The most eloquent theorist of

intertextuality, who always attacked the notions of stable meaning and

unquestionable truth, was Roland Barthes. He is associated with structuralism,
post-structuralism, and semiotics. In his essay Theory of the Text (1981), Barthes
defined what he meant by the term ‘text’ and ‘intertextuality’. Barthes built his
theory on both Julia Kristeva’s and Mikhail Bakhtin’s work.
A textual scholar is considered to be someone concerned with manuscript studies,
with the task of determining the validity of a text. Barthes argued that not the ‘text’
is the material inscription of a ‘work’, but the ‘work’ is the material, offering the
possibility of meaning, closure and thus of interpretation. The term ‘text’ is
considered to be the act of writing. Barthes makes it clear that we should not
confuse the text and the work: “The work is held in the hand, the text in language”
(1981: 39).
Barthes’s theory of text involves the theory of intertextuality because the text
offers a plurality of meanings and is also woven out of numerous already existing
texts. The text is not a unified, isolated object that gives a singular meaning, but an
element open to various interpretations. Similar to Kristeva, Barthes considered that
only literature written after the emergence of Modernism allows the reader to
become fully active in the production of meaning. Only Modernist literature and the
literature that follows it give examples of “texts” which can be re-interpreted, rather
than just simply read, by the reader.
Barthes emphasizes the role of the reader in the production of meaning, and he
distinguished two types of readers: on the one hand, “consumers” who read the
work for stable meaning, and on the other hand, readers who are productive in their
reading, which he called “writers of the text”. The readers that engage themselves in
the second kind of reading are, in Barthes words, doing “textual analysis,” in contrast
with the more traditional “criticism.” This practice of reading, seen as re-writing, is
at the basis of Barthes theory of intertextuality.
One of the most widely-known features of intertextuality is Barthes’ claim of
the “death of the Author” (Barthes 1977: 142-148). Barthes combines
psychoanalytical and linguistic theories to argue that the origin of the text is not a
unified authorial consciousness, but a plurality of other words, other utterances, and
other texts.
Therefore, Barthes suggests that the meaning of the author’s words does not
originate from the author’s own unique consciousness, but from the place of those
words within linguistic and cultural systems. The author has the role of a compiler,
or arranger, of pre-existent possibilities within the language system. Each word,
sentence, paragraph or whole text that the author produces takes its origins from
the language system out of which it has been produced. Thus, the meanings are
expressed in terms of the same system. The view of language expressed by Barthes
in this way is what theorists have termed intertextual.
Intertextuality for Barthes means that nothing exists outside the text. Barthes’
intertextual theory destroys the idea that meaning comes from, and is the property
of, the individual author. Allen synthesizes this view by saying that “the modern
scriptor, when s/he writes, is always already in a process of reading and re-writing.
Meaning comes not from the author but from language viewed intertextually” (2000:
74).
The intertextual nature of writing turns both the traditional author and the
traditional critic, into readers. Barthes concludes The Death of the Author with the
following lines: “… a text is made from multiple writings, drawn from many cultures
and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation, but there is one
place where this multiplicity is focused, and that place is the reader, not, as hitherto
said, the author. The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up
the writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text’s unity lies not in its
origin but in its destination… the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death
of the Author” (Barthes 1977: 148).
Barthes’s most important discussions of textual analysis were written in the late
1960s and early 1970s, during a period in which post-structuralism was emerging
from within structuralism. Thus, textual analysis is not considered as a critique of
structuralism, but as a part of a new movement. Some of the most relevant examples
of textual analysis produced by Barthes are based on readings of literary works. In
his textual analysis, Barthes tried “to say no longer from where the text comes
(historical criticism), nor even how it is made (structural analysis), but how it is
unmade, how it explodes, disseminates – by what coded paths it goes off” (Barthes
1977: 126-127) (italics from original).