Lecture 5
5.1. The Notion of intertextuality.
5.2. Types of Intertextual connections.
5.1 Notion of intertextuality. The notion of the context is next to the questions of intertextuality. I.V. Arnold defines intertextuality as insertion in the text different entire texts with a different subject of speech or their fragments in the form of quotations, reminiscences and allusions.
The term of intertextuality defines the interdependent ways in which texts stand in relation to one another (as well as to the culture at large) to produce meaning.
A central idea of contemporary literary and cultural theory, intertextuality has its origins in 20th-century linguistics, particularly in the work of Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913). The term itself was coined by the Bulgarian-French philosopher and psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva in the 1960s.
M.Bahtin’s ideas are of great importance for the theory of intertextuality, especially his ideas of “an alien word”, “two-voice word”. The problem of intertextuality has been actively elaborated in the late 20th c. Nevertheless, there remained a lot of questions to settle.
One of the reasons why the theory of intertextuality is not fully investigated as a compositional and stylistic phenomenon the vast variety of sizes, forms, functions of insertion of the “the other voice”. The common feature of these insertions is the change of the speaker («субъекта речи»): the author can give the floor to another real author and quote him/ her in the text or the epigraph (as well as Dostoyevsky quotes Pushkin and Gospel in his “Demons”) or include his own verses under the name of a character’s oeuvres (B. Pasternak in “Doctor Jivago”).
The insertions are especially unequal in their length. This can be either a single “alien word” in inverted commas or an entire novel inside of the other one (“Master and Margarita” by M. Bulgakov, “The Gift” by V. Nabokov). The insertion can be marked by the indication on the source in the text (or the author’s comments) by rather often the reader should make a guess about the initial text (for instance in parodies). In such cases, the reader active intellectual work strengthens his/her pleasure of reading.
Quotations undergone highly specific rethinking, restyling, compressions, etc. All of these highly heterogeneous insertions are united by a single common feature – the change of the speaker. This may be the author himself, his character and another author. 1-st person narrative can be substituted for a distanced 3-d person narrator (“Daniel Martin” by Fowls).
Another reason why the theory of intertextuality needs further study is the great complexity and variety of modalities, functions and implications - evaluative, characteristic, compositional, and ideal, etc. Implications can be grounded on the fact that the alien word is sate with the echo of different utterances – passionate, ironic, etc. Bakhtin very figuratively treats each text as dialogue (he very much loves this expression). In his opinion, each statement can be considered in the widest sense as the answer to all previous statements in the given sphere that, of course, very much fair not only for art, but also especially for scholastic texts.
This “dialogicality” is established due to the fact that the real unit of the speech communication is an utterance, its borders being the change of speech subjects. The elementary form — real dialogue with its change of remarks — is presented in the novel in a considerably complicated form: dialogue between characters, direct appeal of the author to the reader, inclusions in the form of letters, diaries and other compositions of characters etc.
To understand means to bring into correlation with one’s thesaurus. Generally, thesaurus stands for the totality of personally accumulated knowledge. Narrowly, one’s thesaurus is a glossary reflective of these knowledge and experience. A person’s associative thesaurus is kind of organization in one’s consciousness the entire information about the world. The thesaurus is based on the experience of the previous generations and takes into account connections between bits of knowledge. One’s thesaurus should be constantly growing by means of establishing new associative connections.
In order to make a figurative idea of intertextuality, one can make use of the idea of the “optical field”. In physics, a “field” stands for the space in which a force/ forces are acting. An optical field is a space in which one can see objects through a lens. In the interpretation process, such a lens is a quotation, otherwise, the premeditated insertion of alien words into the text. In other words, the effect of the quotation highly depends on both the initial context from which it was excerpted and the one in which it was implanted. Additionally, things that matter are the scale of a quote’s transformations, its being marked, formally and semantically transformed, etc.
G. Genette offered to distinguish 5 types of intertextual relations:
1) intertextuality as the co-presence in the text two or more texts (quotation, allusion, plagiarism);