Intertextual Representation: On Mimesis as Interpretive Discourse

Author(s): Michael Riffaterre

Source: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 11, No. 1 (Sep., 1984), pp. 141-162
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1343294
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Intertextual Representation: On Mimesis
as Interpretive Discourse

Michael Riffaterre

If we try to arrive at the simplest and most universally valid definition

of the representation of reality in literature, we may dispense with gram-
matical features such as verisimilitude or with genres such as realism,
since these are not universal categories. Their applicability depends on
historical circumstances or authorial intent. The most economic and general
definition, however, must at least include the following two features.
First, any representation presupposes the existence of its object outside
of the text and preexistent to it. Readers feel, and critics pronounce, that
the text's significance depends on this objective exteriority, even though
this significance may entail destroying the commonplace acceptance of
the object; indeed, negating something still presupposes that something.
Second, the reader's response to the mimesis consists in a rationalization
tending to verify and complete the mimesis and to expand on it in sensory
terms (through visualizations, for instance). The metalanguage of criticism
accordingly prolongs and continues the text's mimetic discourse, and
critics evaluate representation in terms of its precision and suggestive
power. Both processes-presupposition and rationalization alike-assume
that referentiality is the basic semantic mechanism of the literary mimesis.
There are, however, literary representations almost devoid of de-
scriptive content, or so vague and so skimpy that their object cannot be
analyzed or rationalized in sensory terms. Criticism is hard put to explain
why readers feel compelled to evaluate them. And yet these texts not
only lend themselves to interpretation but they are especially apt to
trigger and control the reader's hermeneutic behavior. In short, the

Critical Inquiry 11 (September 1984)

? 1984 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/84/1101-0004$01.00. All rights reserved.

141
142 Michael Riffaterre IntertextualRepresentation

represented object eschews referentiality yet refuses to vanish altogether,

becoming instead the verbal vehicle of an interpretive activity that ends
up by making the object subservient to the subject.'
Critics fail to explain this paradox because they stick to referentiality
as the only law governing representation and assume that the reference
on which the mimesis is based is from words to things, from the verbal
to the nonverbal domain. I propose that reference in such cases is from
words to words, or rather from texts to texts, and that intertextuality is
the agent both of the mimesis and of the hermeneutic constructions on
that mimesis.

Intertextvs. Intertextuality

Let me first anticipate and so avoid possible confusion in my terms.

Some scholars glibly mistake the intertext for sources and seem to think
that intertextuality is just a newfangled name for influence or imitation.
We must be clear that intertext does not signify a collection of literary
works that may have influenced the text or that the text may have imitated.
Similarly, it is neither a context that may explain the text or its effect on
readers, nor one that may be used as a basis of comparison to point out
the author's originality. An intertext is a corpus of texts, textual fragments,
or textlike segments of the sociolect that shares a lexicon and, to a lesser
extent, a syntax with the text we are reading (directly or indirectly) in
the form of synonyms or, even conversely, in the form of antonyms.2 In
addition, each member of this corpus is a structural homologue of the
text: the depiction of a stormy night may serve as an intertext for a
tableau of a peaceful day; crossing the trackless sands of the desert may
be the intertext of furrowing the briny deep.
In contrast, intertextuality is not just a perception of homologues
or the cultivated reader's apprehension of sameness or difference. In-
tertextuality is not a felicitous surplus, the privilege of a good memory
or a classical education. The term indeed refers to an operation of the
reader's mind, but it is an obligatory one, necessary to any textual decoding.
Intertextuality necessarily complements our experience of textuality. It
is the perception that our reading of the text cannot be complete or
satisfactory without going through the intertext, that the text does not

Michael Riffaterre, University Professor at Columbia University, is

the editor of Romantic Review. He is presently working on a book about
Anthony Trollope (forthcoming in 1985). His previous contribution to
Critical Inquiry, "Syllepsis," appeared in the Summer 1980 issue.
 Critical Inquiry September1984 143

signify unless as a function of a complementary or contradictory intertextual

homologue. In a given poem, under certain verbal conditions, a peaceful
day will make sense-literary sense-only as the contrary of a stormy
night, in opposition to countless depictions where day and peace are
represented without eliciting such a dual perception, and without our
feeling a need for it.3

Mimetic Displacement

This detour through an intertext is a widespread phenomenon af-

fecting genres as well as individual works. It even presides over the
formation of conventional literary language in those periods of literature
when aesthetic fashions demand that the mimetic lexicon differ from
that of everyday language. To represent cannons firing, or volcanoes
erupting, or, if one prefers Neptunian examples, water gurgling from
ornamental figurehead spouts, it would not do in English literature of
the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (or, for that matter, in
French literature till the end of the nineteenth century) to speak plainly.
Literary language chose instead a verb that propriety excluded from
everyday language, and the connotations of which would seem a fortiori
to exclude it from lofty ornamental discourse: in literature, cannons vomit
fire, volcanoes vomit lava and ashes, and with the overdetermining factor
of mythic animation, gargoyles and fountain lions vomit water.
Artifice, of course, is the generating agent of this practice. The choice
of the Latinate form is a function of artifice (although at a secondary
stage, as a variant of "vomit,"we find in literature guns belchingup fiery
clouds, and smokestacks, fuliginous ones).4 But the basic selection depends
on the opposition principle of intertextuality; an image is chosen that
will simultaneously be accurate and eschew a prudishness of talk that
makes a mere burp unacceptable at the denotative level-an image which
ignores the connotative stigma of any literal or figurative eructation.
Representation is thus the stronger because it is out of the ordinary and
because it demands of the reader special tolerance of impropriety that
only the extraordinary legitimates and that we significantly call poetic
license. That vomit of all things should have been singled out to become
a literary stereotype manifests intertextuality in its utmost power. The
intertext it conjures up belongs to the realm of the disgusting (Ekel) that
Kant finds so overwhelmingly unbearable as to exclude any aesthetically
acceptable representation.5
Intertextual mimesis assumes one of two types according to whether
the text represents reality by resorting to an intertext incompatible with
that reality, or whether the text represents reality by negating an inter-
text compatible with that reality.
144 Michael Riffaterre IntertextualRepresentation

