The serviceable concepts and vocabulary provided in this section will be applied, finally, to the essays in this volume in terms of influence and intertextuality
Origins: Bakhtin, Kristeva, and Barthes
The term intertextuality, generally understood to connote the structural relations between two or more texts, became popular in the late 1960s as an alternative strategy to studying literary texts that would serve as an antidote to historically oriented approaches. The historicist assumes that a scholar can uncover an author's intentions, the sources of his/her ideas, and responses of contemporary readers. Key terms of this approach are "influence" and "inspiration." The concept of influence privileges an earlier text (or artist) over a later one for which it acts as a source. Conversely, inspiration regards the later text (or artist) as an innovative improvement over the previous one. As early as the 1940s, however, Rene Wellek and Austin Warren questioned the predominance of nineteenth-century influence studies by pointing out a dilermna in the historical investigation of a text: "There are simply no data in literary history which are completely neutral 'facts"' (Morgan 1985, 1). (1) Thus, choice of texts a nd studies of influence were riddled with "value judgments." This shift from historicism with its tracing of literary origins and sources of influence, to intertextuality marked, as Thais Morgan notes, a dramatically different approach to literary studies:
By shifting our attention from the triangle of author/work/tradition to that of text/discourse/culture, intertextuality replaces the evolutionary model of literary history with a structural or synchronic model of literature as a sign system. The most salient effect of this strategic change is to free the literary text from psychological, sociological, and historical determinisms, opening it up to an apparently infinite play of relationships with other texts, or semiosis. (Morgan 1985, 1)
Although Julia Kristeva coined the term intertextuality, Mikhail Bakhtin, whose ideas she popularized, is regarded as having initiated the concept. In Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, originally published in 1929, Bakhtin criticizes historicist literary criticism and its views that the novel consists of a homogenous representation of reality, expresses an author's opinions, or reveals his or her psychology. Instead, he proposes the concept of the "polyphonic" novel, which includes a variety of idiolects employed by characters as well as extra-literary texts such as newspaper articles or anecdotes and, consequently, offers a multiplicity of ways of viewing "reality." A polyphonic novel differs from a realist work by its "carnivalistic" stance, which parodically dethrones dominant ideologies or institutions. Thus, the polyphonic novel demonstrates the "jolly relativity of every system" (Morgan, 1985, 11; emphasis in original). As Morgan points out, Bakhtin's notion of the carnivalization of literature constitu tes a theory of intertextuallity.
Julia Kristeva introduces the term "intertextualite" in 1966 while explaining Bakhtin's notion of dialogism and carnivalization:
Bakhtin was one of the first to replace the static hewing of texts with a model where literary structure does not simply exist but is generated in relation to another structure. What allows a dynamic dimension to structuralism is his 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 writer, the addressee (or the character) and the contemporary or earlier cultural context. (Kristeva 1986,35-36; emphasis in original)
Building upon Bakhtin's theory, Kristeva substitutes the term "text" for Bakhtin's "word" and points out that the "horizontal" axis of subject/addressee and the "vertical" axis of text/context bring to light the important discovery that "each word (text) is an intersection of words (texts) where at least one other word (text) can be read" (1986, 37). Bakhtin considered "writing as a reading of the anterior literary corpus and the text as an absorption of and reply to another text" (39). Consequently, this translinguistic science enables readers to understand intertextual relationships: the word (or text) occupies "the status of mediator, linking structural models to cultural (historical) environment" (37; her emphasis). Employing Bakhtin's intertextual concept of dialogism, Kristeva outlines a new approach to poetic texts in which notions such as authorship, causality, and finality are abolished. Thus, she regards any text as constructed from "a mosaic of quotations" and concludes that "the notion of intertex tuality replaces that of intersubjectivity" (37; emphasis in original).
In "Death of the Author," written two years later in 1968, Roland Barthes introduces similar ideas when he states that writing constitutes the destruction of every voice and of every point of origin. Abolishing the notion of an author, which he regards as a product of Renaissance humanism and capitalism, and of origins, Barthes claims that the text does not consist of a line of words "releasing a single 'theological' meaning (the 'message' of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumberable centres of culture" (1977, 146). Thus, both Kristeva and Barthes replace the concept of an author that "fathers" a text with that of intertextuality, a mosaic or an impersonal blending or intersecting of various texts. Both Barthes and Kristeva, then, distinguish intertextuality from the traditional notion of influence, a principle of causality, of origins, that is associated with a prior meth odology, in which the meaning of a text is traced back to the author's intention.
American Theorists: Reviving Influence and Intentionality
Whereas Barthes and Kristeva refuse to allow the concepts of "author" or "sources" to overlap with that of anonymous intertextuality, American theorists, as Jay Clayton and Eric Rothstein note, have questioned the firm boundaries between influence and intertextuality and even perceive these boundaries as virtually nonexistent. Susan Stanford Friedman, for example, points out that Kristeva's use of Bakhtin to define her concept of intertextuality itself depicts the principles of influence and, conversely, observes that "the discourse of intertextuality was already implicit in the study of literary influences as a methodology" (1991,155). In particular, Friedman notes that scholars of American intertextual criticism generally ignore the "death of the author" and discusses the contributions of Jonathan Culler (1981) and Harold Bloom (1973, 1975) in the debate of intertextuality vs. influence. Culler claims that the concept of intertextuality can be situated in a spectrum ranging from the anonymous, infinite inte rtexuality of Barthes to the finite, dyadic intertextuality of Bloom. (Culler has noted that Bloom's definition of influence often resembles that of intertextuality, "Influence, as I conceive it, means that there are no texts, but only relationships between texts" [Bloom 1975,3].) Culler observes that Bloom reintroduces the idea of "the person' the confrontation of authors with their precursors in an Oedipal rivalry as opposed to Barthes's anonymous textual codes, and submits a definition of intertextuality that straddles both extremes. Culler situates a text in "a prior body of discourse--other projects and thoughts which it implicitly or explicitly takes up, prolongs, cites, refutes, transforms" (Friedman 1991, 156).
