Presupposition and Intertextuality Author(s): Jonathan Culler Source: MLN, Vol. 91, No. 6, Comparative Literature (Dec.

, 1976), pp. 1380-1396 Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2907142 Accessed: 04/08/2010 15:13
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pose thatyou had to explain to an outsider,a strangerfroma culture whichknew nothingabout such matters, whyyou are reading this article. It would not be an easy task, for you would have to explain, in general terms,why people read articles in academic journals, what sort of expectations bring them to engage in this and whatexpectationstheybringto it. If we were to tellthis activity strangerthat an article in a literaryperiodical is expected to instructus in some aspect of the studyof literature, should not we have done much to advance his understanding,forwe should still have to tell him somethingabout this discursivespace or order of words which we call literarycriticismand explain that an article offersignificant should, withinthis framework, propositions. If he pressed us on this point and asked us what we meant by that we "significant," should no doubt have to reply,impatiently, an article must say something which one has not already explicitly thoughtor read but must be related in some positiveway to what one has in the past thoughtor read. Withinthe contextof what is or known,it must propose modifications elaborations. For an article to be significant muststand in a relationship, it whichdoubtless to will be difficult describe, to a body of discourse, an enterprise, of which is already in place and which creates the possibility new work. One would hope that any real strangerwould by this time have become bored, but if he did continue to question we should findit to extremelydifficult explain preciselywhat are the expectations withwhichwe approach an articleon an aspect of literary criticism and how such an articleis rendered intelligible and significant a by whole body of already existing discourse. Indeed, we would be to tempted,I think, take evasive action,to say thatthe expectations of each individual reader, like his knowledge, are different, and that consequentlythere can be no talk of the general presuppositions of an articleor of the general expectationsof readers which willgive itmeaning. But even ifit is thus personalized,the question remainsdifficult. How willyou, as individual,knowwhetherwhat I
MLN 91 (1976) 1380-1396 ? Press Copyright1976 byTheJohns Hopkins University Allrights reproductionanyform in of reserved.

TUALITY

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i JONATHAN CULLER

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or say is significant not? What are the individual expectationsand normswhichwill enable you to make such a judgment? It is worth pointingout that, however difficult you may find it to formulate these normsand expectations,you willmake a judgment about the significanceof this article. You will, very shortly,evaluate it in relation to the criticalenterprise. So even thisretreatfromthe general to the individual-an evasion one respectsin thatit bears the marksof truth-even thisdoes not offer easy answers. Moreover, it is not an option which can alwaysbe exercized: the lectureror writerof an article,for example, cannot accept it as truth;he cannot live or act by it. When he speaks or writes,his discourse makes a decision about a general and implicitcontract,about what is known and what will be significant,about the state of literarystudies as manifestedin the of intersubjectivity his audience. Postulatinggeneral expectations, and explicitknowledgewhichwillmake his discourse intelimplicit ligible,cannot be an impossiblethingto do, for the author or lecturerdoes it; indeed, he cannot avoid doing it. In the act of writing or speaking he inevitablypostulates an intersubjectivebody of knowledge. In saying that my article is intelligible only in termsof a prior body of discourse-other projectsand thoughtswhich it implicitly takes up, prolongs,cites,refutes,transforms-I have or explicitly and posed the problem of intertextuality asserted the intertextual nature of any verbal construct.We can pose the problem another way by asking what a piece of writingpresupposes? What does it This is not assume, what must it assume to take on significance? a essentiallyor even primarily question of what the writerknows, certainlynot a question of what he has in mind, for the relevant presuppositionsmaybe deeply sedimentedin his past or in the past of his discipline; and indeed it is a characteristic experience that one's presuppositions are best revealed by another. They are, of perhaps, thatwhichmustbe revealed byanother,or by an effort of thinkingfromthe point of view of the other. dedoublement: I do not, then, propose to describe the presuppositionsof my own discourse. Rather, I offerit and its situationas an example of the necessarilyintertextual nature of formalutteranceand of the of formulating difficulty presuppositionsor of describingintertexto Even for simple factswhich we know quite explicitly be tuality. we presuppositions, cannot cite a source. How do we know thatan

