. We expect love
poems to be in the first person and directed to a specific addressee,
whilst in epic poems we expect other kinds of themes and narrative
styles than those we might find in a sonnet. The architextual nature
of texts, as we have seen, includes generic, modal, thematic and
figurative expectations about texts, although, as Genette warns
his readers, the five types of transtextuality, of which
architextuality is one, are not ‘separate and absolute categories
without any reciprocal contact or overlapping’ (ibid.: 7).
Genette’s second type of transtextuality is styled
paratextuality. This is clearly a concept of some importance to
Genette and we will break our discussion of Palimpsests to
explore his study devoted to paratextuality: Paratexts: Thresholds
of Interpretation (Genette, 1997b).
Paratextuality
The paratext, as Genette explains, marks those elements which
lie on the threshold of the text and which help to direct and
control the reception of a text by its readers. This threshold
consists of a peritext, consisting of elements such as titles,
chapter titles, prefaces and notes. It also includes an epitext
consisting of elements – such as interviews, publicity
announcements, reviews by and addresses to critics, private
letters and other authorial and editorial discussions – ‘outside’
of the text in question. The paratext is the sum of the peritext
and the epitext. Genette, at the beginning of his study, refers to
the deconstructive critic J. Hillis Miller’s meditation on the prefix
‘para’ and the manner in which examining the threshold, or
paratext, of a text positions us at once inside and yet outside its
material boundaries (Hillis Miller, 1979). The paratext does not
simply mark but occupies the text’s threshold – the space which
is both inside and outside (or ‘para’) – and thus, in a logic
explained before Genette by Jacques Derrida, it paradoxically
frames and at the same time constitutes the text for its readers
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104 STRUCTURALIST APPROACHES
(Derrida, 1987b). As Genette puts it elsewhere: ‘the paratext
consists, as [the] ambiguous prefix suggests, of all those things
which we are never certain belong to the text of a work but
which contribute to present – or “presentify” – the text by making
it into a book. It not only marks a zone of transition between
text and non-text (“hors-texte”), but also a transaction’ (Genette,
1988: 63). What interests Genette is not the kind of philosophical
problem derived from this aspect of textuality by
deconstructionists like Hillis Miller and Derrida, but rather the
transactional nature of the paratext.
The text you are currently reading is heavily marked by
paratextual elements in Genette’s sense. The design of the cover
is not without meaning, since it signals this text’s place within a
series of texts, The New Critical Idiom series, all of which share
a black cover design and a lower border which, in each text,
contains in colour a portion of a different photographic or
computer-generated image. Various other elements which stand
on this text’s threshold, such as the notice concerning the
objectives of The New Critical Idiom series and the description
of the study on the back cover serve as paratextual elements
which are designed to assist the reader in establishing what kind
of text they are being presented with and how to read it.
The paratext, for Genette, performs various functions which
guide the text’s readers and can be understood pragmatically in
terms of various simple questions, all concerned with the manner
of the text’s existence: when published? by whom? for what
purpose? Such paratextual elements also help to establish the text’s
intentions: how it should be read, how it should not be read.
Such an approach leads Genette into a densely packed study of
textual minutiae. The size of books, for instance, can signal various
paratextual significations, and so can the typeface chosen – as
Genette’s example of Thackeray’s Henry Esmond demonstrates.
The original Queen-Anne typeface was chosen by Thackeray to
support his novel’s thematic and stylistic pastiche; in modern
editions, in regularized typefaces, we lose this important aspect of
the text. Likewise, modern editions of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
might be said to eradicate an important paratextual function,
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STRUCTURALIST APPROACHES 105
including the text’s original anonymity. The image which was in
cluded before the text of Mary Shelley’s 1831 edition of
Frankenstein presents us with the creature starring in horror at a
skeleton which lies scattered below his bent legs. Frankenstein holds
open the door whilst he too stares in horror at the skeleton. The
moon, which is visible through the open window, seems to shine
down at precisely the same spot. The design is heavily symbolic
and suggests various readings, including one in which the centre of
horrified speculation is either the skeleton beneath the creature’s
bent legs or the naked creature’s genitalia, which are hidden from
the viewer’s direct gaze but open to the gaze of the creature and his
creator alike. Such a design clearly acts as a powerful paratextual
element, and modern readers of editions of Frankenstein which do
not include this frontispiece begin their reading of the novel in a
different fashion to readers of the 1831 edition.
As Genette demonstrates, there are a number of ways in which
the naming of the author or the titles of works can function to
control reception of the text. Genette distinguishes between
thematic titles which refer to the subject of the text and rhematic
titles which refer to the manner in which the text performs its
intentions. Genette gives the title and subtitle of Baudelaire’s
Le Spleen de Paris: Petits Poèmes en prose as an example. Le
Spleen de Paris, which is translated by Francis Scarfe as ‘Paris
Blues’, relates to the thematic element of the poem; Petits Poèmes
en prose relates to the rhematic element in that it establishes the
kind of poetry which will convey that theme.
A major peritextual field involves dedications, inscriptions,
epigraphs and prefaces; a field which, as Genette demonstrates,
can have major effects upon the interpretation of a text. It is clearly
not a matter of indifference whether a text is dedicated to ‘The
Queen’ or ‘To the Masses’. Just as obviously, particular quotations
used as inscriptions or epigraphs can set up important resonances
before the reader begins the text in question. A famous example
of this paratextual practice from the field of literature comes in
the epigraph to T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Hollow Men’: ‘Mistah Kurtz –
he dead’ (Eliot, 1974: 87). The quotation is from Joseph Conrad’s
Heart of Darkness and it establishes a host of intertextual
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106 STRUCTURALIST APPROACHES
resonances which the reader then both brings to the poem and
discovers within the poem itself. These include issues of failed
quest, juxtapositions between the ‘dead land’ of Eliot’s poem and
Imperial England, along with the colonized and the uncolonized
Africa of Conrad’s novel and, perhaps most importantly, Kurtz’s
often-quoted words ‘the horror – the horror’. So crucial, in fact,
does the epigraph become to Eliot’s poem that to read the text
without it would be to drastically diminish its significance.
A major distinction running throughout Genette’s Paratexts is
that between paratexts which are autographic, by the author, and
allographic, by someone other than the author, such as an editor
or publisher. At times, as Genette demonstrates, the autographic
and allographic can slip into modes of ambiguity crucial for an
interpretation of the text. We might think here of P. B. Shelley’s
anonymous allographic Preface for the first anonymous edition
of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, a paratextual element that has
caused radically misconceived claims about that novel, including
erroneous claims for P. B. Shelley’s authorship. The essential
function of the autographic or allographic preface is, Genette
asserts, to encourage the reader to read the text, and to instruct
the reader in how to read the text properly. A similar function can
be ascribed, he argues, to such epitextual features as the decision
to leave out of the published version the various Homeric chapter
titles of Ulysses, or Joyce’s ‘leaking’ to critics various plans
demonstrating the relations between Ulysses and its Homeric and
other literary and cultural inter-texts. We can add to such
phenomena manuscript revisions returned to a text by modern
scholarly editors, down to newspaper and magazine interviews,
authorial public performances or publishers’ decisions over book
design. Modern scholarly editions of texts, for example, crammed
as they are with such peritextual features as prefaces and notes,
and with what were originally epitextual features (such as private
letters, journal entries, original and later reviews), clearly signify
a text’s status as part of a literary canon and thus worthy of study.
We read such editions in a very different manner to the text’s
original readers and texts are radically transformed by the addition
of these paratextual elements.
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Such an account of paratextuality clearly marks it out, in
Genette’s hands, from the poststructuralist dismissal of authorial
intention we have observed as a major facet of intertextual theory.
Manfred Pfister has argued that such a reassertion of the
importance of authorial intention is a ruling characteristic of
structuralist versions of intertextuality, though seen from a
poststructuralist perspective such an approach seems merely to
strip the term of its original vitality and ideologically disruptive
force (Pfister, 1991: 210–11). Genette in fact asserts that the single
most important aspect of paratextuality is ‘to ensure for the text a
destiny consistent with the author’s purpose’ (Genette, 1997b:
407). He goes on: ‘the correctness of the authorial (and
secondarily, of the publisher’s) point of view is the implicit creed
and spontaneous ideology of the paratext’ (ibid.: 408). Such an
emphasis on authorial intention is not only contrary to
poststructuralist theory and practice but also runs counter to the
major thrust of structuralism, in which system (langue) is
privileged at the expense of work (parole) and thus signification
and function privileged at the expense of intention. It would appear,
however, that to keep transtextual relations within a determinate
and determinable field Genette must neutralize the radically
destabilizing and deauthorizing nature of intertextuality. The
author of the paratext may not originate or really affect the
paratextual system painstakingly described by Genette, yet
Genette himself cannot do without what Foucault would call the
‘author-function’ if he is to retain the pragmatic, open structuralist
approach he takes up with regard to his subject. The same reliance
on notions of authorial intention can be observed if we return to
the centre of his study of transtextual relations, Palimpsests.
Hypertextuality
Having passed through four of the five kinds of transtextuality
posited by Genette, we are left with the kind which forms the
focus of attention of Palimpsests itself, namely hypertextuality.
This phenomenon, according to Genette, involves: ‘any
relationship uniting a text B (which I shall call the hypertext) to
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108 STRUCTURALIST APPROACHES
an earlier text A (I shall, of course, call it the hypotext), upon
which it is grafted in a manner that is not that of commentary’
(Genette, 1997a: 5). What Genette terms the hypotext is termed
by most other critics the inter-text, that is a text which can be
definitely located as a major source of signification for a text. In
this sense, Homer’s Odyssey is a major inter-text, or in Genette’s
terms hypotext, for Joyce’s Ulysses. In his use of hypertextuality
Genette particularly refers to forms of literature which are
intentionally inter-textual. He writes: ‘let us posit the general
notion of a text in the second degree .... i.e., a text derived from
another pre-existent text’ (ibid.: 5). The Oxford English Dictionary
defines the word palismpsest as ‘a parchment, etc., which has
been written upon twice, the original writing having been rubbed
out’. Palimpsests suggest layers of writing and Genette’s use of
the term is to indicate literature’s existence in ‘the second degree’,
its non-original rewriting of what has already been written.
Genette’s concern is with intended and self-conscious
relations between texts. Hypertextuality marks a field of literary
works the generic essence of which lies in their relation to
previous works. As Genette puts this point:
Above all, hypertextuality, as a category of works, is in itself a generic
or, more precisely, transgeneric architext: I mean a category of texts
which wholly encompasses certain canonical (though minor) genres
such as pastiche, parody, travesty, and which also touches upon other
genres – probably all genres.
(Genette, 1997a: 8)
Concerned here, then, not with a general facet of language, or
culturally signifying practices, but with a generic aspect of the
closed system of literature, Genette’s hypertextuality might seem
rather similar to his architextuality. The main difference between
hypertextuality and architextuality is that whilst pastiche, parody,
travesty and caricature are essentially and intentionally
hypertextual, tragedy, comedy, the novel and the lyric are based
on the notion of the imitation of generic models rather than
specific hypotexts. The meaning of hypertextual works, Genette
argues, depends upon the reader’s knowledge of the hypotext
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which the hypertext either satirically transforms or imitates for
the purpose of pastiche.
The bulk of Genette’s study concerns the manner in which
hypertextual transpositions are made of specific hypotexts. Texts
can be transformed by processes of self-expurgation, excision,
reduction, amplification and so on. An example of self-
expurgation might be seen in the differences between the first
serialized version and the final published edition of Thomas
Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles. Hardy’s novel was for
financial reasons first published in serialized form between 4
July and 26 December 1891 in the literary magazine The
Graphic. In order to conform to the expectations of the late-
Victorian audience of The Graphic Hardy had to alter his
narrative so that Tess, instead of being raped by Alec
D’Urberville, goes through a fake marriage with him. Many other
changes to the novel were forced on him. The novel, as it was
originally imagined by Hardy, was finally published in 1912. In
the modern Penguin edition of Tess, the original Graphic version,
present through the scholarly notes at the back, exists as a
hypotext to the canonical version of 1912.
Excision and reduction might make us think of what in Britain
are known as bowdlerized versions of texts, versions of
Shakespeare or popular novels which Victorian publishers often
published minus the ‘sexy’ or religiously controversial bits.
Although Genette does not mention it, the phenomenon of film
adaptations of literary classics clearly constitutes another version
of such a hypertextual activity. The classic film adaptation of Emily
Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, starring Laurence Olivier and Merle
Oberon, concentrates on only the first nineteen chapters of the
novel. Film versions of the bulky novels of the Victorian period
such as those by Dickens or George Eliot, can clearly only
represent small sections of the actual text they hypertexually
transpose. Most film adaptations do not, of course, include the
all-pervading voice of third-person narrators which characterize
novels by authors such as Jane Austen or Henry James.
Amplifications are, of course, as prevalent and as significant
as hypertextual processes which reduce the hypotext. As Genette
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demonstrates, hypotexts can go through processes of extension,
contamination and expansion, as in Thomas Mann’s Joseph and
His Brothers, which amplifies a Biblical hypotext of
approximately 26 pages to a novel of approximately 1,600 pages.
A more recent example of amplification comes in Dreamworks’
animated film Prince of Egypt about Moses and the Biblical
story of the escape from Egypt of the Jewish people. In Exodus
2: 5–11 we find the account of how the infant Moses is
discovered by the Pharaoh’s daughter, is given to a maid and
comes to manhood. The film version spends a great part of its
time developing a narrative in which Moses is brought up by
the Pharaoh and his wife, is fully integrated into Egyptian social
life, and finally rebels against his father, brother and the whole
of Egyptian culture. Prince of Egypt can be said to amplify a
possibility which is unstated in Exodus, that Moses may have
been influenced by Egyptian culture. It elaborates out of this
potential within the hypotext a whole narrative of royal adoption
and so finally amplifies the gaps within the Biblical narrative
into a film in which the exodus of the Jewish people is conceived
in terms of a story of one individual’s rebellion against familial
values.
One of the transformations produced by such amplification
involves another dimension of Genette’s study, namely
‘transmotivization’. The transformation of motivation in
hypertexts can be a fruitful area of study, as Genette
demonstrates. Hypertexts can give a character motivations
lacking in the hypotext, as in the example of Prince of Egypt. At
other times there can be a suppression or eliding of motivation.
In Homer’s Odyssey Ulysses is questing to return home after
the war between the Greeks and the Trojans dramatized in
Homer’s Iliad. In Joyce’s Ulysses we spend a day in the life of
his novel’s protagonist, Leopold Bloom, and, although the
narrative is structured by and shot through with references to
Homer’s Odyssey, no international conflict is explicitly
mentioned, at least in relation to Bloom himself. Leopold Bloom
may well be a traveller of the mind, and a figure not completely
at home in his home town of Dublin, yet it remains true to say
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that his motivations involve a set of expectations and desires
radically different from that of Homer’s Ulysses.
Genette’s study of hypertextuality, as he admits near the end
of his study, has a major source in his love of Jorge Luis Borges’s
‘Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote,’ a short story in which
Menard writes ‘with his own resources a new version of Don
Quixote, which was rigorously and literally identical with
Cervantes’s text but which two intervening centuries of history
had invested with new complexity and depth and with an entirely
different meaning’ (Genette, 1997a: 317; 393–4). Such
acknowledgement of the effect upon his study of the ‘vagaries’
of his own ‘personal readings’ (ibid.: 394), the fact that no
individual study of the literary system can hope to be
‘exhaustive’, is typical of Genette’s open structuralism. As stated
at the end of his study, Genette seeks merely to explore the ways
in which texts are read in relation to other texts. He contrasts
such an open approach to what we might style a closed
structuralism, which is ‘concerned with the closure of the text
and with deciphering its inner structures’ (ibid.: 399). Thinking
of the text by Borges, we might object that it is one thing to
examine the hypertextual relations and functions of a text which
explicitly foregrounds its reliance on and transformation of a
hypotext; it is quite another to deal with a text which hides its
hypotext or depends upon a hypotext no longer available to or
known by modern readers.
This problem of the missing or forgotten hypotext crops up a
number of times in Genette’s study. During his discussion of
hypertextual continuation, Genette considers what occurs when
a continuation’s hypotext is no longer available to a culture; he
argues that in the case of texts such as Rabelais’s Pantagruel
the text’s status changes from hypotext to autonomous text. Most
teachers of literature confront the same problem when attempting
to teach certain canonical texts. We cannot necessarily presume
that the mythical hypotext standing behind P. B. Shelley’s
Prometheus Unbound will be recognized by modern readers.
Sometimes even the scholarly community forgets important
hypotexts, long buried in forgotten traditions. In such cases the
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112 STRUCTURALIST APPROACHES
hypertext becomes merely a text, a non-relational, non-
transformational work. Genette also argues that all texts are
potentially hypertextual, but that sometimes the existence of a
hypotext is too uncertain to be the basis for a hypertextual
reading. He gives the example of Flaubert’s novel Leuwen, which
may have a hypotext in a manuscript draft of a novel entitled Le
Lieutenant sent to the author by Mme Gaulthier in 1833.
Genette’s response to this kind of indeterminate case is perhaps
revealing: ‘This is the most irritating palimpsest of all, which
reduces me to hunches and to questionings’ (ibid.: 383). We
might want to suggest, however, that it is precisely in that critical
act of interpretation of the text which he eschews that such
hunches and questionings are positively embraced. Genette’s
resolution of his own unease with regard to uncertain cases is to
remind himself and his readers that ultimately every hypertext
‘can be read for itself and in its relation to its hypotext’ (ibid.:
397). For Genette, indeterminacies within an individual text are
unimportant, since his task is to establish a general system of
possibilities and functions. As he puts it:
Every hypertext, even a pastiche, can be read for itself without
becoming perceptibly ‘agrammatical’; it is invested with a meaning
that is autonomous and thus in some manner sufficient. But sufficient
does not mean exhaustive. In every hypertext there is an ambiguity
that Riffaterre denies to intertextual reading.
(Genette, 1997a: 397)
It might be argued here that Genette’s project, grounded on the
assertion that a structuralist poetics must uncover the transtextual
nature of texts, cannot perhaps quite so easily retreat to the ap-
parently commonsensical argument that texts have a dual exist-
ence: as autonomous texts and as inter-texts. Various problems
lurk behind Genette’s approach here: the establishment with
regard to paratextuality of the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’ of the
text; the question of the relationship between literature, the other
arts and the cultural text generally; the question of authorial
intention, its establishment by the reader, and the reader’s own
role in the production of meaning.
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The French theorist Laurent Jenny, in his ‘The Strategy of
Forms’, distinguishes between works which are explicitly inter
textual – such as imitations, parodies, citations, montages and
plagiarisms – and those works in which the intertextual relation
is not foregrounded. Texts, Jenny argues, clarifying Genette’s
distinctions, can, at one and the same time, have their intertextual
determinants directed towards a specific work (hypotext) or
towards a model of a kind of textuality such as parody or
montage, à la Genette’s architextuality. When a work enters into
a relation of intertextuality with a genre, what was, in that
architextual genre, a code (a generic structure) can become part
of the text’s or the hypertext’s message (Jenny, 1982: 42). We
move, in such cases, from general codes within a genre to a
meaningful element of a particular text. A modern novelist, for
example, might portray the collapse of a protagonist’s fortunes
but without suggesting that this misfortune is unmerited, or a
cause for pity. In this case, a code (the ‘fall’ of the tragic hero)
from the genre of tragedy has been intertextually utilized, but it
has also been given a specific meaning within the text in question,
a meaning not evident in the general principles of the genre of
tragedy. Jenny’s point is close to Genette’s, in that, whilst it
plays down the interpretive role of the reader, it also recognizes
that the processes of transtextuality involved in hypertextual
translation are never neutral and always involve a resignification
or a semiotic utilization of a previous formal structure for means
other than those produced within the original structure. We are
close here to Kristeva’s point that intertextuality involves the
transposition of elements from existent systems into new
signifying relations.
The heart of Jenny’s argument comes in the section of his
essay entitled ‘Status of Intertextual Discourse’, where he writes
in a manner which cannot but remind us of the poststructural
approach of Kristeva and, particularly, Barthes:
What is characteristic of intertextuality, is that it introduces a new way
of reading which destroys the linearity of the text. Each intertextual
reference is the occasion for an alternative: either one continues reading,
taking it only as a segment like any other, or else one turns to the
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114 STRUCTURALIST APPROACHES
source text, carrying out a sort of intellectual anamnesis where the
intertextual reference appears like a paradigmatic element that has been
displaced, deriving from a forgotten structure. But in fact the alternative
is only present for the analyst. These two processes really operate
simultaneously in intertextual reading – and in discourse – studding
the text with bifurcations that gradually expand in semantic space.
(Jenny, 1982: 44–5)
In other words, to say, as Genette finally does in Palimpsests,
that the reader has a choice between reading the text for itself or
in terms of its intertextual relations is a kind of bad faith. Such
an approach divides up what is indivisible within the work, its
textual structure and its intertextual relations. This is a division
which can only be achieved by the reader performing a kind of
negative forgetting of the intertextual dimension.
Jenny is particularly challenged by the manner in which the
intertextual dimension disrupts any work’s formal structure.
‘Intertextuality,’ he writes, ‘speaks a language whose vocabulary
is the sum of all existing texts. There takes place a sort of release
on the level of parole, a promotion to discourse of a power
infinitely superior to that of everyday monologic discourse’
(Jenny, 1982: 45). If the reader’s initial desire is to find the
‘meaning’ of a work, then intertextuality comes to be seen as
that phenomenon of textuality which disturbs such a project by
potentially shattering the work’s structure: ‘The problem of
intertextuality is to bind together several texts in one without
their destroying each other and without the [text] ... being torn
apart as a structural whole’ (ibid.: 45).
Jenny’s essay is largely concerned with charting how different
textual practices, from Modernism to Surrealism to the cut-up
techniques of William Burroughs, seek to utilize and/or control
the disruptive tendencies of intertextuality. Such a study might
be viewed as complementary to Genette’s work, gesturing
towards a poetics of the kind of ambiguities and disturbances
referred to by Genette at the conclusion of his Palimpsests. On
the other hand, Jenny’s insistence that intertextuality’s essence
lies in the ‘perturbation’ of formal and thematic structures, might
strengthen the argument against Genette that what is required is
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not a poetics which can separate textual from intertextual
dimensions but a theory of interpretation which can explore the
interpretive processes by which the clash of these two dimensions
is registered and reconciled. To say this is to suggest a shift of
focus from Genette to the theorist who most seriously haunts
his work, Michael Riffaterre.
STRUCTURALIST HERMENEUTICS: RIFFATERRE
Michael Riffaterre’s work can be said to straddle structuralism,
poststructuralism, semiotics, psychoanalytic theories of literature
and various other theories of reading. Yet it can be said that his
work is grounded on the belief in a stable and accurate account
of textual meaning and intertextual relations which we are, in
this Chapter, calling structuralist.
The core of Riffaterre’s semiotic approach is his belief that
literary texts are not referential (mimetic). On the contrary, he
argues that they have their meaning because of the semiotic
structures which link up their individual words, phrases,
sentences, key images, themes and rhetorical devices. At the
beginning of his seminal study Semiotics of Poetry he writes of
the reader’s need to ‘surmount the mimesis hurdle’ (Riffaterre,
1978: 6). The centrality of intertextuality in Riffaterre’s work is
signalled by this anti-referential approach, since, as we have
seen, intertextual theory argues that texts and signs refer not to
the world or even primarily to concepts, but to other texts, other
signs. Riffaterre frequently alludes to what he calls the
‘referential fallacy’ and asserts that ‘the text refers not to objects
outside of itself, but to an inter-text. The words of the text signify
not by referring to things, but by presupposing other texts’
(1980b: 228). However, surmounting the ‘mimesis hurdle’ also
means, for Riffaterre, paying tribute to ‘the self-sufficient text’.
For Riffaterre, true analysis seeks to describe the uniqueness of
the literary text. Whilst poetics ‘generalizes and dissolves a
work’s uniqueness into poetic language’, the textual analysis
Riffaterre favours attempts to explain its uniqueness (1983: 2).
Riffaterre states that the ‘largest analysable corpus that we
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conceive in literature should be the text and not a collection of
texts’ (ibid.: 5). The text itself, because of its uniqueness, can,
as Riffaterre puts it, ‘control its own decoding’ (ibid.: 6).
What is at face value a rather paradoxical insistence on inter-
textuality and on the text’s self-sufficient uniqueness is only
explicable when we enter into the minutiae of Riffaterre’s theory
of reading and of textuality. However, it should immediately
alert us both to the circumscribed domain of enquiry Riffaterre
allows for the hermeneutic project and to his belief that such a
project can produce right or proper reading.
The reading strategy Riffaterre charts is one in which the
reader at first seeking for a textual mimesis is forced, by the
indeterminacies of the text, into a deeper examination of the
text’s non-referential structures. Reading, then, takes place on
two successive levels: first, a mimetic level which tries to relate
textual signs to external referents and tends to proceed in a linear
fashion; second, a retroactive reading which proceeds, in a non-
linear fashion, to unearth the underlying semiotic units and
structures which produce the text’s non-referential significance.
What forces the reader into the leap from a mimetic to semiotic
interpretation of the text is recognizing what Riffaterre calls the
text’s ‘ungrammaticalities’. These are aspects of the text which
are contradictory on a referential reading but resolved when we
reread the text in terms of its underlying sign structures.
In the following poem by Sylvia Plath, for example, the reader
working with a referential model might presume that the poem’s
title refers to the addresser’s own name; there seems no other
referential reason why the poem should have this title:
Mary’s Song
The Sunday lamb cracks in its fat.
The fat
Sacrifices its opacity ...
A window, holy gold.
The fire makes it precious,
The same fire
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Melting the tallow heretics,
Ousting the Jews.
Their thick palls float
Over the cicatrix of Poland, burnt-out
Germany.
They do not die.
Grey birds obsess my heart,
Mouth-ash, ash of eye.
They settle. On the high
Precipice
That emptied one man into space
The ovens glowed like heavens, incandescent.
It is a heart,
This holocaust I walk in,
O golden child the world will kill and eat.
(Plath, 1981: 257)
Having performed an initial reading, the alert reader will begin
to recognize a series of connections on what Riffaterre calls the
semiotic level: the level we reach after the referential level has
failed to explain the text to us. The poem is full of references to
people persecuted for their religious beliefs: the ‘tallow her-
etics’, Catholics or Protestants persecuted and killed after the
Reformation; the Jews who suffered genocide under the Nazi
regime; the ‘one man’ who reminds us of Christ, persecuted
and crucified in the Gospel story. Having made these connec-
tions, the reader might then recognize the manner in which the
domestic scene with which the poem begins and ends, a mother
with child preparing the ‘Sunday roast’, is connected to these
historical referents. The mother, in fact, compares herself to the
Biblical Mary: her child becomes symbolically a Christ-figure,
whom the world will ‘kill and eat’. The semiotic connections
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between the domestic scene and the historical referents are ex-
tended by the last line, which on this level seems to refer to the
ritual of the Eucharist in which Christ’s body is re-membered in
the taking of holy wine and bread. To interpret the poem in this
manner, then, we need to move from a mimetic level to a semiotic
level in which apparently ambiguous images and phrases are
connected on a deeper, non-referential level.
Riffaterre resists the traditional literary critical notion of
‘ambiguity’ and the various poststructuralist and
deconstructionist versions of that concept. Whilst concepts like
ambiguity or ambivalence serve to highlight the undecidability
of textual meaning, Riffaterre prefers to substitute alternative
figures and explanatory concepts which work to reinforce the
notion of a move from initial ambiguity or ungrammaticality on
a mimetic level to final decidability on a semiotic level. Against
the term ambiguity, Riffaterre offers the rhetorical term
‘syllepsis’, a word which means something in one context and
has an opposed or clashing meaning in another context. Another
term frequently invoked by Riffaterre, the ‘interpretant’, is taken
from the linguist C. S. Pierce and also emphasizes the possibility
of resolving undecidable textual units by moving to another,
more structurally coherent, dimension. An interpretant, Riffaterre
informs his readers, is a sign which explains the relation between
one sign and another sign. ‘Persecution’ might be said to function
as an interpretant in Mary’s Song.
In Riffaterre’s theory of reading, then, we surmount the
mimetic hurdle by moving to the structurally more coherent level
of semiosis. In Plath’s poem, for example, the connection
between a domestic scene and the images of persecution and
murder might be seen as ‘ungrammatical’ on a referential level
(Riffaterre does not restrict ungrammaticality to breaks in the
rules concerning the construction of sentences). To make sense
of Plath’s text we need to dispense with the idea that it has
anything literal to say about the world and to move to a
recognition that its meaning, or what Riffaterre terms its
‘significance’, is based on an inversion of culturally normative
associations: the roasting of a joint of lamb being unconnected
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to historical events, for example. The poem inverts these
culturally normative associations by taking the roasting of the
‘Sunday lamb’ as a cue for a series of refer ences to historical
scenes of violence. Once we recognize this inversion of context
and the common discourse for that context, we have recognized
the semiotic principle or system upon which the whole poem
depends, and out of which it produces not only its significance
but its idiosyncratic unity.
