Course 4

Defining intertextuality

Intertextuality (Lat. “between texts”) designates the relations between different texts, the manner in
which one text exists within another. It can also be interpreted in terms of deviation as it analyses and takes
advantage of the contrast between two textual sources through contact and evocation. Between texts there can be
a whole range of combinations.
Intertextuality can refer to direct allusions, references beyond the text, to clichés, pastiches and parodic
re-workings. Mikhail Bakhtin is the first to have established the bases of the field by referring to trans-
subjectivity as to the manner in which texts interact with their contexts and receivers. The concepts introduced
by Bakhtin are later on popularised in the West and revised by Julia Kristeva who consecrates the term of
intertextuality. The French critic Gérard Genette introduces the term of trans-textuality - a complex,
concentrated version of the concept of intertextuality; in his work Palimpsestes he uses a special type of hyper-
textual relation between an anterior model - the hypotext (the source) and the resulting product - the hypertext.
Due to the fact that the text is considered to be not only a structure but the centre of a whole network of
references, it offers the reader the possibility to go from a horizontal to a vertical reading by means of
associations and analogies. This type of reading is interested not only in the text’s direct references and allusions
but also in what the text leaves out to be inferred. The process of reading is always a dynamic one consisting of
selecting and organizing textual elements into coherent structures, sometimes excluding or foregrounding others,
envisaging the text from a particular perspective or shifting from one perspective to another.
The traditional theories on intertextuality define it according to the historical and cultural relations
established between different texts, taking into account the various textual sources which generated the final text.
The idealist critical school speaks of intertextuality in terms of influences and sources inscribed in what Laurent
Jenny considers to be an “obsession with immanence” that is a visibly marked preference for biographical
research, genesis of the text and more or less chaotic combinations of critical readings). The modern theories of
the text, starting with the formalist understanding of the concept to its semiotic dimensions stipulate that the
meaning of a text can never be identical to itself because of the multiplicity of readings we can associate to it
which give that meaning different contexts so that there is a constant interchange and circulation of elements.
These elements can never be fixed within rigid frames of interpretation. There is no meaning which is not
interwoven in an open-ended play of signification.
Present critical approaches speak about a cultural textuality and intertextuality according to which the
text is not only a type of reality organized by means of verbal and written signs; it also represents any type of
cultural reality constructed by using different other systems of signs. This fact has been noticed and discussed
for centuries. Leonardo da Vinci, in his treaty The Comparison of Arts operates a confrontation between the
structures and the techniques of constructing musical, pictorial or poetic works. Examples may be taken
especially from the medieval period when society was rigorously governed by strict cultural codes. Here
intertextuality operates through associations of texts built with verbal signs according to some semantic rules,
with others, achieved by means of figurative signs following an iconic model but still offering the same “reading”
of reality. Dante’s literary work offers other examples of intertextuality for the artist combines dimensions of his
own creativity with philosophical speculation, mysticism or metaphysics. The poet, attracted by different modes
of intellectual speculation characteristic for his own period, identifies within different texts some intertextual
models which he uses in his own text.
Intertextuality can operate in these given situations:
 when an existing literary text can give another writer the possibility to use this text for building his own
creation (he might just take some formal pattern to be re-used) - eg: Homer - Joyce, The Bible – Milton
 the creation of a text within another text, of a mosaic-like text which presents a multitude of references and
quotations which might generate other texts within the primal one. The reading of such a text requires the
reader’s cultural background because the primal text is given as a continuous narration while all the others are
just included in a fragmentary way – e. g: Salman Rushdie
 when some ideological, philosophical problems (reflected in previous works) are re-used and given new
dimensions.
Accordingly, different classifications have been established taking into account a variety of criteria; if
the criterion of the classification is based on the relations established between texts, critics have distinguished
between:
 general intertextuality – when the text is related to its architext that is when it contains the characteristic
features of its genre and is thus related to other texts belonging to the same literary genre
 specific intertextuality – when relations are established between hypo- and hypertexts belonging to different
literary genres
All these issues could lead to the problems of imitation and plagiarism but J. L. Borges was the one who
solved the problem by insisting on the fact that each writer creates his own precursors, that in creating his work
he is entitled to re-shape the past, the tradition as well as the future. His work will look back towards the past so
that it should give rise to a different reading and interpretation.
Other examples may be given from our contemporary reality possessing a more complex, coherent and
unitary system of significance, symbols and communication. According to Maria Corti (Pentru o enciclopedie a
comunicarii literare) there can be:
 a synchronic intertextuality - which presents a spatial extension; that means that the final text uses as its
primal sources other texts belonging to the same historical period, or reflect the same historical reality but
within different cultures (W. Thackeray’s Vanity Fair and L. Tolstoy’s War and Peace based on the same event -
the battle of Waterloo)
 a diachronic intertextuality - presenting a temporal extension; the final text uses texts belonging to other
historical periods which it adopts and filters through the contemporary way of thinking. The “old” texts are
either reinterpreted from a modern perspective (the French story of Barbe Bleu and Angela Carter’s The Bloody
Chamber) or distorted by parody or imitation (J. Joyce’s Ulysses and Homer’s The Odyssey). This type of
intertextuality establishes certain relationships projected on a temporal line realising a connection between
literature and other different cultural elements of society.