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This is articleis supposed to tell us somethingnew and significant? not exactlythe fruitof experience, the necessaryinferencefrom the overwhelming evidence of past cases, nor is it part of an original covenant of the discipline.Even in such simple cases, then,we where conventions and are faced with an infiniteintertextuality cannot be traced to theirsource and thus positivispresuppositions ticallyidentified.Readers, in whom these conventionsdwell, are the representatives of a general intertextuality which Roland Barthes has described: anterieur texte... Ce "moi"qui au je n'estpas un sujetinnocent, du une est d'autres textes, s'approche texte deja lui-meme pluralit6 de codes infinis, plus exactement: ou perdus (dont l'originese perd).1 have a lost That conventions, like the conventionof significance, accident. is not to be thoughtof as a simple but unfortunate origin It is not thateveryconventionor momentof a code had a determito nate origin which happens to be difficult discover. On the conthe notion of intertextuality names the paradox of linguistic trary, and discursivesystems: thatutterancesor textsare never moments of origin because theydepend on the prior existenceof codes and conventions,and it is the nature of codes to be always already in to existence,to have lostorigins.It is difficult explain what it is that enables us to make sense of a new instanceof discourse,but whatever intelligibilitydiscursivesequence achieves depends on intera textual codes: "autant d'eclats de ce quelque chose qui a toujours ete deja lu, vu, fait,vecu: le code est le sillon de ce deja."2 Intertextualityis less a name for a work's relationto particularprior texts in than an assertionof a work'sparticipation a discursivespace and of its relation to the codes which are the potential formalizations thatspace. Indeed, as Julia Kristevasays,once we thinkof a textas in and significant termsof other textswhich it absorbs intelligible then "a la place de la notion d'intersubjectivite and transforms, s'installecelle d'intertextualite."3 The notionof intertextuality emphasizes thatto read is to place a workin a discursivespace, relatingitto othertextsand to the codes itself a similaractivity: takingup of a is a of thatspace, and writing
1 Roland Barthes,S/Z (Paris, 1970), p. 16. Ibid., p. 28. 3 Julia Kristeva, Semiotike (Paris, 1969), p. 146.

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positionin a discursivespace. "Par sa maniere d'ecrire en lisantle anterieurou synchroniquel'auteur vit dans l'hiscorpus litteraire et la societe s'ecrit dans le texte."4Writingis the historical toire, praxis of reading made visible:"'Ecrire' seraitle 'lire' devenu prol'ecriture paragrammatique duction, industrie: l'ecriture-lecture, et seraitl'aspirationvers une agressivite une participationtotale."5 and thus designatesthe domain common to writing Intertextuality as the domain of the intertextual, and a description of reading would involvethe most general and mostsignificant intertextuality considerations:the relationshipbetween a text and the languages or discursive practices of a culture and its relationship to those particulartextswhich,for the text in question, articulatethatculis ture and its possibilities.The study of intertextuality not the of sources and influences,as traditionally conceived; investigation it casts itsnet wider to include the anonymous discursivepractices, codes whoseoriginsare lost,whichare the conditions possibility of of warned againstconfuslater texts.Indeed, Barthes has specifically ing study of the intertextualwith source-hunting:"les citations dont est fait un texte sont anonymes, irreperables,et cependant dejdlues"; the crucial thingis thattheyfunctionas "already read."6 In its designation of a discursivespace and its assertion of the studyof discourse, interprimacyof this space for any systematic of is a theoretical construct the first importance,and it is textuality not withoutdirectpracticalconsequences. It leads one to thinkof a text as a dialogue with other texts,an act of absorption, parody, which harmoniand criticism, rather than as autonomous artifact reconciles the possible attitudestowards a given problem; it ously the special conventionsand alerts one to the artificeof literature, on whichit is based; and it makes one parinterpretive operations of ticularlysensitive to the special referentiality literaryworks: to whenevera workseems to be referring the world one can argue thatthissupposed referenceis in facta commenton othertextsand of postpone the referentiality the fictionto another moment or are anotherlevel. The consequences of the notionof intertextuality rich, but it proves itself,nevertheless,an extremely undoubtedly difficult concept to work with,as if it were the nature of intertex4 Ibid., p. 181. Idem. 6 Barthes,"De 1'oeuvreau texte," Revue d'esthetique (1971), p. 229.

