Julia Kristeva’s Idea of Intertextuality

 

      Julia Kristeva is one of the foremost literary critics living today in our times. Largely belonging to the poststructuralist school of literary criticism, her ideas constantly question the construction of the modern ‘subject’ or individual in the society through his/her use of language. She combines a linguistic analysis of the speaking being using psychoanalysis as a mode of interrogation. She tries to understand the subject as the one ‘in process’, whose identity is always in the making and is left incomplete. As individuals, this process happens when we come to use the language to express ourselves in the society. The order of language (symbolic as Lacan says in his theory of psychoanalysis) is always there which exists outside the being. We try to fit ourselves in this symbolic tradition through the use of language (semiotics). But herein lies the problem as Kristeva explains we can never adjust ourselves in this, hence our identities remain incomplete.  Kristeva’s theories range from literary criticism to psychoanalysis and feminism. Her diverse range of works include Revolution in Poetic Language (1974), Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art (1980), Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (1982), New Maladies of the Soul (1995) respectively.

      Kristeva was born to Bulgarian parents in 1941 and her father worked as a Church accountant. Life for young Kristeva was harsh as Bulgaria at that time was ruled by a Communist government who were atheists. Therefore Kristeva’s father sent her to a Francophone school where she received her elementary education before deciding to go to Paris to continue her education. There she met fellow exile and literary theorist Goldmann (1913-1970) who had come from Romania as an émigré and through him she met Roland Barthes (1915-1980) who later became famous for his poststructuralist theories on language and semiotics. Together they had formed an intellectual circle, called the Tel Quel group, wherein discussions on language, subject, contemporary literary situations would be undertaken. In her first seminal work Revolution in Poetic Language, she starts to look at the new kind of poetic language used by French poets such as Stephane Mallarme and Comte de Lautreamont, where her point of interrogation is the construction of a new language by these authors wherein they are successful in creating a new semantic order. In such an order words don’t just immediately mean what they refer to. Rather they signify something other to it, that which lies beyond the immediate association of meaning. Intertextuality stems from this point, where literary texts are read not just in the light of themselves. Rather they become part of a bigger order of meaning, where texts interact and associate freely with one another. In this way there is an intersection of texts, of cultures, of meanings and the reading practice becomes dynamic. Kristeva borrows the idea from the great Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin. It was Bakhtin who had proposed the ideas of ‘heteroglossia’, ‘dialogism’ and ‘carnivalesque’ in his analysis of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novels. Bakhtin observed that in Dostoevsky’s novels, the authorial intention remain largely absent or is in ambiguity as it is the characters who shape and mould the novel. Thus in the voice of the narrator, one can find not just the single voice of the narrator, but multiple voices echoing simultaneously through it. This opens up a new dialogue. There is a crisis in the ‘speaking subject.  Intertextuality takes this notion and believes that there can be no such text which exists independently on its own. Instead there resonate echoes of meaning from other texts in it. In short the single text lives, grows, develops and is transformed in relation to other texts. Intertextuality therefore generates a new methodology of reading texts.

Situating Kristeva in the Intellectual Tradition

      Unlike the Enlightenment thinker Descartes who had put forth his theory of the cogito ergo sum, “I think therefore I am” or a self who is all thinking, and is a master of his ego, the poststructuralists believed that such an understanding of ego is essentially dubious. For our ego is shaped by the material, cultural and societal forces in which we live and we are never at terms with this. We have to mention at first the name of the great German philosophers Georg Wilhem Friedrich Hegel and Friedrich Nietzsche, both of whom had rejected such an idea of the transcendental or the all knowing ego. Later with the advent of Sigmund Freud and his Interpretation of Dreams, words such as ‘unconscious’, ‘conscious’, ‘subconscious’ or id, ego, superego came in the common literary language. Freud specifically talks about the unconscious as the inaccessible, unknown and uncontrolled part of our psyche which lies dominated, repressed in the everyday life. The unconscious gets revealed only through dreams, jokes and Freudian slips.  Freud’s theories of the unconscious gets a further boost by Jacques Lacan who says that the unconscious is structured like the language. The idea of the all knowing, all understanding ‘self’ slowly gets replaced with the ‘subject’, one that is shaped, created, contested historically by the forces of culture, economy and society. This subject is constructed by the language in which he resides. The central idea is that the subject gets in and out of the order of language and this constructs his subjectivity.  Language is thus no more seen as a medium of expression used by the self. Rather it helps him associate with the bigger world, that exists outside the self and makes him a subject in this world. Subjectivity starts off from this notion, the relation of language with the subject.