In this case the phenomenon of intertextuality is rendered even more complex since different periods,
sometimes separated by centuries, present various ideologies, different points of view, different perspectives and
offer multiple readings of reality. The temporal distance between the final text and its source enlarges the area of
interpretation. Intertextuality can thus be viewed as a sort of recreation of history according to a new system of
thought which reinterprets a recorded moment in time and re-evaluates it from new perspectives; it has a
regressive character when it offers new rewritings of texts already produced. Parody plays here an important
part; it tries to exaggerate certain characteristic features of a text, to recontextualize them so as to emphasise its
particularity; its rough form acquires a burlesque form but it does not imply the destruction or ridiculisation of
the first text. On the contrary, sometimes it may appear in an indirect, subtle manner which makes it almost
imperceptible (A. Pope’s The Rape of the Lock - a mock-heroic poem, parody of the epic works). Imitation and
paraphrase may also lead to interesting intertextual productions; it operates transformations on the fundamental
issues and types of discourses which also imply alterations of the reality represented by the primal text.
An intertextual analysis would have to start from the idea that the meaning of a text can never be
stabilised and from the necessity to be open to a multitude of possible readings. The plurality of elements
existing within or outside the text with which it establishes various relations transforms the reader willing to
proceed to this type of analysis into a bricoleur, a person able to generate new perspectives by recombining and
defamiliarising old ones. The first step is to detect the literary genre to which the text belongs and to establish the
codes and principles according to which the text can be related to its genre and interpreted; the places where the
text goes beyond its genre and borrows elements from others, more or less related to its own are to be discovered.
Direct allusions and implicit references, borrowings and imitations have to be spotted as they problematise the
issues of boundary, originality, authorship and uniqueness.
Different levels of intertextuality can be detected when taking into account the nature of the relations
established either among the internal elements of a text (intratextuality) or between this particular text and
different others. These relations can be of alteration (taking sources and altering them according to certain
patterns in order to increase the suggestiveness of a resulting text), explicitness (as the text may make its
intertextual relations explicit through direct quotations, instances of deliberate plagiarism), reflexivity (the text
comes back to and emphasises its own intertextuality) and implicitness (the reader has to play with readings and
interpretations and discover instances of intertextuality hidden within the structure of the text). Laurent Jenny
speaks about intertextuality as a “condition of literary readability”, as a process of assimilation and
transformation with critical intentions and devoid of “innocence” when either the text or the reader is implied or
as based on operations of realisation and transgression of archetypal models.
Brian McHale imagines the fictional universe as a multi-layered world which also contains an
intertextual space among so many other ontological strata which give it its homotopian character. The first of
these layers is the physical space represented by the material side of the book or of the page; the second layer is
represented by the conceptual space alluding to the “spatialized language, introducing an internal space within
the sign”. Besides the materiality of a text, often played with when dealing with modernist and postmodernist
narratives, and its linguistic side, there is also an intertextual space where texts, styles and characters are
borrowed, re-written and parodied. The ontological boundaries are in this way violated and broken so that the
“result is a kind of between-worlds space – a zone” and intertextuality is seen as a phenomenon creating a link
between parallel or conflicting worlds and existences and related to an “ontology of the possible. In defining
intertextuality and its various aspects, to McHale’s passage from one ontological system to another corresponds
Kristeva’s transition from one system of signs to another. Related again to textual boundaries theorists speak
about weak or strong intertextuality depending on the degree of limits transcendence and integration within the
final text.
Starting from Kristeva’s delimitation of homointertextuality (referring to relations between similar texts)
and heterointertextuality (relations between different codes), the intertextual relations have been theorised
according to the degree of total or partial assimilation and neutralisation of an intertext within the hypertext or
on the contrary, its non-integration in the final text resulting in the production of an intertextual space between
the hypo-and hypertexts.
Laurent Jenny devises one of the most pertinent studies of intertextuality starting from the theory of the
text, of different approaches of the field, of its elements, internal relations and of its figures. In his opinion
intertextuality introduces a new type of reading which breaks the text’s linearity by introducing intertextual
references that create “spaces of alternatives” within the text or new “texts of bifurcation” corresponding to
Borges’s “forking paths”. The intertext is defined as “a text absorbing a multiplicity of texts remaining unified
by a single meaning”, the “quoted text” is devoid of its transitivity and capacity of denoting being instead
assigned the power of connoting while intertextuality itself is seen in the endeavour of keeping together several
texts within a single one without their mutual destruction or annihilation.
Intertextuality is nowadays emphasised by the extended use of the web where the possibility to go
beyond the boundary of a text, playing with its structural elements and establishing connections among different
layers of the text becomes obvious. The computer transforms an abstract concept (intertextuality) into a practical
play with and within the text.