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tual space, itscodes and conventions, evade description.If, as we to saw earlier,it is alreadydifficult describethe intertextuality an to of articleabout literary criticism-a formof discourse which is highly institutionalized governed by an elaborate code of professional and what willone be able to say of the more radical and practice-then literature? complex acts of thatexceedinglyevasive institution, It is instructive consider what happens when a proponent of to like intertextuality Julia Kristeva undertakes the descriptionof a work's intertextualspace. "Quel que soit le contenu semantique d'un texte,"she writes, "son statuten tantque pratique signifiante l'existencedes autres discours ... C'est dire que tout presuppose texte est d'emblee sous la jurisdiction des autres discours qui lui to imposent un univers."7But it is difficult make that universe as such the object of attention,so there is a tendencyto narrow the intertextualdomain and to speak of specificworks which a text takes up: "Le signifiepoetique renvoie a des signifiesdiscursifs autres, de sorte que dans l'enonce poetique plusieurs autres discours sont lisibles."8To show this is to identifyspecifically these other discourses.Thus, the intertextuality Lautreamont'sChants of deMaldoror and Poesiesis describedas a dialogue withtexts whichare in principle(and generallyin practiceas well) identifiable: Le texteetranger, est objet de la "raillerie", absorbepar le parasoit une la (l'ocan-Baudelaire? gramme poetique comme reminiscence le le et Lamartine? pelican-Musset?, lune,l'enfant, fossoyeur-Musset? toutle code du romantisme desarticule dans lesChants), comme soit citation texte estrepris desarticule la lettre et a dans les (le etranger

Particularly strikingis Kristeva'sdecision to use as her "exemple de cet espace intertextuel est le lieu de naissance de la frappant qui poesie" Lautreamont'sPoesies,whichcontains a verylarge number of explicit negations or deformationsof identifiablemaxims and sententiae.10Poesies II, in particular, lends itself to a detailed study of the relationshipbetween undeniable sources (usually in Pascal, Vauvenargues, or La Rochefoucauld) and transformation, and anyone under the impressionthatthe whole point of intertex7 Kristeva, Revolution La du langagepoetique (Paris, 1974) pp. 338-9. Kristeva,Semiotike, 255. p. 9 Ibid., p. 194. 10Ibid., pp. 225-6. Lautreamont'sPoesiesare taken as the principal example of in and intertextuality Semiotike are used as the only example in the discussionof"Le contextepresuppose"in La Revolution langage du poetique (pp. 337-58).
8

Poesies).9

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tualitywas to take us beyond the study of identifiablesources is broughtup shortby Kristeva'sobservationthat le avec le textedes Poesies il Pour comparer textepresuppos6 II, editions Pascal,de Vauvenarde seraitnecessaire d'6tablir quelles car Ducasse a pu utiliser, les versions gues,de la Rochefoucauld, a d'une edition une autre.11 varient beaucoup or The point is not that such questions are uninteresting insignificantbut only that a situation in which one can track down sources with such precision cannot serve as the paradigm for a is if descriptionof intertextuality, intertextuality the general discursive space which makes a text possible. Kristeva'sprocedure is however, because it illustratesthe direction in highlyinstructive, leads the criticwho wishes to which the concept of intertextuality based on the contentionthattexts"se font workwithit. A criticism en absorbantet en detruisanten meme temps les autres textesde seems happiestwhen itcan identify particular 1'espaceintertextuel" with which the work wrestles,and thus criticalpractice pre-texts itselfguides the critictowardsthe claim that "le texte poetique est et produit dans le mouvementcomplexe d'une affirmation d'une simultaneesd'un autre texte."'2 negation taken this road, who has emOne criticwho has unhesitatingly and braced the concept of intertextuality compressed it to a relabetween a textand a particularprecursortext,between a tionship poet and his major predecessor, is Harold Bloom. The French would have no quarrel with Bloom's proponentsof intertextuality formulationwhen he asserts the intertextualnature of text and meaning: to Fewnotions moredifficult dispelthanthe"commonsensical" are that one thata poetictextis self-contained, it has an ascertainable to without reference otherpoetictexts.... or meaning meanings but Unfortunately, poemsare not things onlywordsthatreferto and other words refer still to and other words, so on into words, those worldof literary thedensely language.Anypoemis overpopulated of and an inter-poem, anyreading a poemis an inter-reading.13 This is the case because prior linguisticacts are the ground, the of conditionsof possibility one's own discursiveactions.What hapBloom asks, pens,
12
13

1 Kristeva,La Revolution langagepoetique, 343. du p.

Kristeva,SemiotikW,257. p. and Harold Bloom, Poetry Repression (New Haven, 1976), pp 2-3.