First Type:Activating the Intertext

In the first type, the text offers a representation, the literariness of
which results from a conflict between the textual mimesis of the object
and an intertextual mimesis of the same object that voids or contradicts
one or more basic semantic features of the textual one.
Such is the case with William Carlos Williams'celebrated wheelbarrow:

so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain

water

beside the white

chickens

The poem requires that we take aesthetic pleasure in its unadorned

description of the plainest and most pedestrian of farming or gardening
tools. The index or deixis of aesthetic experience is clearly proposed. It
is so emphatically worded ("so much depends / upon") and so violently
at odds with any reader's expectations of what might be found beautiful
or simply worth describing that one almost suspects a parody or hoax.
Be this as it may, the heavily laden first verse contrasts as well with the
nakedness of representation where no fancy adjective, no elaborate de-
scriptive imagery, relieves the stark simplicity or even the objectivity of
the object. Nothing apart from the initial deixis suggests to the reader
that he is expected to find pleasure and truth in the intrinsic qualities
of the thing depicted; or, more paradoxically yet, that the thing itself-
and a lowly one it is-deserves to be looked at. Its very thingness need
only be shown in order that the wheelbarrow attain the announced status
of an art object.
The critics' consensus on the poem is that it achieves its aims-it
fulfills the poet's intent by sheer emphasis on the visual properties of
the object and by the unusual focus that gives each detail such a separate
perceptibility that the object's existence acquires something like an absolute
quality. According to Winifred Nowottny, for instance, "the poem attempts
to make words do what a painting can do: to make us see not a vaguely-
generalized barrow in vaguely-generalized rain but redness and wheel
and glaze and rain and water."6She believes this is accomplished through
Williams' emphasis on spatial and color relations. For example, the fact
that "upon"fills out a line and precedes a break between stanzas highlights
its spatial suggestiveness, whereas it should be a mere grammatical link
 Critical Inquiry September1984 145

that remains faithful to its grammatical function and is meaningless except

in relation to meaningful objects. Another instance is in the way the lines
cut off normal subordination and restore individuality to the visual and
spatial properties of things. Nowottny criticizes this abstraction, but this
is because she yields to the common temptation to equate success in
description with sensory richness: "A particularly unfortunate result of
this technique is that the word "red"and the word "white" are not given
qualitative immediacy; they remain almost as inert and general as in
ordinary contexts."7
Geoffrey Hartman certainly does not fall into this trap, but he, too,
focuses on the cuts, effected by the peculiar lineation, that

place things "beside" each other, avoiding plot or temporal climax.

The cutting edge of the caesuras, moreover, here turned inward,
suggests an outward-turned force that excludes or could exclude
all but its own presence. There is meaning, there is an object focussed
on, but there is also something cleaner than both: the very edge of
the pen/knife that cuts or delineates these lines.... The red wheel-
barrow moves us into the forgetfulness of pure perception.8

I do not deny the power of line cuts, nor am I downplaying the impact
of cuts not just on syntagms but even on the morphemic integrity of
compound words. Such cuts restore independent, full-fledged lexical
value to the components of "wheelbarrow" and "rainwater." But this
reading is vulnerable: it ceases to work if one hears the poem read aloud
without seeing the text. The cuts are too frequent to create perceptible
rhythmic anomalies.9 The real agent of the poem's efficacy, it seems to
me, and one that no accident of the reading process can alter, is the word
"glazed."
"Glazed" presupposes an artistic object with the finish of fragile,
delicate china. "Glazed" conjures up a vast intertext of artifacts made
with aesthetic intent.'1 The representations it evokes are everything that
a wheelbarrow emphatically is not. To be sure, the barrow is an artifact,
but a utilitarian one-sturdy, rustic, of the lowest rank in a farmer's
assortment of tools. It never enjoys the occasional literary sheen of a
spade or an axe, nor does it play a symbolic role in proverbs as a cart or
a plowshare may. Of all the knickknacks that may end up on a petty
bourgeois mantelpiece, the only barrow ever to be literally glazed, a
miniature china one holding a flower or greenery, will be the extreme
of kitsch. Our perception of the wheelbarrow is determined by the intertext
rather than by the fact that the poem's construction gives us the elemental
thing-unattached, unmotivated reality. The pressure of an intertext
constituted by a discourse of the kind attributable to an artist makes
thingness just as absolute. But it does so by showing the barrow not as
an object but as the painting of an object, as the centerpiece of a still
146 Michael Riffaterre IntertextualRepresentation

life. Here the objects, which are artfully assembled to suggest everyday,
natural happenstance, are selected from a dictionary-like definition of
the tool. This definition lists its separate parts and a metonym, the farmyard,
for its context. The whole picture is of a picture of reality, rather than
being reality itself. "Glazed" in fact changes the nature of "beside" and
makes the latter the spatial index of an artful setup for a painting: we
are indeed presented with the wheelbarrow, but not as the object in itself;
rather, as a painter's rendition of it, like the wheelbarrow in Francois
Millet's Angelus or in Salvador Dali's parodies of Millet.
This function of "glazed"is not unlike that of "gilding"in Shakespeare's
picture of the sun "Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy" (sonnet
33), or of the use of house-painter terminology in a Virginia Woolf
landscape, where dawn touches up facades and actually paints into being
the houses that night had obliterated.1
If anything, "glazed"is more powerful in our poem than the metaphors
I am comparing it to. Indeed, "glazed" is not just a metaphor. Its impact
is due not only to the otherness invoked to represent the wheelbarrow;
it stems first of all from the fact that it excludes a fundamental seme of
the "wheelbarrow" sememe. The poem represents nature in its truth
through an implicit reference to its opposite, through an intertext of art
and technique. Nor should one think I read too much into "glazed," for
this is not an isolated instance of an intertext of artifact being called
upon to undergird a description of exemplary nature. Williams repeatedly
describes nature by the detour of ostentatious artifice:

The Easter stars are shining

. . .. . . .. . . .. .. .. . . ... * o
Nobody
to say it-
Nobody to say: pinholes
stars of tinsel
from the great end of a cornucopia
of glass'2

or,

But the stars

are round
cardboard
with a tin edge
[P. 58]13

But none is more striking than the poet's description of a rose:

 Critical Inquiry September1984 147

The rose is obsolete

but each petal ends in
an edge, . . .

... The edge

cuts without cutting
. . . . . . o* ? *....?

Sharper, neater, more cutting

figured in majolica-
the broken plate
glazed with a rose
[P. 32]

Even though the model used by Williams may have been an artifact, a
china plate with a rose pattern, the subject of his poem is an actual rose-
not just a flower, therefore, but the queen of them all, a paragon of
natural beauty. But this masterpiece of nature is represented in terms
of the artifact. Artifice being, as it were, the code conventionally used to
represent its opposite, the natural rose is depicted by the detour of its
intertextual counterpart, the glazed image of a rose.'4 Such is the power
of this complementarity, or of this change of an opposition into an
equivalency, that an equally exemplary synecdoche of the rose (the fine
edge of its petal-the embodiment of the word "rose['s]" most typical
semantic features: the flower's utmost delicacy of shape and its frailty)
calls forth its imagery from an intertext of metal edges:

Somewhere the sense

makes copper roses
steel roses-

It is at the edge of the

petal that love waits
... fragile
plucked, moist, half-raised
cold, precise, touching
. . . . . . . . . . . * * * * .

From the petal's edge a line starts

that being of steel
infinitely fine, infinitely
rigid penetrates
the Milky Way

The fragility of the flower

unbruised
penetrates space
[P. 33]
148 Michael Riffaterre IntertextualRepresentation

I have underscored the exemplary nature of this detour of literariness.