For Riffaterre, texts produce their significance out of
transformations of socially normative discourse, which he calls
the ‘sociolect’. A text’s significance, we might say, depends on
an ‘idiolect’ which transforms a recognizable element of the
sociolect by means of inversion, conversion, expansion or
juxtaposition. The way the reader recognizes this transformation,
and so recognizes the text’s semiotic unity, is to discover what
Riffaterre calls the poem’s ‘matrix’, a word, phrase or sentence
unit which does not necessarily exist in the text itself but which
represents the kernel upon which the text’s semiotic system is
based. As Riffaterre puts it: ‘The matrix is hypothetical, being
only the grammatical and lexical actualization of a structure’
(1978: 19). The text’s structural unity is created by the
transformation of this matrix. In Plath’s poem the matrix perhaps
concerns the common cultural assumption that mothers wish to
preserve their children’s innocence or that the preservation of
childhood purity is an important thing when individuals come
to adulthood. Since Plath’s poem focuses on what the ‘world’
does to those seeking to retain religious belief and thus a kind
of spiritual innocence, the poem might be said to work by
negating a matrix expressible in something like the following
phrase: ‘blessed are the innocent’.
Only when we have recognized the matrix and passed to the
semiotic significance of the text, do the text’s various apparent
‘ungrammaticalities’ become understandable as referring to an
‘invariant’ structure. The invariant structure is the manner in
which all elements of the text can be said to work by transforming
the matrix. This fundamental level of the text may be signposted
by aspects which, though they are not the matrix, point to or
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120 STRUCTURALIST APPROACHES
embody it in some way. This is what Riffaterre styles as the
‘model’, and for Plath’s poem we might imagine for the model
phrases such as: ‘the innocent or pure or faithful are made victims
by the world’. Such phrases might alert the reader to the
‘descriptive system’ normally associated with the words
‘innocence’ or ‘pure’ or ‘faithful’: a descriptive system which
would include a series of notions which refer to precisely
opposite situations and contexts to those invoked in the poem.
Texts, on this model, are expansions and developments of small
signifying units. As Riffaterre writes:
The poem results from the transformation of the matrix, a minimal
and literal sentence, into a longer, complex, and non-literal periphrasis.
The matrix is hypothetical, being only the grammatical and lexical
actualization of a structure. The matrix may be epitomized in one
word, in which case the word will not appear in the text. It is always
actualized in successive variants; the form of these variants is governed
by the first or primary actualization, the model. Matrix, model, and
text are variants of the same structure.
(Riffaterre, 1978: 19)
Riffaterre is a superb close reader of texts, his characteristic man-
ner of presenting theoretical points being through intricate inter-
pretations of canonical texts. Such an approach tends to generate
more and more refinements to its key concepts. The attempt to
follow his vision of textuality and intertextuality is, indeed, an
experience in which key words such as ‘matrix’ and ‘model’ tend
to blend and merge into each other. Riffaterre’s concern is with
what it is to read, with what it is to produce a text. He is not
concerned, that is, with what might constitute the unchanging
dimensions of the literary system itself. This concern with the
phenomenology of reading can be discerned in the rather blurred
relationship drawn in his work between the notion of the ‘intertext’
and of the ‘hypogram’. An understanding of these terms brings
us closer to Riffaterre’s vision of intertextuality.
Riffaterre distinguishes between what he calls the inter-text
and intertextuality itself: the ‘latter,’ he writes, ‘is the web of
functions that constitutes and regulates the relationship between
text and intertext’ (1990a: 57). As he states, the inter-text is not
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STRUCTURALIST APPROACHES 121
to be viewed in terms of ‘sources’ and thus in terms of one text’s
purposeful ‘influence [by] or imitation [of]’ another text or group
of texts. An inter-text, rather:
is a corpus of texts, textual fragments, or text-like segments of the
sociolect that shares a lexicon and, to a lesser extent, a syntax with
the text we are reading (directly or indirectly) in the form of synonyms,
or even conversely, in the form of antonyms. In addition, each member
of this corpus is a structural homologue of the text.
(Riffaterre, 1984: 142)
The origin of a text’s significance is not found, Riffaterre is
implying, by discovering a text or group of texts which suppos-
edly lie behind it; specific prior texts need only be invoked if
such exist which sufficiently characterize the aspect of the
sociolect which is being transformed by the text in question.
Even when there is indisputably a text-to-text relationship in-
volved in a specific text’s generation of significance, the point
of interpretive emphasis is not necessarily that relationship but
the structural homologue (homologous: having the same rela-
tion, proportion, relative position; corresponding) which that
relation foregrounds. Because the inter-text is an aspect of the
sociolect rather than a specific text or group of texts, Riffaterre
can go on to assert that, for semiotic interpretation to occur, all
that is required is what he calls the presupposition of the inter-
text. We do not, that is, need to discover specific inter-texts be-
hind the texts we read; all we need to do to produce a sufficient
interpretation is to assume that such an inter-text – either a spe-
cific text or a piece of socially significant language – is being
transformed by the text in question. Riffaterre’s answer to the
problem of the missing inter-text, which we observed in our
analysis of Genette, is simply to argue that it can be presup-
posed by the reader. Writing of the act of widening out of the
comparison of textual units beyond the text itself, Riffaterre
states:
Intertextual reading is the perception of similar comparabilities from
text to text; or it is the assumption that such comparing must be
done if there is no intertext at hand wherein to find comparabilities.
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122 STRUCTURALIST APPROACHES
In the latter case, the text holds clues (such as formal and semantic
gaps) to a complementary intertext lying in wait somewhere,
(Riffaterre, 1980a: 626)
We have seen in our analysis of Plath’s poem that a semiotic
interpretation of that poem need not locate a specific inter-text
or group of inter-texts in order to describe the sociolectic codes
upon which it builds its significance. The reason why the inter-
text need not be located, but only presupposed, leads us on to
the hypogram, which is, as Riffaterre puts it, ‘the text imagined
by him [the reader] in its pretransformational state’:
This hypogram (a single sentence or string of sentences) may be made
out of clichés, or it may be a quotation from another text, or a
descriptive system. Since the hypogram always has a positive or a
negative ‘orientation’ (the cliché is meliorative or pejorative, the
quotation has its position on an esthetic and/or ethical scale, the
descriptive system reflects the connotations of its kernel word), the
constituents of the conversion always transmute the hypogram’s
markers ... This means that the significance will be a positive
valorization of the textual semiotic unit if the hypogram is negative,
and a negative valorization if the hypogram is positive.
(Riffaterre, 1978: 63–4)
Although the terms inter-text and hypogram may seem to merge
into one another, the hypogram represents specifically liter-
ary or ‘poeticized’ signs. A hypogram depends on the notion
that certain words or word groups already possess a ‘poetic’
function in the sociolect. Our reading of Plath’s Mary’s Song
depends upon long-standing cultural associations connected
to the word ‘innocence’. A text’s hypograms will be those of
its signs which relate to already existent semiotically signify-
ing words or word-groups within the sociolect.
‘Hypogrammatic derivation,’ Riffaterre writes, exists when-
ever ‘the verbal sequence patterns itself upon word groups
which pre-exist in the language and have usually been long
tried and tested in literature’ (1977: 111).
In Semiotics of Poetry Riffaterre gives the following example
from Apollinaire (1978: 97):
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STRUCTURALIST APPROACHES 123
Et vous cils roseaux qui vous mirez dans I’eau profonde et claire de
ses regards
Roseaux discrets plus éloquents que les penseurs humains ô cils
penseurs penchés au-dessus des abîmes
[And you eyelashes reeds looking at yourselves in the deep clear
water of her gaze/ Reeds discreet more eloquent than human
thinkers oh eyelashes thinkers leaning over chasms]
Although on a referential level this verse, with its prominent
eyelashes acting as addressee, and its association of those
eyelashes with reeds, doesn’t appear to make much sense, when
we remember that the metaphor ‘eyelash–reeds’ is ‘a traditional
image for feminine eyelashes, themselves metonymic of woman
as love-object’ (1978: 98) we begin to unravel the poem’s
significance. The woman need not be addressed herself, since
conventionally her eyelashes can stand in for her whole body,
and thus her beauty in toto. The verse’s matrix is something like
‘You are beautiful’: ‘The model then expands in a descriptive
sequence where the eyelashes in turn exemplify that beauty’
(ibid.). The metaphor takes us to one of the verse’s hypograms,
the ‘descriptive system of the word eye’, since conventionally,
in love poetry, ‘eyelashes are to the eye what reeds are to a lake’
(ibid.). Activating the eye-hypogram means that the addressee’s
eyes need not be referred to directly at all, since they are
necessarily invoked by the cliché involved in the metaphor of
eyelash–reeds.
Riffaterre goes on to demonstrate how various inter-texts
can explain elements of the second line, specifically the
initially puzzling ‘discreet’ and ‘human thinkers’: the first
relating to the story of King Midas and the place of reeds
within it; the second ‘an oft-quoted sentence of Pascal’s’
which itself, because of its subsequent conventionality,
functions as a hypogram: “l’homme n’est qu’un roseau, mais
c’est un roseau pensant” [man is a reed, but a reed that thinks]’
(1978: 99).
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124 STRUCTURALIST APPROACHES
In Riffaterre’s work, therefore, the hypogram represents what
Barthes calls ‘the already read’. As Jonathan Culler puts it:
the hypogram is not located in the text itself but is the product of past
semiotic and literary practice, and it is in perceiving a sign’s reference
to this pre-existing phrase or complex that the reader identifies the
sign as ‘poetic’. The apparently mimetic sign is seen as a transformation
of past poetic discourse. But ‘for the poeticity to be activated in the
text, the sign referring to a hypogram must also be a variant of that
text’s matrix’ [1978: 23]. In other words, poetic signs in a text are
powerfully overdetermined: they both refer to a pre-existing hypogram
and are variants or transformations of a matrix.
(Culler, 1981: 83)
It is, above all, this overdetermination of the poetic sign which
marks the difference between Riffaterre’s approach and that
of the poststructuralist utilizations of semiotic theory we have
previously examined. The overdetermined nature of the literary
sign might indeed lead us to locate or presuppose inter-texts
and hypograms which clarify the structural significance at the
heart of a text; yet such intertextual functions can be
presupposed by the reader, and what counts is the unravelling
of the code, just as an analyst would unravel the overdetermined
dream symbols of a patient. In this approach Riffaterre manages
to avoid unravelling the text into the infinitely regressive
domains of a poststructuralist vision of the general or social
text.
Riffaterre’s interpretive practice is dependent on discovering
the ways in which texts produce semiotic unity by transforming
socially shared codes, clichés, oppositions and descriptive
systems; yet such an approach refuses to accept that such a
reliance on the sociolect involves the text in anything other than
its own self-generating system, its idiolectic and thus unique
significance. Whilst Barthes, Kristeva and other poststructuralist
textual or semiotic analysts move outwards from the text to what
we have called the general or social text and so explode the
traditional idea of textual unity, Riffaterre reads in a backwards
movement, from text to textual invariant, from mimetic
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STRUCTURALIST APPROACHES 125
ungrammaticalities to semiotic (textual) unity. As he puts it: ‘A
poem is read poetically backwards’ (1978: 19). In this sense,
the poem’s significance depends upon the reader’s bringing to
the text of a knowledge of the sociolect which will unlock its
initially hidden meanings. Texts presuppose inter-texts, which
the reader must then actualize within a semiotic reading of the
text. The theory depends heavily on the belief not only that texts
give us clear clues to their decoding (a belief, that is, that texts
can be properly decoded in their own terms), but also that readers
have the capacity, the knowledge of the sociolect and of literary
traditions, which will allow them to perform such a successful
decoding.
Literary competence
Riffaterre is a celebrated theorist and practitioner of literary
criticism. However, his reliance on a notion of linguistic or
literary competence has produced a series of criticisms and
objections. The question of what happens when specific inter-
texts are culturally lost returns with even more frequency in
Riffaterre’s work than in Genette’s. Riffaterre argues that such
a problem is surmounted by his theory of linguistic/literary
competence and thus the reader’s ability to presuppose the inter-
text. At the conclusion of his essay ‘Interpretation and
Undecidability’, for example, he asks: ‘Does not undecidability
become final, a genuine impasse, when the intertext disappears
from readers’ memories and traditions? Can interpretation
impede the gradual obsolescence of the intertext without the
aid of philology, an archaeology of reading?’ His answer to these
questions is characteristic:
Interpretation remains relatively impervious to the intertext’s
obsolescence because the text, as the ungrammatical reverse of a
sociolectic obverse, goes on pointing to this obverse even after the
latter has been effaced by time; all that is needed for communication
is the postulation of the absent meaning. All that is needed for the
text to function is the presupposition of the intertext. Certainly,
presupposition itself cannot exist unless the reader is familiar with
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126 STRUCTURALIST APPROACHES
the structures or ganizing a representation of reality: but these are
the very stuff of our linguistic competence.
(Riffaterre, 1980b: 239)
To argue that different readers have different levels of literary
competence, and come from different literary and cultural tra-
ditions, might seem a simple enough rebuff to this statement
(see Clayton and Rothstein, 1991: 26). However, when he is
evoking literary competence Riffaterre is not referring to knowl-
edge of texts and canons, but is rather referring to an adequate
possession of the sociolect. Thus, the competence he is refer-
ring to involves the reader’s awareness of language as it is pres-
ently used in communication and as it has been used in previ-
ous eras. To this we might object that the reference to a single,
communal sociolect is a naïve generalization. We might also
object that the contemporary currency of past literary and cul-
tural symbols, descriptive systems, themes, generic and other
codes, is insufficiently analysed in Riffaterre’s work. Riffaterre,
we might want to say, relies on an insufficient historical under-
standing of text production.
More specific objections can be established with regard to the
Riffaterrean system if we focus on one specific example of his
interpretive method. In his essay ‘Intertextual Representation: On
Mimesis as Interpretive Discourse’, Riffaterre, along with claims
about the modes of conversion associated with the hypogram,
develops his thoughts concerning the ‘obligatory’ nature of
intertextuality in textual decoding. In mimetic or representational
poetry, for instance, texts produce semiotic unity, Riffaterre argues,
either by ‘resorting to an intertext incompatible with [the] reality
[being depicted]’ or ‘by negating an intertext compatible with
that reality’ (1984: 143). His example of the first variety is William
Carlos Williams’s Modernist poem ‘The Red Wheelbarrow’
(quoted in Riffaterre, 1984: 144):
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
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STRUCTURALIST APPROACHES 127
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens
The poem, argues Riffaterre, produces its significance by com-
paring a common object to the highly crafted objects of the art
world. The word which alerts us to this transformative deploy-
ment of the language of high art in the description of such a
commonplace object as a wheelbarrow is the word ‘glazed’.
Riffaterre writes: ‘“Glazed” conjures up a vast intertext of
artefacts made with aesthetic intent. The representations it
evokes are everything that a wheelbarrow emphatically is not
... Our perception of the wheelbarrow is determined by the
intertext rather than by the fact that the poem’s construction
gives us the elemental thing – unattached, unmotivated real-
ity’ (1984: 145).
His example of the second kind of poem, where the text
negates an inter-text compatible with the reality being
represented, is Wordsworth’s sonnet ‘Composed Upon
Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802’:
Earth has not anything to show more fair:
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty:
This city now doth, like a garment, wear
The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
Open unto the fields, and to the sky;
All bright and glittering in the smokeless steep
In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill;
Ne’er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!
The river glideth at his own sweet will:
Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still.
(Riffaterre, 1984: 149)
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128 STRUCTURALIST APPROACHES
Riffaterre’s reading of this poem depends upon a recognition
of the polarities and equivalencies established within it between
natural and urban imagery. More precisely, the poem is said to
negate the sort of city-code we might expect to dominate a poem
on the subject of London:
Wordsworth chooses the most powerfully representative of all the
metonyms of London in common parlance. In all allusions to the
modern Babylon [i.e. London], ‘smoke’ summarizes every stereotype
about urban pollution that arose from the conflicting ideologies of
the sublime in nature and of the realism born of the industrial
revolution. ‘Smokeless’ literally quotes from the intertext, in
accordance with the law that we cannot negate anything in language
without naming it.
(ibid.: 153)
The inter-text here, then, is the conventional sociolectic code
concerning the city as a place antithetical to a positively
encoded nature. The poem’s significance depends on a negation
of that city-code, which not only has the effect of invoking the
nature-code but of producing a kind of positive representation
out of a double negative. Negating the expected relation
between the city of London and a smoke-filled environment,
Riffaterre argues, the poem merely reinforces our cultural
opposition between city and nature in the very act of negating
that opposition. We remain, that is, with our sociolectic sense
of the city as smoke-filled and of nature as smokeless, only
here we view the city of London in terms of the nature-code
rather than the city-code. A confirmation of such points can
be found, Riffaterre argues, by noting the representation of
the Thames as free-flowing rather than its expected
representation in terms of something approximating William
Blake’s ‘charter’d Thames’ in his poem ‘London’. Riffaterre
concludes: ‘The spectacle therefore is born not of a spectator’s
delusion but of a cancellation of sociolectic conventions: this
is enough to make it [the poem’s representation of London] a
coded sign, the self-sufficient icon of a truth deeper than
conventional representation’ (ibid.: 154).
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STRUCTURALIST APPROACHES 129
Riffaterre’s argument that the decoding of such texts is
‘obligatory’, that if we are attentive to their deeper structural
transformations of sociolectic units we cannot but locate their
semiotic unity, is, as various commentators have remarked,
belied by the fact that he invariably posits his readings as
correctives to prior interpretive traditions. As Culler puts it: ‘it
is difficult to treat the efforts of previous readers simultaneously
as the phenomena one wishes to explain and as the errors one is
attempting to surpass’ (Culler, 1981: 94).
One possible objection is that, because Riffaterre’s theoretical
model interprets all texts as elaborations of small semiotic
kernels, matrixes, intertextual or hypogrammatic units, it evades
the generic and formal differences between texts. To read a novel
in terms of an invariant subtext is perhaps to misread it as a kind
of elaborate lyric poem. To read a descriptive poem such as
Wordsworth’s sonnet on Westminster Bridge in terms of its
negation of general sociolectic codes is, perhaps, to miss its
ideological imperatives.
A related critique is voiced by Culler, and the critics Paul de
Man and Geoffrey Hartman. This concerns Riffaterre’s
oversimplification of figurative language. De Man, for example,
writes of Riffaterre’s inability to ‘cope with the sheer strength of
figuration, that is to say, master their power to confer, to usurp,
and to take away significance from grammatical universals’ (de
Man, 1986: 45). A striking example of this point might be said to
come in the sonnet’s last line. It does not seem very likely that
Wordsworth was intending a pun in the penultimate word. Is not
the possibility of such a pun, however, a perfect expression of the
act of refiguration Wordsworth has performed upon the city of
London? Wordsworth’s poem could be said to ‘lie’ in presenting
a London reconfigured into an organic unity which the great
proportion of the rest of his poetry on that subject fails to discover
within it. The ability of local figures to produce overdetermined
significance irresolvable on a grammatical model cannot be
contained within Riffaterre’s vision of self-sufficient textuality.
Such figures explode that unity and force the text’s readers into
the recognition of indeterminate elements; the text does and does
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130 STRUCTURALIST APPROACHES
not have this meaning, i.e. of lying and deceit. Such elements
also force the reader out into figurative and semiotic chains which
explode any notion of textual self-sufficiency.
A reader well-versed in Wordsworth’s poetry will surely finish
Riffaterre’s reading with a host of questions. What is the relation
between the ‘smokeless’ scene in the sonnet and the conspicuous
smoke which arises from amongst the trees in the Wye valley of
‘Tintern Abbey’? And how does that relate to Riffaterre’s model
of the negation of a city-code which includes the idea of the city
as an exclusively smoke-related environment? Is the opposition
between an industrialized city and a pre- or non-industrialized
nature as conventional in the first decade of the nineteenth century
as Riffaterre suggests? Or is it actually being formed and figured
within poetry such as Wordsworth’s? In Books 7 and 8 of The
Prelude (1805 and 1850) Wordsworth presents fundamentally
negative accounts of his time as a young man in London. How
does Wordsworth’s tendency, described in those Books of The
Prelude, to seek out places of seclusion, or to locate fixed objects
among the city’s bewilderingly heterogeneous parts, relate to the
unitary but distanced scene presented in the sonnet? What is the
sonnet’s relation to the common poetic representations of London
in the eighteenth century?
The list of possible questions widens as the potential
intertextual boundaries of Wordsworth’s sonnet are widened by
its reader. Various commentators have pointed to the tension,
even confusion, in Riffaterre’s work between aleatory and
determinate intertextuality. The latter would involve instances
where an inter-text clearly stands behind a text; the former
involve instances in which many potential inter-texts can be
found for a specific text. Yet it seems difficult to imagine how
Riffaterre can deal with aleatory intertextuality. Such a notion
seems to return us to a poststructuralist emphasis on the reader’s
productive role in reading; an emphasis which Riffaterre’s
approach strenuously denies.
John Frow has argued that the tension between determinate
and aleatory intertextuality is paralleled in Riffaterre’s work by
the conflation of matrix and hypogram. For Frow, the matrix
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STRUCTURALIST APPROACHES 131
depends upon a notion of intratextuality, which he describes as
‘the elaboration of a text from a semantic core’. The hypogram,
how ever, depends upon intertextuality, which Frow defines as
‘the elaboration of a text in relation to other texts’ (Frow, 1986:
152). He writes: ‘Because he needs the concept of matrix as a
guarantee of textual unity Riffaterre tends ... to confuse the
intratextual matrix with the intertextual hypogram.’ Frow goes on
to define the hypogram as: ‘a semantic structure – thematic field,
cliché, norm, or actual text – which is referred to and transformed
by a particular poem’ (ibid.). We might go one step further and
question the very necessity for the concept of intentional reference
when speaking of the hypogrammatic intertextual field.
De Man’s reading of Riffaterre can be said to complement
Frow’s, particularly in its attention to the manner in which the
notion of the hypogram in his work implicitly evokes the work
on anagrams which Saussure conducted but then abandoned.
As de Man puts it, Saussure’s work on the anagram argues that
‘Latin poetry was structured by the coded dispersal (or
dissemination) of an underlying word or proper name throughout
the lines of verse’ (de Man, 1986: 36). Such a theory is so close
to that of Riffaterre that it seems remarkable that Riffaterre has
not given more space to its discussion within his critical and
theoretical works (see, however, Riffaterre, 1983: 75–89). It may
be that Riffaterre’s arguments about hypogrammatic structures,
and more generally about the essential semiotic unity of texts,
represent the fullest articulation of one source of the whole post-
Saussurean project of semiology. But one must also recognize
the possibility, as articulated by Kristeva and others, that
Saussure’s theory, clearly one rather unnoticed source of the
concept of intertextuality, can be turned another way. Saussure’s
work on anagrams, as Kristeva demonstrates, can be made to
emphasize not textual unity so much as the dialogic quality of
the literary sign and thus the literary text. That Saussure may
have abandoned his project, of finding anagrammatic key-words
fragmented into ‘syllable-pairs’ and ‘potentially into letters’ (de
Man, 1986: 38) within Latin poems, because of an inability to
determine whether such intertextual relations were ‘random or
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132 STRUCTURALIST APPROACHES
determined’ (ibid.: 43), seems to reinforce, rather than resolve,
the tension between aleatory and determinate intertextual
relations in Riffaterre’s system.
Ultimately, the above points might all be said to extend
Hartman’s criticism of Riffaterre’s elision of the role of author
and reader (Hartman, 1987: 129–51). Riffaterre, we might say,
not only confuses issues of determinate and random
intertextuality, he also evades the full nature of the reader’s
presuppositions, those things the reader presumes before coming
to a text. As de Man and Culler have suggested, arguing that the
text compels the reader to read in a certain way evades the tension
between a formalist emphasis on the self-sufficiency of the text
and an interpretive theory and practice which, by recognizing
the vital role the reader plays in producing textual significance,
does the opposite. In this sense Riffaterre’s theory, for all its
significance within the area of textual and intertextual studies,
remains blind to the disrupting effect of what has been called
‘the hermeneutic circle’. This phrase is employed to refer to the
fact that it is impossible to ascertain whether reading produces
the theory of textuality or whether reading supports and is driven
by that theory. Do we begin with texts and produce theories
about them after we have read them? Or do we begin with
theories about texts and then read specific texts in the light of
those theories? Such a question, in twentieth-century theories
of literature, has proved notoriously difficult to answer.
Riffaterre’s notion of presupposition and its ability to assist the
reader in locating a text’s meaning, seems a rather inadequate
response to such a question. Readers come from numerous
backgrounds and have numerous reading experiences. They
clearly do not share a single ‘sociolect’. We cannot, therefore,
refer to the presupposition of readers as if it were a singular, or
predictable phenomenon. A greater recognition of the
situatedness of the reader and the historical, social, ideological
and even individual specificities of text production, might appear
an alluring prospect after the apparently stable, de-situated
theories discussed in this Chapter.
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4
SITUATED READERS: BLOOM,
FEMINISM, POSTCOLONIALISM
INFLUENCE REVISITED: BLOOM
The kinds of theories we have so far studied have had a major
impact on literary critics and theorists working in North America.
Of all these critics Harold Bloom remains the most
conspicuously dedicated to a version of intertextual theory and
practice. To understand Bloom’s version of intertextual theory
we must first turn to his work on Romantic poetry.
Bloom has always had a concern for nineteenth-century and
particularly for Romantic poetry. From the mid-1960s onwards,
this concern developed a rather singular bent which can best be
expressed in a question: If Romantic poets such as Blake,
Wordsworth, Keats or P. B. Shelley believed so passionately in
the idea of the imagination, an idea which ascribes uniqueness
of vision to those possessed by or with it, why do they all
consistently return, by direct and indirect means, to Milton as a
figure of poetic authority? Bloom’s answer to the question is
expressed neatly by one of his chapter titles: ‘The Belatedness
of Strong Poetry’ (1975a: 63–80). Belatedness is defined by
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134 SITUATED READERS
Bloom as the experience of coming after the event. The reason
the Romantic poets could not rid their poetry of explicit or
implicit references and allusions to Milton was, it would appear,
that they were late for an event. Bloom has no doubt that Milton’s
poetry is that event, and that Milton’s poetry makes all poets
after him, including the canonical male Romantics, belated.
Employing a vocabulary taken from Freud’s theory of the
Oedipus Complex, in which sons wish to marry or sexually
possess their mothers and so wish to supplant or even kill their
fathers, Bloom writes of the ‘poetic father’ as a scandalous figure,
scandalous because he cannot die or be murdered. Bloom also
employs a Greek vocabulary of ‘precursor’ (father) and ‘ephebe’
(son) to figure this relation between Milton and all poets who
come after him in the tradition of British poetry. He writes:
A poet, I argue ... is not so much a man speaking to men as a man
rebelling against being spoken to by a dead man (the precursor)
outrageously more alive than himself. A poet dare not regard himself
as being late, yet cannot accept a substitute for the first vision he
reflectively judges to have been his precursor’s also.
(Bloom, 1975a: 19)
The ideas contained in that last sentence are crucial and lead us
on to Bloom’s conflictual vision of the intertextual process.
Poetry in the post-Miltonic period, Bloom argues, stems from
two motivations, or, to employ the Freudian terminology which
Bloom adapts, drives. The first concerns the desire to imitate
the precursor’s poetry, from which the poet first learnt what
poetry was. The second concerns the desire to be original, and
defend against the knowledge that all the poet is doing is imitat-
ing rather than creating afresh. Bloom’s vision of poetry is thus
intertextual. It argues that poetry, and indeed literature in gen-
eral, can only imitate previous texts. In his most widely read
critical work, The Anxiety of Influence, Bloom articulates these
points as corrections to previous critical approaches which ei-
ther misguidedly presume the literary text to possess in itself
unity, and thus determinable meaning, or which misguidedly
seek the meaning of literary texts in non-literary contexts. His
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SITUATED READERS 135
own resolution of these critical ‘errors’, based on the recogni
tion of the intertextual nature of poetic texts, he styles ‘Anti-
thetical Criticism’:
All criticisms that call themselves primary vacillate between tautology
– in which the poem is and means itself – and reduction – in which
the poem means something that is not itself a poem. Antithetical
criticism must begin by denying both tautology and reduction, a denial
best delivered by the assertion that the meaning of a poem can only
be a poem, but another poem – a poem not itself. And not a poem
chosen with total arbitrariness, but any central poem by an indisputable
precursor, even if the ephebe never read that poem. Source study is
wholly irrelevant here; we are dealing with primal words, but
antithetical meanings, and an ephebe’s best misinterpretations may
well be of poems he has never read.