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ifone tries write to teachor to think, evento read without to or or thesenseof a tradition? at Why, nothing all happens, just nothing. You cannotwrite teachor think evenread without or or imitation, and what is youimitate whatanother personhas done,thatperson's or or or to writing teaching thinking reading.Your relation what informs personis tradition.14 that Here we can already detectthatshift fromtextsto persons which willassume greaterimportanceuntilit becomes the centralfeature it of of Bloom's theory, setting in radical oppostion to the theory his French predecessors. For Barthes, one might say, the model for textualproductionis Bouvard and Pecuchet,whose livesare generated by an infinite networkof anonymouscitations.For Bloom, on the contrary, intertextual not a space of anonymity the is and banalbut of heroic struggles betweena sublimepoet and his dominant ity it, predecessor ("A poetic 'text,'as I interpret is not a gatheringof on a page, but is a psychicbattlefieldupon which authentic signs forces strugglefor the only victory worthwinning,the divinating over oblivion").15 triumph Turning fromtextsto persons,Bloom can proclaimintertextuality with a fervor less circumspect than Barthes's, for Barthes's as tautologous naming of the intertextual the "deja lu" is so anticlimactic to preclude excitedanticipations, while Bloom, who will as go on to name precursorsand describe the titanicstruggleswhich take place on the battlefieldof poetic tradition,has grounds for is enthusiasm. Indeed, his use of intertextuality a daring move whichcannot but temptthe criticwho is frustrated the prospect by of workingin a Barthesian space of infinite and anonymous citations.It is a daring move, for,while proclaimingthe dependence of everytexton other texts,it produces a cosiness which even a Kabbalisticrhetoriccannot disguise. The function Bloom's theoryof of influence,certainlythe functionof the Freudian analogies which in structureit, is to keep everything the family.Intertextuality is the family archive;when one explores itone stayswhollywithinthe traditionalcanon of major poets. The text is an intertextual conin termsof other textswhich it prostruct,comprehensibleonly and sublimates; but when we ask longs, completes, transforms, whattheseothertextsare theyturnout to be the centralpoems of a
14 15

(New York, 1975), p. 32. Bloom, A Map ofMisreading and Bloom, Poetry Repression, 2. p.

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singlegreatprecursor.And ifwe ask whythisshould be so, whythe intertextual should be compressed to a relationshipbetween two individuals,the answer seems to be that a man can have only one father:the scenario of the familyromance gives the poet but one romance,thiscosyand murderous progenitor.It is fromthisfamily deof intertextuality sublime poets, that Bloom's intertextuality rives.There are originsafterall; the precursoris the greatoriginal, the intertextualauthority.Locate the key precursor text, by an occult process which, pace A Map of Misreading,remains to be space; a space whose aranalysed, and you have your intertextual ticulations can be described by a series of variouslynamed figures. In describingBloom's theoryI am seeking not so much to attack him as to evade him,to step aside and let him go rushingpast, for and ultimatelyhis theory bears not on tradition,intertextuality, but on what I shall call "application": the rubbing presupposition, togetherof two textsin order to release energy.Though his theory and looks like an account of intertextuality presupposition,interis narrowed to the point where it is a relationshipbetextuality tweena given poem and the great precursorpoem whichthe poet to was striving overcome. Cast in this form,it is stilla theoryof one intertextuality: makingthe strongclaim that forthe poet only a handful of prior textscondition his discourse, make it possible. But in factby this point Bloom's theoryabandons that claim and implies that the relationshipbetween text and pretextis one perceived by the interpreter: and bothtautology reAntithetical criticism mustbeginbydenying of that a duction, denialbestdelivered theassertion themeaning by And not a poemcan onlybe a poem,butanother poem-apoem itself. but totalarbitrariness, anycentral nota poemchosenwith poemby readthatpoem. even iftheephebenever an indubitable precursor, irrelevant is Sourcestudy wholly here; we are dealingwithprimal but and words, antithetical meanings, an ephebe'sbestmisinterpretations maywellbe of poemshe has neverread.16 of To read an author's poem as a misinterpretation a poem which a he never read is simplyan act of interpretation, decision by the criticthat valuable meaning and energy will be produced if one poem is applied to the other. The decision to use only one textto the constitute intertextual space of anotheris revealed as a decision
16 Bloom, The