I should underscore as well that the text tends to refine the exemplary.
The systematic metonymic or synecdochic exploration of all aspects of
the given object becomes an ascending scale of value judgments and for
the reader serves as an ordered sequence of invitations to admire further,
or to share the pleasure proposed at the narrative level and exemplified
at the descriptive level. The narrator of Marcel Proust's Remembranceof
Things Past, for example, buys a branch of apple blossoms to reminisce
about the apple trees that gave him so much pleasure during his country
walks at Combray. As his memories become stronger and more sensuous,
the description of these fresh, natural flowers switches from a straight
text about their appearance to an intertext of artificiality: "How often in
Paris, during the May of the following year, was I to bring home a branch
of apple-blossom from the florist, and to stay all night long before its
flowers." This is the setup for our sharing in the narrator's admiration,
the generic index pointing both to the representation and to the register
we must adopt in interpreting and evaluating it. Proust then writes,
"flowers between whose snowy cups it seemed almost as thoughit had been
the salesman who had, in his generosity towards myself, out of his wealth of
invention too and as an effective contrast, added on eitherside the supplement
of a becomingcrimsonbud."'5
The climax of a praise of natural flowers is reached through an
intertext about artificial flowers. It is clear that the sentence generated
by "salesman" has the same effect as "glazed" in Williams. It does not
matter that the former is a syntagm and the latter a lexeme: both are
signs which have the primary function, at the level of significance, of
telling the reader there is a latent intertext at work. These connectors
work by triggering presuppositions, by compelling the reader to recognize
that the text makes sense only by reference to meanings found neither
within the verbal context nor within the author's idiolect but within an
intertext. The reader's assumption-though he need not make it by a
fully conscious process-is that the difficulty he experiences in deciphering
the ungrammaticality of a given sign must be pointing to a grammaticality
elsewhere, among the semiotic systems of the sociolect and/or among
other literary texts.
Besides the connectors, certain words may invite and facilitate the
reader's simultaneous perception of text and intertext. These are dual
signs, equally grammatical (although with different acceptations) on both
sides. In the example above, these signs are first the ghost word that
would embody the phonetic kinship of "petal" and "metal,"and the two
meanings of "edge"-as a blade's and as a fine line, suggestive of delicate
design-a syllepsis that the poem actualizes in an apparent adynaton:
"the edge / cuts without cutting."'6
 Critical Inquiry September1984 149

Second Type: Negating the Intertext

The second type of intertextual representation is exactly the reverse

of the first. In the first, the text cannot represent reality without using
an intertext that cancels or challenges the very nature of the represented
object. In the second, conversely, the text owes its descriptive power to
an intertext that it negates while compelling the reader to remain fully
aware of that intertext.
My first example is Wordsworth's much-admired sonnet on London
at dawn, "Composed Upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802":

Earth has not anything to show more fair:

Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty:
This City now doth, like a garment, wear
The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
Open unto the fields, and to the sky;
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.
Never did sun more beautifully steep
In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill;
Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!
The river glideth at his own sweet will:
Dear God! the -very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still! 7

The title and the date indicate beyond a doubt that the poem is descrip-
tive and that the poet intended it to be the reflection of an actual con-
templative experience. But the tableau presented in the poem itself utterly
lacks the linear precision and notation of details we are thus led to expect.
This raises two questions: What is the real function of the title? and How
does a representation so bare as this represent?
The title does point to a content, but more importantly it suggests
that this content is meant to be interpreted. At the level of meaning, the
title is a topographical index pointing to a place and identifying the
reality the text purports to imitate. At the level of significance, the title
is not topical but generic: it indicates a genre or subgenre, the ethos of
which is, as we saw before, that it defines the object as something to be
admired and directs the reader toward decoding rules.
The painter has left the studio, where he has been doing nature
from memory, with curtains drawn (or some curtains drawn-he may
need a north light), with the aid of intermediaries: other painted landscapes,
his own sketches or those of the masters before him. The painter now
comes out into the open field and plants his easel facing his subject.
150 Michael Riffaterre IntertextualRepresentation

Early Romanticism offers many examples: Shelley gazing from the Eu-
ganean hills, Wordsworth writing fresh from the Simplon Pass, titles like
his "Effusion in the Pleasure-ground on the Banks of the Bran, Near
Dunkeld," or Victor Hugo's "Dictated in the Presence [his veryphrase] of
a Mountain Glacier" ("Dicte en presence du glacier du Rh6ne"), and so
forth. Localization transforms (indeed, subverts) the meaning of "com-
posed." Standing alone, this verb denotes studied art, calculated art,
thought-out writing. Once modified by a statement of place, however,
"composed" connotes simultaneity of impression and recording. It implies
immediacy, hence spontaneous inspiration on the spur of the moment,
or on the spur of the experience. Whereas at the meaning level it still
designates a point in space, at the significance level it now gives a point
in time-the flash of perception, and a remarkable one, worthy of re-
cording.18 Consequently, it also implies two reactions in rapid succession:
first, surprise at a spectacle (this is something more than expected, or
something other than commonly believed); and second, the drawing of
a lesson from this spectacle, the perception of a truth now first revealed,
later on relived over and over again in the writing down and then the
reading of its description.
The lesson we are supposed to learn is that London has beauty, a
beauty equal to nature's-indeed an obvious lesson, unanimously agreed
upon by readers and critics alike. Its semiotic mechanism, however, has
not been understood. This praise of the city, so persuasive and so noble,
has much puzzled commentators because of its nakedness. As I stated
at the beginning, a description is first of all, and sometimes only, a
statement of intent and an invitation to the reader to vie with the text
and to make the sensory experience his own by developing and building
on the written given. For this reason, critics could not resist the temptation
to add details to the poem: "He caps the London profile with Westminster
Bridge. Soon the very houses will seem to jabber; the sweet will of the
Thames will be soured and harnessed." Another writes: "The buildings
lie open to the field and sky as if they were ruins of their usual selves. ...
The poet looks at London and sees it as a sort of corpse and admires it
as such, welcomes a death which is the death of what the city has come
to stand for in his symbolic world."Again, a friend of Wordsworth objected
in 1836 to the paradox of a city clothed in bareness, a paradox only
because the mimesis encourages visualization.'9 Cleanth Brooks remarks
that mimetic effectiveness is achieved through means that should by
rights be ineffective:

The attempt to make a case for the poem in terms of the brilliance
of its images ... quickly breaks down: ... We get a blurred impres-
sion-points of roofs and pinnacles along the skyline, all twinkling
in the morning light. More than that, the sonnet as a whole contains
some very flat writing and some well-worn comparisons.20
 Critical Inquiry September1984 151