(Bloom, 1973: 70)
Bloom refers to ‘source study’ in order to distance his use of the
word ‘influence’ from traditional uses of that word. As the pas-
sage explains, poets write by misinterpreting and misreading
the poems of specific precursor poets. Poets become poets by
becoming ‘hooked’, we might say, on the poetry of an earlier
poet. However, to be ‘strong poets’, to employ Bloom’s com-
bative terminology, new poets must do two things: they must
rewrite the precursor’s poems, and in that very act they must
defend themselves against the knowledge that they are merely
involved in the process of rewriting, or what Bloom calls mis-
reading. For Bloom, poets employ the central figures of previ-
ous poetry but they transform, redirect, reinterpret those already
written figures in new ways and hence generate the illusion that
their poetry is not influenced by, and not therefore a misreading
of, the precursor poem.
Mapping misreading
Bloom develops an expanding ‘map of misreading’ in his work
of the 1970s. This map is meant to enumerate and specify the
kinds of figurative misreadings which dominate modern poetry.
The map of misreading is in six stages, each stage concerning
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what Bloom calls a ‘revisionary ratio’, a specific technique of
misreading. Each stage is also presented through the use of an
archaic terminology characteristic of Bloom’s tendency to mix
and merge modern critical theory with ancient traditions. He
also employs other modern vocabularies, most notably that of
Freudian psychoanalysis. We need not describe each of the six
stages of the map of misreading here (see Allen, 1994: 26–9,
49–54), but we do need to recognize that Bloom’s fully
developed map of misreading allows him to articulate one of
his cardinal theoretical points: that poetry, and indeed all
literature, involves both figurative language and psychological
defence mechanisms. For each kind of misreading, Bloom
associates a defence mechanism taken from Freudian
psychoanalysis, and particularly from Anna Freud’s mapping
of the defence mechanisms in The Ego and the Mechanisms of
Defense (Freud, 1948). Defence mechanisms concern the manner
in which people defend themselves against that which they need
to keep repressed in the unconscious. Thus, ‘projection’ involves
the transference of elements repressed in the unconscious on to
another person or some other external phenomenon. Someone
who is terrified of lightning may well be projecting onto an
external phenomenon an aspect of their own unconscious which
terrifies them. In another defence mechanism, ‘reaction-
formation’, people fix on an idea which is opposite to the idea
which must remain repressed in the unconscious. Someone who
complains about the slow work-rate of others may well be
reacting against an unconscious anxiety concerning their own
work-rate.
The combination of a rhetorical and a psychoanalytical
approach to intertextuality is Bloom’s particular contribution
to contemporary literary theory’s movement beyond the study
of literary texts as if they alone contained meaning. For him
all texts are inter-texts. As he writes in Kabbalah and Criticism:
‘A single text has only part of a meaning; it is itself a
synecdoche for a larger whole including other texts. A text is a
relational event, and not a substance to be analysed’ (1975b:
106). What makes Bloom unique is what he does with this
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relational feature of liter ature. Intertextuality is for Bloom a
product of the ‘anxiety of influence’. This anxiety, the keystone
of Bloom’s account of literary writing and critical reading,
not only concerns the inability to avoid what Barthes styles
the ‘already written and read’, but also concerns writers’ and
readers’ refusal to accept this state of affairs. The fact that any
writing is necessarily a misreading must, in Bloom’s account,
be resisted. As he puts it in The Anxiety of Influence: ‘If
influence were health, who could write a poem? Health is stasis’
(1973: 95). Bloom’s account of intertextuality is concerned
with motivation, with the reasons why people write in a culture
in which everything seems to have already been written, and
written in better ways – and in which, as a consequence, there
is no way of ever producing writing that is representational of
the world, of producing writing that does anything more than
rewrite what has already been written. Bloom directly confronts
the way in which the intertextual dimension of writing might
affect the desire to write.
Bloom’s characteristic method of reading involves an
intertextual assessment of the patterns of misreading observable
between a poetic text and a precursor poem or set of poems.
Once these figurative patterns are established, the psychological
motivations which generated the particular figurative
misreadings observable within the text in question can be
discussed. Often, however, Bloom’s intense awareness of
canonical literature opens this procedure out into a wider
framework and includes the precursor’s own misreading of
previous figurative patterns within his or her own precursor’s
poem or poems.
There are many similarities between Bloom’s approach and
that of Riffaterre. Both theorists reduce intertextuality to a model
of text and inter-text, and by so doing produce very compelling,
reading strategies. However, whilst for Riffaterre such an
approach produces interpretive certainty, for Bloom critical
reading is itself always a form of misreading, and suffers from
the same anxieties of influence as we find in what he insists on
calling ‘strong poetry’. As Bloom writes:
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Poetic meaning ... is ... radically indeterminate. Reading, despite all
humanist traditions of education, is very nearly impossible, for every
reader’s relation to every poem is governed by a figuration of
belatedness. Tropes or defenses (for here rhetoric and psychology
are a virtual identity) are the ‘natural’ language of the imagination in
relation to all prior manifestations of imagination. A poet attempting
to make this language new necessarily begins by an arbitrary act of
reading that does not differ in kind from the act that his readers
subsequently must perform on him.
(Bloom, 1975a: 69)
We can better understand why Bloom argues that critical read-
ing is itself misreading, and is motivated by the same act of
defence that motivates literary writing, by returning to the pas-
sage quoted earlier regarding ‘Antithetical Criticism’. There
Bloom asserts that poets misread precursor poems ‘even if the
ephebe never read that poem’. How can this be? One answer
can be located if we attend to Bloom’s statements concerning
the cultural centrality of certain original writers. In his more
recent work Bloom has moved his focus towards those writers
who can be said to be truly original. The author of the earliest
parts of the Bible, the J-writer, along with Shakespeare and
Freud, are recurrent examples in Bloom’s later work of what he
styles ‘facticity’. We might define ‘facticity’ as the unavoid-
ability of certain writers within Western cultures (see Bloom,
1988: 405–24, and Bloom, 1989).
Shakespeare, Bloom argues in The Western Canon and more
recently in Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, is the
most factitious writer in history, and we live out our lives in
images and figures which originated in Shakespeare’s work.
Thus, Shakespeare usurps the category of Nature and functions
as a constant source for our emotional and psychical lives. In
the recent second edition of The Anxiety of Influence Bloom
writes: ‘Shakespeare did not think one thought and one thought
only; rather scandalously, he thought all thoughts, for all of us’
(1997: xxvii–xxviii). Perhaps an easier example of facticity is
the effect that Freud’s work has on modern Western cultures.
Whether people have read any work by Freud or not, they tend,
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nowadays, to speak of themselves in Freudian ways. We have
problems with our parents, we speak of our unconscious, our
drives, even our id, ego and super-ego. Freud is a facticity, an
already-read script in modern culture, as Bloom states in his
essay ‘Wrestling Sigmund’:
The unconscious turns out alas not to be structured like a language,
but to be structured like Freud’s language, and the ego and superego,
in their conscious aspects, are structured like Freud’s own texts, for
the very good reason that they are Freud’s texts. We have become
Freud’s texts, and the Imitatio Freudi is the necessary pattern for the
spiritual life in our time.
(Bloom, 1982b: 64)
If we take this idea of facticity, we can begin to understand why
a poet might be forced to misread a poet of pervasive influence
even if they had not in fact read that poet themselves. Bloom
frequently argues that all poetry after Milton is influenced by
him, and that all lyrics after Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey’ tend
to replicate elements of that great Romantic ode.
There is, however, a major fault line in Bloom’s argument
here. Bloom argues that all critical reading is misreading, because
its shares with literary writing an anxiety of influence. The reason
reading as well as writing never brings us interpretive resolution
is because, in his account, interpretive certainty is not what
motivates writing or reading. The crucial motive for these
activities, according to Bloom, is the recognition of having been
preempted in one’s words, one’s sentiments, one’s very
experience of the world or even of one’s self. The objective for
poet and critical reader is identical, to persuade others to read
their work, to become themselves an influence. According to
Bloom, the desire to be an influence is the only motive which
can explain why writing and reading still occur. To be an
influence is to successfully ‘lie against time’, since it gives the
figure who influences a sense of ‘earliness’ rather than of
‘belatedness’.
Bloom, however, also admits that if reading is the study of
intertextual relations, then there is an inevitably ‘arbitrary’
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element in all reading. If we are not dealing with intended
intertextual relations between texts, then where do we begin
in our search for the text’s significant inter-text? For Bloom
the answer is always, ‘in the poetry of the precursor’. But how
do we know who the poet’s precursor is? And how do we know
that in certain texts other inter-texts are not also significant?
We circle back to the distinction between determinate and
aleatory intertextuality we observed in Riffaterre’s work. To
locate a necessary intertextual relation between a text and an
inter-text or set of inter-texts can only be achieved by two
processes: arguing that the text itself directs its readers to the
appropriate inter-text, or, conversely, deciding arbitrarily,
lacking direct textual evidence, that a particular intertextual
relation is the significant and interpretively informing one. For
Bloom, the significant inter-text need not even be directly
linked stylistically or figuratively to the text in question.
Writing of Robert Browning, Algernon Charles Swinburne,
Thomas Hardy and W. B. Yeats, Bloom argues that P. B.
Shelley’s poetry is the significant inter-text for all four poets,
even though they ‘have styles antithetical to Shelley’s style’
(1975b: 67).
Bloom’s theory of the anxiety of influence and the model of
misreading he builds upon it is, then, his own act of misreading.
Bloom cannot prove that all literature and all criticism is based
on a desire to defend against the anxiety of influence; all he can
do is to produce reading after reading which asserts this fact.
Either all reading is misreading because of the anxiety of
influence, or all reading is misreading because of the inability
of readers to draw a verifiable frame around the intertextual
domain within which texts exist and signify and to distinguish
relevant from irrelevant inter-texts.
Reading Bloom’s work one cannot help but come to the
conclusion that the theory of misreading is actually a defence
against the plurality celebrated by Barthes and Kristeva and
the accompanying recognition that literature does not exist
in a hermetically sealed universe. Bloom’s vision refuses to
accept social and cultural contexts as relevant intertextual
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fields of meaning for literary texts. For Bloom, literary texts
can only have other specific literary texts as inter-texts. He
defines his brand of literary history as ‘an historicism that
deliberately reduces to the interplay of personalities’ (1975a:
71). Beginning with his theory of the anxiety of influence,
there is nothing to stop Bloom demonstrating that poems are
written by ephebes defending against their precursors. To
argue that such a critical practice is circular, that it begins
with a theory which can only be proved accurate by the
readings Bloom then produces, is not a viable critique for
Bloom himself. Bloom is a pragmatist, which is to say he is
a critic for whom the relevant criteria are not accuracy and
truth but persuasiveness and the gaining either of influence
or of consent (1982a: 19–20).
On this pragmatist basis Bloom’s theory and practice
cannot be proved wrong: it can only be agreed or disagreed
with. However, there is one area of his work which does seem
open to clear disagreement. In order to demonstrate this we
might turn to a poetic text and assess the Bloomian method’s
ability to account for it. The text is one of Elizabeth Barrett
Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese, a sonnet cycle
which she addressed to her husband, the poet Robert
Browning:
The first time that the sun rose on thine oath
To love me, I looked forward to the moon
To slacken all those bonds which seemed too soon
And quickly tied to make a lasting troth.
Quick-loving hearts, I thought, may quickly loathe;
And, looking on myself, I seemed not one
For such man’s love! – more like an out-of-tune
Worn viol, a good singer would be wroth
To spoil his song with, and which, snatched in haste,
Is laid down at the first ill-sounding note.
I did not wrong myself so, but I placed
A wrong on thee. For perfect strains may float
‘Neath master-hands, from instruments defaced, –
And great souls, at one stroke, may do and dote.
(Barrett Browning, 1988: 231)
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This poem might be said to confirm the third revisionary ratio
in Bloom’s map of misreading. Kenosis involves a strategy
whereby the poet humbles him/herself only eventually to humble
the precursor more profoundly. As Bloom puts it: ‘Kenosis ....
appears to be an act of self-abnegation, yet tends to make the
fathers pay for their own sins, and perhaps for those of the son
also’ (1973: 91). A Bloomian reading of this sonnet, therefore,
might begin by noting that the poetic addresser seems intent on
humbling herself in relation to the addressee. The addressee is
figured as a ‘master-hand’; the addresser figures herself as a
‘Worn viol’. The addressee seems to exist in a world of perfec-
tion and to be perfect (a ‘great soul’); the addresser figures her-
self as a damaged person (an ‘instrument defaced’). The ad-
dressee is beautiful, while the addresser is outside of beauty.
To demonstrate that a revisionary twist is occurring in this
poem, and that it is dominated by kenosis, the reader must now
move on to a reassessment of the text’s figures. A Bloomian
reading would take these figures of self-humbling and read them
as misreadings of a precursor poem. The sonnet which might
come to mind is Shakespeare’s sonnet 130, ‘My mistress’ eyes
are nothing like the sun’, in which the sonneteer refuses to deploy
the stock clichés for female beauty. Shakespeare’s sonnet initially
appears to humble its female addressee, to figure her as lacking
in conventional beauty. It ultimately, however, establishes the
addressee’s beauty through the very act of refusing to employ
stereotypical figures. Barrett Browning’s sonnet might be said
to perform a figurative reversal of Shakespeare’s sonnet by
rhetorically humbling the poetic addresser rather than the
addressee. A Bloomian reading would then assess whether such
a strategy achieved a reversal of canonical power: do we leave
the sonnet with a sense that Barrett Browning has wrestled poetic
strength and canonical authority away from Shakespeare’s
sonnet?
It is possible to suggest that the self-humbling going on here
is more complex than it might initially appear. Is the apparently
perfect addressee actually too quick to declare love? Is the love
that he has declared, and the realm he appears to exist in, rather
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unrealistic? Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese do
seem to demonstrate a critique of the traditional style of amorous
verse and to argue for a more realistic mode of love poetry.
Does this poem stage a poetic conflict, or what Bloom calls an
‘agon’ (poetry viewed as a conflict for power), in which
romanticized love poetry, through a process of realistic self-
assessment which appears like self-humbling, is overturned in
favour of a new, modern, realistic mode of love poetry?
The answer, readers have suggested, is yes. But it is an answer
which cannot be made on the basis of an approach, such as
Bloom’s, which focuses exclusively on an agon between a poetic
son and a poetic father. There are two reasons why this is the
case. The first concerns our need to extend the field of the
intertextual. No amount of attention to the poetry of Barrett
Browning and Shakespeare will fully do justice to this poem.
We also need to look at the intertextual code of love poetry.
Referring back to Barthes’s method, we might suggest that a
‘literary code’ very much related to a ‘cultural code’ is strongly
at work in this text. Love poetry tends to be idealized rather
than realistic. This might be our first intertextual point, verifiable
by citing any number of the numerous examples of love poems
in the literary archive. The second point we might make is that
in the sonnet tradition a male poet addresses a female addressee.
There are, of course, exceptions, as Shakespeare’s sonnets to
the ‘young man’ prove. However, if we consider the traditional
relationship between sonneteer and addressee we recognize that
various intertextual codes are being overturned in Barrett
Browning’s sonnets. As in our example above, her sonnets are,
unusually, addressed to another poet. The female poet is, again
unusually, the addresser and the male poet the addressee.
The traditional relations, then, between a male poet and a
female addressee are reversed by Barrett Browning – a point
which seems connected to the manner in which Barrett
Browning’s sonnets argue for a realistic form of amatory verse.
A female sonneteer, we might say, does not, like the traditional
male sonneteer, idealize female beauty. The real reversal of
power and authority in this sonnet might well concern what
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happens when women write love poetry instead of having love
poetry written for them. Things change when women write and
speak rather than being written about and spoken to. We cross
over into issues of cultural stereotyping and of gender relations,
into the very realms which Bloom, by tying literary texts to
literary inter-texts, refuses to accept as a legitimate field of
literary meaning: the intertextual field of social and cultural
codes, stereotypes and ideological formations.
GYNOCRITICISM AND INTERTEXTUALITY
In a discussion of Bloom’s theories, the US critic Annette
Kolodny refers to Virginia Woolf’s account of, as a woman, being
barred from an Oxford library containing the manuscript of John
Milton’s Lycidas (Kolodny, 1986: 48–9). The episode acts as a
symbol for the exclusion of women from the idea of the literary
tradition or canon. Male critics such as Bloom may well believe
that there is one singular and inescapable canon of literature,
and that this is what causes the anxiety of influence; however,
such monologic descriptions of the literary canon evade the fact
that women writers have traditionally been excluded from it. It
is not possible to conflate notions of intertextuality with notions
of a monological canon without endorsing the historical practice
of marginalizing certain kinds of writing, including writing by
women. Yet, do we really escape from that exclusionary logic if
we attempt to establish a distinctly female literary canon?
The attempt to examine previously overlooked traditions of
writing by women has been a central feature of the feminist
critical movement. Elaine Showalter, an influential feminist
critic, describes the critical approach of gynocriticism as:
the feminist study of women’s writing, including readings of women’s
texts and analyses of the intertextual relations both between women
writers (a female literary tradition), and between women and men.
(Showalter, 1990: 189)
We get in the gynocritical approach an image of a female liter-
ary tradition which depends upon an at least implicit notion of
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intertextual relations between women writers. Showalter’s vi-
sion here is of a set of ‘images, metaphors, themes and plots’
which connects women’s writing across periods and national
divisions and builds into something as cohesive and as
intertextually rich as the traditionally sanctioned male literary
canon.
Gilbert and Gubar, in their study of nineteenth-century
literature by women writers, The Madwoman in the Attic, take
up Bloom’s patriarchal theory of literature and, instead of
rejecting it out of hand, actually examine ‘what is right’ about it
as a theory (Gilbert and Gubar, 1979: 47). One thing that is
‘right’ about Bloom’s approach, they say, is that it attends to the
motivations which generate writing. However, they go on to
argue that the motivation of anxiety, the desire for imaginative
freedom within an overpopulated literary tradition, the
subsequent desire to revise (symbolically defeat or murder) the
father, or precursor, are irrelevant to women writers’ experience
and the motivations which drive them to take up the pen, that
traditional symbol of the phallus.
In societies in which women are traditionally excluded from
‘serious’ literature, and even from formal education, the woman
writer’s anxiety is concerned first and foremost with the culturally
dominant images of women which would deny her access to
intellectual and aesthetic achievement, which would marginalize
her as an ‘angel in the house’ or as a dangerous ‘other’ (witch,
madwoman, whore). As Gilbert and Gubar put it:
precisely because a woman is denied the autonomy – the subjectivity
– that the pen represents, she is not only excluded from culture (whose
emblem might well be the pen) but she also becomes herself an
embodiment of just those extremes of mysterious and intransigent
Otherness which culture confronts with worship or fear, love or
loathing.
(Gilbert and Gubar, 1979: 19)
It might be objected that such statements merely collude in the
patriarchal symbolic association between pen and phallus, and
that women writers should define their writing in symbolic ways
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suitable to women’s bodies. As we shall see, the notion of
intertextuality, with its connotations of webs and weaving, con-
stitutes an opportunity for such a feminization of the symbolics
of the act of writing. That the pen was traditionally associated
with male authority and thus, symbolically with the phallus,
remains true enough, however, and the nineteenth-century
women writers discussed by Gilbert and Gubar were, it seems,
deeply affected by such a cultural and symbolic association.
Gilbert and Gubar, along with other gynocritics writing from
the 1970s onwards, such as Elaine Showalter (1984) and Mary
Poovey (1984), demonstrate the manner in which nineteenth-
century women writers avoided censure for taking up the pen
by adopting various strategies in which the gendered images of
patriarchal culture are accommodated on the surface level of
the work. Taking male pseudonyms, or adopting the persona of
what Poovey calls ‘the proper lady’, allowed women writers to
avoid charges of unnaturalness. Yet Gilbert and Gubar’s work
stresses the fact that recurrent themes, images and figures –
notably that of madness – mark an attempt to articulate distinctly
female experience and a resistance to the dominant constructions
of femininity.
The eighteenth- and nineteenth-century woman writer’s
experience, as Gilbert and Gubar stress, is essentially a solitary
one. Lacking the sense of an inherited tradition enjoyed – or, in
Bloom’s account, suffered – by male writers, the woman writer
also fears that writing will mark her as Other, as unfeminine. In
place of Bloom’s ‘anxiety of influence’, argue Gilbert and Gubar,
the woman writer suffers from an ‘anxiety of authorship’: ‘a
radical fear that she cannot create, that because she can never
become a “precursor” the act of writing will isolate and destroy
her’ (1979: 49). The desire for, rather than the anxiety
concerning, a precursor or tradition for the woman writer makes
influence and/or intertextuality, when established, a matter of
legitimation rather than of emasculating belatedness.
Like Bloom before them, Gilbert and Gubar employ the term
‘influence’ to refer to a mode of intertextuality limited to authors
within a specific literary tradition. We will keep this usage here
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and employ intertextuality in its poststructuralist senses. In
contemplating twentieth-century women’s writing, Gilbert and
Gubar imply that influence is viewed differently by men and by
women. There seems to be, that is, a gender difference in the
writer’s response to affiliations with previous writers. They write:
The son of many fathers, today’s male writer feels hopelessly belated;
the daughter of too few mothers, today’s female writer feels that she
is helping to create a viable tradition which is at last definitively
emerging.
(Gilbert and Gubar, 1979: 50)
Such gendered differences might appear to connect us back to
poststructuralist accounts of intertextuality. Barthes’s sugges-
tion that the marking of a text’s relation to the ‘cultural text’ can
only be made provisionally, that each reader ‘writes’ or par-
tially constructs the text’s intertextual dimensions, clearly al-
lows us to recognise a space for gender and its effects on how
we read within the theory of intertextuality. A woman reader,
we might say, would produce a different intertextual reading of
Balzac’s Sarrasine than would a man. Barthes’s homosexual
position, some would argue, is clearly evident in his particular
reading of that text.
Critics such as Gilbert and Gubar appear more interested in
tracing the previously hidden connections between women
writers than in developing a theory of a distinctly female or
feminist approach to reading. The feminist theorist Toril Moi
has written persuasively on the confusions such an approach
can create. She argues that gynocritical and other feminist critical
approaches frequently confuse the terms ‘female’, ‘feminine’,
and ‘feminist’. If ‘female’ refers to a biological state, then
‘feminine’ refers to a cultural ideology of womanhood, whilst
‘feminist’ involves a mode of social and political thought and
action. On this basis, to chart previously hidden ‘female’ literary
traditions, is not necessarily a ‘feminist’ activity. Moi writes:
Gilbert and Gubar’s account homogenises all female creative
utterances into feminist self-expression: a strategy which singularly
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fails to account for the ways in which women can come to take up a
masculine subject position – that is to say, become solid defenders of
the patriarchal status quo.
(Moi, 1982: 217; see also Moi, 1985)
Gilbert and Gubar’s restriction of focus allows for the recovery
of traditions and trends within a female literary tradition previ-
ously overlooked or even repressed. However, there remains a
need for a theory of feminist reading and a tension between
what we have been calling influence and intertextuality. To
employ images, figures and plots concerned with madness and
other states of psychical disturbance to locate a distinctly fe-
male literary tradition is not the same thing as analysing the
cultural codes which express dominant ideological construc-
tions of masculine and feminine identity. The cultural codes out
of which female identity and female texts are constructed might
foster images of otherness, madness, psychical disturbance.
However, it seems problematic to perceive such intertextual
codes as both repressive when placed in the context of domi-
nant culture and liberating when placed in the context of a de-
veloping female literary tradition. A theoretical consideration
of how intertextual networks within the cultural text relate to
intertextual relations within the network (tradition) of women’s
writing needs to be established if this tension is not to threaten
the gynocritical approach. Such a consideration will inevitably
involve a focus on questions concerning the act of reading it-
self: how does one read as a feminist critic? Are concepts con-
cerned with reading and writing, such as intertextuality, neu-
tral, or are they gendered, and thus available for a feminist re-
appraisal and transformation?
A recent feminist theorist, Monika Kaup, attempts to confront
these problems by adding a poststructuralist approach to the
gynocritical concern with the relations of influence within
women’s writing. The association between women and madness,
Kaup writes, involves us in ‘a vast cultural space, in different
disciplines, such as philosophy, psychoanalysis, psychiatry and
literature, feeding each other and exceeding any single textual
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manifestation of that complex’ (Kaup, 1993: 12). Intertextuality,
or ‘mad intertextuality’ as Kaup terms it, gives us, then:
an open exchange between the domain of literature and a ‘universe’
of intersecting scientific, cultural, ideological and literary discourses
or ‘voices’, and, conversely, the potential rhythm, merging and overlay
of those heterogeneous voices within what we usually regard as a
‘single literary text’.
(ibid.: 12–13)
Kaup’s point is that the relations of influence between literary
texts by women are shot through with traces of a vast cultural
text or intertextuality which is itself bound up with developing
disciplines and discourses. There can be no complete under-
standing of how individual texts relate to this vast cultural net-
work; the reader is forced to choose various points of entrance
and exit into the field of ‘mad intertextuality’ when coming to
women’s writing of the twentieth century. Kaup’s approach fol-
lows that of Barthes in S/Z, in that it recognizes the somewhat
arbitrary manner in which any reader maps out a text’s
intertextual relations. The challenge to the feminist reader, then,
is to find constructive and illuminating ways of making entrances
into the vast, heterogeneous field of mad intertextuality.
Kaup’s method is firstly to employ a historically chronological
approach, moving from Modernist texts of the early twentieth
century, on to texts of the 1960s and then of the 1970s. Such an
approach allows a recognition of the relations between a set of
texts in each period, but also the ability to foreground how the
cultural construction of women and madness alters in each
period, and so is woven into texts of the 1960s in ways distinct
from texts of the 1970s. Kaup also takes various synchronic
approaches, arranging groups of texts not around historical
periods but particular themes, plots and cultural configurations.
Madness, for example, is a cultural construction experienced in
immensely different ways by different classes and communities
of women. A focus on communities and local sites disrupts a
too simplistic notion of a historical development of a female
literary tradition.
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An example of Kaup’s practice which demonstrates the
above points comes in her discussion of Jean Rhys’s The Wide
Sargasso Sea, first published in 1966. Rhys’s novel deals with
the story of Antoinette Cosway, a Creole heiress who marries
an Englishman. This man is the Mr. Rochester of Charlotte
Brontë’s Victorian novel, Jane Eyre. Antoinette is the
‘madwoman in the attic’, Bertha, the shadowy double of Jane,
who in Brontë’s text threatens the final union of Rochester
and Jane and who eventually dies in the fire which ravages
Thornfield Manor and cripples Rochester. Kaup cites Rachel
Blau DuPlessis’s Writing Beyond the Ending (1985) in order
to establish one major intertextual revision occurring between
Rhys’s and Brontë’s texts. Employing DuPlessis’s argument,
Kaup claims that:
nineteenth-century romance ‘ends’, for women, in either marriage
or death, which would then have to be read as the heroine’s success
or failure. The antithetical resolutions of the marriage plot inscribe
‘the sex-gender system’ ... which feeds women into heterosexual
coupling while repressing their Bildung or quest in a way analogous to
the male hero. DuPlessis’s claim is that twentieth-century women
authors ‘write beyond’ the ending of the romance plot, undoing the
‘aura of the couple’.
(Kaup, 1993: 81)
On the level of plot, then, Rhys’s text resists the patriarchal
‘ending’ of marriage in its inter-text, Jane Eyre. This resis-
tance can be seen in terms of both texts’ relation to what
Kaup calls ‘mad intertextuality’. Jane Eyre is shown con-
stantly on the verge of slipping irrevocably into social con-
structions which would delegitimate her as an individual;
however, she finally achieves social legitimacy in marriage
to Rochester. This legitimacy is achieved at the cost of Ber-
tha/Antoinette, and Rhys’s focus on the story of this woman
switches our attention to the ‘other’ or delegitimated woman
upon whom the ideal Victorian wife and mother depends.
Although the bulk of Rhys’s text involves a nar rative,
Antoinette’s, which is only tangentially related to the narra-
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tive of Jane Eyre, the text slowly builds up to the climactic
scene of the devastation through fire of Thornfield Manor.