(New York, 1973), p. 70. of Anxiety Influence,

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made for purposes of interpretation and not as a motivatedaxiom of the theoryof intertextuality. Indeed, Bloom's procedure reveals in its grandiose way, the dangers which threatenthe very nicely, notion of intertextuality: is a difficult it concept to use because of the vastand undefineddiscursivespace itdesignates,but when one narrowsit so as to make it more usable one either fallsinto source kind (which is what the constudyof a traditionaland positivistic was designed to transcend)or else ends by naming particular cept textsas the pre-texts grounds of interpretive on convenience. Bloom's effortsare not to be dismissed: on the contrary,his effortsare primarilyresponsible for reinvigoratinginterpretive criticism,which had lost its sense of purpose as the moderate humanismof the New Criticism came to seem dated. Asserting that "humane letters" is an oxymoron, that "the imagination's gift comes necessarilyfrom the perversity the spirit"and that the of main tradition Westernpoetrysince the Renaissance "is a history of of anxiety and self-savingcaricature, of distortion,of perverse, wilfulrevisionism withoutwhich modern poetryas such could not assertionslike these Bloom will inspirea whole genexist,"17-with caricature. eration of criticsto read poems as acts of self-saving He is also to be admired for raisingso forcefully and frequently but the problemof intertextuality; those of us who lack his strength mustcontendwiththe factthatpoems do seem to presuppose more than a single precursor poem: what makes possible reading and writingis not a single anterior action which serves as origin and moment of plenitude but an open series of acts, both identifiable and lost, which work togetherto constitutesomethinglike a lanof systems convention.Intertextualguage, discursivepossibilities, is unfortunately more complicatedthan the model of sublime ity poets suggest. In fact,as the example of a criticalarticle will alinvolvesmany things:explicit ready have indicated,intertextuality conventionsof a genre, specificpresuppositionsabout what is already known and unknown, more general expectations and interpretive operations,and broad assumptionsabout the preoccupation and goals of a type of discourse. How could one investigate of intertextuality this sort? How could one avoid the danger of and settingout to studyintertextuality focusing,in the end, on a text'srelationto specificprecursors?An obvious strategy to folis
17

Ibid., pp. 86, 85, 30.

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low the linguistic model as far as one can; in particular,one might think about the notion of presupposition in linguisticsand the literary analogues it suggests. In discussingthe presuppositionsat work in a natural language to finditconvenient distinguish betweenlogical and pragmatlinguists ic presupposition.The formerare best thoughtof as the presuppositionsof a sentence,as when we recognize that Have you stopped is wife? a loaded question because any answer one gives beating your assentsto whatthe sentencepresupposes: thatone previously made a habitof beatingone's wife.An explicitdefinition logical presupof positionis as follows:"A sentenceS logicallypresupposes a sentence S' just in case S logically impliesS' and the negationof S, -S, also are logically impliesS'."18Presuppositions whatmustbe truein order thata proposition either be trueor false.Thus, It surprised that me John a car presupposes thatJohn a car,as does It didn't bought surprise bought methat a Johnbought car. A whole series of grammaticalconstructions and lexical items carry presuppositionsof this sort: factive who predicates(as in the example above), cleftsentences(It wasJohn thethief), subordinate clauses (John before caught left Mary temporal in which built the was relativeclauses (Thehotel, called),non-restrictive nineteenth is decrepit), certainaspectuals (John [or constopped century, at tinued, resumed] (Johncalled again), writing twoo'clock),iteratives but presuppositionalquantifiers(Everyone Johndied), and definite as whichfunction all those syntactic constructions names, including and names(John thatFred has a sister married Fred's sister presupposes the Fredgave himtoreadpresupposes the existence Johnlost paperthat of a paper that Fred gave John to read). We can also extend this did notion of logical presuppositionto questions (Where he go? prethat he went somewhere) by sayingthat the presupposisupposes tionsof a question are those sentenceswhichare the logical presuppositionsof everyone of its answers.19 This notion of presupposition,which is not defined in termsof in speaker's or author's beliefs,introducesa modest intertextuality sentencesof a textto another set of sentences which they relating presuppose. This kind of presuppositionis of considerable impor18 Edward L. Keenan, "Two Types of Presuppositionin Natural Language," in Studies Linguistic in ed. Semantics, Charles Fillmoreand D. Terence Langedoen (New York, 1971), p. 45. 19For discussion and see examples of these constructions ibid., pp. 46-8.