It is true that there are no graphic details, and that the writing is
abstract, if not actually flat, and that all the images are stereotyped. But
this does not mean that they are worn out, only that they pack, in un-
changing traditional formulas, time-tested devices for eliciting and con-
trolling reader reaction. The writing is abstract in that most of the praise
comes out of mere marking. What turns this nondescript description
into an encomium of London is not a sequence of full-fledged signifiers
but a series of positive markers. These are devoid of mimetic power;
they have in fact almost no semantic content save that every one is
qualified with a plus sign. Archaic morphemes like "doth ... wear" (1. 4)
and "glideth" (1. 12) are mere indices of poetic discourse. In this context,
along with eulogies like "more fair" (1. 1), they act as praise-boosters (not
hyperboles, since they do not directly affect the actual extolment lexicon).
So does the word "garment" (1. 4), which really does not aim at making
us see how beauty clothes an object but is merely a praise-implying way
of connecting the object and the quality it is endowed with. "Garment"
is not an image but the shadow of an image, an indirect allusion to the
possibility of an allegorical representation of nature, or the city, or whatever,
as a personage clothed in particular quality. To put it otherwise, "garment"
is the homologue in clothes code of "majesty" in physical behavior or
deportment code. And in the pseudomimetic attire paradigm, "garment"
has the plus sign, as opposed to cloak, with its minus sign.
What about the stereotypes? We have two descriptive periphrases:
the cliche enumeration for city-"Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and
temples"; and for nature-"valley, rock, or hill." Far from being neutral,
all-purpose gap-fillers, these periphrases are instances of the poetic sign's
exemplariness. As mimesis, "valley, rock, or hill" throws together what
seems a random sampling of paraphernalia of nature scenery. But only
the loose syntagm makes it desultory: the lexicon is strongly and significantly
organized. The three nouns conceal two pairs of descriptive polar opposites:
first, the valley and its counterpart, the heights; second, within the rep-
resentational frame of high ground, two possible contraries-easy, rolling
hills or craggy steeps. The three nouns thus summarize an entire landscape
and operate together as a multiple, syntagmatic, compound sign for
"nature."
Not surprisingly, the polarity "city vs. nature" is emphasized by a
symmetrical transformation: an abstract phrase, "the entire city,"is trans-
coded into the figurative line 6. We know the whole line is also a cliche
from innumerable variants, running from as far back as Spenser's "High
towers, faire temples, goodly theaters," to Shelley's Venetian "Column,
tower, and dome, and spire," to Browning's "domes and towers and
palaces."21The "ships"in line 6 have been added, an adjustment rendered
necessary by the river: William Blake and Woolf, faced with the same
descriptive problem, make exactly the same adjustment.22 We have no
reason to suspect that these masters of the written word all alike yielded
152 Michael Riffaterre IntertextualRepresentation

to the temptation to pad their work the easy way. Here once more,
exemplariness motivates the stereotype: it sums up not only the complex
city mimesis but the mimesis of a meliorative city-the city as a majestic
panorama-by implying the multitudinous varieties of shape and structure.
This implication requires mention of only the extreme opposite components
of synonym paradigms, and these extremes, recognizable as linked by
polarity, inevitably presuppose the entire gamut of intermediate terms
in the paradigm. The whole skyline is contained between rounded highrise
and pointed highrise buildings ("domes" vs. pinnacles or spires or even
pyramids, where the city is phantasmal, as in Shelley); and the whole
architectural parade of public buildings is encompassed within the space
between "theatres" and "temples," between the profane and the sacred.
Proof that such is indeed the sign structure, and that the secret of its
power lies in polarization, is that the terms may be interchangeable but
must always be polar opposites (the theatre, for instance, becomes the
Temple of Melpomene, borrowing through metaphor the very language
of its contrary-that is, activating and actualizing its intertextual homo-
logue). The symmetrical emphasis by the same means of two opposite
poles does much more than underscore certain representations: it tells
the reader how to interpret the poem. Since both opposite poles are
given positive markers, London appears to have taken on descriptive
features characteristic only of Nature herself. This is the surprise the
genre demands. Its expression accords, in any event, with Wordsworth's
abiding aesthetic tenet set forth in his "Preface to the Second Edition of
LyricalBallads": "Ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an
unusual aspect."23
Though I have, I hope, demonstrated how Wordsworth composed-
how he arranged to cancel a major, basic opposition that molds and
structures, within the sociolect, any concept we may have of city or nature-
I still have to make clear why this cancellation retains its powerful hold
upon the reader's imagination and does not wear out. It remains strong,
and goes on working so well, through the agency of intertextuality. For
the cancelled opposition has not been destroyed; the negated intertext
survives everywhere (that is, it stays in the language) except in the idiolect
of this particular sonnet. And the sonnet can never be read without the
reader perceiving it as the reverse image of what the sociolect tells him
the real city is like. London and its river are described as if they were
indistinguishable from nature, but the description does not pick out a
random assortment of normal, so-called natural features. Only those
features which our linguistic competence tells us are the reverse of the
real London are selected: the city is said to be silent as nature, but this
silence remains complementary to the bustle and the turmoil and the
uproar of the city in the sociolectic intertext. The title had announced
a reality only for the text to expel it, to push it back from front stage
into the wings. As soon as London is alluded to, it recedes into the
 Critical Inquiry September1984 153

background so that it can be described as what it is not (contrariwise,

the wheelbarrow had been represented but only to be beautified by the
implication that it was an objetd'art). But this repression or displacement
of London is no suppression. There is no void, no lack. The objective
image of the city must be deciphered between the lines at the same time
as the idealized picture is decoded. There is a connector that forces upon
the reader's consciousness the inseparability or the mutual complementarity
(like an obverse and a reverse) of the bright and glittering skyline and
of the soot and grime drifting down and blackening the cityscape of the
sociolect. This connector, this trace left by the intertext at the surface of
the text displacing it, is "smokeless" (1. 8).
The adjective owes its role and its power of controlling the reader's
interpretation to its shape. The word is one of a kind: it sticks out in
context both morphologically (it is the only compound) and semantically
(there is something technical about its specificity as opposed to the vague-
ness or generality of all the other adjectives). This singularity vividly
focuses on the one verbal borrowing, a hostage from the sociolect, as it
were, the one word foreign to the text's idealization, the one word through
which the latent intertext surfaces into the text: "smoke." We are not
given just any fragment of that intertext; Wordsworth chooses the most
powerfully representative of all the metonyms of London in common
parlance. In all allusions to the modern Babylon, "smoke" summarizes
every stereotype about urban pollution that arose from the conflicting
ideologies of the sublime in nature and of the realism born of the industrial
revolution. "Smokeless" literally quotes from the intertext, in accordance
with this law that we cannot negate anything in language without naming
it.
Another connector might be the unusual colloquialism, the river's
"own sweet will" (1. 12), suddenly freed of its irony and returned to the
tenderness, almost, of its literal meaning. Once again, this is the exact
reverse of the nineteenth-century Thames stereotype: the harnessed river
par excellence, slave to the boats that exploit it. No matter how the poem
may try to rationalize this moment of peace-with the dawning day,
with sleep-it flies in the face of the Thames image we accept as realistic
(what we get, for instance, at the beginning of Charles Dickens' Our
Mutual Friend). We are affected by whatever the poem says because at
every step of the way, we are being forced to fight against habit, to resist
the pressure of usage and a vast corpus of texts attesting to the contrary
of what Wordsworth wants us to see. The complementarity of sonnet
and sociolect resembles the correspondence between a photograph and
the negative it has been developed from: developing requires a reversal
of tones, an exchange of black for white.
Thus the semiosis consists in a reverse mimesis: an object is offered
for our identification through the mimesis of what it is not. We are able
to discover the equivalence through a sustained correspondence, term
154 Michael Riffaterre IntertextualRepresentation