This catastrophic event, however, is experienced by the reader
of Rhys’s text through the viewpoint of Antoinette, and as
such places us at the very centre of the dangerous ‘other’
who haunts the margins of Brontë’s novel. The effect, as Kaup
suggests, is to take the reader into the very Otherness which
traditionally occupies the margins of Gothic and Gothic-in-
spired nineteenth-century novels. It also takes us into the point
of view of a colonial subject, who is doubly or even triply
‘other’ to the British audience of Brontë’s fiction: ‘mad’, a
woman, a mulatto colonial subject.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has captured well the intense
and peculiar intertextual re-visioning at the conclusion of Rhys’s
novel. After a series of dreams which include snippets of events
the reader will remember from Brontë’s novel, Antoinette awakes
with a clear sense of her role and the appropriate course of action;
these, in brief, are to enter, intertextually, into the ‘house’ of
British, imperialist fiction. As Spivak writes:
It is now, at the very end of the book, that Anoinette/Bertha can
say: ‘Now at last I know why I was brought here and what I have to
do’ ... We can read this as her having been brought into the England
of Brontë’s novel: ‘This cardboard house’ – a book between cardboard
covers – ‘where I walk at night is not England’ ... In this fictive England,
she must play out her role, act out the transformation of her ‘self’
into that fictive Other, set fire to the house and kill herself, so that
Jane Eyre can become the feminist individualist heroine of British
fiction. I must read this as an allegory of the general colonial subject
for imperialism, the construction of a self-immolating colonial subject
for the glorification of the social mission of the colonizer. At least
Rhys sees to it that the woman from the colonies is not sacrificed as
an insane animal for her sister’s consolidation.
(Spivak, 1985: 250–1)
The shift in focus in Rhys’s text involves, as Kaup demon strates,
immense social and cultural changes, many of which bear di-
rectly on the constructions of femininity which revolve around
the oppositional network of patriarchal culture. Kaup, in her
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introduction, employs the famous breakdown of patriarchal bi-
nary oppositions mapped out by the French feminist theorist
Hélène Cixous in her essay ‘Sorties’ (Cixous, 1994: 37–46).
Cixous begins:
Where is she?
Activity/passivity
Sun/Moon
Culture/Nature
Day/Night.
(Cixous, 1994: 37)
Moving through a series of cultural oppositions which figure
the supposed difference between masculinity and femininity,
Cixous’s point is that culture depends upon a ‘violent hierar-
chy’ of binary codes, each replicating a fundamental division
between men and women. In patriarchal logic, man is always
what woman is not. Thus, if man is associated with culture,
woman is associated with nature; if man is associated with mind
and with rationality, woman is associated with body and with
madness.
Whilst this kind of diagnosis of dominant patriarchal
representation is crucial to feminist thinking, it does not
explain how women have struggled against such hierarchies.
To remain within an analysis of binary logic is to miss the
crucial social and historical differences which exist between,
for example, an author of Brontë’s period and an author like
Rhys, working from a colonial background and within the
period of the 1960s.
To think of madness as simply a biological or psychical
disturbance is, as Kaup suggests, merely to fall in with a
patriarchal logic which argues that men are essentially rational
and that women are essentially outside of rationality so defined.
Michel Foucault has famously argued for a rethinking of madness
as a changing historical construct which serves, at any socio-
cultural moment, to silence and ‘other’ (marginalize) certain
groups of people and certain forms of behaviour. Such a
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rethinking of the history of madness and its social and ideological
function led, in the 1960s, to changes in the very treatment of
mental disorders themselves. Elaine Showalter, in The Female
Malady, discusses the impact of Laingian anti-psychiatry on the
feminist movement. Anti-psychiatry, according to Laing’s
colleague, David Cooper, aimed to reverse the established power
relations between doctor and patient. It represented, Showalter
writes:
an attempt to reverse the rules of the ‘psychiatric game’, countering
‘medical power as embodied in the diagnosis ... the secret dossier
...[and] the system of compulsory detention’ with ‘attentive non-
interference aimed at opening up of experience rather than its closing
down’. According to the anti-psychiatrists, mental illness had to be
examined in terms of its social contexts: the emotional dynamics of
the family and the institution of psychiatry itself.
(Showalter, 1987: 221)
Whilst critical of the anti-psychiatrists’ actual attention to
the issue of women and madness, Showalter expresses the
liberatory effect of this rethinking of madness upon women
patients and on women’s writing. Kaup’s treatment of Wide
Sargasso Sea places that text within precisely this context,
demonstrating how such social, cultural and medical trans-
formations are intertextually reflected in the formal, rhe-
torical and narratological aspects of women’s writing dur-
ing this period. In the novels by women concerning ‘mad
intertextuality’ during the 1960s it is no longer the female
protagonist’s ‘double’ who is mad but the protagonist her-
self. This transformation is immediately registered in the
relationship between Brontë’s and Rhys’s texts. For Kaup,
such a reversal of the conventions of plot and narrative
voice:
upsets narrative and ideological priorities. The sacrificial victim of
Jane Eyre whose death by fire enables Jane Eyre’s ‘ascendancy’ is
granted the confessional first-person voice. Marginal – insane and
colonial – experience is given the status of female ‘heroism’.
(Kaup, 1993: 93)
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Kaup, then, demonstrates that only an approach which finds
ways of relating the influence-relations between women writ-
ers with the intertextual spheres of social, cultural and ideologi-
cal constructions of femininity, can possibly produce a method
of reading which does not fall back into a binary opposition
between men and women which ultimately reinforces patriar-
chal logic. However, we might still suggest that, dependent as
she is on various combinations of gynocritical and
poststructuralist theories and interpretive strategies, the ques-
tion concerning the relationship between intertextuality and
gender remains unresolved in her work.
The return of the female author
Nancy K. Miller’s work can be placed broadly within the
gynocritical approach. Miller argues that it remains important
whether texts were written by men or women. Feminist criticism
cannot, she argues, locate and describe gender differences within
writing if it concentrates ‘not [on] the productions signed by bio-
logical woman alone but [on] all productions that put the “femi-
nine” into play – the feminine then being a modality or process
accessible to both men and women’ (Miller, 1988: 72). We have
seen how Kristeva views writing and intertextuality in terms of a
tension between phenotext and genotext. Given that the phenotext
relates to dominant social discourses and structures, it can be di-
rectly related to patriarchy. As the genotext relates to the pre-
socialized relationship between infant and mother, it is a force
which seems related to the feminine. Such an opposition, which
has been taken up by a host of feminist theorists, views the ‘femi-
nine’ as a potential, if normally repressed, aspect of language and
tends to locate its release not in texts specifically written by women
but in avant-garde texts generally. Miller, however, asserts that
the ‘female signature’ is important, and that approaches such as
Kristeva’s fall in with a trend within poststructuralism which im-
plicitly collaborates with the effacement of women authors. Such
poststructuralist effacement occurs, Miller argues, as part of
wholesale rejection of notions of authorship.
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Miller criticizes the kind of poststructuralist theory from
which we have seen intertextuality emerging, since it produces
a universalized vision incapable of attending to gender
difference.
The removal of the Author has not so much made room for a revision
of the concept of authorship as it has, through a variety of rhetorical
moves, repressed and inhibited discussion of any writing identity in
favor of the (new) monolith of anonymous textuality, or, in Foucault’s
phrase, ‘transcendental anonymity’.
(Miller, 1988: 104)
Poststructuralist theories of language, textuality and
intertextuality, Miller argues, deny the feminist critic the site
upon which discussion of gender can be produced: that is, the
authorial subject. Miller attacks the implicit universalism of
poststructuralist textual theory, arguing that the woman writer’s
relation to language, literary tradition and the social production
and reception of texts is historically different to that of men.
Attention to gender, for a theorist such as Miller, disrupts any
totalized description of language, textuality and, we might add,
intertextuality:
The postmodernist decision that the Author is Dead and the subject
along within him does not ... necessarily hold for women, and
prematurely forecloses the question of agency for them. Because
women have not had the same historical relation of identity to origin,
institution, production that men have had, they have not, I think,
(collectively) felt burdened by too much Self, Ego, Cogito, etc. Because
the female subject has juridically been excluded from the polis, hence
decentered, ‘disoriginated’, deinstitutionalized, etc., her relation to
integrity and textuality, desire and authority, displays structurally
important differences from that universal position.
(ibid.: 106)
Miller’s position is recognizably gynocritical. Poststructural
textual theory implies that it does not matter who writes and
who reads; indeed, it suggests, writing and reading are the
products not of human subjects but of writing and textuality
themselves. However, for gynocritical theorists writing and
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reading are experienced and produced very differently depending
on the gender of the subject who writes or reads.
Such points lead Miller, in her essay ‘Arachnologies’, to look
with fresh eyes at the myths which stand behind the
poststructuralist notions of text, textuality, and intertextuality.
Citing The Pleasure of the Text, she reminds us of Barthes’s
foregrounding of the etymology of the term ‘text’ as connected
to ‘webs’ and ‘weaving’. Miller writes: ‘Were we fond of
neologisms, we might define the theory of the text as an
hyphology (hyphos is the tissue and the spider’s web)’ (Barthes,
quoted in Miller, 1988: 64).
Miller’s problem with Barthes’s move here is that in killing
off the traditional figure of the author, not in itself a negative
action, he also delegitimates ‘other discussions of the writing
(and reading) subject’. As she puts the point:
This suppression is not simply the result of an arbitrary shift of
emphasis: when a theory of the text called ‘hyphology’ chooses the
spider’s web over the spider; and the concept of textuality called the
‘writerly’ chooses the threads of lace over the lacemaker ... the subject
is self-consciously erased by a model of text production which acts to
foreclose the question of agency itself.
(Miller, 1988: 80)
Theories such as those found in Barthes, according to Miller,
participate in the eradication of the female subject. Taking a
figure – of weaving and of spinning – culturally associated with
female work and female identity, Barthes strips these figures of
any signs of the female subject. In order to reverse such a trend,
Miller takes her readers back to the classical myths which form
the source of the etymologies utilized by Barthes. In the sixth
book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, she reminds us, Arachne is the
‘lowborn’ daughter of a ‘wool dyer’. So excellent is Arachne’s
weaving that people presume that Pallas Athena (Minerva) has
taught her; but Arachne refuses to go along with such an as-
sumption, thus implicitly challenging the authority of the god-
dess. Annoyed by this rebelliousness, Athena, disguised, chal-
lenges Arachne to a weaving competition. Arachne’s tapestry is
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inflam matory in subject matter, depicting ancient heroines who
were seduced or betrayed by the gods, so again she is challeng-
ing the authority of the gods. Athena punishes Arachne, muti-
lating her tapestry and knocking her on the head with a shuttle.
When Arachne attempts suicide Athena takes pity and trans-
forms her into a spider: Arachne becomes a virtually headless
figure – sign of Athena’s punishment – who is a perfect spinner
of webs. Doomed to remain a spinner of webs, but now without
the ability to make those webs signify, Arachne is doomed to
remain, as Miller puts it, ‘outside representation, to a reproduc-
tion that turns back on itself’ (ibid.: 82). Spiders’ webs may be
immensely beautiful, but they are not art!
Miller’s return to classical mythology and the origins of the
symbolics of weaving and webs does not end here. Using, as a
starting point, an essay by the deconstructive critic J. Hillis
Miller, she also returns to the myth of Ariadne. We may
remember that Ariadne, by holding one end of a spool of wool
and giving the other to her beloved Theseus to unravel, allowed
Theseus to enter the heart of the labyrinth constructed by
Daedalus, to kill the Minotaur, and then to escape from the
labyrinth again. Theseus later seduces Ariadne and then
abandons her.
Hillis Miller’s essay focuses on the relation between the two
mythical female characters by way of Chaucer’s conflation of
their names in Troilus and Cressida; Chaucer there writes of:
‘Ariachne’s broken woof’ (quoted in Hillis Miller, 1977: 91).
What is the relation between Arachne and Ariadne? To simplify
Miller’s complex argument, Ariadne can be seen as a figure of
interpretation, allowing the critic to enter into the labyrinthine
web of the text and to exit from it again. Yet, as Miller goes on
to suggest, Ariadne can come to stand for a female principle of
interpretation, i.e. intertextual reading, which reinstates the male
as critic and the female as merely a symbol or figure for reading
(Miller, 1988: 93). Miller’s point is that theories of intertextuality
such as Barthes’s have employed a whole mythology of weaving
and making webs whilst, at the same moment, underplaying or
even erasing those myths’ connection to women’s efforts to break
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into art. Without any attention to gender issues, theories of
intertextuality threaten to consign women to figures in the
position of Ariadne, who passively help male protagonists to
enter and exit the labyrinth of textual meaning. Attention to the
gender issues inscribed mythically within the notions of text
and textuality can, Miller implies, return us to the figure of the
defiant woman artist, as exemplified by Arachne. The difference
between Arachne and Ariadne, Miller suggests, is that, whilst
the latter is a figure of assistance to men, the former, at least
before her punishment and metamorphosis, is a female artist
who actually wins, in aesthetic terms, a competition or agon
with a goddess, or ‘phallic mother’.
Miller places such meditations in the context of Barthes’s
discussion of ‘the already read’. We have seen how for Barthes
intertextuality means that no text is ever read for the first time:
all texts are already read. However, as Miller writes:
Only the subject who is both self-possessed and possesses access to
the library of the already read has the luxury of flirting with the
escape from identity – like the loss of Arachne’s ‘head’ – promised
by an aesthetics of the decentered (decapitated, really) body.
(Miller, 1988: 83)
Theories of text and intertextuality such as Barthes’s, Miller
argues, efface women writers and women’s writing by arguing
for a general de-authored textuality and for an aesthetic of the
already read that historically has been available only to privi-
leged male readers. Against such a theoretical position and rheto-
ric, Miller offers us Arachne, as the female artist, and an aes-
thetics of ‘over-reading’, an interpretive practice which looks
for signs within the text of the female subject. As she puts it:
the latter project involves reading women’s writing not ‘as if it had
already been read’, but as if it had never been read; as if for the first
time. (This assumption has the added advantage of being generally
true.) Overreading also involves a focus on the moments in the
narrative which by their representation of writing itself might be said
to figure the production of the female artist.
(ibid.: 83)
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Whilst not calling for a return to the god-like author, Miller
argues for a return to a specifically female writing subject. Text
and intertextuality must not be defined, that is, in a generalized
way which presumes that writing and reading for women is
identical to the process by which men write and read. Male critics
may well be in a position to generalize about the lack of a subject
in writing; such a position, however, makes little sense to feminist
critics searching for adequate theories and for a retrieval of a
grossly under-represented tradition.
Whilst Miller’s argument here is a timely reminder of the
gendered nature of the concept of intertextuality, and whilst her
insistence on the need to return to the subject of writing is
generally representative of recent feminist moves, it might be
said that she leaves no actual room for a feminist theory of text
and intertextuality itself. Reading ‘for the first time’ surely denies
the intertextual dimension of our reading. It is difficult to
understand what a ‘first-time reading’ might be, once we have
accepted at least some of the principal theoretical moves by
which the concepts of text and intertextuality enter our
vocabulary. We might argue that Miller cannot move towards
an ‘over-reading’ which eschews the notion of the ‘already read’,
without bringing into her account a host of male critical texts
which, although they may be criticized, clearly stand as
mediating inter-texts for the women’s writing she rightly
describes as woefully under-read. It would seem that we need
some additional account of the relation between women writers
and the intertextual before we can begin to perform the kinds of
readings which Miller proposes. Many feminist theorists have
found such an account by returning to the theoretical work of
Bakhtin.
THE RETURN TO BAKHTIN: FEMINISM AND
POSTCOLONIALISM
At the end of her essay, ‘Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness’
(Showalter (ed.), 1986: 243–70), Showalter criticizes those forms
of feminist criticism which seek a women’s writing, an écriture
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féminine, totally outside dominant patriarchal discourse. Such a
female space of discourse, a ‘wild zone’ of feminine utterance
and writing, is, Showalter argues, unavailable and a distraction
from the real task of locating and fostering women’s writing and
an active female subjecthood in patriarchal society. She writes:
The concept of a woman’s text in the wild zone is a playful abstraction:
in the reality to which we must address ourselves as critics, women’s
writing is a ‘double-voiced discourse’ that always embodies the social,
literary, and cultural heritage of both the muted and the dominant.
(Showalter (ed.), 1986: 263)
The employment of Bakhtin’s notion of ‘double-voiced dis-
course’ is significant here. It allows a critical focus which can
capture the ‘otherness’ of women’s writing within patriarchal
culture and society. A recognition of the dialogic, double-voiced
nature of discourse, allows Showalter and other feminists to cease
in the exploration of a wholly ‘other’ tradition of writing, and to
begin exploring the manner in which the writing of women,
along with other marginalized groups, is always a mixture of
available discursive possibilities. As she writes:
there are muted groups other than women; a dominant structure
may determine many muted structures. A black American woman
poet, for example, would have her literary identity formed by the
dominant (white male) tradition, by a muted women’s culture, and
by a muted black culture. She would be affected by both sexual and
racial politics in a combination unique to her case.
(ibid.: 254)
The desire to resist the poststructuralist effacement of the writing
subject, whilst not returning to a model of authorship in which
meaning is generated by a god-like, male authority figure, seems
best served by a return to Bakhtinian notions. Women’s lives within
society, like the lives of colonial subjects, are inevitably fractured
or divided. Seen as ‘other’, as mute, objectified and outside of
discourse, the dominant male and dominant white culture, women
subjects, along with colonial subjects, write within and yet against
such an ‘othering’ process.
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Whilst Bakhtin cannot be claimed as a feminist theorist,
women and women’s writing being conspicuously absent in his
work, his concepts of the carnivalesque, of heteroglossia, of
double-voiced discourse, and of the dialogic as opposed to the
monological principle within language, are of great assistance
in articulating the manner in which the ‘othered’ subject speaks,
writes and reads. Dale M. Bauer in her Feminist Dialogics: A
Theory of failed Community, argues that Bakhtin can be ‘an
empowering model’ for women writers and readers. Looking at
notions of community within novels by Nathaniel Hawthorne,
Henry James, Edith Wharton and Kate Chopin, Bauer takes up
Bakhtin’s description of the polyphonic novel and describes how
characters within these novels learn to see themselves and the
process of their own social construction through the language
of others. Such female characters, ‘othered’ by the social
discourse, can be linked, Bauer argues, to the carnivalesque
figure of the Fool: a figure the critic Mary Russo has also
discussed in terms of Bakhtin, feminism and the construction
of women’s identity within society (Russo, 1986). For such
‘naïve’ characters, Bauer argues: ‘Stupidity (a form of resistance)
forces the unspoken repressions into the open, thus making them
vulnerable to interpretation, contradiction and dialogue’ (Bauer,
1988: 11). Such female characters, finding their own identities
constructed by the language of others, can be linked to the
feminist reader. Both female character and feminist reader
question the monological discourse dominant in society and
articulated by specific characters, and thus move from a position
Showalter calls ‘mutedness’ to an exposure of resistant, un-
official, alternative discourses and subject positions. In so doing,
character and reader release the dialogic play of languages
previously repressed. The effect is to expose not only the fact
that the self, in Bakhtin’s terms, is always a product of the
discourse of an other, but also to display the dialogic nature of
identity itself. As Bauer argues, for those characters who are
alienated and ‘confused’ by society, who find themselves in the
position of the carnivalesque ‘Fool’, it becomes crucial to
interpret the discourses and discursive structures which others
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in positions of power take as monologically unquestionable.
‘Reading,’ she writes, ‘is an activity that by definition takes place
only when one confronts the unfamiliar, the strange, the other
which requires deciphering or dialogicization’ (ibid.: 162).
Such points can be related more particularly to concepts of
intertextuality, if we move to an influential essay by Patricia S.
Yaeger, entitled ‘“Because a Fire Was in My Head”, Eudora
Welty and the Dialogic Imagination’. Developing an account of
women writers as inevitably involved in ‘plagiarism’, Yaeger
also turns to the Bakhtinian account of the polyphonic, dialogic
novel: ‘Since language,’ she writes, quoting Bakhtin, ‘is
“overpopulated with the intentions of others”, the novelist has
at his or her disposal only those words that are already qualified,
already inscribed by others; writing occurs within a hostile
linguistic environment’ (Yaeger, 1984: 957). Yaeger, in a manner
she connects to the work of Showalter and Nancy K. Miller,
uses Bakhtinian dialogism to explore women’s writing as a
resistance to patriarchal monologism. The resistance centres on
a recognition of ‘othering’ which is clearly connected to notions
of intertextuality and to double-voiced discourse. As Yaeger
writes:
Showalter is right to insist that theories of women’s creativity must
address the intersections of different kinds of discourse in women’s
writing, since the best feminocentric writing will be not only in conflict
but also in dialogue with the dominant ideologies it is trying to dislodge.
(Yaeger, 1984: 959)
Yaeger’s example comes in Eudora Welty’s appropriation of
Yeats’s poetry. In particular she employs Welty’s collection of
stories, The Golden Apples, to demonstrate the manner in which
Yeats’s poetry is intertextually inscribed but also revised, re-
aligned and challenged by Welty’s characters. Welty, she ar-
gues, uses ‘Yeats’s language as a form of “otherness”’, only in
order to expropriate it, ‘to make it articulate her own point of
view’ (ibid.: 959). Bringing the work of Kristeva and Bakhtin
together, Yaeger argues that Welty’s use of Yeats’s poetry takes
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the signifieds of certain Yeatsian images and reincorporates them,
in The Golden Apples, as new signifiers, thus establishing ‘a
distance between the incorporated text and its initial meaning
... [opening the] text to another point of view’ (ibid.: 962).
The principle inter-text for Welty’s collection, Yaeger argues,
is Yeats’s ‘Song of the Wandering Aengus’. This poem: ‘tells
the story of a man driven by the “fire” in his mind to seek an
object equal to his desire. He finds this object in “a glimmering
girl/ With apple blossom in her hair/ Who called me by my name
and ran/ And faded through the brightening air”’. The poet,
undaunted, quests after the girl’s ‘echoing image’, and Yaeger
cites the following lines of the poem:
Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon
The golden apples of the sun.
(quoted in Yaeger, 1984: 959)
Welty’s text, Yaeger argues, gives us various female figures who
not only stand for the female other as depicted in Yeats’s poem
but who also, in having their own narratives and quests for iden-
tity, challenge the patriarchal discourse in which female figures
are idealized ‘others’ by themselves taking up the questing role
classically viewed as essentially male. By a subtle use of
intertextual echo and quotation of Yeats’s poem Welty challenges
the monological discourse of male quester and female other by
having her own female characters at different moments occupy
both male and female discursive positions. As Yaeger writes:
in The Golden Apples [Welty] has invented a complement of [female]
characters who replicate even as they relativize the patterns of Yeats’s
poetry. She achieves this primarily by giving the figure of Yeats’s
glimmering girl a literary if not a social status equal to that of Yeats’s
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wanderer ... she ... alters the poem’s context and its meaning by
insisting that Yeats’s poem has two protagonists and that each
protagonist incarnates a different aspect of woman’s story.
(Yaeger, 1984: 962)
Yeats’s poem, which monologically argues for a gender divide
in which men are questing protagonists and women passive
others symbolizing the ideal, is used by Welty to capture the
double nature of her female characters, both socially ‘other’ and
yet protagonists of their own search for identity.
Such a sense of the double nature of women’s identity in
society and thus of women’s writing is clearly related to the
social positions postcolonial theorists have sought to describe,
as a reference to the title of the Frantz Fanon’s classic 1950s
text of postcolonial theory, Black Skin, White Masks, can attest.
Again, in this context, a return to Bakhtin helps retain not only
the notion of subjecthood, of the struggle for identity and agency,
but also that of the inevitably ‘double-voiced’ or intertextual
nature of the speech and writing of such marginalized, ‘othered’
subjects.
At the beginning of his book The Location of Culture, Homi
K. Bhabha takes up the often monologic use of notions such as
nationality, race, class and gender and asks a series of rhetorical
questions designed to foreground the fact that modern subjects
exist ‘in-between’ such terms:
How are subjects formed ‘in-between’, or in excess of, the sum of
the ‘parts’ of difference (usually intoned as race/ class/ gender, etc.)?
How do strategies of representation or empowerment come to be
formulated in the competing claims of communities where, despite
shared histories of deprivation and discrimination, the exchange of
values, meanings and priorities may not always be collaborative and
dialogical, but may be profoundly antagonistic, conflictual and even
incommensurate?
(Bhabha, 1994: 2)
Bhabha’s questions not only refer to the ‘double’ or ‘in-between’
position of postcolonial subjects, they also suggest that the term
‘dialogue’ requires to be understood in a Bakhtinian sense.
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Dialogism does not necessarily mean a ‘conversation’ between
subjects equally empowered within the language game; it re-
fers, more specifically, to a clash between languages and utter-
ances which can foreground not only social division but a radi-
cally divided space of discursive formations within an individual
subject. An African-American woman writer, as suggested ear-
lier, may find herself the ‘subject’ of competing discourses which
it is not possible simply to resolve. Such a subject’s utterances
are certainly ‘double-voiced’, if not ‘triple-voiced’, and a clash
between dominant and repressed discourses may well exist
within them. Bhabha’s most influential term for such a radi-
cally split experience of ‘being in discourse’ is hybridity: ‘a dif-
ference “within”, a subject that inhabits the rim of an “in-be-
tween”’ reality’ (ibid.: 13). On this basis, beyond any possibil-
ity of a shared community or even a stand-off between mutu-
ally exclusive group positions, postcolonial criticism’s focus
seems highly intertextual, exploring: ‘the more complex cul-
tural and political boundaries that exist on the cusp of ... often
opposed political spheres’ (ibid.: 173). The postcolonial writer,
in other words, like the woman writer we have been analysing,
exists as a ‘split’ subject whose utterances are always ‘double-
voiced’, their own and yet replete with an ‘otherness’ which we
can associate with a socially oriented notion of intertextuality.
Aldon L. Nielsen, in his Writing Between the Lines: Race
and Intertextuality, clarifies these points by returning his readers
to the history of the enforced acquisition of the English language
by the black slaves upon whom was built the modern United
States of America. In a manner connectable to Bhabha’s notion
of hybridity, Nielsen demonstrates that the situation in the States
presents us not simply with the African-American acquisition
of English language, but equally the influence upon American
English of an African-American revision, appropriation and
transformation of English into new forms and styles:
each attempt to draw borders within the language of race and to
establish ownership of a territory encounters and is countered by
the already-in-place deterritorializing language of the other. America’s
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mulatto past, though nearly invisible in the political discourse of the
late twentieth century, is continually disseminated within its language.
Each speaking subject speaks a language of racial difference and
amalgamation.
(Nielsen, 1994: 78)
We find, as Nielsen suggests, that it is white American writing
which lags behind the black American author’s long-held rec-
ognition of the necessity to speak with what the black Ameri-
can theorist W. E. B. Du Bois styled ‘double consciousness’.
Mary O’Connor cites a pertinent passage from Du Bois’s 1918
text Souls of Black Folk. Du Bois writes of the ‘peculiar sensa-
tion’ of ‘double consciousness’, ‘always looking at one’s self
through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape
of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity’. Du Bois
continues: ‘One ever feels his two-ness – an American, a Ne-
gro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two
warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone
keeps it from being torn asunder’ (quoted in O’Connor, 1991:
202).
Nielsen’s argument leads not to the segregation of traditions
into ‘African’ and ‘American’ but an explicit recognition that
those traditions are woven into each other and that no author
writes a language which does not display this intertextual,
double-voiced condition. A combination of Kristeva’s
intertextual theory, particularly her account of a transposition
of the thetic position within writing, and a return to Bakhtinian
notions of double-voiced discourse and the dialogic resistance
to monological positions, leads Nielsen to a positive model of
reading in which ‘language is at once our own and other’
(Nielsen, 1994: 26). Such an intertextual approach returns us to
the writing subject, now viewed as a ‘palimpsestic self’ always
in the process of being constructed, and thus always able to
form resistances to monological definitions of racial identity
which would deny the dialogic, intertextual ‘in-betweenness’
of the writing self.
Perhaps the most impressive example of postcolonial theory’s
return to Bakhtin comes in the work of Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
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At the beginning of his seminal work The Signifying Monkey
(1988), Gates refers to the danger for African-American theory
and criticism of an unquestioning deployment of Eurocentric
theoretical models. African-American criticism, indeed, has
impressive theoretical antecedents of its own. Having made that
point, however, Gates’s work is still significantly influenced by
Bakhtinian theory, although reinterpreted via the traditions of
black writing his work maps out. Explaining the role of such
traditional trickster figures as Esu-Elegbara originating in the
Yoruba cultures of Nigeria, Benin, Brazil, Cuba and Haiti (Gates,
1988: xxi), along with the figure of the Signifying Monkey, and
central black tropes such as the Talking Book, Gates develops
an account of what he terms ‘Signifyin(g)’: ‘a metaphor for
formal revision, or intertextuality, within the Afro-American
literary tradition’ (ibid.: xxi). ‘Signifyin(g)’ represents the
peculiar relation African-American writers have with regard to
Standard English and the vernacular of black American speech.