Similarly, Friedman supports a redefinition of intertextuality that allows for the concept of agency. She employs the American feminist Nancy K. Miller's method of "arachnology," a type of gynocriticism, as a useful model. Miller's methodology blends Barthes's notion of the text as a "web" with American feminists' stress on the importance of the author. Miller's arachnology acknowledges a text as a weaving of other cultural and historical texts, but refuses to accept Barthes's notion of anonymity and advocates "the author" as a concept central to feminist criticism. In place of "anonymous textuality" Miller proposes "a political intertextuality" that remains necessarily a form of negotiation with the dominant social text" (Friedman 1991, 158--59).
The art historian Michael Baxandall adds another twist to the influence vs. intertextuality debate and implicitly supports the notion of agency when he argues that the line of intentionality runs from the later to the earlier artist. This viewpoint turns the theory of influence on its head and resembles traditional theories of inspiration as it portrays the successor not as a passive recipient of the predecessor's ideas or techniques, but rather an active agent who reshapes the precursor's material:
"Influence" is a curse of art criticism primarily because of its wrong-headed grammatical prejudice about who is the agent and who the patient: it seems to reverse the active/passive relation which the historical actor experiences and the inferential beholder will wish to take into account. If one says that X influenced Y it does seem that one is saying that X did something to Y rather than Y did something to X. But in the consideration of good pictures and painters the second is always the more lively reality. If we think of Y rather than X as the agent, the vocabulary is much richer and more attractively diversified: draw on, resort to avail oneself of, appropriate from, have recourse to, adapt, misunderstand, refer to, pick up, take on, engage with, react to, quote,... copy, address, paraphrase, absorb, make a variation on, revive, continue, remodel, ape, emulate, travesty, parody.... Most of these relations cannot be stated the other way around--in terms of X acting on Y rather than Y acting on X. (Baxand all 1985, 58-59)
Baxandall's concept of intentionality and the means with which an artist consciously transforms a predecessor's material brings forth the question of motive, which, in turn, leads one to ask if varying degrees of awareness might contribute to one distinction between influence and intertextuality (Clayton 1991, 30). There are various obstacles, however, in a practical application of the concept of intentionality. Notions of agency and intentionality, of course, risk reinstating traditional psychologistic concepts of artistic production at the cost of understating culturalist explanations. Moreover, the trail to determining intentionality can be rife with potential obstacles and pitfalls. While the influence of previously written works on later ones can be quite obvious, such as in the case of parody or pastiche, it is conceivable that authors may inadvertently appropriate ideas, plots, or motifs from works they read years earlier. Conversely, an artist can deliberately employ/subvert cultural texts/codes as, f or example, when parodying a certain genre or writing style. On the other hand, these codes may be so "embedded" in the artist's Weltanschauung or so enmeshed in his/her idiolect that the writer unwittingly employs them. Despite the barriers to discerning or verifying an author's intention or awareness of appropriating specific sources or cultural texts, the concepts of agency, influence, and intentionality are serviceable ones particularly when the influence of a previous work or artist is obvious and/or verifiable and significant in comprehending the subsequent one.
The difficulty in abolishing the concept of agency especially when attempting to analyze a literary or artistic work becomes evident when one peruses the essays of scholars who have attempted to elaborate and systematize various elements/aspects either of influence or of intertextuality. The concept of an author is explictly present, of course, in the former, but also implicitly alluded to in the latter. Those who describe texts in terms of intertextuality and cultural codes employ terms that suggest agency and allude to notions of sources and influence. A brief discussion of two models, each from one camp, will illustrate this point.
In "Influence vs. Intertextuality," Ulla Musarra-Schroeder argues for the rehabilitation of the concept of influence and sketches out three types of influence. First, an artist or writer may be influenced by philosophical, psychological, sociological, or scientific ideas from individual thinkers or their works. Second, an influence can consist of formal, stylistic, structural, or compositional principles. The model text could represent a certain genre or style or contain particular structural devices that the successor appropriates. Third, she restricts the concept of influence to include "only those phenomena which in some way have directed the process of creation of a text, the writing process" (1996, 170). This process of influence "may manifest itself in various ways in certain schemes or patterns of semantic, stylistic, compositional, or formal order or sometimes also in concrete inter-textemes such as quotations or allusions" (170).
Lauro Zavala (1995) designates a text as "the weaving of meaningful elements" and defines intertextuality as "the rules that determine the existence of the net." He outlines elements for intertextual analysis including: "discursive cartography" such as the sociolect common to text and intertext and "intertextual strategies" such as allusion, ekphrasis, quotation, parody, plagiarism, and pastiche as well as irony, hyperbole, metaphor, and paradox. If sociolect suggests cultural or linguistic codes, then intertextual strategies such as ekphrasis and parody assume an author, who deliberately borrows from and transforms previous texts. Thus. when actually analyzing a concrete text, theorists of both camps clearly articulate the need to assume an agency and sources for that text as well as cultural and social intertexts.
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