for term, between the semes defining the meaning of the object and the
semes of its counterpart, of the "nonobject." This correspondence is what
links the two faces of a coin, or pairs of antonyms like "pure/impure,"
"clean/unclean," "natural/unnatural." The sonnet is powerful not because
it substitutes an unexpected code for the one expected in the description
of a city but because it substitutes a positive structure for its negative
homologue. Everything is so simple, so beautifully mechanical, so close
to automatic writing that narrative motivation would actually weaken the
effect. Dickens provides an example in Martin Chuzzlewitwhen this view
of Liverpool is gilded and transmogrified by the joy of two exiles who
have finally returned home:

Bright as the scene was; fresh, and full of motion; airy, free,
and sparkling; it was nothing to the life and exultation in the breasts
of the two travellers, at sight of the old churches, roofs, and darkened
chimney stacks of Home. The distant roar, that swelled up hoarsely
from the busy streets, was music in their ears; . . . the canopyof smoke
that overhung the town was brighterand more beautifulto them than if
the richest silks of Persia had been waving in the air..... The water
going on its glistening track, turned, ever and again, aside to dance
and sparkle round great ships, and heave them up; and leaped
from off the blades of oars, a shower of diving diamonds; and
wantoned with the idle boats, and swiftly passed, in many a sportive
chase, through obdurate old iron rings, set deep into the stone-
work of the quays....
A year had passed, since those same spires and roofs had faded
from their eyes.24

Dickens makes us see something that is in the eye of the beholder,

but only because it is the novel's aim to depict the tribulations of two
young men. We are free not to share their naive enthusiasm. Poetry's
aim is different: while the sonnet, spoken in the first person, relates an
individual experience, it is one that must be generalized. The beholder's
"I"is but the grammatical tool of the semiosis itself. The spectacle therefore
is born not of a spectator's delusion but of a cancellation of sociolectic
conventions: this is enough to make it a coded sign, the self-sufficient
icon of a truth deeper than conventional representation.

From Descriptive to Narrative

Let us now observe how the same poetic description beautifying

London, the same transformation of a negative model to a positive one,
functions in a fictional context and how its hermeneutic system undergoes
successive transformations to fit the changing needs of the narrative.
This modified version of an idealized big city mimesis is found, surprisingly,
in Bleak House. Surprisingly, because the novel draws most of its symbols
 Critical Inquiry September1984 155

from the most sordid scenes in London. From the overture picturing the
Chancery mired in mud and fog, to the squalor of the slums, to the
touching story of the crossing sweeper, to the final chase through lanes
ending in the Thames, Dickens evokes a veritable apocalypse of pollution.
The ugliness of the city is a Dickensian obsession: witness the ruinous
hovels of Little Dorrit, or the ever expanding suburban blight in Dombey
and Son, or the epic of garbage recycling in Our Mutual Friend. But it is
in Bleak House that realism seems to be built exclusively on the repre-
sentation of squalor. The pressure of this ideological bias, of this over-
whelming aesthetic and ethical constant, makes for quite a dramatic,
almost operatic contrast, when London is transfigured into a midsummer
night's dream-a moonlit sublimation of the object:

He looks up casually, thinking what a fine night, what a bright large

moon, what multitudes of stars! A quiet night, too.
A very quiet night. When the moon shines very brilliantly, a
solitude and stillness seem to proceed from her, that influence even
crowded places full of life. Not only is it a still night on dusty high
roads and on hill-summits, whence a wide expanse of country may
be seen in repose, quieter and quieter as it spreads away into a
fringe of trees against the sky, with the grey ghost of a bloom upon
them; not only is it a still night in gardens and in woods, and on
the river where the water-meadows are fresh and green, and the
stream sparkles on among pleasant islands, murmuring weirs, and
whispering rushes; not only does the stillness attend it as it flows
where houses cluster thick, where many bridges are reflected in it,
where wharves and shipping make it black and awful, where it winds
away from these disfigurements through marshes whose grim beacons
stand like skeletons washed ashore, where it expands through the
bolder region of rising grounds, rich in corn-field, wind-mill and
steeple, and where it mingles with the ever-heaving sea; not only
is it a still night on the deep, and on the shore where the watcher
stands to see the ship with her spread wings cross the path of light
that appears to be presented to only him; but even on this stranger's
wilderness of London there is some rest. Its steeples and towers,
and its one great dome, grow more ethereal; its smoky house-tops
lose their grossness, in the pale effulgence; the noises that arise
from the streets are fewer and are softened, and the footsteps on
the pavements pass more tranquilly away. In these fields of Mr.
Tulkinghorn's inhabiting, where the shepherds play on Chancery
pipes that have no stop, and keep their sheep in the fold by hook
and by crook until they have shorn them exceeding close, every
noise is merged, this moonlight night, into a distant ringing hum,
as if the city were a vast glass, vibrating.
What's that? Who fired a gun or pistol? Where was it?25

To be sure, the still night, the muted harmony is here only to prepare
the coup de theatreof Mr. Tulkinghorn's assassination. The still night only
156 Michael Riffaterre IntertextualRepresentation