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If tance in literature. the presuppositions a sentenceare all those of propositionswhich it and its negation logicallyentail,then we can thattheyconsistof all the assertionsmade by say,more informally, a sentenceexcept assertionmade by its surface structurepredithe cate. It is of considerable importance which propositionsa work chooses to assertdirectly and whichitchooses to place in thisintertextual space by presupposing them. Thus, when Baudelaire begins a poem Quand le cielbas et lourdpese commeun couvercle en Sur l'esprit g6missant proieaux longsennuis,20 and when he carries on in temporal subordinateclauses for three assertions stanzas,he is choosing to presuppose the mostimportant or of his discourse, to relegate them to the intertext pre-text,to them as part of the deja lu, as a set of sentencesalready in identify There is implicitreference to prior poetic discourse, to a place. even though no poet may ever have described the poetic tradition, as the lid of a pot. If Baudelaire had begun "Parfoisle ciel bas et sky lourd pese comme un couvercle," he would be claiming to have discoveredsomethingabout the world,and we mightexpect explaa nation,justification, narrativewhich located thisfactin an experientialcontext.The decision to presuppose undermines referenat tiality thislevel by treatingthe factin question as already given. In cases like this,logical presuppositionis an intertextual operator which implies a discursive context and which, by identifying an modifiesthe way in which the poem must be read. intertext, Again, when Baudelaire begins "Benediction" with des supremes Lorsquepar un decret puissances Le Poeteapparait ce mondeennuye,21 en by presupposing this fact about the poet he takes up a different it to relationship it: treating as priordiscourse,partof the intertext, a mythof the poet which he can cite,he opens the question of the mode in which his poem will treat this prior discourse. Presupposition opens an intertextual space which can easily become ironic. In poetryit makes a difference whethera propositionis asserted
ed. 20 Baudelaire, Oeuvres completes, Le Dantec & Pichois (Paris, 1961), p. 70. 21Ibid., 7. p.

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directlyor presupposed. Ted Hughes begins a poem "October is This direct assertionof a metaphor, especiallyof an marigold."22 unusual one, is a way of acquiring a reputation for energy and To forthrightness. have begun "In marigold October" would have as and marigold presupbeen to treat the conjunction of October of posed, to have relegated to a priortextthe creationor discovery thatrelationship, and to have suggested (even though we know of no other poem whichtreatsOctober as marigold) thathe was using a metaphor already implicitin poetic vision, in poetic discourse. "October is marigold" eschews the citational mode, perhaps because it seeks to avoid irony. asserttheirintertexFinally, questionsexplicitly poems containing tual nature, not just because they seem to request an answer and hence designate themselvesas incomplete,but because the presuppositions carried by their questions imply a prior discourse. In Blake's "The Tyger" we have a series of questions: Whatimmortal hand or eye Could frame fearful thy symmetry? In whatdistant deeps or skies of Burntthefire thine eyes? dare he aspire? On whatwings Whatthehand dare siezethefire?23 was framed by some By presupposing that the fearfulsymmetry immortalhand, that the fire of the eyes burned in some distant theselattersentencesas partof etc. the poem identifies deep or sky, a discourseor mode of discoursealreadyin place, as a textor set of Thus the problemof interpreting attitudespriorto the poem itself. the poem becomes essentiallythat of deciding what attitude the poem takes to the prior discourse which it designates as presupposed. This kind of presuppositionis useful forthe studyof intertextuality for, though it is clearly very limited (in no way an infinite of it the truth repertory possibilities), indicateswithperfectclarity of Barthes's claim about the intertext: that a textrefersto or cites bitsof discourse which are "anonymes,irreperables,et cependant deja lus." By presupposing sentencesworkstreatthem as prior dis22 23

Ted Hughes, Selected Poems(London, 1972), p. 25. WilliamBlake, Complete ed. Writings, Geoffrey Keynes (Oxford, 1966), p. 214.

