Inventiveness in Intertextuality
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Inventiveness in IntertextualityHimawan Pradipta
Student, Department of English, Faculty of Arts, University of Padjadjaran,Jatinangor, Sumedang, West JavaEmail: [email protected]
A work can only be read in connection with or against other texts, which providea grid through which it is read and structured by establishing expectations whichenable one to pick out salient features and give them a structure.
- Jonathan Culler in Structuralist Poetics.
Jonathan Culler’s “Prepositions and Intertextuality” pinpoints that any act of
writing or speaking is viably intertwined with the postulation of an intersubjective
body of knowledge, from which one may seemingly construct her own context in a
number of interactions in life. The commonplace fact that intertextuality refers to a
dialogical circumstance between two particular texts, epitomizes not only a sense of a
tradition-governed tendency but also an anonymity of the author. Here, he construes
that how we read, teach, or even think is predominantly affected by how we position
the activities thereof in a discursive spectrum consisting of other works, enabling us
to treat ourselves in a territory where discourses are no longer seen independent. In
fact, discourse, which is no surprise phonetically analogous with the word discursive,
is described to have a clear-cut bound to one’s tradition or culture so imprintedly that
the discourse itself may have stirred how people in general do most things in such a
way. The question now is this: if intertextuality, of any existing text, is positioned to
possess a strong kinship with one’s tradition or culture, or in this sense the rigid
literary conventions, then how could we guarantee that we, who, say, know nothing
about the culture of the writer, could thoroughly, not freely, manifest our own culture
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to the text into which we are being absorped?
Suzanne Moore in her brilliant “The Pimps of Postmodernism” clarifies this
intersubjectivity issue experienced within human physical entity--that we, as an
own-standing being, tend to interchange subjects in different moments as to “embody
specific roles which others expect us to play” (1988:160). Such interchangeable self,
thus, leads the reader to alter his “constructed identity” to another identity he himself
never before bothers to impinge upon, and this is how the urge to intertextualizing
emerges in the first place. Moore further describes that a superinduced subject is
likely to self-destruct the past identity in order to survive the forthcoming. This
identity-survival conduct in essence does demonstrate the intertextualized concept of
floating diverse subjects within one’s body. Yet again, how this relevant with his own
culture? What does it have to correlate in the framework of taking away his
constructed identity, which is unconsciously performed as he reads a text? If, for
instance, a five-year-old boy reads a folklore, and five years later he reads the same
folklore, then the interpretation that arises, despite his psychological and
physiological development, which in this case his subject-changing encounter, may in
fact be dissimilar. Let us assume that the boy has stayed in a certain place for a
respectable quantity of time. His state of mind of being conscious to stand at a point
called “his five-year-old subject”, and then neatly “slithering” to that of ten-year-old,
would be as stable as it used to be, only the physical appearance is developing--hair,
voice, chest, muscle, etc.
Culler’s claim on this subject has indeed excited a number of theorist’s concerns,
one of which is that of Khosravi Shakib, stating that intertextuality equals a form of
species (2012:188). Texts, he elaborates, share a similar origin and a common means
of “expression of communicating and interacting with the environment”, which
opposes the beforehand Culler’s scheme. Furthermore, Shakib’s introducing “literary
evolution”, which is problematic enough, for the readers might end up in-between
whether or not such evolutionary term is generative, asserts that only if the “viability
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novel gene expression” in species occurs will the activity of intertexts be succesful.
Here, it is not the culture or tradition being looked at as the principal thing to be
acquainted with intertextuality--with how one may subjugate his identity whilst
embodying that of others; it is, instead, the biological aspect. Nonetheless, this
criticism would be weak if the preliminary concept of essentialism (biology as a
source of human’s behavior and anatomy as destiny) is involved in this analysis, as
also offered by Moore. The problem is: suppose we assume that only people from the
middle-class society are allowed to do some things, just because their parents come
from the same society layer, then what about those from the lower class?
This indicates that, providing that Culler takes account the concept of
essentialism, he does not give enough choices for both those people and for himself.
He would let them be the ones suffocating due to their lack of having adequate
choices, while, instead, they were either dispatched to survive from “foreign” subjects
or employed in a stage where the higher subject would not bother to intervene: the
lower one. The existence of the 18th-century women, for example, was undeniably
marginalized in the absence of their own bargaining power and of their inability to
see themselves (and their voices) to others, to juxtapose them, and to intertextualize
their own thoughts. Perhaps that is why, being greatly reinforced to perform any task
other than writing for the sake of earning living, because their culture--how people
there carried themselves or thought or spoke even what was judged wrong by popular
belief (rationalization), and being overridden while at the same time depicting a sex
symbol (for people looked to them only by appearance), women were barely exposed
by the fact of who gave birth to them or where they came from. Other people at the
era would use those women in ways as they wished. There was, and is, indeed, no
biological reference considered, as there is no, as Culler continues, “originality” to
intertextuality.