sets the stage for the pistol shot that will reverberate through nineteen
more chapters. But Dickens' motives do not affect the intertextual de-
scriptive mechanism, which is quite like that of Wordsworth's poem. Just
as in Wordsworth, the sublimation of London is effected through a sim-
plified version of a cityscape-the abstract skyline ("steeples," "towers,"
"dome")that is less a representation than a representation of representation,
a geometry symbolic of the mimesis, a sign referring to a spectacle rather
than the spectacle itself. This spectacle, in any case, is already reduced
to the presuppositions that an observer's contemplative stance implies.
Again as in Wordsworth, silence does not just stand for nature. It is
a specialized. descriptive sign countervailing noise pollution, one of the
metonyms for the metropolis in the London intertext. So essential was
this stillness in Wordsworth that it triggered a repetition-another codified,
well-established sign for emotion: "Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so
deep" (a very oral one, hence more emotional, since the pronoun is not
repeated). Similarly in Dickens, repetition coincides with this symbolic
climax of significance. A novel, however, has to stay closer to everyday
reality than poetry does. Fictional verisimilitude makes it unlikely that
London should lie absolutely still. Since silence remains a structural re-
quirement of the hermeneutic system, the conflict is solved by translation
of silence from no sound to mystical, that is, almost inaudible, ethereal
sound: "Everynoise is merged, this moonlight night, into a distant ringing
hum, as if the city were a vast glass, vibrating." We recognize an allusion
to the Glasharmonika inherited from German Romanticism, the continental
equivalent of Coleridge's aeolian harp-in short, a sublimation of noise
within a sublimation of the city.
As for the connector "smokeless," it is indeed present, with the dif-
ference that predication (theverbal sign for interpretation) is syntagmatic
instead of being morphological. Instead of a compound of noun plus
suffix, we have the clause, "its smoky house-tops lose their grossness."
The historical present neatly separates this clause from the surrounding
narrative, thus setting apart a textual segment and tagging it as a descriptive
and interpretive aside. The relative anomaly of "smokeless"in the context
of the sonnet is, we remember, a device to focus on the connector. A
similar peculiarity controls our decoding in the case of "grossness," an
abstract word, with moral connotations, unusual in its reference to the
negative concreteness of "house-tops."
The two passages are thus clearly two variants of the same descriptive
structure. But they are not put to the same use. Wordsworth's description
is a self-sufficient piece, a poetic moment; his subjective truth colors the
object's reality. Dickens, on the other hand, chronicles a society: he must
not allow the idyllic vision of countrified London to hide the evil lurking
in the still of the night. If moonlight is a garment here, as sunlight is in
Wordsworth, it is also a deceptive cloak that must be lifted. These contrary
postulations of poetry and realism find expression in both the narrative
 Critical Inquiry September1984 157

and the descriptive. In the narrative, the dramatic contrast between a

stagey stillness and the gunshot that rends it; in the descriptive, the
humorous rewrite of London as parodic pastoral:

In these fields of Mr. Tulkinghorn's inhabiting, where the shepherds

play on Chancery pipes that have no stop, and keep their sheep in
the fold by hook and by crook until they have shorn them exceeding
close, every noise is merged, this moonlight night, into a distant
ringing hum, as if the city were a vast glass, vibrating.

Parody does not disturb the peace, which is diffused by the moon
in equal measure on London and the countryside. In fact, it is the descriptive
sameness of the open fields and the city that now motivates the otherwise
farfetched extended metaphor of the lawyers masquerading as bad shep-
herds. The reader may still demur at the first pun (on "stop"), but the
successive secondary metaphors appear more and more convincing as
they build toward the acceptability that is the law of the descriptive. This
growing acceptability stems from intertextuality replacing, as it were, the
as if structure that would otherwise make the simile legitimate.
The unfolding of descriptive parody can be divided into three stages.
In the first, referentiality still prevails. The moon's magic wand embellishing
the landscape is familiar stuff. Applied to London, the image-trope or
vision-does no more than hyperbolize an already conventional repre-
sentation.
In a second stage, the need for realism and the intertext of London's
image according to the sociolect combine together to suggest that it is
unnatural to paint a bucolic London. This is all that is needed for generating
a pastoral, since the pastoral in Dickens' times has already become an
egregious example of the contrived in literature. There is no question
that the passage refers to the literary genre, thus to a sign system, rather
than to an actual, direct mimesis of reality. The shepherds are not portrayed
as full-fledged characters; they appear only in the guise of metonyms,
and these metonyms themselves are conventional symbols rather than
real things. Consider, for example, the use of "crook" for a shepherd's
staff. It is true that this staff does have a hooklike handle, but the noun
"crook" is not shepherd talk. The same is true of "pipes" and "stop":
shepherds do play pipes, of course, but the noun is as literary as the
Elizabethan "oaten straws." So is "stop,"the conventional synecdoche for
the whole syrinx.
In a third stage, the parody is finally fully activated by the proximity
of "shepherds" in the pastoral text and "fleecing" in the intertext-that
is, in the sociolectic stereotypes about sharp practices in the law business.
This proximity facilitates the semiotic transference, or exchange, between
text and intertext. Thus representation is finally verified, but at the imagistic
level and not at the referential one. The puns and wordplays are no
158 Michael Riffaterre IntertextualRepresentation

longer lexical games but the signs of equivalencies between codes, between
the bucolic convention and the satirical one. The transition from moonlit
idyll to social satire is easy since shepherds, good and bad, are accepted
conventions in both.
The hermeneutic function of representation has taken over and
eliminated any actual mimesis. When details are given, they are not based
on referents but instead are significance-induced. A case in point is the
pun on "no stop." Like any pun, it is an intertextual phenomenon: in
context, the word designates the holes of the flute, but since there are
no stops, these flutes lack a component basic to the dictionary definition
of all musical woods and winds. Their representation is ungrammatical,
and the way in which the idea of a nonfunctional flute blocks meaning
forces us to an intertext where "no stop" is grammatical, an intertext
consisting of the multiple instances of a motif that recurs throughout
the novel, and that always boils down to the defining behavior of the
Chancery shepherds: the tune they play is endless litigation.
Even in such cases, however, the lure of the referential fallacy-that
is, linguistic habit-remains so powerful that critics persist in seeking
referents accessible to the senses. Even though the pun does not escape
his attention, a perfectly sensible editor still tries to get some sound out
of this patently fictitious flute and to find a literal side to this metaphor:
"the Chancery lawyers' pipes, having no stop, would produce a monotonous
serenade."26 The whole passage quoted above is articulated by a verisi-
militude system we expect to find steeped in referentiality (or a presumption
of it). But a closer examination of the system's components shows that
their hold on reality is as flimsy as the imaginary flute's. Notations such
as the "fringe of trees against the sky, with the grey ghost of a bloom
upon them," the "stream[s] sparkl[ing]," and the "murmuring weirs" are
mere positive markings on a par with the ones we observed in Wordsworth.
Conversely, the details about the darker side of the Thames when it flows
across the industrial zone are negative markings ("thick,""black,""awful,"
"disfigurements,""grim,"and so forth). Topographical pointers and spatial
distribution are just a grammatical structure, a syntactic frame which
outlines an ideal setting made up of interchangeable landscape stereotypes,
the sole purpose of which seems to be to provide space for the unfolding
of paradigms of adjectives stating successively the good and the bad.
When representations get more complex and therefore more sensory,
like the navigational beacons that "stand like skeletons washed ashore,"
they would hardly convince us if we really tried to visualize them; in
effect, they confirm and corroborate the marking constant with a simile
that is already conventional and already value oriented. Even the one
striking experience of the real toward the end-the optical illusion that
makes moonshine on the sea look as if it shone only for the observer-
is more like a mystical moment that balances the gloom of the surroundings
symbolically and sets up a contrast with the coming pastoral parody. We
 Critical Inquiry September1984 159

have to conclude that the verisimilitude system itself, and particularly

those descriptive details whose definiteness seems to invite the reader's
sensory participation, actually are hermeneutic devices.