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course, as part of a traditionwhich the poem is dealing with.We may or may not find in earlier poems sentences similar to those presupposed; that is in no way crucial. They functionas already read; theypresentthemselvesas already read by virtueof the simple factthat theyare presupposed. Logical presuppositiondoes not, however,exhaust the notion of presupposition. Indeed, it is not difficultto produce examples contrastthe logical presuppositionsof linguiswhichset in striking whichare central and literary ticsand therhetorical presuppositions works. to the process of reading literary Consider the matterof opening sentencesin novels: logical prerole here, as the basic figureswhich suppostionshave an important The boy stoodbythestrange a hermeneuticstrategy. determine object had thatnothing happened implies a veryrich set of prior pretending sentencesand as opening sentencein a novel or story would, by the res us in medias and program of its presuppositions, put veryweight our reading as an attemptto discover the elementsof this"prior" text:what boy? what object? what had happened? But logicallythe opening sentence withthe fewestpresuppositionswould be somePoor there liveda kingwhohad a daughter. thinglike Onceupona time richin literary thissentenceis extremely in logical presuppositions, and pragmatic presuppositions.It relates the storyto a series of it identifies withthe conventionsof a genre,asks us to other stories, take certainattitudestowardsit (guaranteeing,or at least strongly that the storywill have a point to it, a moral which will implying, the organization of detail and incident). The presupposigovern tionlesssentence is a powerfulintertextual operator. If we think about this kind of case we shall see that there are or many ways in which literary pragmaticpresuppositionsare sigwhich carryno naled and produced by elements or constructions For example, in most cases the logical prelogical presupposition. suppositionsof positiveand negativepropositionsare the same, but literarily, negations are much richerin rhetorically, pragmatically, Thus, in Baudelaire's "Un Voyage a Cythere," presuppositions. afterthe line,"J'entrevoyais pourtantun objet singulier!"the poem continues as follows: aux ombres Ce n'etait un temple bocageres, pas amoureuse fleurs, des Ou la jeune pretresse, le chaleurs, Allait, corpsbrulede secretes Entrebaillant robeaux brisespassageres.24 sa
24

Baudelaire, Oeuvres p. completes, 112.

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presupposes only that there was someLogically,it was nota temple but rhetoricallyit presupposes that someone would have thing, expected it to be a temple or had claimed thatit was. The lengthof thispresuppositionand makes the following descriptionintensifies the whole stanza the negation of an intertextual citation,the negation of somethingalready in place as a discursivesupposition,the mighthave applied negationof the language whichpoetictradition to Cythere.The rhetoricalpresuppostionwhichopens an intertexorder fromthe tual or dialogical space in the poem is of a different we have previouslybeen considering. logical presuppositions To describe rhetoricalor literarypresupposition would be to operations which are broughtinto analyse the various interpretive kinds of discourse. This enterpriseis related to the play by special mustdevelop to deal withitssecond type programwhichlinguistics of presupposition: pragmatic presupposition. These presuppositionsare defined not on the relationsbetweensentencesbut on the relationsbetween utteranceand situationof utterance."An utterance of a sentence pragmaticallypresupposes that its context is That is, the contextmustbe such as to allow one to appropriate."25 the utteranceas the kind of speech act whichitis. Openthe interpret the presence, in a room with a door presupposes, pragmatically, door thatis not open, of another person who understandsEnglish and is in a relation to the speaker which enables him to interpret thisas a request or command. are The analogies withthe case of literature not veryrich,except utteranceas a special kind of speech in thisrespect:we take literary act, detached from a particulartemporal context and placed in a discursiveseries formedby other members of a literarygenre, so that a sentence in a tragedy,for example, is appropriatelyread according to conventions which are differentfrom those which to would apply in comedy. In trying formulatethe pragmaticpreetc. of sentenceswhichwarn,promise, command, one is suppositions on the conventionsof a genre of speech act. working to Attempts formulatepragmaticpresuppositionsforspeech acts have onlyrecently underwayand have generallyfocusedon the got of criteriaforsuccessfulaccomplishment speech acts such as promstudies would ising,ordering,warning. It is not clear that literary The point is, learn much fromthe details of such investigations. simply,that formallythe investigationof pragmatic presupposi25

Keenan, "Two Types of Presupposition. .." p. 49.