Like Derrida’s term différance, ‘Signifyin(g)’ exemplifies the
features and processes of language to which it refers. If
‘signification’ in Standard English, functioning on a horizontal
plane of language, can be seen as a signifier pointing towards a
signified, then ‘Signifyin(g)’ represents a vertical revision and
rhetorical play with standard signifields, turning them into new
signifiers. ‘Signifyin(g)’, in other words, is an act which opens
up supposedly closed, unquestionable significations (relations
between signifiers and signifieds) to a host of associated
meanings any monological view of language would wish to
efface. Gates explains:
Signifyin(g) operates and can be represented on a paradigmatic or
vertical axis. Signifyin(g) concerns itself with that which is suspended,
vertically: the chaos of what Saussure calls ‘associative relations’, which
we can represent as the playful puns on a word that occupy the
paradigmatic axis of language and which a speaker draws on for
figurative substitutions. These substitutions in Signifyin(g) tend to be
humorous or function to name a person or a situation in a telling
manner. Whereas signification depends for order and coherence on
the exclusion of unconscious associations which any given word yields
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at any given time, Signification [or Signifyin(g)] luxuriates in the
inclusion of the freeplay of these associative rhetorical and semantic
relations.
(Gates, 1988: 49)
Gates spends considerable time recounting the traditions of the
figure of Esu-Elegbara, who, with his two mouths, symbolizes
plurality. He also explores various African-American traditions
of rhetorical word play including the ‘dozens’ in which speak-
ers ritually ‘Signify’ and make fun of each other. The result is a
complex picture of a set of myths and practices which produce
a notion of language, embodied by the term ‘Signifyin(g)’, which
is essentially double-voiced in Bakhtin’s sense.
The core of Gates’s argument is that African-American
writing is double-voiced and self-consciously intertextual in
its relation to both Standard English and a black vernacular
discourse which historically has been turned into ‘non-speech’
by Eurocentric, white cultural values. Gates demonstrates how
Western Enlightenment values associate rationality with the
ability to read and write. Such abilities are measured in
Western culture by their performance in a standard, Western
(white) manner. Western culture associates Standard Usage,
whether it be English, Dutch or French, with a culture of
writing and reading, whilst it associates the black vernacular
with speech, a form of language outside of writing and its
interpretation.
The struggle of black subjects to enter into Western literary
culture is, Gates demonstrates, intensely connected to the
recurring trope of the Talking Book. This trope embodies for
Gates the problem facing black subjects since the arrival of
slavery: ‘how can the black subject posit a full and sufficient
self in a language in which blackness is a sign of absence?’
(ibid.: 169). Working through a series of slave narratives in which
black characters, sometimes miraculously, learn to read Western
writing, Gates demonstrates, as he puts it: ‘the extent of
intertextuality and presupposition at work in the first discrete
period of Afro-American literary history’. Far from being
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isolated oddities, these early slave narratives already exhibit a
highly sophisticated tradi tion of writing. However, this recovery
of an in itself deeply intertextual tradition of black slave writing,
helps to foreground a more general issue which grounds Gates’s
subsequent treatment of twentieth-century African-American
literature and demonstrates:
the curious tension between the black vernacular and the literate
white text, between the spoken and the written word, between the
oral and the printed form of literary discourse ... represented and
thematized in black letters at least since slaves and ex-slaves met the
challenge of the Enlightenment to their humanity by literally writing
themselves into being through carefully crafted representations in
language of the black self.
(Gates, 1988: 131)
The double-voicedness of African-American writing, accord-
ing to Gates, remains deeply rooted in the tension between stan-
dard (English) writing and the non-standard oral traditions of
black communities. To enter (white) writing does one have to
sacrifice black speech? Gates’s analysis of a number of twenti-
eth-century African-American authors explores the way in which
such a question has been answered in dialogic, double-voiced
ways.
Zora Neale Hurston’s novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God
(1937), begins by foregrounding the difference between standard
writing and the speech of its black characters. The novel opens
with its third-person narrator writing in a manner perfectly
assimilated into the literary form of Standard English:
Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board. For some they
come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon,
never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes
away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the
life of men.
(Hurston, 1986: 9)
As soon as we move to the speech of the characters, however,
we move to the written rendition of essentially oral language:
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‘What she doin’ coming back here in dem overalls? Can’t she find no
dress to put on? – Where’s dat blue satin dress she left here in? –
What all dat money her husband took and died and left her? – What
dat ole forty year ole ’oman doin’ wid her hair swingin’ down her
back lak some young gal? Where she left dat young lad of a boy she
went off here wid? Thought she was going to marry? – Where he left
her? – What he done wid all her money? – Betcha he off wid some
gal so young she ain’t even got no hairs – why she don’t stay in her
class? –’.
(ibid.: 10)
These remarks concern the return to the town of the novel’s
female protagonist, Janie. The first words we hear from her
are also a written rendition of oral speech: ‘Ah, pretty good,
Ah’m tryin’ to soak some uh de tiredness and de dirt outa mah
feet’ (ibid.: 14). Gates, with one eye on Barthes’s categories in
S/Z, styles Hurston’s novel a ‘speakerly text’, which he de-
fines as:
a text whose rhetorical strategy is designed to represent an oral literary
tradition, designed ‘to emulate the phonetic, grammatical, and lexical
patterns of actual speech and produce the “illusion of oral narration”.’
The speakerly text is that text in which all other structural elements
seem to be devalued, as important as they remain to the telling of the
tale, because the narrative strategy signals attention to its own
importance, an importance which would seem to be the privileging
of oral speech and its inherent linguistic features.
(Gates, 1988: 181)
Such a ‘speakerly text’ exemplifies Bakhtinian notions, since
the ‘voice’ of the novel’s characters does not simply express
a ‘point of view’ but also contains an ‘otherness’ within it;
that is, the presence of a tradition of black speech patterns
and genres. However, Hurston’s novel does not simply give
a written voice to black oral tradition. Gates demonstrates
the manner in which, as Janie comes to self-consciousness
and a more empowered state of identity, the narrator’s stan-
dard ‘writerly’ voice and the ‘speakerly’ voice of the novel’s
protagonist begin to merge in a free indirect discourse in
which we cannot always know the point of view being repre-
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sented: the narrator’s, or Janie’s, or both? In such moments,
Gates asserts: ‘Their Eyes Were Watching God resolves that
implicit tension between standard English and black dialect,
the two voices that function as verbal counterpoints in the
text’s opening paragraphs’ (ibid.: 192). Such a blending of
distinctly writerly and speakerly voices, Gates argues, pro-
duces for the first time in African-American literary tradi-
tion a resolution of the cardinal challenge facing African-
American authors. The resolution is characteristically double-
voiced, merging without negating white and black discourses
into what might be styled a hybrid voice beyond any notion
of singular or stable identity.
Gates’s work, however, is concerned to do justice to the
tensions and accommodations between socially recognizable
discourses and to the influences and shared patterns of
imagery, tropes and strategies between specific texts within
that tradition. To recognize that feature of his work, we need
also to refer to his analysis of Alice Walker’s more recent
novel, The Color Purple. Walker has frequently asserted the
influence of Hurston on her writing, and her famous novel
of 1983 mirrors Hurston’s in following the passage towards
self-consciousness in its female protagonist Celie. The
important point for Gates is that Walker’s novel, by reversing
the formal strategy pursued by Hurston, ‘signifies’ upon
Hurston’s novel. Whilst Hurston, as Gates puts it, creates a
‘speakerly text’ in which black dialect is given a form of
written life, Walker takes a ‘spoken or mimetic voice’ and
places it within the written form of an epistolary novel. As
he states:
Whereas Hurston represents Janie’s discovery of her voice as the
enunciation of her own doubled self through a free indirect ‘narrative
of division’, Walker represents Celie’s growth of self-consciousness
as an act of writing. Janie and her narrator speak themselves into
being; Celie, in her letters, writes herself into being ... Celie ... never
speaks; rather, she writes her speaking voice and that of everyone
who speaks to her.
(Gates, 1988: 243)
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Celie’s written voice is, as Gates shows, a complex mix of a
‘dominated and undereducated adolescent’ and ‘a remarkably
reflective and sensitive teller, or writer’ capable of rendering
the speech and thoughts of others within her writing voice. In
this sense Walker’s novel seems to evidence a growing confi-
dence in the African-American women’s literary tradition. It
presents a single character with a voice capable of producing
that synthesis of self and other, of dialect speech and written
language, previously divided, in Hurston’s work. Celie’s double-
voiced writing, which contains within it not only her own and
all other characters’ speech, but also the tradition of the Afri-
can-American people’s struggle to find identity between im-
posed and self-designed linguistic forms, is a testament to the
radically intertextual nature of black American writing. It dem-
onstrates the achievement of self-enlightenment within rather
than outside of or in transcendence of a hybrid, multiracial and
multivoiced environment. As Mary O’Connor states, writing of
the climactic moment of the novel in which Celie asserts her
independence from her husband, Celie’s agency is established
not simply because of her decision to speak out for herself, but
also because of her friend and lover’s, Shug Avery’s, recogni-
tion of that speech (O’Connor, 1991: 205). As Bakhtin argues,
identity is only ever achieved in relation to another, an addressee
who in answering speech affirms the subject’s dialogic exist-
ence:
I’ll fix her wagon! say Mr. _, and spring toward me.
A dust devil flew up on the porch between us, fill my mouth with
dirt.
The dirt say, Anything you do to me, already done to you.
Then I feel Shug shake me. Celie, she say. And I come to myself.
I’m pore, I’m black, I may be ugly and can’t cook, a voice say to
everything listening. But I’m here.
Amen, say Shug. Amen, amen.
(Walker, 1983: 176)
Gates’s study is a testament to the manner in which critics
have reworked the concept of intertextuality to deal with ma-
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terial very different from the avant-garde and classic realist
texts which formed the immediate focus of the term’s first theo-
rists and practitioners. It also highlights the seminal place
Bakhtin holds within such rearticulations of intertextual theory.
As we move on to the non-literary arts and to discussions of
Postmodernism, re-definition and the persistence of Bakhtinian
theory will be confirmed as fundamental to intertextual theory
and practice.
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POSTMODERN CONCLUSIONS
INTERTEXTUALITY IN THE NON-LITERARY ARTS
Intertextuality, as a term, has not been restricted to discussions
of the literary arts. It is found in discussions of cinema, painting,
music, architecture, photography and in virtually all cultural
and artistic productions. Despite the common-sense association
between literature and the word ‘text’, we need only remember
the connection between the early articulations of intertextual
theory and the development of Saussure’s notions concerning
semiology to make intertextuality’s use in studies of non-literary
art forms understandable. In the Course on General Linguistics,
Saussure looked forward to a new science, semiotics, which
would study ‘the life of signs within society’ (Saussure, 1974:
16). It is possible to speak of the ‘languages’ of cinema, painting
or architecture: languages which involve productions of complex
patterns of encoding, re-encoding, allusion, echo, transposing
of previous systems and codes. To interpret a painting or a
building we inevitably rely on an ability to interpret that
painting’s or building’s relationship to previous ‘languages’ or
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POSTMODERN CONCLUSIONS 175
‘systems’ of painting or architectural design. Films, symphonies,
buildings, paintings, just like literary texts, constantly talk to
each other as well as talking to the other arts.
Many critics welcome the availability of intertextuality as a
term and argue for its positive advantage over more established
terms in their field. J. Michael Allsen, for example, compares
favourably the term’s potentiality for musicology and prefers it
to more established musicological references to ‘imitation’ and
‘borrowing’ (Allsen, 1993: 175). Robert S. Hatten takes this
further by exploring the manner in which a composer’s
competence in particular musical styles and that same
composer’s strategic utilization of those styles in particular
musical pieces constitute ‘regulators of relevant intertextual
relationships’ (Hatten, 1985: 70). In this sense, whilst styles
represent the available building blocks for the composer, music’s
version of the ‘already written’, strategies represent the
composer’s ability to transpose such styles into original
compositions. As Hatten puts it:
Strategies, to the extent they exceed complete formalization or simple
predictability, assert a work’s individuality even as they rely upon a
style for intelligibility. Thus, a given work will typically be in and of a
style, while playing with or against it strategically.
(Hatten, 1985: 58)
Keith A. Reader points to the fact that intertextuality can be
utilized, in the context of cinema, to examine a phenomenon
like the Hollywood star system. As he writes:
The very concept of the film star is an intertextual one, relying as it
does on correspondences of similarity and difference from one film
to the next, and sometimes too on supposed resemblances between
on-and off-screen personae. Thus, Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time
in the West ironically inverts Henry Fonda’s normal heroic role to
make of him a particularly sadistic villain; Mike Nichols’s Who’s Afraid
of Virginia Woolf ? exploits parallels between the stormy domestic life
of George and Martha on screen and that of Richard Burton and
Elizabeth Taylor off it.
(Reader, 1990: 176)
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176 POSTMODERN CONCLUSIONS
A recognition of the intertextuality of performance can equally
be made of theatrical productions (see Carlson, 1994), and can
foreground the potential intertextual connections between liter-
ary and non-literary forms; even perhaps reaffirming our sense
of drama as a form lying between literary and non-literary art.
Intertextuality can often radically challenge established
accounts of non-literary art forms. Wendy Steiner refers to the
fact that, since painting appears to have an immediacy unavailable
to other art forms more dependent upon an unfolding over time,
this art form’s ‘a-temporality’ has ‘given rise to the naïve view of
painting as a mirror of nature, a perfect equivalent of a visual
field, a complete vision of the beautiful’ (Steiner, 1985: 57). Such
received ideas, Steiner goes on, can lead to assumptions that
painting stands beyond semiology, or that it cannot ‘mean’
anything more than its own immediate appearance. Whilst the
temporal arts are capable of negating or critiquing older points,
or of proposing new ones, painting, so such an idea would have
it, presents a pure form of representation beyond propositional or
critical meaning. Intertextuality, for Steiner, offers a useful way
to refute such naïve ideas. As she writes:
It is only by viewing paintings in light of other paintings or works of
literature, music, and so forth that the ‘missing’ semiotic power of
pictorial art can be augmented – which is to say that the power is not
missing at all, but merely absent in the conventional account of the
structure of the art.
(Steiner, 1985: 58)
As Steiner shows, the intertextual features of painting can take
us from the manner in which some paintings, as in diptychs and
triptychs, are completed by others, on to ‘quotation’ by painters
of culturally recognizable styles of earlier schools or individual
artists. The ability of painters to parody styles and gestures sug-
gests a profound intertextual level to the pictorial arts. Modern-
ist painting, with its tendency towards collage, the mixing of
different media, and the use of ‘found material’, might extend
this sense of painting’s facility for intertextual expression. Fur-
thermore, as Steiner suggests, the tendency for paintings to be
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collected into exhibitions involves the pictorial arts in a kind of
random intertextuality which radically affects their reception.
Decisions as to what paintings are to hang together, or what
paintings to reproduce within a book, set up relations between
individual paintings which normally could not have been part
of their original design and intention.
The idea of intertextuality can produce a similar rethinking
of photography, often seen as a pure representation of reality.
Recent photographic artists and critics have argued that the
meaning of the photographic image depends upon its deployment
of and its viewers’ recognition of established codes and
conventions. Cindy Sherman employs recognizable styles and
specific visual intertexts from painting, photography and film
to portray her own image. Such a practice not only makes plain
the intertextual nature of the photographic image but serves also
to make points about the construction of female identity within
culture’s network of available visual codes.
Barbara Kruger’s mixing of image and text exploits the
tension between photography’s apparent unmediated capturing
of the real world and its dependence on established codes, genres
and conventions. Linda Hutcheon, in her account of Postmodern
photography, refers to the manner in which artists such as Kruger
and Victor Burgin centre their art on an exploration of this
tension. She refers to Burgin’s ‘Possession’ with its romantic
image of a man and woman kissing. In the top part of the border
which surrounds the picture a text reads: ‘What does possession
mean to you?’ A text in the bottom part of the border reads: ‘7%
of our population own 84% of our wealth’ (see Hutcheon, 1989:
122; see Walker, 1994: 113 for a reproduction). In Kruger’s ‘We
are your circumstantial evidence’, an image of a woman’s face
is built up in segments. The face is surrounded by other segments
of photography, mainly displaying what could be seen as beads,
pills or sequins. The text is laid word by word over the
constructed image so that it forms a central spine from top to
bottom (for a reproduction, see Wallis, 1984: 415).
Burgin and Kruger, through such combinations of text and
image, employ codes from advertising and other commercial sides
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178 POSTMODERN CONCLUSIONS
of modern life to unsettle the photographic image’s doxa, its
apparent naturalness and transparency. They do this by
foregrounding various culturally encoded contexts and by mixing
codes, from ‘high’ art and from popular and commercial contexts,
usually separated from each other (see Hutcheon, 1989: 135).
This practice, which brings a recognition of photography’s
intertextual codedness to bear on the dissemination of ideology
within modern media is demonstrated by turning to Loraine
Leeson’s and Peter Dunn’s photomurals, the most widely
discussed being their ‘The Changing Picture of Docklands’.
Working for the East London Health Project, and backed by the
Trades Council and other local political groups, Leeson and
Dunn produced a series of posters on six poster sites in London’s
Docklands area which mixed visual images with texts styled on
advertising slogans and on the more discursive form of political
pamphlets (Leeson and Dunn, 1986: 102–18). The posters, which
were successively changed, present a combination of image and
text which ‘unfold[s] an argument through time’ (Hutcheon,
1989: 106). The first poster, with the banner text ‘What’s Going
On Behind Our Backs’, presents the question spray-painted onto
a corrugated iron fence behind which the viewer can see an
idealized cityscape of tower blocks made of coins. The next
poster, ‘Big Money Is Moving In’, unveils more of the cityscape,
the third displays it in full, complete with towering blocks of
money, and the sub-text: ‘Don’t Let It Push Out Local People’.
The next two posters develop the image, showing people being
dropped into a land-fill site which rises up to obscure the tower-
blocks. The last two images present the gradual shattering of
these images of ‘big money’ by what in the last poster becomes
a utopian image of local people celebrating in a municipal park.
Intertextuality is an illuminating concept to bring to a reading
of this photomural series, since the work utilizes a number of
culturally significant codes and conventions and also refers as a
text to the environment within which it is displayed. The
combination of image and texts depending on genres such as
advertising and political pamphlets produces a field of
signification which re deploys the principal media which the
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POSTMODERN CONCLUSIONS 179
London Docklands Development Corporation also deploy:
advertising, promotional literature, the sound-bite, the business
slogan. The posters thus make visible the ideological messages
of big business. They also transpose the ‘languages’ by which
those messages are disseminated and do so within the very
geographical sites they target. Leeson and Dunn’s work is
intertextual on the level of genre and code, or ‘language’, but it
is also intertextual in its social situatedness. Their posters
exposed the fact that the Docklands area of London was a text,
the meaning of which was being disputed during the 1980s.
Their combining of different cultural codes, visual and textual,
exemplifies the manner in which modern art utilizes intertextual
techniques to demonstrate the ideological nature of modes of
communication which dominant culture and state power
frequently assert to be neutral, transparent, and even natural. As
Hutcheon argues, such practices are in tune with Barthes’s
association of the intertextually explicit text with a critique of
what he calls doxa (Hutcheon, 1989: 3). They are also in tune
with Bakhtinian notions of the social situatedness of art and the
deployment of already existent discourses, or what he calls
speech genres.
Intertextuality can also be seen as connected to a developing
trend within twentieth-century art to incorporate ‘real objects’
into painting. The use of bits of wallpaper, string, postage stamps,
within, for example, a Cubist design, incorporates segments of
the physical world into the pictorial image only, paradoxically,
to unsettle the notion of painting’s realistic representation of
the world.
Discussions of cinema have frequently explored kinds of
intertextuality across artistic boundaries. T. Jefferson Kline’s
Screening the Text: Intertextuality and the New Wave French
Cinema, for example, looks at the manner in which film-makers
such as Jean-Luc Godard, Robert Bresson, Alain Resnais and
others associated with New Wave movement, refer to and yet
simultaneously repress literary inter-texts. Kline employs
intertextuality in order to demonstrate how in the French New
Wave we can read a specific approach to cinema’s characteristic
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180 POSTMODERN CONCLUSIONS
ambivalence towards the literary tradition. Literary texts, in that
movement, function as ways of authorizing artistic, cultural and
even ideological positions whilst at the same time being
repressed or ‘screened off’ in the films themselves. As others
have suggested, this is a recognizable element of film. As a new
and popular form of artistic production, cinema has, from its
earliest days, relied on the established and ‘serious’ form of
literature to provide it with cultural value. Adapting literary texts
relates the new form of cinema to a universally recognized
aesthetic field. As Kline demonstrates, however, more recent
‘high art’ forms of cinema repress as much as they continue to
rely on that intertextual connection with literature.
Kline, then, reminds us of the deeply-rooted intertextual
relationship between film and literature; a relationship also
inscribed, as Bruce Fleming has argued, in terms of a tension
between film and original film-script (Fleming, 1994: 127–39).
This is not at all to suggest that modern cinema remains sub-
servient to literature. Many analyses of cinema demonstrate the
manner in which literary traditions are radically transposed
within the medium. Anne Marie Miraglia has explored how
Jacques Poulin’s Volkswagen Blues punctuates its representation
of a physical journey across Canada and the United States with
intertextual references to literary texts from those two countries.
The film not only merges a literal and a textual journey across
Canada and the United States, it also foregrounds how place is
itself textualized, the places represented always already being
part of a received textual map.
James Goodwin’s study of the films of Akira Kurosawa draws
the two strains of intertextuality together when he explores
Kurosawa’s place in the intertextual history of the Western film
genre and the manner in which Kurosawa transposes into
contemporary culture the tragedies of Shakespeare. The first
instance takes us from the early Hollywood Westerns of John
Ford, Howard Hawks and others, through Kurosawa’s jidai-geki
(period drama) films, with their anti-hero played by Toshiro
Mifune, on to Sergio Leone’s successful transpositions of
Kurosawa’s style in the ‘Spaghetti Westerns’, starring Clint
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POSTMODERN CONCLUSIONS 181
Eastwood, which he made in the 1960s and 1970s. This
intertextual chain demonstrates the hybridity, the crossing of
Japanese and US cultures, involved in Kurosawa’s and Leone’s
contributions to the Western. Kurosawa’s later films, Throne of
Blood and Ran, however, transpose Shakespearean tragedies
such as Macbeth and King Lear into a modern cultural setting,
by presenting his audience with tragedies denuded of any form
of heroism.
Postmodernism and intertextuality
At the present time, any discussion of the place of intertextuality
within the arts leads us towards the issue of Postmodernism.
Ours, it appears, is a Postmodern age. Unlike poststructuralism,
with which it is often compared, Postmodernism is a term which
is employed by many to refer to the current historical, social
and cultural epoch. Poststructuralism, in this sense, would merely
be an aspect of the Postmodern era. The idea of Postmodernism
is clearly a vast subject. It might be useful for us, however, to
recognize the contested nature of the term. Postmodernism has
been the subject of great debate over the last two decades; it is
itself a dialogic word with various negative and positive
connotations.
Walter Benjamin’s often cited essay ‘The Work of Art in the
Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ is a useful reference point in
any discussion of these negative and positive approaches to
Postmodernism (Benjamin, 1968: 217–51). Benjamin, writing
in 1930s Germany, referred to the manner in which modern
modes of technological production and reproduction have
shattered previous ideas concerning the aesthetic value of the
work of art. In particular the technological world shatters and
disseminates the ‘aura’ of the work. In an age before the mass
publication of books, possession of an individual text was
extremely rare and of enormous value. The prices still paid for
original classic paintings also attest a residual attachment in
contemporary society to the aura of the original work of art.
Technological society, however, is dominated by reproductions
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182 POSTMODERN CONCLUSIONS
of original works. The signed copy of the novel may be preferable
to the unsigned copy, an original painting by Van Gogh may
seem priceless, attendance at a dance performance may seem
preferable to viewing it on video, but in contemporary society
our experience of these and all other arts are generally of their
technological reproductions. New artistic media of the twentieth
century, such as film, video and television, are, indeed, based
on technological methods of reproduction. The aura which
surrounds The Mona Lisa or the eighth-century Book of Kells in
Trinity College Library, Dublin, is unavailable to, and indeed
an irrelevance for, these kinds of art forms.
The new media of film, television and video also, of course,
provide us with our main forms of access to local, national and
global events. Reality, we might say, is something which is par-
tially created by the media through which it is represented. This
point has led many to focus on the relationship between reality
and representation, fact and fiction. Benjamin, writing before
the incredible increase in communications technology in the
post-war period, made the point that technological processes of
representation, functioning on a mass level, can be deployed by
socially regressive as well as socially progressive forces. The
Nazi regime in the 1930s Germany in which Benjamin lived
notoriously employed film as an outlet for its propaganda.
For many theorists and critics, the Postmodern era can seem
one in which reproduction takes over from authentic produc-
tion. Marxist critics, such as Terry Eagleton (1986) and Fredric
Jameson (1991), are of this camp, and their arguments are often
augmented by reference to the work of Postmodern theorists
such as Jean Baudrillard. For Baudrillard Postmodern culture is
dominated by the simulacrum, a word taken from the work of
Plato and referring to a copy which does not possess an original
(see Baudrillard, 1988). Hence our experience of modern art, as
we have seen, increasingly comes to us in forms of reproduc-
tion. News reports of political and social events are provided by
competing television channels, often with their own political
and social agendas. These reports employ processes of fram-
ing, editing and other reproductions of images and speech which
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POSTMODERN CONCLUSIONS 183
the viewer, possessing only what is presented, cannot challenge.
A constructed news report thus comes to substitute for any real
experi ence of the event. The ‘simulacrum’, the copy, comes to
replace the ‘real’.
We noted earlier that for Barthes intertextuality – which for
poststructuralism is usually a term denoting a radical liberation
of signification – can be the cause of a certain ennui or boredom.
In a culture dominated by codes so pervasive that they appear
natural, the intertextual, viewed as the presence of these codes
and clichés within culture, can cause a sense of repetition, a
saturation of cultural stereotypes, the triumph of the doxa over
that which would resist and disrupt it. It might seem, then, that
in a Postmodern context intertextual codes and practices
predominate because of a loss of any access to reality. Jameson,
commenting on the manner in which Postmodern theory tends
to eradicate notions of what he styles ‘depth’ writes: ‘depth is
replaced by surface, or by multiple surfaces (what is often called
intertextuality is in that sense no longer a matter of depth)’
(Jameson, 1991: 12). He is not merely referring to the manner
in which, in Postmodernism, earlier divisions between ‘serious’
and ‘popular’ or ‘high’ and ‘low’ cultural productions are merged.
Jean-François Lyotard argues that, in the culture of late
capitalism, traditional notions of national identity and culture
are superseded by global forms deriving from transnational
corporations in control of the media, of scientific research and
other technological and commercial areas of life (Lyotard, 1986).
In such a situation, argues Jameson, previous modes of identity
and expression, based on a shared sense of the ruling norm,
give way to a heterogeneous, rootless culture in which neither
norm nor a resistance to that norm seems any longer possible.
Connecting such a scenario to national languages as well as to
cultural styles, Jameson writes:
If the ideas of the ruling class were once the dominant (or hegemonic)
ideology of bourgeois society, the advanced capitalist countries today
are now a field of stylistic and discursive heterogeneity without a
norm. Faceless masters continue to inflect the economic strategies
which constrain our existences, but no longer need to impose their
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184 POSTMODERN CONCLUSIONS
speech (or are henceforth unable to); and the postliteracy of the late
capitalist world reflects not only the absence of any great collective
project, but also the unavailability of the older national language itself.
(Jameson, 1991: 17)
In such a situation, in which there seems no longer to a be a
cultural norm to resist, parody of dominant norms is impossible
and gives way to what Jameson calls pastiche:
In this situation, parody finds itself without a vocation; it has lived,
and that strange new thing pastiche slowly comes to take its place.
