54
ISSN 0258–0802. LITERATÛRA 2007 49(5)
INTERTEXTUALITY IN THEORY AND PRACTICE
Adolphe Haberer
Emeritus Professor,
University of Lyon 2
Intertextuality is a concept often associatedwith postmodernism, more particularly withthat sphere of postmodernism where literatureencounters critical theory.
1
In many respects,and especially in the field of literature andpoetics with which I am concerned, post-modernism can be viewed as a developmentof modernism which manifested itself duringthe first decades of the 20
th
century, in theyears preceding and following the greatfracture of the first World War. Modernismwas characterized by the loss of stable values,by the loss of belief in the possibility of anobjective truth and in the validity of totalizingideologies, by the rejection of formal aesthetictheories, the emphasis given to subjectivity,to the discontinuous and the fragmentary, alsoby the place given to reflexivity and self-consciousness in the production of texts.Postmodernism, I would suggest, merely wentfurther in the same direction, sometimes with anadded dose of scepticism and irony, mostlyperhaps as a consequence of new developmentslike consumerism, the new technologies,globalization, but to me there was no newepistemological rupture like the one that tookplace with the emergence of modernism.What I will try to show in this lecture is thatthough the word for it had not yet been coined,the workings of intertextuality were alreadybeing explored by such modernists as T. S. Eliotand David Jones. In that respect also, there isan undeniable continuity between modernismand postmodernism, and I cannot imagine thatif we have truly entered a new age “beyondpostmodernism” we can do without the keyconcept of intertextuality to account for thatall-important dimension of our experience asreaders of literary texts, which we could call“the memory of literature”.
2
* * *
In the Preface to
The Anathemata
, first publishedhalf a century ago, David Jones wrote, probablywith reference to “the signs of the times” (MattXVI, 3): “The times are late and getting later,not by decades but by years and months,” andcomplained that this “tempo of change,” making“schemes and data out-moded and irrelevantovernight,” created special difficulties for theartist, which he then tried to explain:
The artist deals wholly in signs. His signs mustbe valid, that is valid for him and, normally,for the culture that has made him. But thereis a time factor affecting these signs. If a
1
A first version of this article, “The IntertextualEffect”, was published in
Symbolism, An International Annual of Critical Aesthetics
(New York: AMS Press,2005), 35–60.
2
See Tiphaine Samoyault,
L’Intertextualité. Mémoirede la littérature
(Paris: Nathan, 2001).
55
requisite now-ness is not present, the sign, valid in itself, is apt to suffer a kind of invalidation. This presents most complicatedproblems to the artist working outside areasonably static culture-phase.
3
If I choose to start these reflections onintertextuality with David Jones, it is not onlybecause he belonged to the generation of menwhose fate it was to experience two World Warsand become so much involved in the history of the 20
th
century, and who could have said withAbraham Cowley that “a warlike, various, andtragical age is best to write of, but worst to writein,”
4
but also because, in his way, he was a poetwho strongly believed in the supreme importanceof tradition, if not explicitly in the intertextualsolidarity of texts, for the good reason that theword “intertextuality” had not yet been coined.The opening sentence of his Preface to
The Anathemata
is a quotation from Nennius: “I havemade a heap of all I could find,” and some tenpages later he writes: “I believe that there is, inthe principle that informs the poetic art,something which cannot be disengaged fromthe mythus, deposits,
matière
, ethos, whole
res
of which the poet is himself a product,”
5
clearlya way of pointing to the importance of culture agood deal broader and more far-reaching thanwhat T. S. Eliot had said a few years earlierabout our common heritage, in
Notes towardsthe Definition of Culture
:
The Western world has its unity in this heritage,in Christianity and in the ancient civilisations of Greece, Rome and Israel, from which, owingto two thousand years of Christianity, we traceour descent.
6
By then Eliot was not only “classical in literature,royalist in politics, and Anglo-Catholic in religion,”as he had described himself: he had also becomethe figurehead of cultural conservatism. Yet thereis no great difference in effect between DavidJones’s desire for a “reasonably static culture-phase” and Eliot’s insistence upon the necessityto preserve the unity of our cultural heritage,both classical and Christian.Now, is there any stability left in the worldwe live in, in that “botched civilization” whichEzra Pound (with all the dead of WWI in mind)described long ago as “an old bitch gone in theteeth” – “two gross of broken statues” and “afew thousand battered books”?