Understanding Kristeva’s Idea of Intertextuality

      Kristeva’s use of the word ‘intertextuality’ can be found in two of her seminal essays, The Bounded Text and Word, Dialogue and Novel. But before moving forward to them, we have to refer to her previous essay The System and the Speaking Subject. Kristeva’s idea points to a major poststructuralist turn in the literary criticism. In order to understand it better we have to refer briefly to the structuralist idea as introduced by Ferdinand de Saussure and later on by Claude Levi Strauss. Ferdinand de Saussure in his Course in General Linguistics (1917) talks about language as composed in an order- the langue and the parole. In this system, the words exist in relation to its opposition from each other. Thus the individual signifier (sound image) of the word produces a different concept image ( signified) which varies from one signifier to another. Language is created in this way and meaning is generated in this opposition, difference from each other. To give an example of this- water is everything which is not water. Levi Strauss in his analysis of anthropology has brought out this binaries perfectly when he says that society too operates in terms of such oppositions, such as nature vs culture, raw vs cooked etc. Semiotics is the study and analysis of this signs taken together as a whole which enabled a unified order of meanings to be possible. The world emerged as something related with each other with a unified sense of meaning. This heralded a new school of interpretation called the Structuralist School.  Julia Kristeva’s intertextuality dents this idea of a unified order of meaning. Many events were happening simultaneously in France when Kristeva arrived at the scene. On 21^st October, 1966, Jacques Derrida presented an essay titled “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of Human Sciences”  at John Hopkins University, which was later published in Derrida’s book Writing and Difference in the following year, 1967. In this essay Derrida counters the analysis laid forward by the structuralists and say that it is impossible to arrive at any given meaning in language, for meaning making process escapes outside the fold of language. The signifier which produces a signified itself becomes another signifier which produces multiple signifieds making the process of arrival of meaning forever deferred. This Derrida says is deconstruction and the process is post-structuralist. Roland Barthes in the following year, 1967, published his essay “The Death of the Author” which produced seismic shifts as well. In that essay, Barthes argues about the position which the author would take up in a text. The author as Barthes says is a modern figure who exists as part of a bourgeoisie market capitalist forces.

      Analysing a text while keeping in mind the background of the author would only produce a limited world of meaning. Instead the semiotics has to be the locus of the readers’ attention. Barthes heralds the concept of a scriptor, the conscious reader who is aware of the play of meanings happening in the text and simultaneously becomes the author himself. Such kind of texts as Kristeva later says becomes ‘writerly’ texts which generates unending variety of meanings compared to the ‘readerly’ texts, where meaning is restricted to the authorial intention working in the text. A text can be called a composite thing, a tissue of meanings drawn from different cultures. It is here that we arrive at Kristeva’s idea of intertextuality.  Roland Barthes in his essay The Death of the Author concludes the essay by saying:

Thus it is revealed the total existence of writing: a text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation, but there is one place where this multiplicity is focussed and that place is the reader, not, as was hitherto said, the author. .. The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination…we know that to give writing its future, it is necessary to overthrow the myth: the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the author.  (Barthes 148)

This spatial position occupied by the reader is a new way of perceiving the subject reader  which ultimately delinks him from any historio-socio cultural moorings and make him free to create meanings in a text. At the same time the meaning of the word ‘text’ is no longer confined to the two dimensional pages of a book. Rather text becomes anything that contains in itself the play of meanings, the play of signifiers and the signifieds. The world appears as a text in front of our eyes. This understanding prompted Derrida to say once, “There is nothing outside the text!” He called this phenomenon as ‘textuality’, where the text (when looked as a collection of sign systems) opens up and engages in free meaning play. Interterxtuality is the process of finding a connection, an association in the reading mechanism.

Intertextuality as a Concept

      The word intertextuality has often been misunderstood as the way how one writer influences each other or how two works of literature bear resemblances with each other. What Kristeva meant as she puts it in her Revolution in the Poetic Language, was a “passage from one sign system to another”, the way in which one signifying practice is transposed into another:

The term inter-textuality denotes this transposition of one (or several) sign systems into another; but since this term has often been understood in the banal sense of “study of sources”, we prefer the term transposition because it specifies that the passage from one signifying system to another demands a new articulation of the thetic- of enunciative and denotative personality. If one grants that every signifying practice is a field of transpositions of various signifying systems (an inter-textuality) , one then understands that its “place” of enunciation and its denoted “object” are never single, complete and identical to themselves, but always plural, shattered , capable of being tabulated.  In this way polysemy (multiple levels or kinds of meaning) can also be seen as the result of semiotic polyvalence – an adherence to different sign systems.  (Kristeva 111)

      Kristeva was heavily influenced by Bakhtin’s idea of ‘dialogism’ (the idea he discusses in his Problems in Dostoevsky’s Politics) where there exist no lone voice in the novelistic discourse. This can be found in Dostoevsky’s novels, where instead of one authorial voice; the different voices of the characters intersect, meet and interact with each other. The situation is that of a polyphony or plurality of voices, giving way to diffusion of one narrative voice. This multiplicity of voices creates a reverberation, an echo in the mind and creates the scope of multiple meanings. Kristeva in Word, Dialogue and Novel highlights this as:

…each word (text) is an intersection of word (texts) where at least one other word (text) can be read. In Bakhtin’s work, these two axes which he calls dialogue and ambivalence, are not clearly distinguished.  Yet, what appears as a lack of rigour is in fact an insight first introduced into literary theory by Bakhtin: any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another. The notion of intertextuality replaces that of intersubjectivity, and poetic language is read as at least double. (Kristeva 37)

This  word ‘mosaic of quotations’ recalls Barthes’s “the text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture” (Barthes 146) and therefore intertextuality becomes the way in which we can relate one sign system in a text to another. This is the ‘transposition’ in the signifying process, the ability to pass from one sign system to another. Thus every text acts as a passage, an intermediary to other texts and in turn becomes a reference to another as the signification (the play of signifiers and signifieds happen on endlessly). This unified network of meaning making gives multiple meanings and opens the possibilities to multiple interpretations.  

 

Notes and References

Barthes, Roland. Image Music Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. London: Harper Collins, 1977.

Kristeva, Julia. Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art. Ed. Leon.  S.                   Roudiez. Trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine and Leon. S. Roudiez.  New York:    Columbia     University     Press. 1980. Print.

---. The Julia Kristeva Reader. Ed. Toril Moi. New York: Columbia University Press. 1986.   Print.