Pastiche is, like parody, the imitation of a peculiar mask, speech in a
dead language: but it is a neutral practice of such mimicry, without
any of parody’s ulterior motives, amputated of the satiric impulse,
devoid of laughter and of any conviction that, alongside the abnormal
tongue you have momentarily borrowed, some healthy linguistic nor-
mality still exists. Pastiche is thus blank parody, a statue with blind
eyes ... the producers of culture have nowhere to turn but to the
past: the imitation of dead styles, speech through all the masks and
voices stored up in the imaginary museum of a now global culture.
(ibid.: 17–18)
In the culture of late capitalism, Jameson argues, a play of im-
ages and styles, with no attachment to any recognizable cul-
tural norm or social class, pervades the way in which people
speak and the art they produce or consume. Such a dialogic,
double-voiced phenomenon as parody, the mixing of official
with unofficial language or style, becomes impossible.
Intertextual practice, no longer capable of radical double-
voicedness, collapses into a kind of pointless resurrection of
past styles and past voices.
John Barth’s essay, ‘The Literature of Exhaustion’, might
seem to confirm such a view of the present state of culture and
cultural production. However, Barth begins his essay thus:
By ‘exhaustion’ I don’t mean anything so tired as the subject of physical,
moral, or intellectual decadence, only the usedupness of certain forms
or exhaustion of certain possibilities – by no means necessarily a
cause for despair.
(Barth, 1975: 19)
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POSTMODERN CONCLUSIONS 185
The fact that Barth went on to write a follow-up article, entitled
‘The Literature of Replenishment: Postmodernist Fiction’,
confirms the fact that for him the perceived saturatedness of
present cultural forms and styles, the sense that culture cannot
(to employ the Modernist rallying cry) constantly ‘Make It New’,
is not a cause for concern and does not mean that contemporary
art is a weakened, irrelevant, and parasitic phenomenon.
Many positive accounts of Postmodernism, in fact, refer to
the fact that Modernism’s belief that technological innovation
could be harnessed by art, and that it offered the prospect of an
ideal cultural future, have proved groundless. Nowhere can this
point be seen with more clarity than in the domain of architecture,
many critics’ choice for the origins of Postmodern theory and
practice. Mary McLeod writes that Postmodern architects:
oppose the modern movement’s messianic faith in the new; no longer,
they assert, can architects naïvely assume that technological innovation
insures a universal aesthetic and social solution .... In contrast to the
modern architects of the twenties, postmodern architects publicly
acknowledge their own objectives as pluralistic and historicist. The
past is neither condemned nor ignored, but warmly embraced as a
vital formal and intellectual source. All period styles, whether classical
or vernacular, are considered open to imitation or reinterpretation.
(McLeod, 1985: 19)
Instead of architectural Modernism’s call to ‘Make It New’,
Postmodern architects practice what we can style an intertextual
architecture which appropriates styles from different eras and
combines them in ways which attempt to reflect the historically
and socially plural contexts within which their buildings now
have to exist. The Modernist architect Le Corbusier may earlier
have announced that buildings are ‘machines for living in’, yet
by the late 1960s and early 1970s the effects of Modernist inno-
vation were being radically questioned. In his book, What is
Post-Modernism?, the Postmodern architect and theorist Charles
Jencks refers to the collapse of the Ronan Point tower block in
London in 1968 and the bombing of the Pruitt-Igoe Modernist
building in St Louis in 1972 as significant demonstrations of
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186 POSTMODERN CONCLUSIONS
the popular cultural challenge to the aesthetics of Modernism.
The now famous conference, entitled the Biennale of Architec-
ture, in Venice in 1980, which included Jencks, Paolo Portoghesi
and other architects now associated with Postmodernism, is of-
ten cited as the moment in which the new aesthetic was fully
articulated. Jencks refers to the slogan of that conference, and
by so doing reminds us of the thoroughly intertextual nature of
the Postmodern architectural movement: ‘The Presence of the
Past’ (Jencks, 1989: 41).
For Jencks the Postmodern age is ‘a time of incessant
choosing ... an era when no orthodoxy can be adopted without
self-consciousness and irony, because all traditions seem to have
some validity’ (ibid.: 7). Starting with the same point as
Jameson’s critique of the culture of pastiche, Jencks moves in a
more positive direction, and views this situation as one which
opens up possibilities for radical forms of intertextual practice,
or what, in more Bakhtinian-sounding terms, he styles ‘double-
coding’:
Post-Modernism is fundamentally the eclectic mixture of any tradition
with that of the immediate past: it is both the continuation of
Modernism and its transcendence. Its best works are characteristically
double-coded and ironic, because this heterogeneity most clearly
captures our pluralism. Its hybrid style is opposed to the minimalism
of Late-Modern ideology and all revivals which are based on an
exclusive dogma or taste.
(Jencks, 1989: 7)
Whilst Modernist architecture eschewed popular forms,
Postmodernism plays with and mixes forms and styles from what
were previously perceived as ‘high culture’ and ‘popular cul-
ture’. In this way it employs an intertextual practice which seeks
to reflect a building’s different users. Thus it argues for:
an architecture that [is] professionally based and popular as well as
one that [is] based on new techniques and old patterns. Double coding
to simplify means both elite/popular and new/old and there are
compelling reasons for these opposite pairings.
(ibid.: 14)
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POSTMODERN CONCLUSIONS 187
Jencks’s discussion of James Stirling’s additions to the
Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart provides us with a fine example of this
double-coded, intertextual practice. The ‘U-shaped palazzo from
the old gallery is echoed and placed on a high plinth, or “Acropo-
lis”, above the traffic’ (ibid.: 16). At its base lies the parking
area, ‘one that is ironically indicated by stones which have
“fallen”, like ruins, to the ground’. Jencks goes on:
The resultant holes show the real construction – not the thick marble
blocks of the real Acropolis, but a steel frame holding stone cladding
which allows the air ventilation required by law. One can sit on these
false ruins and ponder the truth of our lost innocence: that we live in
an age which can build with beautiful, expressive masonry as long as
we make it skin-deep and hang it on a steel skeleton. A Modernist
would of course deny himself and us this pleasure for a number of
reasons: ‘truth to materials’, ‘logical consistency’,
‘straightforwardness’, ‘simplicity’ – all the values and rhetorical tropes
celebrated by such Modernists as Le Corbusier and Mies van der
Rohe.
(ibid.: 18–19)
Stirling in his work at the Staatsgalerie mixes Grecian styles,
references to eighteenth-century constructed ruins, Modernist
monumentalism and the garish colours of the contemporary
moment in the hand-rails that run along the taxi drop-off point.
As Jencks says of that last area:
the blue and red handrails and vibrant polychromy fit in with the
youth that uses the museum – while the Classicism appeals more to
the lovers of Schinkel .... The pluralism which is so often called on to
justify Post-Modernism is here a tangible reality.
(ibid.: 19)
Reflecting the juxtapositions of contemporary living, the
plurality of cultural styles and groupings which lie around the
building and are embodied by its users, Stirling’s Postmodernism
exemplifies the double-coded, intertextual dimension of
Postmodern architecture. Far more than depthless pastiche, as
Jameson’s diagnosis would have it, Jencks’ Postmodernism is
intertextual in a manner which again seems to relate that term
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188 POSTMODERN CONCLUSIONS
back to Bakhtin’s insistence on the social situatedness of (here)
architectural ‘language’.
POSTMODERNISM AND THE RETURN OF HISTORY
Postmodernism is now a major term in the study of literature.
Ihab Hassan’s famous list of the key terms of Modernism and
Postmodernism includes the following opposites, again making
clear the relationship drawn by many between Postmodernism
and poststructuralism as well as the place of intertextuality within
such definitions of the former (Hassan, 1993: 152):
Modernism
Purpose
Design
Centering
Genre/Boundary
Interpretation/Reading
Lisible (Readerly)
Origin/Cause
Postmodernism
Play
Chance
Dispersal
Text/Inter-text
Against Interpretation/Misreading
Scriptable (Writerly)
Difference–Différance/Trace
The construction of such lists is somewhat of a gamble. The
lists seem to posit Modernism and Postmodernism as antitheti-
cal to each other, whilst the reality, as theorists such as Jencks
have suggested, is that Postmodernism remains complicit with
many of the forms and theories which characterized Modern-
ism and allows itself to utilize Modernism’s major styles, genres
and innovations. Linda Hutcheon, a major theorist of the rela-
tionship between Postmodernism and intertextual theory and
practice, makes the same point (Hutcheon, 1988: 49) and, in-
fluenced by Postmodern architects such as Jencks, argues that
what characterizes Postmodern literature is a double-codedness.
This double-codedness questions the available modes of repre-
sentation in culture whilst recognizing that it must still employ
those modes. In such an approach Modernism can never simply
be opposed to Postmodernism, since the latter movement con-
tinually relies on and exploits the former’s styles, codes and
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POSTMODERN CONCLUSIONS 189
approaches, just as it relies on and exploits those of other his-
torical periods.
For Hutcheon, then, Postmodernism is contradictory and
double coded, since it ‘works within the very systems it attempts
to subvert’ (ibid.: 4). Contrasting the implicit nostalgia she sees
in Modernism’s intertextual employment of past forms with the
ironic distance frequently established when Postmodern works
utilize similar forms, Hutcheon writes:
When Eliot recalled Dante or Virgil in The Waste Land, one sensed a
kind of wishful call to continuity beneath the fragmented echoing. It
is precisely this that is contested in postmodern parody where it is
often ironic discontinuity that is revealed at the heart of continuity,
difference at the heart of similarity .... Parody is a perfect postmodern
form, in some sense, for it paradoxically both incorporates and
challenges that which it parodies. It also forces a reconsideration of
the idea of origin or originality that is compatible with other
postmodern interrogations of liberal humanist assumptions.
(Hutcheon, 1988: 11)
A statement made by Eliot concerning Joyce’s use of myth in
his Ulysses, but equally applicable to Eliot’s own work, might
seem to back up Hutcheon’s point. Eliot’s argument that Joyce’s
use of myth is a way of ‘controlling’ and ‘ordering’, of giving
‘shape and a significance’, to what he styles ‘the immense pan-
orama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history’
suggests a rather dismissive, even appalled, reaction to the
present and an accompanying nostalgia for past forms and past
times (Eliot, 1975: 177). In contrast to such an approach,
Postmodernism’s employment of the codes and forms of the
past, Hutcheon argues, are best viewed in terms of the concept
of parody.
Parody, the key term in Hutcheon’s and other critics’ work
on Postmodernism, is intimately connected to notions of
intertextuality. In the index to her The Politics of Postmodernism
(Hutcheon, 1989) the entry for ‘Intertextuality’ simply directs
the reader to the entry for ‘Parody’. At times this substitution of
parody for intertextuality can lead to unhelpful complications,
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190 POSTMODERN CONCLUSIONS
and on occasions Hutcheon would fare better by employing the
term intertextuality rather than continue to reshape and redirect
notions of parody.
Whether we employ the term parody or intertextuality, it is
clear that for critics such as Hutcheon Postmodern literature
deploys a vast array of contemporary and historical forms. It
does this to register its dependence upon established forms of
representation, or what Barthes would call doxa. But at the same
moment that it registers this fact, its juxtaposition of styles and
codes, of different and sometimes apparently incompatible forms
of representation, serves to question, disturb and even subvert
the dominance of those established forms. At once doxa and
paradoxa, Postmodern literature, like other Postmodern artistic
practices, involves, or for Hutcheon can involve, a radical
questioning of the available forms of representation and thus
the available modes of knowledge within culture. Hutcheon pits
such a view of Postmodernism against alternative views which
understand Postmodernism as simply a playful registering of
culture’s current saturation of signs and sign-systems:
parody works to foreground the politics of representation. Needless
to say, this is not the accepted view of postmodernist parody. The
prevailing interpretation is that postmodernism offers a value-free,
decorative, de-historicized quotation of past forms and that this is a
most apt mode for a culture like our own that is oversaturated with
images. Instead, I would want to argue that postmodernist parody is
a value-problematizing, de-naturalizing form of acknowledging the
history (and through irony, the politics) of representations.
(Hutcheon, 1989: 94)
Hutcheon’s frequent focus on Postmodern novels dealing with
historical subjects – she styles them ‘Postmodern historio-
graphic metafiction’ – foregrounds not only how many con-
temporary novels intertextually integrate forms, codes and ref-
erences to historically diverse texts and textual traditions, it
also demonstrates the manner in which history as an idea and
a practice is fre quently an important part of this kind of
fiction’s double-coded questioning of available forms of rep-
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POSTMODERN CONCLUSIONS 191
resentation. She frequently cites Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s
Children as an example of the double-coding of Postmodern
historiographic fiction. As she states, the self-reflexivity of
Rushdie’s text:
points in two directions at once, toward the events being represented
in the narrative and toward the act of narration itself. This is precisely
the same doubleness that characterizes all historical narrative. Neither
form of representation can separate ‘fact’ from the acts of
interpretation and narration that constitute them, for facts (though
not events) are created in and by those acts. And what actually
becomes fact depends as much as anything else on the social and
cultural contexts of the historian, as feminist theorists have shown
with regard to women writers of history over the centuries.
(ibid.: 76)
Deploying the work of theorists of history such as Hayden White
and Dominick LaCapra, Hutcheon argues that in such
Postmodern novels as Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children we are
reminded of the fact that no historical narrative of events ever
directly and transparently records or represents those events.
All historical narratives are themselves dependent on available
modes of narrative. Hayden White, for example, utilizing the
work of the literary theorist Northrop Frye, has argued that the
four main genres of literature – comedy, tragedy, romance, and
satire – always shape, singularly or in mixed modes, every his-
torical narrative (White, 1973). Whether an historian narrating
the events of the French Revolution or the Irish Uprising of
1798 employs an essentially comic, tragic, romantic or satiric
mode of narration will depend upon that historian’s own set of
ideological allegiances. Historical events themselves, we might
also remember, only come to the historian through what
Hutcheon, following Genette, calls ‘paratexts’. Whether it be
newspaper accounts, diaries, military reports, parliamentary
documents, private letters, or any of the vast array of historical
documents the historian must depend upon, history is only avail-
able to the contemporary historian through a network of prior
texts, all infused with the traces of prior authors with their own
ideological agendas, pre-suppositions and prejudices. History
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192 POSTMODERN CONCLUSIONS
exists as a vast web of subjective texts, the new historical ac-
count being one more author’s struggle to negotiate a way
through an intertextual network of previous forms and repre-
sentations.
Writing of Postmodern historiographic metafiction, Hutcheon
states:
If the past is only known to us today through its textualized traces
(which, like all texts, are always open to interpretation), then the
writing of both history and historiographic metafiction becomes a
form of complex intertextual cross-referencing that operates within
(and does not deny) its unavoidably discursive context. There can be
little doubt of the impact of poststructuralist theories of textuality on
this kind of writing, for this is writing that raises basic questions about
the possibilities and limits of meaning in the representation of the
past.
(Hutcheon, 1989: 81)
In Rushdie’s novel, a contemporary narrator, Saleem Sinai,
born at the moment of Pakistan’s independence, tries to nar-
rate his own life history at the same time as narrating the his-
tory of Pakistan. The historical archive, however, constantly
contradicts itself, and Saleem’s subjective perspective medi-
ates and colours his narration of historical events. The per-
sonal and the social, the psychological and the cultural, with
all its ideological conflicts and divisions, merge into each other
in the narrative. This fact is often noted by referring to a sen-
tence in which Saleem finds it possible to write the following:
‘Aircraft, real or fictional, dropped actual or mythical bombs’
(Rushdie, 1995: 341).
John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman, first published
in 1969, is another novel which clearly comes under Hutcheon’s
heading of Postmodern historiographic metafiction (see
Hutcheon, 1985: 91–2; 1988: 45). In Fowles’s novel we shuttle
between a realistic narrative set in the mid-nineteenth century
and a contemporary narrative voice which is able to pull into
that Victorian world a host of intertextual references which
disrupt the novel’s historical realism. References to modern
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POSTMODERN CONCLUSIONS 193
theoretical ideas, including those of Barthes, along with notes
explaining aspects of Victorian society and referring to
historically later ideas, mean, as Hutcheon puts it, that the reader
is constantly referred to the arena of the ‘extra-textual ... a world
outside the novel’ and to ‘other texts, other representations’ of
the world being represented in the text itself.
Fowles’s novel should confirm how thoroughly this form of
Postmodern fiction depends upon intertextual practice. More
importantly, it appears to confirm the destabilizing function of
intertextuality within such fiction. Radically double-coded, such
texts exploit the tension between fact and fiction, between the
constructed and the real, between the doxa of realism and the
para-doxical assertion of that realism’s impossibility.
Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose is perhaps the most
widely discussed of all such recent Postmodern novels. The
novel is set in a fourteenth-century abbey run by Benedictine
monks, and involves the story of the visit of William of
Baskerville and the novice Adso, their search to uncover the
mysterious murder during their visit of various of the abbey’s
monks, and the connection those murders have with a lost or
concealed text, which turns out to be Aristotle’s lost work on
comedy. The novel might at first appear to be an
uncomplicated attempt to realistically represent the world of
medieval monasticism. In his Reflections on ‘The Name of
the Rose’ Eco refers to his obsession with the Middle Ages:
‘I know the present,’ he writes, ‘only through the television
screen, whereas I have direct knowledge of the Middle Ages’
(Eco, 1985: 14). The reader first encounters an untitled
introduction in which the history of the manuscript we are
about to read is given. A note then explains the novel’s
division into seven days and each day into the eight religious
ceremonies which order the daily life of the monks. A
Prologue follows in which Adso, the novel’s narrator, writes
at the end of his own life of Brother William and the historical
events leading up to the narrative itself. The novel finally
begins with the sentence: ‘It was a beautiful morning at the
end of November’ (Eco, 1998: 21).
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194 POSTMODERN CONCLUSIONS
It would appear that the complications involved in beginning
the narrative are the traditional ones of establishing the reality
of a world which, though different to the world inhabited by
the author and reader, is to be, for the duration of the novel,
consistently and convincingly represented. Eco writes of the
need to distance the fictional world of such a novel in the
current Postmodern climate of parody, irony and the
deconstruction of previously unquestioned modes of narration
and speech:
Is it possible to say ‘It was a beautiful morning at the end of November’
without feeling like Snoopy? But what if I had Snoopy say it? If, that is,
‘It was a beautiful morning ... ’ were said by someone capable of
saying it, because in his day it was still possible, still not shopworn? A
mask: that was what I needed.
I set about reading or rereading medieval chroniclers, to acquire
their rhythm and their innocence. They would speak for me, and I
would be freed from suspicion. Freed from suspicion, but not from
the echoes of intertextuality. Thus I discovered what writers have
always known (and have told us again and again): books always speak
of other books, and every story tells a story that has already been
told .... My story, then, could only begin with the discovered
manuscript, and even this would be (naturally) a quotation. So I wrote
the introduction immediately, setting my narrative on a fourth level
of encasement, inside three other narratives: I am saying what Vallet
said that Mabillon said that Adso said ...
I was now free of every fear.
(Eco, 1985: 19–20)
Eco makes plain that in writing a historically-oriented text
the principal problem is intertextual: the ‘already written’
and ‘already said’ threaten to turn one’s narrative and narra-
tive voice into a mere repetition of previous utterances and
previous texts. The Postmodern cultural climate, figured by
Eco in terms of a loss of innocence, requires that we dis-
tance or ironize our representations and utterances if they
are to be taken seriously.
Eco, however, is not describing literary techniques which
finally allow for a direct and wholly serious representation of
the past. On the contrary, the need to ironize historical representa
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POSTMODERN CONCLUSIONS 195
tion means that the narrative necessarily becomes charged with
intertextual traces of the past, the present and the historical
periods between the two. In the place of the call to ‘Make It
New’, the Postmodern author, Eco argues, finds that the past is
unavoidable, but can only be represented and re-employed in a
non-innocent, ironic or parodic fashion (ibid.: 67). To explain
this Eco presents us with a hypothetical scenario from
contemporary life:
I think of the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a
very cultivated woman and knows he cannot say to her, ‘I love
you madly’, because he knows that she knows (and that she knows
that he knows) that these words have already been written by
Barbara Cartland. Still, there is a solution. He can say, ‘As Barbara
Cartland would put it, I love you madly’. At this point, having
avoided false innocence, having said clearly that it is no longer
possible to speak innocently, he will nevertheless have said what
he wanted to say to the woman: that he loves her, but he loves
her in an age of lost innocence. If the woman goes along with this,
she will have received a declaration of love all the same. Neither
of the two speakers will feel innocent, both will have accepted the
challenge of the past, of the already said, which cannot be
eliminated; both will consciously and with pleasure play the game
of irony ... But both will have succeeded, once again, in speaking
of love.
(ibid.: 67–8)
To speak of love, Eco’s hypothetical lovers must employ
ironic or double-coded words; double-coded because they
are simultaneously employed and undermined. They must do
this because they exist in a self-consciously intertextual en-
vironment in which awareness of the ‘already-written’ and
‘already-said’ cancels the possibility for any direct,
unironized statement or representation. Similarly, to write of
the past in an historical novel means that the author enters an
intertextual environment of things already written and already
said so many times that it does not seem possible merely to
write them or have characters utter them without at the same
moment placing what the author writes at an ironic distance
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196 POSTMODERN CONCLUSIONS
and thus undermining or destabilizing the very things of
which the author wishes to write.
Eco achieves this double-coded practice of representation and
ironization by constructing his realistic medieval world out of
intertextual strands from the Middle Ages through to the present
day. His protagonists, William of Baskerville and Adso are
clearly based on the Sherlock Holmes and Watson of Arthur
Conan Doyle’s famous Victorian detective stories. William’s
surname directs us towards Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the
Baskervilles. The medieval world within which they live is im-
mediately complicated, therefore, by the development of a nar-
rative of mystery and detection through deductive logic which
readers of Conan Doyle will immediately recognize as gener-
ated from that Victorian inter-text. The sinister librarian, Jorge
of Burgos, directs readers to the twentieth-century Argentinian
writer Jorge Luis Borges. The developing narrative centred on
the mysteries contained in the Aedificium, or labyrinthine, tow-
ered structure of the library, alerts readers with a knowledge of
Borges’s work to texts including ‘The Circular Ruins’ and ‘The
Library of Babel’ (Borges, 1970: 72–7, 78–88). Many other in-
ter-texts also play major roles in the structuring of the narrative
and the long conversations between characters. The novel is
constructed from echoes, quotations and allusions to
Wittgenstein’s philosophical writings, medieval texts, the lan-
guage and frequently the specifics of particular medieval
churches and cathedrals, the paintings of Breughel, passages
from the Bible, and many other examples, not all of which any
one reader is likely to register in any single reading (see
Hutcheon, 1985: 12; 1989: 94–5).
Interestingly for readers of this study, Bakhtin’s work and
ideas are frequently woven into the text, particularly in relation
to the conflict between those forces, led by Jorge, that wish to
repress the lost book on comedy by Aristotle, and those, like
William and Adso, that search for its recovery. The glimpse
which William and Adso gain of the illuminations of the ill-
fated Adelmo of Otranto immediately link the narrative to
Bakhtin’s work on the carnivalesque:
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This was a psalter in whose margins was delineated a world reversed
with respect to the one to which our senses have accustomed us. As
if at the border of a discourse that is by definition the discourse of
truth, there proceeded closely linked to it, through wondrous allusions
in aenigmate, a discourse of falsehood on a topsy-turvy universe, in
which dogs flee before the hare, and deer hunt the lion.
(Eco, 1998: 76)
The list of carnivalesque images which follows confirms that
Bakhtin’s idea of the carnival is a significant inter-text for these
illuminations. Their placement around the border of the sacred
text serves to remind us of Bakhtin’s distinction between the
centripetal and centrifugal forces of language. The sacred lan-
guage of monologism, which asserts one truth and one language,
is here challenged by images of popular festivity, grotesque in-
versions and the dialogic play which Bakhtin associated with
the carnivalesque but equally with the polyphonic novel so im-
portant for the ideas of double-voiced discourse, heteroglossia
and hybridization we have seen as the basis for later work on
intertextuality.
The reference to Bakhtin is useful for our reading of the novel,
since the conflict between Jorge of Burgos and William of
Baskerville seems well described as a conflict between a
monologic and a dialogic attitude towards language, comedy
and laughter, and ultimately towards society itself. For Jorge
there is one God, one Law, and One Word. The duty of monks
like himself is to protect the sacred books and to preach a
monologic religion which effectively puts the lid on the common
people, their carnivalesque desires and heterogeneous points of
view. For William, however, ‘laughter is proper to man, it is a
sign of his rationality’ (ibid.: 131), books are not sacred unless
they are read by human beings, and the entire universe, along
with the labyrinthine library he attempts to penetrate, is a text
open to interpretation.
The entire narrative, then, can be read as a commentary on
Bakhtinian ideas and other theories of intertextuality. Whilst
the novel is concerned with many other things, the intertextual
nature of texts, of our interpretation of them and of the world
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198 POSTMODERN CONCLUSIONS
around us is a constant theme within Eco’s novel. The whole
narrative centres on the search for a lost or repressed text, yet
this search merely goes to demonstrate the interconnectedness
of all texts. As Adso discovers, our understanding of the world
and of each individual text depends upon a vast intertextual
network. He writes:
Until then I had thought each book spoke of the things, human or
divine, that lie outside of books. Now I realized that not infrequently
books speak of books: it is as if they spoke among themselves. In the
light of this reflection, the library seemed all the more disturbing to
me. It was then the place of a long, centuries-old murmuring, a
imperceptible dialogue between one parchment and another, a living
thing, a receptacle of powers not to be ruled by a human mind, a
treasure of secrets emanated by many minds, surviving the death of
those who had produced them or had been their conveyors.
(ibid.: 286)
Such an insight makes the destruction by fire of the library at
the conclusion of the novel even more dramatic. Eco’s novel,
however, does not end simply with the destruction of the
labyrinthine intertextual network which opens up to the mind
of Adso, since it is itself constructed from and exists as a
testament to that ‘library of Babel’, to employ Borges’s phrase.
The Name of the Rose so thoroughly exemplifies the
Postmodern approach to intertextuality that we can use it to
repeat the kinds of distinctions between Modernism and
Postmodernism made by critics such as Hutcheon, Jencks and
Eco himself. Barthes, Kristeva and other poststructuralists of
the 1960s and 1970s sought a text which, through intertextual
practices, would go beyond the available codes and systems of
the already written and already read. They remained attached to
a rhetoric of textual liberation and release from conventions and
even human intention which is clearly connected to a residual
Modernism. Eco’s novel, however, like other Postmodern novels
concerned with the question of history, reads more like the
Balzacian readerly text Barthes analysed in his S/Z. The
difference, however, is that whilst it is left to Barthes as textual
analyst to open Balzac’s text to the writerly and the intertextual,
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POSTMODERN CONCLUSIONS 199
the writerly and the intertextual are already inscribed by Eco as
author into The Name of the Rose, and it is left for the reader to
negotiate that text’s paradoxical play between the readerly or
realistic and the writerly or intertextual. Eco’s text sharply
highlights the difference between Barthes’s and Kristeva’s
residual commitment to a Modernist aesthetic of the ‘New’ and
the liberation from established modes of representation and the
Postmodern acknowledgement of the inescapability of those
modes of representation alongside a recognition of the need to
submit them to parody and ironical disruption.
INTERTEXTUALITY, HYPERTEXTUALITY AND THE
WORLD WIDE WEB
Eco’s The Name of the Rose reaches its apocalyptic climax when
a library which had seemed to contain the knowledge of the
world is destroyed by fire. This event has its own historical inter-
texts in the destruction of the ancient Alexandrian library and
of the medieval library of Monte Cassino. Our new computer
technologies may still be sporadically prone to physical
corruption, such as that threatened by the Millennium Bug, yet
they present us with a new form of textuality which is infinitely
more flexible, manipulative and – given the appropriate hardware
and software – accessible. One feature of the new computing
technologies which has been the subject of increasing debate
and theorization is its far greater capacity, compared to print
culture, for interconnectedness. Digitalized computing systems
such as the World Wide Web, electronic books and hypertexts
present a form of intertextuality which seems to many to have
finally made manifest the theoretical arguments we have
analysed in this study.
Whilst theorists such as Barthes, Kristeva and Derrida attack
the traditionally dominant idea of the work’s isolation,
individuality and authority, the new computer-based systems
seem to embody such critiques. For those who write on this
new form of textuality, poststructuralist and Postmodern theory
seems to be merely that, a theory directed towards an object,
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200 POSTMODERN CONCLUSIONS
books, which appear to resist notions of relationality, difference
and intertextuality. What to many might seem counterintuitive
in Barthes’s treatment of literary books becomes obvious,
inevitable and even ‘natural’ when dealing with hypertext
systems. Such computer systems, at the same moment, seem to
take us back to the medieval idea of the total library. Jay David
Bolter’s remarks would not have been understood by William
of Baskerville, yet the spirit of such remarks has many
correspondences with the ideals he expresses in The Name of
the Rose:
In a fully hypertextual library, readers will be able to choose any of
the existing paths, or define a new path, through the materials they
are reading and perhaps leave that path for other readers to follow if
they choose. What we get from this speculation is a vision of the
library as an encompassing hypertextual book in which everyone can
read and everyone can add his or her own writing.