Conclusion
The following factors seem to be constant in the literary representation
of reality:

(1) The mimesis proper refers not to referents but to elementary rep-
resentations of these. The mimetic text is not composed of words
referring to things but of words referring to systems of signs that
are ready-made textual units.
(2) The presence of lexical connectors makes the perception of intertextual
references compulsory and inescapable. Formal similarities or semiotic
homologies facilitate their dual relevancy astraddle text and intertext.27
(3) Most paradoxically, it is in and through intertextual mimesis that
literature challenges representation most and most undermines its
readers' views about the world. The more faithfully a text is supposed
to reflect the manifold aspects of reality, or the more it proclaims
itself a mirror, the more total the subordination of the mimetic mul-
tiplicity to a single message, to a semiotic oneness. Interpretation
takes over at the very point where the text would seem closest to an
objective recording.
The literary representation of reality, then, for all its objectifying
stance, is essentially an interpretive discourse. It is indeed predicated on
objects that seem to be outside the text and are presumed to exist in-
dependently of textual significance, or of the writer's intent. But the
mimesis remains little more than a grammatical symbol of referentiality.
Within the frame of presuppositions that such a grammar allows, the
mimetic lexicon is weighted so as to dictate value judgments to the reader
and to lead him inescapably to specific conclusions.
In some instances, as in lyrical poetry or poetry of the self, a special
index may be present that engages the reader and involves him in inter-
pretation: the first-person pronoun in Wordsworth's sonnet is such an
index, since in uttering it the reader does much more than a passive
decoding. By taking on the pronoun himself, he necessarily adopts the
text as if it were his own expression and becomes responsible for its
significance. Even if he does not sympathize with the message, he still
performs a praxis of interpretation. For this to occur, the index need
not be explicit: it is enough that it be implied, as in Williams' poem.
Better still, the index's deixis is really superfluous; or, rather, it is
simply a feature characterizing a particular genre. The mere superim-
160 Michael Riffaterre Intertextual Representation

position or parallelism of text and intertext suffices to make representation

into an interpretation. This is true, first, because intertextuality at least
compares and usually opposes two viewpoints, or rather two coding systems
for the same "thing," the sociolectic and the idiolectic; second, because
the slightest predicative manipulation of the sociolectic given must be
decoded as assimilation or rejection or parody; and third, because a
negative representation necessarily amounts to a conflict of two inter-
pretations. In sum, intertextuality cannot avoid being hermeneutic.

1. See Roland Barthes et al., Littrature et realite (Paris, 1982), esp. my paper, pp. 81-
118, on the referential fallacy.
2. "Sociolect," in semiotic terminology, is language viewed not just as grammar and
lexicon but as the repository of society's myths. These are represented by themes, commonplace
phrases, and descriptive systems (stereotyped networks of metonyms around any given
lexical nucleus). Sociolect is opposed to "idiolect,"an individual's specific semiotic activity,
and in the case of literature, the lexicon and grammar specific to a text and whose rules
and verbal equivalencies are valid only within its limits.
3. See Jonathan Culler, The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics,Literature,Deconstruction(Ithaca,
N.Y., 1981); Paul de Man, "Hypogram and Inscription: Michael Riffaterre's Poetics of
Reading," Diacritics 11 (Winter 1981): 17-35; and my "Syllepsis,"CriticalInquiry6 (Summer
1980): 625-38.
4. This commonplace practice stems from Latin in which vomere used figuratively is
already a literary cliche. It is so well established that it sprouts parodies (e.g., "Three
hundred cannon threw up their emetic" [Lord Byron, Don Juan, The CompletePoetical Works
of Lord Byron (Oxford, 1917), canto 8, st. 12]). It is figurative and therefore distinct from
the literal (albeit symbolic) vomit of Errour in which Edmund Spenser wallows so graphically
in The Faerie Queene (see 1. 1. 20) and which he then develops figuratively (see 1. 1. 21).
5. See Immanuel Kant, CritiqueofJudgement,trans. J. H. Bernard, 2d ed. rev. (London,
1931), par. 48, pp. 193-96. Kant remarks (after Aristotle) that the literary representation
of an ugly or horrible object (a snake, a dragon, the infernal Furies, etc.) is deemed beautiful
qua mimesis. But he excepts those words that excite sensations as if their object were
present, unmediated by any sign, i.e., repulsive terms such as the image I am discussing:
There is only one kind of ugliness [Hdsslichkeit]which cannot be represented in
accordance with nature, without destroying all aesthetical satisfaction [asthetische
Wohlgefallen]and consequently artificial beauty; viz. that which excites disgust [Ekel].
For in this peculiar sensation, which rests on mere imagination, the object is represented
as it were obtruding itself for our enjoyment while we strive against it with all our
might. And the artistic representation of the object is no longer distinguished from
the nature of the object itself in our sensation, and thus it is impossible that it can
be regarded as beautiful. [P. 195]
6. Winifred Nowottny, The Language Poets Use (London, 1962), p. 120.
7. Ibid.
8. Geoffrey H. Hartman, Criticismin the Wilderness:The Study of LiteratureToday (New
Haven, Conn., 1980), pp. 120, 121.
9. Precisely because the enjambment affects compounds, the reader's lifelong habits,
the whole weight of his linguistic competence, prevents him from expecting, let alone
perceiving, the cuts. John Hollander, whose argument is similar to Hartman's (although
it leads him to a different interpretation), sees William Carlos Williams' device as culminating
an English tradition in the practice of enjambment, but the examples he cites all differ
 CriticalInquiry September1984 161

from those of Williams in that they exhibit devices that make the cut perceptible whether
the reader sees or hears. Either a rhythmic pattern is identified, one with which the sentence
pattern does not fit (e.g., his Thomas Campion, Ben Jonson, and Andrew Marvell examples),
or the cut coincides with a recognizable rhyme sequence, the rhyming word occurring at
the wrong place in the sentence (e.g., his Robert Herrick and Robert Frost examples, and
his second Marvell passage) (see Vision and Resonance: Two Senses of Poetic Form [New York,
1975], pp. 107-11).
10. See Wallace Stevens, "Extracts from Addresses to the Academy of Fine Ideas," The
CollectedPoems of Wallace Stevens (New York, 1969), p. 253. For Stevens, "glazed" alone
suffices to epitomize the sterile, impoverishing aspects of aestheticism when the glaze is a
cover-up for the bad and the good of real life ("The evilly compounded, vital I" ["The
Poems of Our Climate," p. 253]):

