Intertextuality

Defining "Intertextuality"

The term intertextuality was coined by Julia Kristeva to refer to the way texts and discourses are formed in relationship to other texts and discourses, that is, the way all discourse is shaped by and further shapes other discourse. She argued that comprehension occurs along two axes – the horizontal axis, which connects the author and the reader in relationship, and the vertical axis, which connects the text being read (or other discourse) to other texts (or discourses) around it.  In other words, the vertical axis was the intertextual axis. Although Kristeva coined the term itself she was building on the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, Claude Lévi-Strauss and Franz Boas. Mikhail Bakhtin argued that “Our speech is filled with others’ words, varying degrees of otherness and varying degrees of ‘our-own-ness’, varying degrees of awareness and detachment. These words of others carry with them their own expression, their own evaluative tone, which we assimilate, rework, and reaccentuate_”_ (1986: 89). Claude Lévi-Strauss spoke of the anthropological figure of the ‘bricoleur’ who creates improvised structures by appropriating pre-existing materials which are ready-to-hand and constructing from them new arrangements and new creations (i.e. ‘la bricolage’); as an anthropologist, was dealing primarily with oral traditions – oral poetry and folktales. Franz Boas, in a very similar way, also talked about folktales as cultural objects, “durable, repeatable, classifiable, linked to other texts by relationships of descent (both textual and national) and generic similarity” (Bauman 2004: 2).

Kristeva argued that the meaning of a text was not just influenced by, but actually determined by, the network of its relations with other texts, writing: “Every text is from the outset under the jurisdiction of other discourses which impose a universe on it.” Every text finds its place as part of a chain of communication and must be understood as such. A text, so often thought of as an autonomous bounded unit, is really just one textual moment in a longer chain of antecedences and simultaneities. “The text lives only by coming into contact with another text (with context). Only at this point of contact between texts does a light flash, illuminating both the posterior and anterior, joining a given text to a dialogue. We emphasize that this contact is a dialogic contact between texts… Behind this contact is a contact of personalities and not of things” (Bakhtin 1986: 162). 

Seeing a text in this way has three main implications:

• The meaning of a text is multidirectional. That is to say, it leans upon prior texts, drawing meaning from them and contributing to how they are understood. Similarly, subsequent texts lean upon it and influence how it will come to be understood.
   
• The meaning of a text is unresolved. That is to say, it does not have a single fixed meaning, but rather a fluid meaning which is influenced at every encounter or link made with another text, whether new or old.
   
• The meaning of a text is historical. This Kristeva saw as a two-way relationship, speaking of both the “insertion of history into a text” (i.e. the text absorbs and is built out of texts from the past, texts being the major artefacts that constitute history) and the “insertion of a text into history” (i.e. the text responds to, reaccentuates and reworks past texts, thus contributing to the (re)writing of history and transformation of society) (1986: 39).

Kristeva was not alone in insisting on the ‘fundamentally social horizons of reception’ of any text, emphasizing the role played by society in forming our worldview and ideologies and thereby governing how we make sense of and understand any text we come across. As a result, it’s not surprising that discussions of intertextuality almost always intersect with those of comprehension.

Michel Foucault, who also wrote on the topic, expressed it this way: “The frontiers of a book are never clear-cut: beyond the title, the first lines and the last full stop, beyond its internal configuration and its autonomous form, it is caught up in a system of references to other books, other texts, other sentences; it is a node within a network… The book is not simply the object that one holds in one’s hands… Its unity is variable and relative” (1974: 23).