(Bolter, 1992: 23)
As Delaney and Landow state, a hypertext is ‘a variable struc-
ture, composed of blocks of text (or what Roland Barthes terms
lexias) and the electronic links that join them’ (Delaney and
Landow, 1991: 3). Clearly, Genette’s term ‘hypertextuality’ has
some relevance to these new systems, but it should not be con-
fused with the term as applied to computer-based digitalized
textuality. Read on and through computer networks, web sites,
or through CD-ROM disks, hypertexts can consist of one ‘text’
divided into lexias with connecting links, or can consist of a
text with a range of other texts embedded within it, access to
which is made by links activated by the reader on the screen.
Although only one block or lexia may be activated at one time,
readers of hypertext are assisted by ‘browser’ menus displaying
networks of other ‘links’, along with the ability to link specific
words to dictionary definitions or other constructed chains of
explanatory or contextual lexias. Complex hypertext systems,
like London’s National Gallery system, provide us with a host
of texts or images, or both, which the reader can peruse and
connect through linkways. Some hypertexts, such as those de-
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POSTMODERN CONCLUSIONS 201
scribed by George P. Landow (Delaney and Landow, 1991;
Landow, 1994), often educational in nature, allow not only for
a main text or set of texts to be linked to numerous other related
texts, but also can be added to by the reader creating new path-
ways and new texts within the overall hypertext system. As
Delaney and Landow suggest, the use of such hypertexts chal-
lenges received ideas about reading and writing derived from
an increasingly challenged ‘book culture’. They write:
Because hypertext breaks down our habitual way of understanding
and experiencing texts, it radically challenges students, teachers, and
theorists of literature. But it can also provide a revelation, by making
visible and explicit mental processes that have always been part of
the total experience of reading. For the text as the reader imagined it
– as opposed to the physical text objectified in the book – never had
to be linear, bounded or fixed.
(Delaney and Landow, 1991: 30)
Landow, in his Hypertext (Landow, 1992), makes much of this
new text’s challenge to notions of linear narration and reading,
the boundedness or independence of each text, and thus of tra-
ditional notions of authorial and critical authority. In doing so,
he recognizes that hypertext systems and the manner in which
we respond to them have many connections to textual and
intertextual theories. As he writes elsewhere: ‘an experience of
reading hypertext or reading with hypertext greatly clarifies
many of the most significant ideas of critical theory’ (Landow,
1994: 3). No idea is more relevant to this new technology than
that of intertextuality. Hypertextuality, the textuality generated
through the new computer-based technologies, Landow states,
is ‘a fundamentally intertextual’ phenomenon (ibid.: 10).
Referring to the intense intertextual references and allusions
to be found in the ‘Nausicaa’ section of Joyce’s Ulysses, Landow
imagines a hypertext version of the novel which would be able
to link the whole section to the specific inter-texts involved in
Joyce’s writing but also to other relevant works by Joyce. Such
a hypertext would, Landow suggests, manifest far more clearly
than any printed edition of Ulysses, no matter how annotated,
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202 POSTMODERN CONCLUSIONS
the ‘decenteredness’ of Joyce’s novel. Hypertext systems allow
us to branch off from what appears to be a main text into
intertextual pathways, to the extent that the main text may well
be forgotten or come to seem just one more text in an intertextual,
or in this case hypertextual, chain. Like the intertextual theories
of Barthes, Kristeva, Derrida and others before it, hypertexts
destroy the notion of the linearity of a text; we no longer read
from beginning to end as if meaning were a matter of one word
in a text following another. The fact that a text’s significance
depends upon a host of other texts is made an integral part of
the reading experience of such hypertext systems and as a
consequence the disturbance that intertextuality brings to notions
of a text’s ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ is made manifest by hypertextual
reading (ibid.: 60).
Other key features of intertextual theory as we have studied
it are also made manifest by hypertextuality. Often citing S/Z as
a theoretical model for the hypertextual reading experience,
Landow points out that the reader’s ability to break the linear
flow of a text by activating links, and, in some systems, to add
commentaries and other lexias to the text being read, confirm
Barthes’s points about the reader’s active role in the production
of textual meaning. The hypertext reader can become for Landow
and others an ‘author-reader’ who embodies poststructuralism’s
points about the death of the ‘Author’ as sole authority of
meaning and the accompanying birth of the reader as ‘scriptor’.
As Landow states, hypertext follows Barthes in S/Z by making
author, text and reader into joint participants of a plural,
intertextual network of significations and potential significations.
‘In this case, as in others,’ he writes: ‘hypertext embodies many
of the ideas and attitudes proposed by Barthes, Derrida, Foucault,
and others’ (ibid.: 72–3).
We might take two examples to back up our sense of the
manner in which hypertextuality can be said to embody the
notions of intertextuality we have studied so far. The first
concerns Landow’s own hypertext system at Brown University,
the In Memoriam web. Tennyson’s In Memoriam, written over
many years to mark the death of his friend Arthur Hallam,
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POSTMODERN CONCLUSIONS 203
consists of 131 lyric sections plus a Prologue and an Epilogue.
The poem, as Landow states, is highly intra- and intertextual.
Its intratextuality fundamentally concerns the manner in which
different lyrics or groups of lyrics relate to others, sometimes
spaced far apart in the text’s overall arrangement. Thus, for
example, lyric sections 28, 78, 104 and 105 can be grouped
together as the ‘Christmas lyrics’, a grouping which alerts the
reader to the passing of time. In this way In Memoriam employs
intratextual links to combine lyric intensity with a sense of
narrative movement. Whilst the reader of a book-based version
of the poem has difficulty in marking and exploring the many
intratextual links which operate within the text as a whole, the
reader of the In Memoriam web has no trouble in activating
links between lyrics displayed visually on the computer screen.
Many of the intratextual connections between lyrics within the
series work on the level of shared or complementary imagery,
and the hypertext version allows readers to make searches
throughout the text of particular images and words. In an example
of a ‘typical screen’ Landow shows us an ‘Imagery Overview’
within which are a number of keywords relating to section 7 of
the poem. Words such as ‘dark, darkness’, ‘veil’, ‘wind’, ‘ice,
frost, cold’, and many others exist as lexias available for the
reader to activate and thus make searches throughout the entire
text (ibid.: 39).
In Memoriam is also intertextual in that a great part of its
significance comes from its engagement with social, political,
historical and scientific issues of Tennyson’s own time. It is also
a highly intertextual text on the level of literary allusion, echo
and citation. The In Memoriam web allows readers to call up a
vast array of contextual material, including other literary texts
as well as texts concerning the poem’s scientific, religious and
philosophical concerns. An overview entitled ‘Cultural Context:
Victorianism’ displays link pathways concerning, amongst
others, ‘Artistic Relations’, ‘Political and Social Background’,
‘Religion and Philosophy’, ‘Science and Technology’ (ibid.).
The reader of the web can also call up student essays and
other comments on the ‘Web View’. The same reader is able to
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204 POSTMODERN CONCLUSIONS
contribute to discussion by adding his or her own comments,
essays, and suggestions for further links. Such hypertexts,
moving beyond strict ‘read-only’ systems to active systems
which turn the reader into not only a potential ‘reader-author’
but also a collaborative ‘worker’ are compared by Landow to
the kind of Bakhtinian ideas we have seen as so important to
intertextual theory. Placing the reader in a dialogue with other
readers of the same text, hypertext systems such as the In
Memoriam web also serve to dramatically demonstrate the
intertextual place of such a text; that is, hypertext disallows any
notion that the text is singular, independent and thus monologic
in nature. Starred and punctured by numerous links, as Landow
puts it: ‘hypertext does not permit a tyrannical, univocal voice’
(ibid.: 11).
The second example moves us to an example of hypertext’s
potential for literary writing. Michael Joyce’s Afternoon, a story
is a much-discussed hypertext fiction consisting of 538 lexias
and around 950 links. The reader reads one lexia at a time, and
the first one ends with the question: ‘Do you want to hear about
it?’ (see Bolter, 1992: 25). The reader can answer this question
by typing either ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ in the space provided. Typing
‘Yes’ moves the reader onto the next lexia. The reader can then
choose to answer ‘yes’ every time, which will take him or her
through 36 lexias. At the end of these the reader will have been
presented with an incomplete story concerning a narrator, his
missing son, the question of whether he saw a car accident on
the way to work in the morning and various other details
concerning the narrator’s life. To continue, the reader must access
other parts of the hypertext by clicking on ‘yield words’ which
each lexia contains. Although some ‘yield words’ cannot be
accessed unless others earlier in the series have also been
followed, it becomes clear that each reader will ‘read’ a
somewhat different text, and that each time the same reader
‘reads’ the text s/he can choose to select the same path or branch
out into new ones. Commenting on the manner in which the
nature of the experience of reading Afternoon reflects its status
as a ‘mystery story’, Bolter writes:
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POSTMODERN CONCLUSIONS 205
The father’s quest also becomes the reader’s – to establish what
really happened to the son. The episodes the reader visits will
determine the answer he or she receives. In that sense, ‘Afternoon’
becomes an allegory of the act of reading. The reader’s own
participation in the story becomes the story.
(Bolter, 1992: 29)
There is no ‘ending’ to Joyce’s text, since, as Terence Harpold
states, every conclusion will be a ‘contingent conclusion’, the
product of the reader’s selection of some links and avoidance or
sheer ignorance of others (Harpold, 1994: 192–3). Joyce’s text
is not simply intratextual; it contains various intertextual con-
nections to cultural and literary inter-texts, notably the Ulysses
by Afternoon’s author’s namesake, James Joyce. The main point
derived by Landow and others from Joyce’s hypertext, how-
ever, is that the emphasis which poststructuralist theories of
intertextuality placed on the ‘reversibility’ of texts, on the fact
that no text can ever fully be ‘consumed’ or ‘finished’, is made
manifest and embodied by such hypertextual texts.
It seems, then, that the new hypertextuality unarguably fulfils
the textual and intertextual vision of poststructuralists such as
Barthes, Kristeva and Derrida, along with the theoretical stress
on dialogism inherited from the work of Bakhtin. Landow’s work
certainly appears to confirm such a response. David Coughlan
also compares literary intertextuality and the Net or World Wide
Web. The term ‘Net’, he reminds us, refers both to the connection
between millions of computer terminals world-wide and also to
the concept of ‘cyberspace’: the mass of ‘words, images, and
sounds’ which those connected computers contain. Remarking
on the spatial dimension of ‘cyberspace’, Coughlan writes:
Perhaps intertextual space exists in the same way, flowing between
the texts which form it, each text acting now as a terminal through
which to access this network, quotations and references serving as
hypertext, transporting the reader to another page on the web, to
another part of the textual space.
If the computer is the point of intersection between physical space
and cyberspace, then the text is the porthole to the space of
intertextuality, each text simply one exposed section of a limitless
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206 POSTMODERN CONCLUSIONS
network of other texts which are, some would say, already present
within that one text.
(Coughlan, 1997: 116)
Despite these clear connections between intertextuality and new
computer systems, it remains difficult to imagine that techno-
logical changes by themselves will produce more active and
productive ‘author-readers’ and an increased ‘democratization’
of language, reading and the communication and possession of
information. At times Landow and others seem rather too easily
to take the basic theories of poststructuralism without consider-
ing the deeper motivations which produced those theories. We
might, for instance, wonder whether systems which are said to
increase the capacity of readers to ‘download’, process and then
utilize ‘information’, or systems which immensely speed up and
facilitate ‘communication’, actually fit as well as they appear to
do with the kind of arguments against notions of ‘information’,
the ‘consumption’ of literature, and the ‘clear’ and ‘transparent’
conveyance of meaning we have seen at the heart of Tel Quel
theory. When we remember that in Kristeva and Barthes ‘text’
and ‘intertextuality’ are terms meant to highlight a resistance to
notions of reading, direct and full communication, and the capi-
talist exchange or consumption of texts, then ‘hypertextuality’
can seem less obviously connected to poststructural theory.
Landow’s references to Bakhtin are also at times more
questionable than they might appear. We can see this most clearly
when we remind ourselves, as Landow does near the conclusion
of his Hypertext, that not all members of society are currently
able to deploy the new computer technology. Landow states:
‘Technology always empowers someone, some group in society,
and it does so at a certain cost’ (Landow, 1994: 171). As he goes
on to remark: ‘The vision of hypertext as a means of democratic
empowerment depends ultimately upon the individual reader-
author’s access to these networks’ (ibid.: 187). Landow’s remarks
have direct links to what has become a recognizable debate
within the Western world: whilst great claims are made for the
democratizing power of the World Wide Web, the fact remains
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POSTMODERN CONCLUSIONS 207
that the majority of the world’s population remain without access
to that mode of communication.
In discussing the issue of access Landow makes two central
points. Using historical examples, he argues that it is never
possible to determine whether a new technology will be a force
for democratization or will merely shore up existing power
groups, or even create new dominant classes and groups. He
then argues, contradicting his first point, that the new
‘information technology’ will necessarily produce an increase
in ‘democratization’ (ibid.: 174). Attempting to substantiate this
second point, Landow takes the example of print technology
and the seventeenth-century French Academy Dictionary:
This dictionary is one of the most obvious instances of the way print
technology sponsors nationalism, the vernacular, and relative
democratization. It standardizes the language in ways that empower
particular classes and geographical areas, inevitably at the expense of
others. Nonetheless, it also permits the eventual homogenization of
language and a corollary, if long-in-coming, possibility of
democratization.
(Landow, 1994: 175)
As we have observed, however, intertextual theories have ar-
gued that the ‘homogenization’ of language establishes or sup-
ports monologic power. Democracy, for Bakhtin and the theo-
ries of intertextuality he helped to inspire, stems from the re-
lease of plurality and multivocality, the dialogic and hybrid play
of different languages, dialects, registers and/or speech genres.
It remains open to question whether hypertextuality will incor-
porate such a dialogic play of voices and languages or will in
fact be a medium through which monologism exerts its centrip-
etal force in society. Can hypertext incorporate the differences
between gendered or nationally or racially specific languages,
or between other social classes or other minority dialects and
points of view? Can it produce the kind of double-voiced dis-
course described within feminist and postcolonial criticism? or
the kind of resistance to dominant discourse described within
poststructuralist theory?
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208 POSTMODERN CONCLUSIONS
If the answers hypertextuality provides prove to be negative,
it will not be the fault of the new digitalized computing
technology itself. Rather, the fault will lie in the producers,
designers, programmers, authors and readers of that new
medium. Intertextual theory, far from being seamlessly
incorporated within the new hypertextual systems, has much to
offer and perhaps to teach the new information technologies
and their users.
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CONCLUSION
In this study we have observed the manner in which
intertextuality is increasingly assimilated into literary theory and
into theories of cultural, artistic and even technological
production and reproduction. In the work of Genette, Riffaterre
and Bloom we have seen ways in which the term is employed to
draw limits around the relations between texts and the field of
critical enquiry and interpretation. However, the two main
strands which dominate theories of intertextuality have
constantly reasserted themselves and proved their
interconnectedness as we have moved from the term’s origins
to its later adaptations. Whether it be based in poststructuralist
or Bakhtinian theories, or in both, intertextuality reminds us
that all texts are potentially plural, reversible, open to the reader’s
own presuppositions, lacking in clear and defined boundaries,
and always involved in the expression or repression of the
dialogic ‘voices’ which exist within society. A term which
continually refers to the impossibility of singularity, unity, and
thus of unquestionable authority, intertextuality remains a potent
tool within any reader’s theoretical vocabulary. By that same
logic, however, it also remains a tool which cannot be employed
by readers wishing to produce stability and order, or wishing to
claim authority over the text or other critics. This is perhaps the
reason, since cultural debate never ceases, that intertextuality
promises to be as vital and productive a concept in the future as
it has been in the recent past.
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GLOSSARY
Key: Fr. = French; Gr, = Greek; L. = Latin; OED = The Oxford
English Dictionary.
Where a term is associated with a particular theorist, his or her
name appears, bracketed, at the beginning of the explanation.
addressivity (Bakhtin) Refers to the fact that any utterance is
directed towards an addressee (listener, potential respondent).
agency term used in literary theory and criticism to retain no-
tions of human participation in the production of meaning with-
out suggesting more absolute notions such as originality, genius or
uniqueness.
anagram ‘a transposition of the letters of a word, name, or
phrase, whereby a new one is formed’ (OED); Samuel Butler’s
Erewhon is an anagram for ‘nowhere’. Explored by Saussure in the
context of classical poetry.
architextuality (Genette) ‘the entire set of general or tran-
scendent categories – types of discourse, modes of enunciation,
literary genres – from which emerges each singular text’ (Genette,
1997a: 1). If literature is conceived as a formally defined system
filled with categories such as the realist novel, tragedy, and so on,
then architextuality is the study of literature in terms of these
formal categories.
carnival for Bakhtin, ‘carnivalesque’ forces in society are con-
nected to popular forms of literature and language which disrupt
the dominant order and monologic view of society and language
promoted by dominant power groups. ‘Carnivalization’ relates to
his term, ‘dialogicism’, and is opposed to notions of single mean-
ing and unquestionable authority.
deconstruction a movement associated with poststructuralism,
and with the work of Derrida in particular. Deconstruction can
be said to be generally critical of ideas of stable and authoritative
meaning. It attempts to demonstrate how a reliance on the un-
stable phenomenon of language unravels dominant ideas and struc-
tures from within.
descriptive system (Riffaterre) ‘the network of words, phrases
and stereotyped sentences associated with one another in ... rela-
tion to a kernel word to which they are subordinate’ (Riffaterre,
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GLOSSARY 211
1990b: 126–7). Centrally important words in texts suggest a se-
ries of associated words and concepts which the text then ma-
nipulates to create its specific overall meaning.
diachrony a diachronic study in linguistics is the study of lan-
guage over time.
dialectics (Hegel, Marx) Can refer to argument where a final
position is achieved via dialogue, or can simply refer to the main
argument or tendency of a work or a body of work (see Cuddon,
1992: 238–9). Hegelian dialectics is the clash between ‘thesis’ and
‘antithesis’, resolved by their ‘synthesis’. Hegel sought to demon-
strate that distinctions between say science and art or mind and
body could be resolved by the emergence of a ‘higher truth’.
Marx recast this onto the conflict between the owners of capital
and the workers who produced that capital.
dialogic (Bakhtin) refers to the idea that all utterances respond
to previous utterances and are always addressed to other poten-
tial speakers, rather than occurring independently or in isolation.
Language always occurs in specific social situations between spe-
cific human agents. Words always contain a dialogic quality, em-
bodying a dialogue between different meanings and applications.
Bakhtin’s dialogism undermines any argument for final and un-
questionable positions, since every position within language is a
space of dialogic forces rather than monologic truth.
différance (Derrida) combines Fr. ‘to defer, postpone, delay’
and ‘to differ, to be different from’. The word itself illustrates
Derrida’s point that writing does not copy or follow speech. The
distinction between the two different meanings does not ‘corre-
spond to any distinction in their spoken form’ (Cuddon, 1992:
246). It makes no difference if we write or speak the word
différance, we cannot help but invoke notions of both difference
and deferral. The word thus illustrates that language involves at
one and the same time the differences between and the deferral
of meanings.
discourse term used in distinct contexts in different disciplines.
In the study of narrative the term ‘narrative’ is used to refer to
the recounting of events without attention being paid to the per-
son doing the recounting, e.g. ‘The King is dead’. In contrast,
‘discourse’ directs attention to the speaker or writer and the situ-
ation from which they speak or write, e.g. ‘He told them the sad
news that the King was dead’. ‘Discourse’ has gained a more gen-
eral sense of language in its social and ideological contexts. Cul-
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212 GLOSSARY
ture and society can be seen as built up of recognizable ‘discur-
sive practices’, such as those used in educational, legal, religious
or political contexts. ‘Discourse’ points to the fact that language
always occurs in specific social contexts and always reflects spe-
cific codes, expectations, ideological pressures and presupposi-
tions.
double-voiced discourse (Bakhtin) refers to the idea that lan-
guage is always double-voiced. No word has a single, independent
meaning. All language is shot through with prior utterances, prior
uses of the same words, and is always addressed towards other
speakers. Bakhtin’s vision of double-voiced discourse is essentially
intertextual, in that it recognizes that all utterances contain within
them the dialogic force of competing interpretations, definitions,
social and ideological inflections and so on.
doxa (Barthes) ‘-doxy’ or ‘-doxa’ mean ‘opinion’. Barthes uses
this suffix as a term for anything which constitutes general opin-
ion, or is at any one moment in society considered unquestion-
able or natural.
ego (Freud) a term only explainable in relation to the id and the
superego. The id is that part of the unconscious which contains a
subject’s desires, including frequently repressed sexual (libidinal)
desires. The superego is that part of the conscious mind which,
echoing received morality and ideology, strives to police the de-
sires emanating from the id. The ego is the part of the psyche
‘which tries as best as it can to negotiate the conflicts between
the insatiable demands of the id, the impossibly stringent require-
ments of the superego, and the limited possibilities of gratification
offered by the world of “reality”’ (Abrams, 1993: 265).
epitext (Genette) refers to ‘outside’ elements which help us in-
terpret a text (letters, interviews and so on). Genette contrasts
‘epitextual’ features with what he calls the peritext, which consists
of all the features which literally frame a text, such as prefaces,
covers, titles and so on.
facticity (Bloom) term based on ‘fact’, also punning on ‘ficti-
tious’, and perhaps ‘factive’ (‘causative’). Refers to the unavoid-
able influence of certain canonical writers. Shakespeare’s plays
may have been fictitious, but their influence on every subsequent
writer gives them the status of facts, or facticity.
filiation ‘filial’ relations are family relations. The traditional no-
tion of authorship views the author as a kind of parent giving life
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GLOSSARY 213
to a text. This ‘myth of filiation’ is attacked by poststructuralists
such as Barthes.
free indirect discourse refers to the manner in which ‘the
reports of what a character says and thinks shift in pronouns,
adverbs, tense, and gram matical mode, as we move – or some-
times hover – between the direct narrated reproduction of such
events by the narrator. Thus, a direct representation, “He thought,
‘I will see her home now, and may then stop at my mother’s’,”
might shift, in an indirect representation, to: “He would see her
home then, and might afterwards stop at his mother’s”’ (Abrams,
1993: 169). Allows a narrator to merge their own voice with the
inner thoughts or the speech of a particular character.
genotext (Kristeva) refers to elements of a text which unleash
or signal semiotic forces which derive from the earliest stages of a
subject’s existence, when drives and desires are not controlled
and channelled into the ‘Symbolic Order’ (the social categories
and divisions of language). Texts which unleash the genotext are
resistant to social standards of communication, breaking stylistic
and linguistic conventions, and tend to be those of avant-garde
and experimental writers. In contrast, Kristeva refers to the
phenotext, which can be described as ‘the language of communi-
cation and ... the object of [traditional] linguistic analysis’ (Roudiez
in Kristeva, 1980: 7). Texts which attempt to produce clear and
unequivocal meaning will be almost totally describable in terms of
the phenotext.
gynocriticism ‘criticism concerned with writings by women ...
and all aspects of their production and interpretation’ (Cuddon,
1992: 340); ‘the branch of modern feminist literary studies that
focuses on women as writers, as distinct from the feminist cri-
tique of male authors’ (Baldick, 1990: 93).
hegemony the OED defines that which is ‘hegemonic’ as ‘the ruling
part, the master-principle’. Often used to refer to power which is so
dominant that it appears unquestionable, even natural.
heteroglossia, heteroglot (Bakhtin) hetero, Gr. ‘other’ + glossia
Gr. ‘tongue’: ‘other-tongued’, ‘other-voiced’. Defined by Graham
Roberts thus: ‘heteroglossia ... refers to the conflict between “cen-
tripetal” and “centrifugal”, “official” and “unofficial” discourses
within the same national language’. The term also has a smaller-
scale application: ‘every utterance contains within it the trace of
other utterances, both in the past and in the future’ (Roberts in
Morris, 1994: 248–9). If we call an utterance ‘heteroglot’ we re-
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214 GLOSSARY
fer to the presence within it of other utterances, past utterances
and future responses or redeployments. A heteroglot utterance
would openly attest to the dialogic nature of language, and could
be contrasted to an utterance which concealed such features and
presented itself as monoglot. As dialogism is contrasted to
monologism, so heteroglossia is contrasted to monoglossia.
hybridization (Bakhtin) ‘the mixing, within a single concrete
utterance, of two or more different linguistic consciousnesses, often
widely separated in time and social space’ (Clark and Holquist,
1984: 429).
hypertextuality (Genette) ‘any relationship uniting a text B (...
the hypertext) to an earlier text A (.... the hypotext), upon which it
is grafted in a manner that is not that of commentary’ (Genette,
1997a: 5). Genette tends to limit his analysis to satire and inten-
tional relations of this kind.
hypogram (Riffaterre) ‘the text imagined in its
pretransformational state’ (Riffaterre 1978: 63). Since, for
Riffaterre, all texts are transformations of small units of meaning,
the hypogram is the series of basic units upon which the text is
built: ‘The hypogram may be made out of clichés, or it may be a
quotation from another text, or a descriptive system’ (ibid.: 63–4).
hypotext see hypertextuality.
id see ego.
ideologeme (Kristeva) Fredric Jameson defines this as ‘the small-
est intelligible unit of the essentially antagonistic collective dis-
courses of social classes’ (Hawthorne, 1992: 80). Kristeva em-
ploys the term in the context of her work on Bakhtin and relates
it to the manner in which texts do not simply reflect but contain
elements of society’s ideological structures and struggles.
idiolect see sociolect.
invariant see matrix.
jouissance Fr. ‘bliss’, often in the sense of sexual climax. Used in
poststructuralist theory, notably in Barthes’s The Pleasure of the
Text. He distinguishes between the text which gives plaisir (plea-
sure) and the text which gives jouissance (bliss). The former he
associates with the kind of-text which he had previously called
lisible (readerly), the latter with the kind of text he had called
scriptible (writerly).
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GLOSSARY 215
langage see langue.
langue (Saussure) refers to language in its synchronic state, as it
is shared by every member of a speaking community. It involves
the rules of combination, definitions and distinctions which oper-
ate in language at any moment in time. Parole concerns the activa-
tion of such rules in particular utterances. Thus parole can be seen
as each specific utterance or utilization of the system of langue.
Saussure also uses the term langage. Since langue is an abstract
system of rules and codes, it is not simply the accumulation of all
acts of utterance, parole. Even if we could group all utterances
together, we would not describe the full extent of langue. Langage
stands for that sum total of all acts of parole, and so is to be
distinguished from the abstract system, langue.
lisible (Barthes) Fr. ‘legible’. A lisible or ‘readerly text’ encour-
ages readers to view themselves as passive decipherers of mean-
ings already existent in the text itself. Contrasted with the scriptible
text.
matrix (Riffaterre) refers to a word, phrase or sentence upon
which the whole semiotic structure of a text is built. The matrix
might not be linguistically present in the text, but would be the
basis for the text’s invariants, its recognizable patterns and struc-
tures, all of which will be transformations of that matrix. The
word model is also employed by Riffaterre to refer to this idea of
texts as constructed through transformations of basic elements of
meaning.
metafiction ‘fiction about fiction; or more especially a kind of
fiction that openly comments on its own fictional status ... the
term is normally used for works that involve a significant degree
of self-consciousness about themselves as fictions’ (Baldick, 1990:
133).
metatextuality (Genette) ‘the relationship most often labelled
“commentary”. It unites a given text to another of which it speaks
without necessarily citing it ... sometimes even without naming it’
(Genette, 1997a: 4).
mimesis from Gr. ‘imitation’. The idea that art directly repre-
sents external reality. Mimetic views of art are severely challenged
by theories of intertextuality, which argue that art works, or ‘texts’,
refer not directly to external reality but to other texts.
model see matrix.