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tions is similarto the task whichconfrontspoetics.To workon the is presuppositionsof a sentencewhichpromises to relateitto a whole series of other sentences,to place it in a discursiveor intertextual space which gives rise to the conventionsthat make this sentence as and significant a speech act. In relatingthissentence intelligible to other acts of promisingwhichform,as it were, its conditionsof one need not enquire whetherthe speaker of the senpossibility, tence has previously encountered these other sentences which promise, nor even whether anyone has actually produced these sentences.None of these sentencesis a point of origin or moment of of authority. They are simplythe constituents a discursivespace fromwhich one triesto derive conventions. whichpoeticsmustunderthe This is precisely kindof enterprise it take. Focusing on the conditionsof meaning in literature, relates work to a whole series of other works,treatingthem not a literary of as sources but as constitutents a genre, for example, whose in to conventionsone attempts infer.One is interested conventions of which govern the production and interpretation character,of condensation and of of plot structure, thematicsynthesis, symbolic displacement.In all these cases there are no momentsof authority and points of origin except those which are retrospectively desigcan be shown to derive from nated as originsand which,therefore, as the series forwhichtheyare constituted origin.As in explaining the conventions of a lecture, it is a matterof working out what conventions are necessary to account for what happens, not of the discoveringcomsurveying membersof a class and inductively mon properties. of Paul Valery,who thoughtthat a true history literatureought to be "une Histoirede l'espriten tantqu'il produitou consomme de taskof such a projectwould be saw la litterature," thatthe primary "une etude qui eut pour objet de formerune idee aussi exacte que possible des conditionsd'existenceet de developpement de la Litterature, une analyse des modes d'action de cet art, de ses moyens A et de la diversite ses formes."26 poeticsof thiskindfindsitsraison de Authors in theintertextual natureof literary works. d'etre, Valerysaw, believe that theyare the source of theirworks,but theyhave may developed, withoutsuspectingit, "tout un systemed'habitudes et a de d'ideesqui etaientles fruits leur experienceet s'imposaient leur
26

ed. Hytier(Paris, 1957), I, 1439. Valery,Oeuvres,

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Ils production. avaientbeau ne pas soupconnertoucesles definitions, toutela logique que la composition toutesles conventions, suppose,et necescroirene rien devoir qu'a l'instant meme, leur travailmettait sairement en jeu tous ces procedes et ses modes inevitablesdu de fonctionnement l'esprit."27 nature of literature This is a firmassertion of the intertextual accompanied by a recognitionthat to talk about the constitutive function the experience of other textsshould involvenot a conof centrationon particular precursor texts but on conventions,systems of combination, a logic of composition. To talk about and differences between particulartextsis is a perfectly similarities to valid and interesting pursuitbut it is not in itselfa contribution It of intertextuality. is importantto avoid the veryreal the study temptationsof source study and the fleshpots of Bloom's "anas if criticism" one is to provide an account of literature an tithetical its institution and give intertextuality due. The linguistic analogy,which seems to me useful here in its limThe ited way, suggests two ways of approaching intertextuality. firstis to look at the specificpresuppositionsof a given text,the way in which it produces a pre-text,an intertextualspace whose occupants may or may not correspond to other actual texts.The goal of this project would be an account of how textscreate presuppositions and hence pre-texts for themselves and how the ways of producing these presuppositionsrelate to waysof treating them. The second enterprise,the studyof rhetoricalor pragmatic presupposition,leads to a poetics which is less interestedin the occupantsof thatintertextual space whichmakes a workintelligible or than in the conventionswhich underlie that discursiveactivity space. These projectsleave a middle ground, a space between them,in to whichtakes place what I propose to call application: the bringing release bear of one body of discourse on another in an effortto energy. Whether one applies Milton to Wordsworthor the disto course of thermodynamics a chapter of a Zola novel (as Michel of Serres has done), one is engaged in an activity interpretation the criteriaby which it is ultiwhich may or may not be aware of matelyjudged. The more self-aware such activitiesbecome the more explicitlydo they make strengththe criterionof value. A
27

Ibid., I, 1440.

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strongreading is that which commands attention,which imposes itself.Here, in principle,there are no grounds for argument,no reason to prefer one reading to another; in practice, however, thereare alwaysgrounds forargument,because the strongreading can only acquire strengthby pretending that it is open to argument, that it is in principle verifiable.It gains strengthonly by attachingitselfto existingmodes of thoughtand discourse. If one simplyexpressed a desire to interpret poems anagrammata ically,by extracting "concealed" word fromeach line and putting one would stand little chance of achievingstrength. themtogether, One must instead produce a theorywhich makes this procedure plausible in terms of a notion of literatureand the interpretive of of operations which are at present constitutive the institution literature.Even the proponentsof strongreadings which may, ulseek emancipationfromthe conventionsof discourse,the timately, pragmatic presuppositionsof literature,must engage with these presuppositions,must relate to them. Insofar as theydo this,their activitiestoo fall withinthe domain of a poetics; theycan be deuses of scribed,can become objectsof knowledge.The interpretive contribute to the notion of intertextuality thereforeindirectly may evade or distort. thatpoeticsof readingwhichtheyinitially
Brasenose Oxford College,