7
Is there a wayto reconcile the views of such men as DavidJones and T. S. Eliot on tradition and culture withthe radically subversive discourse held by thepoststructuralists and neo-postmodernists whenthe issue of intertextuality became all the rage,first in Paris among the intellectual circles of theLeft Bank, in the late 1960s, and soon afterwardsamong the avant-garde of American literarytheorists and language philosophers? Isintertextuality, now that we tend to think thatwe are
beyond postmodernism
, still a relevantissue? Is it of any real critical use? Is it still beingdiscussed, or is it simply viewed as a well-established irrefutable concept by some, andflatly rejected by others as an outdated craze, avogue concept, today to be ignored? These aresome of the questions that I wish to address inthis lecture. I will first look back upon the originof the concept, try to clarify the main issues atstake, and observe its successive theoreticalavatars. I will also point out the fact that theepistemological modernist rupture of the 1920swas the occasion for the production of worksand reflections, especially by T. S. Eliot, that are
3
David Jones,
The Anathemata
(1952, London:Faber, 1972) 15.
4
Quoted by James Reeves in
The Modern Poets’ World
(London: Heinemann 1968), xviii.
5
Jones,
Anathemata
1972, 20.
6
T.S.Eliot,
Notes towards the Definition of Culture
(London: Faber, 1948), 123.
7
Ezra Pound, “E.P. Ode pour l’élection de son sépulcre,”
Selected Poems
(London: Faber, 1948), 176.
56
the forerunners of those produced by theintertextualists of our postmodernity. I will thentake a number of examples in order to illustratethe way in which the notion of intertextuality canbe tested
in situ
. Those examples will also helpme to introduce some of the conclusions I havecome to, and point to the directions in whichfurther theoretical explorations should perhaps bemade. Let it be clear that as an intertextualistmyself, though no hardliner, I lay no claim to anyoriginality, especially in my attempts tocircumscribe the problem, clarify definitions,defend and illustrate the concept of intertextuality.
8
There is no doubt that this concept was notcreated
ex nihilo
out of the fertile brain of JuliaKristeva. But she was the first to use it in printin an article on Bakhtin, whom she had read inRussian while still a student in Bulgaria, beforeshe settled in France.
9
The late 1960s were inParis the years when the human sciences madea quantum leap forward in all directions, with anumber of hyper-active, avant-gardist, mostlyleftist intellectuals trying to apply the theoriesand methodologies of those sciences to the studyof literature. Foremost were the fast-developingsciences of post-Saussurean linguistics (RomanJakobson, Émile Benveniste), post-Freudianpsychoanalysis (Jacques Lacan), semiology(Roland Barthes) and anthropology (Claude Levi-Strauss). It was the heyday of theorists, theyears of transition from structuralism to post-structuralism (not clearly distinguished fromwhat later came to be known as postmodernism)with also Jacques Derrida, Louis Althusser,Michel Foucault all at work, the years when allforms of authority were challenged (andsometimes equated) – the Government, deGaulle, God, tradition, capitalism, reason, thereigning
doxa
, the Establishment, the Author, theSorbonne mandarins, the police, etc. They werethe years that led to the great libertarian subversiveexplosion of May 1968 in France, echoed andsometimes amplified in the campuses of manyother countries, notably in Prague, in Belfast,and in North America.Any assessment of Julia Kristeva’s launchingof the notion of intertextuality must surely beginby recalling the social and political context of the 1960s, but also the specific context of thedevelopment of the problematics of the linguisticsign, of the concept of enunciation, and of allthe theoretical work done on the notion of
subject
, which Kristeva was soon to define as“
le sujet-en-procès
” (the subject conceived atthe same time “in the making” and “on trial”).The order of the sign being radically differentfrom that of the referent, the sign itself beingsplit into signifier and signified, the very notionof meaning as something fixed and stable, eventhough it sometimes had to be deciphered, waslost and replaced by that of the sliding, shifting,floating signified. Meaning could no longer beviewed as a finished product, it was now caughtin a process of production. The subject of theenunciation was to be distinguished from thesubject of the utterance (
sujet de l’énoncé
), andall the imaginary representations of a solid,identifiable self, or ego, in control of languageand capable of expressing himself, weredenounced and replaced by the notion of asubject intermittently produced by his
parole
–literally spoken by language.Dealing with intertextuality, it is quite normalto start with Kristeva, but one of the difficulties
8
Mention must be made, among the books that I havefound helpful, of Michael Worton and Judith Still, eds.,
Intertextuality, Theories and Practices
(Manchester:Manchester UP, 1990), Heinrich F. Plett, ed.,
Intertex-tuality
(Berlin & New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1991);Graham Allen,
Intertextuality
(London: Routledge, 2000);and Vincent B. Leitch, ed.,
The Norton Anthologyof Theory and Criticism
(New York & London:W. W. Norton & Co., 2001).
9
Julia Kristeva, “Bakhtine, le mot, le dialogue et leroman,”
Critique
(Paris, 1967, 33, 239), 438–465.
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