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216 GLOSSARY
Modernism a period of cultural and aesthetic practice usually
dated from the beginning of the twentieth century. Not to be
confused with ‘modernity’, which is often used as a term for ideas
concerning human and social progress stemming from the eigh-
teenth century. Many movements called Modernist argued that
an increase in technological sophistication would liberate society,
or at least art, from the shackles of tradition and conformity to
established rules and norms.
monoglossia; monoglot see heteroglossia.
monologic see dialogic.
paradigmatic the associative aspect of language. ‘The paradig-
matic relationship entails a consideration of the fact that each word
in [a sentence] has a relationship with other words that are not
used but are capable of being used – and by being capable are thus
associated’ (Cuddon, 1992: 946).
paradoxa (Barthes) Represents anything which is contrary to
common opinion and to that which is considered ‘natural’.
paratextuality (Genette) relates to all the elements which stand
on the ‘threshold’ of a text.
parody ‘a mocking imitation of the style of a literary work or works,
ridiculing the stylistic habits of an author or school by exaggerated
mimicry. Parody is related to burlesque in its application of serious
styles to ridiculous subjects, to satire in its punishment of eccentrici-
ties, and even to criticism in its analysis of style’ (Baldick, 1990: 161).
parole see langue.
pastiche ‘a literary work composed from elements borrowed
either from various other writers or from a particular earlier au-
thor. The term can be used in a derogatory sense to indicate lack
of originality, or more neutrally to refer to works that involve a
deliberate and playful imitative tribute to other writers. Pastiche
differs from parody in using imitation as a form of flattery rather
than mockery, and from plagiarism in its lack of deceptive intent’
(Baldick, 1990: 162).
peritext see epitext.
phenotext see genotext.
polyphony (Bakhtin) (from Gr. ‘many-voicedness’). ‘A polyphonic
novel is one in which several different voices or points of view
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GLOSSARY 217
interact on more or less equal terms’ (Baldick, 1990: 173). It dem-
onstrates and celebrates the dialogic nature of society by present-
ing a vision of human society dominated by the dialogue and play
between voices and utterances.
polysemy poly, from Gr. ‘much’, ‘many’ + semeio, ‘sign’ or ‘sig-
nal’. That which is polysemous has many meanings or significa-
tions. Employed within poststructuralist theory as a way of resist-
ing traditional notions of the singularity of meaning and thus of
texts and signs.
Postmodernism a term which has emerged since the 1970s,
suggesting a break from Modernism or from the notion of ‘mo-
dernity’. Since it attempts to represent contemporary trends,
Postmodernism is a particularly debated term. However, there
are recurrent themes in these debates. Firstly, the idea that na-
tional limits for social and cultural identity have been superseded
by a global environment in which multinational companies are
now more important than national governments in directing so-
cial and cultural tendencies. Secondly, such a transnational system
is characterized by ‘empty signifiers’, or representations and signs
which have no base in a recognizable, lived reality. Many descrip-
tions of Postmodernism depict a transnational cultural situation in
which pastiche and parody of earlier forms and styles predomi-
nate. Postmodern art, many argue, rejects notions of originality
and Modernism’s desire to ‘Make it New’, and cultivates a wilfully
derivative, mixed and thoroughly intertextual approach which
attempts to capture a new age in which old certainties about his-
torical knowledge, social progress and even the ability to repre-
sent the external world have collapsed.
poststructuralism poststructuralist theorists argued that Saussurean
structuralism did not provide scientific objectivity and methodological
stability but, rather, demonstrated the unstable nature of language and
of meaning. Poststructuralists deny any claims for a scientific study of
texts or cultural sign systems and insist that all texts are polysemous.
readerly see lisible.
revisionary ratios (Bloom) in historical and political studies
‘revisionism’ concerns the rewriting of the standard accounts of
historical events, often for contemporary ideological purposes or
to expose the ideological purposes of prior, established and ap-
parently ‘neutral’ accounts. Bloom uses revisionary ratios to refer
to the different ways in which poets seek to rewrite the works of
previous poets.
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218 GLOSSARY
satire a text which ridicules or ironically comments on socially
recognizable tendencies or the style or form of another text or
author. Close to the concept of parody, but traditionally has a
more moralistic intention.
scriptible see lisible.
semianalysis Kristeva’s term to characterize her approach to
semiotics. She defines it as a ‘critique of meaning, of its elements
and its laws’ (Kristeva, 1980: 4).
semiology see semiotics.
semiotic, the (Kristeva) ‘the flow of pre-linguistic rhythms or
“pulsions” that is broken up by the child’s entry into the Symbolic
order of language. The unconscious energies of the semiotic are
repressed and marginalized by patriarchal logic and rationality but
they may still disrupt the Symbolic order, transgressing its rigid cat-
egories (including those of identity and sexual difference)’ (Baldick,
1990: 201). Kristeva at times refers to language in its ‘semiotic
phase’ (the language of pre-linguistic subjectivity), as opposed to
language in its ‘thetic phase’ (the language of the subject after
entry into the Symbolic order).
semiotics, semiology (Saussure, C. S. Pierce) ‘the systematic
study of signs, or, more precisely, of the production of meanings
from sign-systems, linguistic or non-linguistic’ (Baldick, 1990: 201).
The relationship between sign and system is particularly impor-
tant. Sign-systems can be any recognizable field of human com-
munication. Clothing might signify within the cultural ‘fashion sys-
tem’, for example. Semiotics and semiology as developed in struc-
turalism and poststructuralism can treat anything emanating from
a signifying system as a text to be read.
sign (Saussure) a linguistic or non-linguistic element of communi-
cation. Saussure divides the sign into two parts: the signif ier and
the signif ied. The signifier is the material ‘sound pattern’, a writ-
ten or spoken word, whilst the signified is the ‘concept’ associ-
ated with that particular signifier. For Saussure signs do not refer
directly to things in the external world but have their meaning in
terms of the relation between signifiers and signifieds, depending
upon the synchronic system of language and its rules and codes of
association, combination, definition and distinction.
signifiance (Kristeva, Barthes, poststructuralists) as opposed to
the term ‘signification’ and its association with clear communica-
tion of meaning, signif iance is used to refer to a kind of language
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GLOSSARY 219
‘that enables a text to signify what representative and communi-
cative speech does not say’ (Roudiez in Kristeva, 1980: 18).
Signifiance also refers to the ‘production of meaning’ which the
reader is involved in when reading such radical forms of language.
Signif ication implies the creation of meaning before the act of read-
ing; signif iance implies that meaning is only ever produced in the
act of reading.
signification see signifiance.
signified see sign.
signifier see sign.
signifyin(g) (Gates) refers to traditions in African-American cul-
ture which play upon conventional ‘white’ modes of signification.
The bracketed ‘(g)’ marks the division between standard written
language (associated with dominant ‘white’ culture) and the spo-
ken dialects of African-Americans.
sociolect ‘used to denote language ... which is specific to a
particular social group, and which carries with it the values and
status of the same group. The social group in question can be
defined in terms of class ..., age, or gender – or a permutation
of all three’ (Hawthorne, 1992: 167). Often paired with idiolect,
or ‘the features of a particular person’s language which mark
out him or her individually from others’ (ibid.: 80).
speech genre (Bakhtin) denotes a particular kind of language-
use associated with specific social situations.
split subject, the (Kristeva) the idea that the human subject is
divided. In psychoanalysis the split is between the conscious and
the unconscious, while for theorists such as Kristeva there are
other interesting divisions, such as the split between semiotic and
symbolic modes of language.
structuralism a movement which stems particularly from
Saussure’s vision of semiology, the study of all the sign-systems
operative in culture. Structuralism took texts, from works of lit-
erature to aspects of everyday communication, and accounted
for them in terms of the system from which they were produced.
subject of enunciation distinguished in linguistics from the sub-
ject of utterance, which can be said to be the actual person who
performs an act of communication. When that subject refers to
itself as an ‘I’, however, it has become a subject of enunciation.
This difference involves ‘the particular, time-bound act of making
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220 GLOSSARY
a statement, and the verbal result of that act, a result which es-
capes from the moment of time and from the possession of the
person responsible for the act’ (Hawthorne, 1992: 57). A particu-
lar subject (of utterance) might write the words ‘I love you’ on a
card. Years later, when this card is found by someone else, that
subject has become merely a first-person pronoun in a conven-
tional and depersonalized statement (subject of enunciation). The
same process occurs in any act of writing or repeatable linguistic
utterance.
subject of utterance see subject of enunciation.
superego see ego.
Symbolic Order, the see semiotic, the.
synchrony a synchronic study in linguistics involves the study of
how language functions at any one moment in time.
syntagmatic the combinatory aspect of language. Concerns the
sequential placing of words together to form sentences and the
relationship of those words when thus combined.
Tel Quel a school of theory and writing formed in the 1960s and
associated with many leading poststructuralist theorists of the pe-
riod, including Kristeva, Derrida and Barthes. Tel Quel sought to
theorize and unleash the revolutionary power of language and to
celebrate writers who were seen as having performed a similar
action.
text from L. texere, textum ‘to weave’, ’woven’ (Cuddon, 1992:
963). Traditionally, a text was the actual words or signs which
made up a work of literature. It gave permanence to the work.
In structuralist and poststructuralist theory the ‘text’ comes to
stand for whatever meaning is generated by the intertextual
relations between one text and another and the activation of
those relations by a reader. ‘Text’ becomes a term associated
with the absence of stable and permanent meaning, while
‘work’ is now associated with the idea of a stable and self-
contained meaning.
thetic see semiotic, the.
trace According to Derrida, ‘every sign .... contains a trace of
other signs which differ from itself .... No sign is complete in itself.
One sign leads to another via the trace – indefinitely’ (Cuddon,
1992: 981).
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GLOSSARY 221
transcendental signified (Derrida) a sign which provides a
centre for a particular linguistic system. As a centre, it promotes
stability, presence and singular, transparent meaning, because its
own meaning is not dependent upon any other sign. The signs
‘God’, ‘Justice’ or ‘Truth’ function in this way. Without these ‘tran-
scendental signs’ the traditional notion of the discursive systems
of religion, law and philosophy would collapse due to a lack of
cohesion and the lack of a central term. Derrida argues that no
sign can ever attain such a position, since every sign has its mean-
ing in relation to other signs. Demonstrating this forms a large
part of his deconstruction of the traditional fields of Western
thought.
transposition (Kristeva) used to reinforce the notion that
intertextual processes have nothing to do with traditional notions
concerning ‘influence’. Far from an author-to-author transmis-
sion of ideas and styles, Kristeva argues that intertextuality, or
what she renames transposition, concerns the way in which one
‘sign system’ is incorporated into another ‘sign system’ and the
semiotic changes this transposition entails.
transtextuality (Genette) ‘the textual transcendence of the text
.... defined roughly as “all that sets the text in a relationship,
whether obvious or concealed, with other texts”’ (Genette, 1997a:
1). Genette’s term transtextuality is his particular variation on the
idea most other critics call intertextuality. He reduces the term
intertextuality to ‘a relationship of copresence between two texts
or among several texts .... the actual presence of one text within
another’ (Genette, 1997a: 1–2).
trope a figure, where language is not used literally.
ungrammaticality (Riffaterre) refers to anything within a text
which alerts the reader to a meaning or structural pattern beyond
or below that of the referential or mimetic level of a text. A poem,
for example, might have a title which does not seem in any way to
relate to the text of the poem itself. The ungrammaticality may
well be resolved, however, if the reader shifts from a mimetic to a
semiotic level of reading.
work see text.
writerly see lisible.
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INDEX
Abrams, M. H. 212, 213
addressivity see Bakhtin, M. M.
agon see Bloom, Harold
Allen, Graham 55, 136
Allsen, Michael 175
Althusser, Louis 16
anagrams see Kristeva, Julia and
Saussure, Ferdinand de
anxiety of influence see Bloom,
Harold
Apollinaire, Guillaume 123
architecture and intertextuality 5,
174–5, 178–9, 185–8, 189
architextuality see Genette,
Gérard
Aristotle 43, 44, 46, 97, 98, 99,
193
Artaud, Antonin 34, 51
Austen, Jane 5, 109
Bakhtin, M. M. 3, 6, 7, 10, 11, 14–
30, 33, 35, 36, 38, 39, 42, 43,
44, 45, 46, 47, 49, 52, 53, 54,
55, 56, 57, 58, 66, 72, 91, 93,
159, 160, 161, 162, 164, 165,
166, 167, 170, 172, 173, 179,
196, 197, 204, 205, 206, 207,
208, 209, 210, 211, 212, 213,
214, 216, 219; addressivity 21–
1, 23, 210; carnivalesque 22,
24, 57, 161, 196–7, 210;
critique of Formalism 16–17;
critique of Saussure 16–20;
dialogic nature of language
21–30, 145, 160, 162, 164,
166, 211, 213–14; on
Dostoevsky 22–5, 47, 49–50,
57; double-voiced discourse
see double-voiced discourse;
hybridization 22, 25, 30, 42,
52, 165, 207, 214; polyphony
(the polyphonic novel):
eteroglossia 22, 25, 29–30,
42, 52, 161, 213–14; on
Rabelais 22; read by Kristeva
35–47; and social situatedness
of language 11, 16–21, 24, 25,
27–9, 30, 38; speech genres
20–1, 55, 207, 219
Baldick, Chris 213, 215, 216, 218
Balzac, Honoré de 12, 13, 67, 78,
80, 81, 85, 147, 198, 199
Barth, John 184–5
Barthes, Roland 3, 4, 5, 6, 12, 13,
14, 31, 33, 40, 41, 42, 47, 50,
51, 52, 56, 58, 60, 61–94,
100, 102, 113, 124, 137, 140,
147, 149, 156, 157, 158, 170,
179, 183, 190, 193, 198, 199,
202, 205, 206, 212, 214, 215,
216, 218, 220; death of the
Author 70–6, 84–8, 89;
doxa/ paradoxa 76, 79, 89–4,
179, 183, 190, 193, 212;
reading of Balzac 76–89;
scriptible/ lisible 68, 78–89,
170, 214, 215; text of bliss/
pleasure 89, 90–1, 214 textual
analysis 69–70, 78–89 (codes
within 84–88, 89)
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234 INDEX
Bataille, Georges 34
Baudelaire, Charles 105
Baudrillard, Jean 182–3
Bauer, Dale M. 161–2
Beckett, Samuel 51
Benjamin, Walter 181–2
Benveniste, Émile 39, 40
Bhabha, Homi K. 164–5
Blake, William 128
Bloom, Harold 2, 4, 74, 133–44,
145, 146, 209, 212, 217;
anxiety of influence 133–5,
137, 138, 139, 140, 143–4;
facticity 138–9, 212; map of
misreading 135–8; revisionary
ratio 136, 142, 217
Bolter, David Jay 200, 204–5
Book of Kells 182
Borges, Jose Luis 111, 196
Bowie, David 102–3
Bresson, Robert 179
Breughal 196
Brontë, Charlotte 150–1, 153
Brontë, Emily 98, 99, 109
Browning, Elizabeth Barrett 141–4
Browning, Robert 140, 141
Burgin, Victor 177–8
Burns, Robert 26–7
Burroughs, William 114
Burton, Richard 175
Butler, Samuel 210
Byron, Lord George 88
Carlson, Marvin 176
carnivalesque (carnival) see
Bakhtin, M. M.
Cartland, Barbara 195
Cervantes, Miguel de 111
Chaucer, Geoffrey 157
Chopin, Kate 161
chora, the see Kristeva, Julia
cinema and intertextuality 179–81
Cixous, Hélène 152
Clark, Katerina 15, 30, 214
Clayton, Jay 57, 92, 126
computing technology and
intertextuality 6, 199–208;
cyberspace 205–6; hypertexts
200–8; condensation see
Freud, Sigmund
Conrad, Joseph 105–6
Cooper, David 153
Coughlan, David 205–6
Cubism 179
Cuddon, J. A. 211, 213, 220
Culler, Jonathan 88, 97, 123–4,
129, 132
cyberspace see computing
technology and intertextuality
dance and intertextuality 51
Dante Alighieri 73, 189
‘death of the Author’ see
Barthes, Roland
deconstruction see Jacques,
Derrida
Delaney, Paul 200, 201
denotation see language
Dentith, Simon 15, 58
Derrida, Jacques 16, 31, 32, 33,
44, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 76, 92,
103, 104, 167, 199, 202, 205,
210, 211, 220, 221; différance
65, 167, 188, 211; trace, the
66, 188, 220
Descartes, René 64
descriptive system see Riffaterre,
Michael
diachrony see language
dialectics 46–7, 211
dialogic see Bakhtin, M. M.
Dickens, Charles 23–4, 109
différance see Derrida, Jacques
displacement see Freud, Sigmund
Dostoevsky, F. M. 22–5, 47, 49, 57
double-voiced discourse 25, 27–
30, 36, 38, 43, 52, 67, 160,
161, 162, 164, 165, 166, 168,
169, 171, 172, 184, 186, 197,
207, 212
doxa see Barthes, Roland
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Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan 196
drama and intertextuality 176
DuBois, W. E. B. 166
Duff, David 57
Dumas, Alexandre 67
Dunn, Peter 178–9
DuPlessis, Rachel Blau 150
Durey, Jill Felicity 57
Eagleton, Terry 182
Eastwood, Clint 180
Eco, Umberto 193–9
écriture féminine 159–60
Einstein, Albert 70
Eliot, George 109
Eliot, T. S. 105–6, 189
Exodus, the Book of 110
facticity see Bloom, Harold
Fanon, Frantz 164
feminist theory and
intertextuality 4–5, 144–64;
gynocriticism 144–59, 213
Ffrench, Patrick 30
filiation (myth of) 69, 71–2, 73–
6, 212–13
Flaubert, Gustave 67, 112
Fleming, Bruce 180
Fonda, Henry 175
Ford, John 180
Foucault, Michael 16, 31, 70–1,
92, 93, 107, 152, 155, 202
Fowles, John 192–3
free indirect discourse 169–73,
212–13
Freud, Anna 136
Freud, Sigmund 15, 34, 48, 52,
53, 54, 134, 136, 138, 139,
212; condensation/
displacement 52–3
Frow, John 56, 57, 130–1
Frye, Northrop 191
Gaskell, Elizabeth 55, 56
Gates, Henry Louis, Jr 166–73
Gaulthier, Mme 112
Genesis, the Book of 63, 78
INDEX 235
Genette, Gérard 4, 6, 95, 97–115,
200, 210, 214, 215, 216, 220;
architextuality 98, 99–100,
101, 103, 108, 113, 210;
hypertextuality 107–15, 214;
intertextuality 101–2;
metatextuality 102, 215;
paratextuality 103–7, 191, 216;
transtextuality 98, 100, 101,
102, 103, 107, 113, 221
genotext see Kristeva, Julia
Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan
Gubar 145–8
Godard, Jean-Luc 179
Gogh, Vincent Van 181
Goodwin, James 180–1
Gothic literature 12, 88
gynocriticism see feminist theory
and intertextuality
Hardy, Thomas 98, 99, 109, 140
Harpold, Terence 205
Hartman, Geoffrey H. 129, 131
Hassan, Ihab 188
Hatten, Robert S. 175
Hawks, Howard 180
Hawthorne, Jeremy 39–40, 214, 219
Hawthorne, Nathaniel 161
Hegel, G. W. F. 46, 47, 211
hermeneutic circle, the 132
heteroglossia see Bakhtin, M. M.
Holquist, Michael 15, 30, 214
Homer 106, 108
Hurston, Zora Neale 169–71
Hutcheon, Linda 177, 178, 179,
199, 189–93, 196, 198
hybridization see Bakhtin, M. M.
hypertexts see computing
technology and intertextuality
hypertextuality see Genette,
Gérard
hypogram see Riffaterre, Michael
Ibsen, Henrik 82
ideologeme see Kristeva, Julia
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236 INDEX
idiolect see Riffaterre, Michael
Imaginary, the 48
influence 36, 53, 69, 73, 121,
133–44, 145, 146–7, 148, 149,
154; and Harold Bloom 133–
44, 145, 146; and
gynocriticism 144–59
interpretant, the see Riffaterre,
Michael
intertext see Riffaterre, Michael
invariant see Riffaterre, Michael
semiotics 31–2, 34, 35, 36, 37,
38, 48–9, 51, 57; signifiance
35, 52, 56, 218; split subject,
the 34, 39–42, 45, 46, 47, 49,
50–6, 219; subject in process
34; Symbolic, the 48, 49, 50,
51; thetic, the 48, 49, 50, 51,
52, 53, 54, 220; transposition
53–6, 57, 58, 221
Kruger, Barbara 177–8
Kurosawa, Akira 180–1
Jakobson, Roman 39
James, Henry 109, 161
Jameson, Fredric 182, 183–4,
186, 187
Jencks, Charles 185–8
Jenny, Laurent 112–15
John, Gospel of 14
jouissance 56, 89, 90, 214
Joyce, James 25–6, 34, 50, 51,
106, 108, 110, 189, 201–2, 205
Joyce, Michael 204–5
J-writer 138
Kafka, Franz 50
Kaup, Monika 148–53
Keats, John 133
Kline, T. Jefferson 179–80
Kolodny, Annette 144
Kristeva, Julia 3, 6, 11, 14, 15, 16,
28, 30–60, 61, 62, 65, 66, 67,
68, 72, 73, 76, 83, 94, 95,
100, 113, 124, 154, 162, 166,
199 202, 205, 206, 213, 214,
218,, 219, 220, 221; Bakhtin,
on 15–16, 28–9, 35–47;
dialetics, critique of 46–7;
genotext, the 50–6, 66, 154,
213; ideologeme 37–8, 214;
phenotext, the 50–6, 66, 154,
216; productivity 34, 36, 47,
165; poetic language 38, 44–
5, 46, 49; Saussure’s
anagrams, on 43–4;
semianalysis 34–5, 47, 48–9,
218; semiotic, the 48–56, 218;
La Rochefoucauld, François de 72, 73
Lacan, Jacques 16, 48
LaCapra, Dominick 191
Laing, R. D. 153
Landow, George 200, 201–7
langage see Saussure, Ferdinand de
langue see Saussure, Ferdinand de
Lautréamont (Isadore Ducasse) 34
Lavers, Annette 68
LeCorbusier 185, 187
Leone, Sergio 180–1
Lesson, Loraine 178–9
lisible text see Barthes, Roland
Livy 44
Lyotard, Jean-François 183
Macksey, Richard 98
McLeod, Mary 185
Mallarmé, Stephane 34, 51, 74,
86–7
Man, Paul de 129, 131, 132
Mann, Thomas 110
Mark, Gospel of 69
Marx, Karl 15, 17, 21, 34, 46–7,
54, 72, 91, 182, 211
Marxism see Marx, Karl
matrix see Riffaterre, Michael
Medvedev, P. N. see Bakhtin, M. M.
metatextuality see Genette,
Gérard
Mifune, Toshiro 180
Miller, J. Hillis 103, 104, 157
Miller, Nancy K. 154–9, 162
Milton, John 11–12, 113, 114, 139, 144
Miraglia, Anne Maria 180
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INDEX 237
mixed media and intertextuality 176–7
model see Riffaterre, Michael
Modernism 34, 50, 56, 68, 81,
114, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189,
198, 199, 215–16
Moi, Toril 147–8
Morgan, Thaïs E. 97
Moriarty, Michael 68, 71
Morris, Pam 15, 213
music and intertextuality 5, 51–2,
174, 175
Nichols, Mike 175
Nielsen, Aldon L. 165–6
Oberon, Merle 109
O’Connor, Mary 166, 172
Olivier, Laurence 109
Ovid 156
painting and intertextuality 5,
174, 176–7, 179, 181, 182
paradoxa see Barthes, Roland
paratextuality see Genette,
Gérard
parody 108–9, 113, 176, 184,
189–90, 194, 199, 216
parole see Saussure, Ferdinand de
Pascal, Blaise 123
pastiche 5, 104, 108, 109, 112,
184, 186, 187, 216
Pearce, Lynn 20
Pfister, Manfred 58, 107
phenotext see Kristeva, Julia
photography and intertextuality
177–9
Pierce, C. S. 118, 218
Plath, Sylvia 116–20, 122
Plato 49, 97, 98, 182
Poe, Edgar Alan 78, 79–80, 81, 82, 91
poetic language see Kristeva, Julia
polyphony (polyphonic novel) see
Bakhtin, M. M.
Poovey, Mary 146
Portoghesi, Paolo 186
postcolonial theory and
intertextuality 4–5, 6, 151,
160, 164–73
Postmodernism 5, 67, 173, 177,
181–99, 217
Poststructuralism 3, 4, 6, 14, 28,
30–5, 56, 57, 69, 76, 77, 86,
88, 92, 93, 94, 95, 97, 100,
102, 107, 113, 115, 118, 124,
130, 147, 154, 155, 156, 161,
181, 183, 192, 198, 199, 202,
205, 206, 207, 209, 210, 217,
218, 220
Poulin, Jacques 180
productivity see Kristeva, Julia
quotation 13, 39, 69, 73, 75, 96,
101, 122, 163, 176, 190, 194,
196, 205
Rabelais, Francois 22, 111
Radcliffe, Ann 88, 102
Reader, Keith A. 175
realism 58, 81–2, 128, 193
Renais, Alain 179
revisionary ratios see Bloom,
Harold
Rhys, Jean 150–1, 152, 153
Riffaterre, Michael 4, 6, 115–32,
137, 140, 209, 210–11, 214,
215, 221; descriptive system
119–20, 122, 123, 124, 126,
210–11; hypogram 120, 122,
123–4, 126, 129, 130–1, 214;
idiolect 119, 124, 214;
interpretant, the 118; intertext
120, 121, 125, 127, 130;
invariant, the 119–20, 124,
129, 214; literary competence
125–31; matrix 119, 120, 123,
124, 129, 130, 131, 215; model
119, 120, 123, 215; obligatory
and aleatory intertextuality
130–1, 140; presupposition, of
reader 121–2, 132; self-
sufficient text, the 115–16,
128, 129; semiotic level of
meaning 115–19, 124, 128,
131; sociolect 119, 121, 122,
124, 125, 126, 128, 129, 132,
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238 INDEX
219; syllepsis 118;
ungrammaticality 118–19, 221
Roberts, Graham 213
Rohe, Mies van der 187
Rothstein, Eric 57, 92, 126
Roudiez, Leon S. 48–9, 51, 52, 218
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 65
Rushdie, Salman 191–2
Russo, Mary 161
Rylance, Rick 78
Still, Judith 47
Stirling, James 187
Strauss, Claude-Lévi 96
Structuralism 4, 6, 10, 15, 30, 31–
2, 53, 54, 62, 76, 77, 78, 82–3,
95–132, 217, 218, 219, 220
subject of enunciation/utterance
39–42, 72, 219–20
Surrealism 114
Swinburne, Algernon Charles 140
Saussure, Ferdinand de 6, 7, 8–
14, 16, 17, 18, 19, 30, 42, 43–
4, 45, 62, 65, 76, 96, 131, 167,
174; anagrams 43–5, 210;
langage 17, 214, 215; langue
and parole 9, 17, 18, 77, 96,
107, 114, 214–5; semiology 10,
31–2, 95–6, 174–5, 218
Scarfe, Francis 105
scriptible text see Barthes, Roland
semianalysis see Kristeva, Julia
semiology see Saussure,
Ferdinand de; semiotics
semiotic, the see Kristeva, Julia
semiotics 31–2, 34–5, 37, 38, 45,
46, 48–9, 56, 174; see also
Kristeva, Julia and Riffaterre,
Michael
Shakespeare, William 98, 109,
138, 142, 143, 181
Shelley, Mary 37–8, 43, 72, 104–
5, 106
Shelley, P. B. 106, 111, 133, 140
Sherman, Cindy 177
Showalter, Elaine 144, 146, 153,
159–60, 161, 162
Signifyin(g) 167–9, 219
simulacrum 182–3
sociolect see Riffaterre, Michael
Sollers, Phillipe 31, 34, 51
speech genres see Bakhtin, M. M.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 151
split subject, the see Kristeva, Julia
Starobinski, Jean 43
Steiner, Wendy 176–7
Taylor, Elizabeth 175
Tel Quel 30–5, 43, 48, 49, 50, 56,
58, 67, 69, 72, 93, 206, 220;
see also Poststructuralism
Tennyson, Alfred Lord 202–4
textual analysis see Barthes,
Roland
Thackeray, Henry 104
thetic, the see Kristeva, Julia
Todorov, Tzvetan 15, 28, 47
trace, the see Derrida, Jacques
transcendental signified 64–5,
220–1
transposition see Kristeva, Julia
transtextuality see Genette, Gérard
ungrammaticality see Riffaterre,
Michael
Virgil 189
Volosinov, V. N. see Bakhtin
Walker, Alice 171–3
Welty, Eudora 162–3
Wharton, Edith 161
White, Hayden 191
Williams, William Carlos 126–7
Wittgenstein, Ludwig 196
Woolf, Virgina 25, 144
Wordsworth, William 127–30,
133, 139
Worton, Michael 47
Yaeger, Patricia S. 162–4
Yeats, W. B. 140, 162, 163, 164