Let the secretary for Porcelain observe

That evil made magic, as in catastrophe,
If neatly glazed, becomes the same as the fruit
Of an emperor, the egg-plant of a prince.
The good is evil's last invention. Thus
The maker of catastrophe invents the eye
And through the eye equates ten thousand deaths
With a single well-tempered apricot, or, say,
An egg-plant of good air.
[P. 253]
"Glazed"functions here as the hyperbolic equivalent of "porcelain,"and "porcelain" as that
of the objet d'art, in itself less a thing than the symbol of an attitude. Cf. Harold Bloom,
Agon: Towardsa Theoryof Revisionism (New York, 1982), pp. 247-51.
11. See Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway(New York, 1925), pp. 34-35: "things ... huddled
together in the darkness; reft of the relief which dawn brings when, washing the walls
white and gray, spotting each windowpane,... all is once more decked out to the eye."
12. Williams, Spring and All (Columbus, Ohio, 1970), p. 18; all further references to
this work will be included parenthetically in the text. It is not unusual to compare the
starry canopy to a sable pavillion with light filtering through holes in it-a simile so stylized
as to hardly require visualization. The almost pedestrian specificity of "pinholes," on the
contrary, gives visual immediacy to the image. I omit from the quotation a first metaphor,
"coronal of the black," since, as a rhetorical commentary on the realistic picture, it remains
marginal to it and belongs to a different type of discourse. Indeed, "pinholes" and "coronal"
are both figurative, but not equally so: "pinhole" is not perceived as such, whereas "coronal"
is, because "pinhole" is everyday matter-of-fact parlance, while "coronal" belongs in the
specialized beautifying discourse of literary convention. The first is closer to "tinsel," the
second to "cornucopia." Note, however, that even Williams' borrowings from conventional
rhetoric end up generating phrases that deflate the convention, thus approximating literalness:
"great end" and "glass"bring the cornucopia close to being a utensil. Similarly, the following
appositives develop "coronal," first, in the discourse of traditional allegory ("a crown for
her head with / castles upon it"-the corona muralis of ancient goddesses) and then in the
discourse of an American child's candy factory fantasy ("skyscrapers / filled with nut-
chocolates"), debunking the former. In short, the representation of the natural in terms
of artifacts is a consistent feature.
13. Even though this appears four poems after the previous quotation, the representation
presupposes the "coronal" discussed in n. 12. By making it the tin and cardboard crown
of a child on Twelfth Night, the lowly material again de-conventionalizes the image and
leaves only the artificiality of the artifact. A mock artifact is even farther from nature than
an ordinary one.
14. This perception of the poem's meaning has no connection with what we might
see if we knew the genesis of the poem (see Bram Dijkstra, TheHieroglyphicsof a New Speech:
Cubism,Stieglitz, and the Early Poetry of William Carlos Williams [Princeton, N.J., 1969], pp.
174-76). Williams' model is a collage by Juan Gris entitled Roses (1914), or rather a black-
and-white photograph of it. The collage includes pictures of crockery, the proximity of
162 Michael Riffaterre IntertextualRepresentation

which causes us to see a broken plate in a circumference. It also includes pictures of roses
presumably from a gardener's catalog, some of them cut to fit the plate's edge, some with
their petals extending beyond it. Readers, however, do not know this; only philologists do.
In any case, my point is that outside sources only, not the text itself, can impart this
knowledge, which therefore cannot and should not play any role in a natural reading of
the poem. The verbal description of a pictorial collage is not necessarily perceived as a
verbal collage unless there is a statement identifying it as such, since mentions of the
materials used in the pictorial model tend to be understood as metaphors. An interpretation
exclusively based on a natural reading-a reading recognizing the text's self-sufficiency-
will have only two sets of represented objects to build with: a vegetable sequence ("rose"
and its metonyms or synecdoches) and an artificial sequence used as an oxymoron to repeat,
depict, and amplify the first.
15. Marcel Proust, Remembranceof Things Past, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff, 2 vols.
(New York, 1934), 1:536; my emphasis. Cf. Edward S. Casey, "Literary Description and
Phenomenological Method," Yale French Studies 61 (1981): 176-201.
16. That is, a word understood in two different ways at once; and by extension, a
word understood in two different ways in the text in which it appears and in that text's
intertext.
17. William Wordsworth, "Composed Upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802,"
Poetical Works,ed. Thomas Hutchinson, rev. Ernest de Selincourt (Oxford, 1969), p. 214.
18. For the same words in a literary text, I distinguish between "meaning," when these
words are decoded successively and separately and interpreted according to context and
sociolect through their one-to-one relationship with their referents; and "significance,"
when these words are interpreted in accordance with the constants of the text as a whole,
perceived globally and retroactively, through their relationship with structural invariants.
19. Carl Woodring (in an otherwise thoroughly convincing analysis), Wordsworth (Boston,
1965), p. 167; David Ferry, "Some Characteristics of Wordsworth's Style," in Wordsworth,
ed. M. H. Abrams (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1972), pp. 43-44; and for the friend, see
Woodring, Wordsworth,p. 166.
20. Cleanth Brooks, The Well WroughtUrn: Studies in the Structureof Poetry (New York,
1947), p. 5.
21. Spenser, "Ruines of Time," The Poetical Worksof Edmund Spenser, vol. 1, Spenser's
Minor Poems (Oxford, 1910), p. 130, 1. 92; Percy Bysshe Shelley, "Lines Written among the
Euganean Hills," The CompletePoetical Worksof PercyByssheShelley,ed. Hutchinson (London,
1961), p. 554; and Robert Browning, "Luria,"The Poems and Plays of RobertBrowning, ed.
Ernest Rhys, 2 vols. (1906; New York, 1911), vol. 2, 1844-1864, p. 166.
22. See William Blake, King Edward the Third, The CompleteWritings of William Blake,
ed. Geoffrey Keynes (London, 1966), sc. 2, 11. 10-12, p. 19: "his golden London, / And
her silver Thames, throng'd with shining spires / And corded ships"; and Woolf, Mrs.
Dalloway: "he tripped through London, towards Westminster, observing" "looming houses,
high houses, domed houses, churches, parliaments, and the hoot of a steamer on the river,
a hollow misty cry" (pp. 249, 250).
23. Wordsworth, "Preface to the Second Edition of... LyricalBallads,"Poetical Works,
p. 734.
24. Charles Dickens, Martin Chuzzlewit,ed. P. N. Furbank (Harmondsworth, 1968),
bk. 13, chap. 35, p. 620; my emphasis.
25. Dickens, Bleak House, ed. George Ford and Sylvere Monod (New York, 1977), bk.
15, chap. 48, pp. 718-19.
26. Ford and Monod, eds., Bleak House, by Dickens, p. 584 n.6.
27. To recapitulate: words that can be both affirmed and negated ("edge," "smoke"
in "smokeless")or simultaneously figurative and literal ("shepherds").These syllepses function
somewhat like Sigmund Freud's Bahnung. Even if his concept remains unsubstantiated, we
may use it as a metaphor here: Freud's word refers to the effect of repeated stimuli that,
in the end, lessen the resistance to their being transmitted from one neuron to another
(see, e.g., Beyondthe Pleasure Principle, The StandardEdition of the CompletePsychologicalWorks
of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey, 24 vols. [London, 1953-74], 18:26). Here,
the fact that in usage some words are identified as equally apt in opposite and mutually
exclusive contexts opens the way to an interchange between them.