What makes this paper assume that Culler’s statement on intertextuality’s being
related to one’s tradition or literary convention is fickle, is that, at the end of the
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article, he unseemingly creates a confusion toward his own definition of
intertextuality, which has previously been mentioned in the few first pages. He
asserts:
To talk about similarities and differences between particular texts is a perfectlyvalid and interesting pursuit but not in itself a contribution to the study ofintertextuality. (p. 17)
This somehow means that to intertext is simply to reflect one’s pre-existing
thought in the connection of what he has beforehand said, read, or thought, without
paying heed to the characteristics of a text, from which the reader may later on issue
his temporary judgment that one text is much more convincing or responsible or less
skeptical than the other. The fact that such labelling indeed counts in the reader’s
awareness in discovering what the similarities and differences are in the text,
becomes palpably revealing. This could be performed by looking into its textual
evidence to ensure that the information being exchanged in the text is valuable and
worthy enough to grasp, and it does not require one’s deep cultural knowledge to
perform it. In fact, Culler’s claim here is somehow contradictory to what Deborah
Tannen calls a “joint production”: that when we read a text, it is not the sole
production of a speaker (or writer) but the joint of an interlocutor and an interactant”
(2007:21). Moreover, similarities and differences in two particular texts may
potentially stir our critical thinking upon which one is more, say, credible or reliable;
that is one of the most vital keys when analyzing the historicality of a text.
Much of the Tannen’s claim about the joint production is somewhat analogous to
what A.L. Becker labels as “jarwa dhosok”, a unique term in Java which means
“taking old [context] (jarwa) and pushing (dhosok) it into new ones” (1995:185). By
“pushing”, it means that the reader, already being at one particular position,
eventually repositions himself into the new context containing both the old contexts
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and the new ones, or, as Halliday names it, “recontextualization.” Such interrelating
self from one context to the other indeed defines intertextuality already, and the
reader has the golden opportunity to arbitrarize what is before him, constructing a
new discourse of his own understanding. To be able to do this, he must, as Julia
Kristeva writes, position himself as “the addressee” (the reader) and not as “the
subject” (the implied reader) in a similar point of view or in a “horizontal axis.” This
same-stratum graphic would enable each other to visualize a dialogical circumstance
as to intertextualize the perspectives and latent ideologies contained within each
subject.
Kristeva then proceeds that intertextuality would not work out as long as it does
not involve the other axis, “the vertical,” the top of which positions text, and context
at the other end. She argues that both axes, though embody different roles, attach a
vital necessity as the intertextuality instruments. However, these axes would
inevitably be useless if the two do not “coincide,” intersecting between one’s culture
or pre-existing knowledge and his discovery of the textual evidence in the text.
Simply put, to presuppose is, thus, to “permutate texts, in which several utterances
intersect and neutralize one another” (Allen, 2000:35). Although this theory is
plausible for Culler’s main concept of presuppositions, Bakhtin scopes the horizontal
axis as “dialogue” and the vertical “ambivalence.” The fact that the vertical line
includes text and context in the position where one is higher than the other, is still not
“clearly distinguished”, for the reader has to reminisce to his culture in order to grasp
the context out of the text, which is necessarily insignificant to what this paper is
opposing.
Any literary work, in any genre, despite its intangibility to other works, must in
itself create distinctive signs for the reader to decode. It means that the privilege of
the reader to either appreciate or ignore the work into which he is being absorped, is
rife, without, in a sense, his cultural forcement or background distraction.
Mukarovsky, then, elaborates:
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The work of art manifests itself as sign in its inner structure, in its relation toreality, and also in its relation to society, to its creator and its recipients. - (citedby Fokkema and Kunne-Ibsch through Gunter’s article on Prague Structuralism,1977:143)
What Culler, and perhaps other theorists as well, offers in this context, fails to see that
the whole idea of understanding literary works is not principally based on the reader’s
culture, which symbolizes the involvement of the tradition. In fact, looking back to
Culler’s theory that intertextuality should not “talk about the [text’s] similarities and
differences,” this paper assumes that the point of talking about it is indeed what
makes our own society in a dynamic spectrum, which continously changes in time, in
different form and in different genre. Mukarovsky’s idyllic statement allows us to
deconstruct, and thus expand, the beforehand concept of intertextuality, in which we
may assume that intertextualizing does not always have to correlate in textual terms,
but instead how a person (an entity) reflect himself in the existence of others (other
entities), like their bodies. For instance, in a certain group of society, in the middle of
nowhere, a boy never wears a hat in his life. Soon, he discovers that wearing hats for
boys is in the trend, and all but him now wear a hat. Realizing that he is the one “left
unattended,” he then wears the hat without feeling uneasy or guilty whatsoever, even
to himself. He, then, becomes in the trend.
The exempli of a boy hesitate to be “engaged”, and not to be “engulfed”, in a
particular societal activity is what Mukarovsky attempts to expound another
definition about intertextuality. People in any layer of society by no means tend to,
when they are in the process of constructing an utterance, “take words from the
system of language in their neutral, dictionary form...and from other utterances”
(Bakhtin, 1986:87). Fairclough even asserts that such intersubjective linkage is not a
form of intertextuality, but instead an imitation, a form closely “relat[ed] to tradition.”
Furthermore, he then asks, “what is it about existing societies that produce poverty,
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deprivation, misery, and insecurity in people’s lives?”, bringing the subject into a
much larger context, which he himself concludes that “the concept of intertextuality
must [indeed] be combined with the concept of power” (2003:22).
In the end, A. Teeuw, in his comprehensive Literature and Literary Studies,
underscores that literary conventions, however rigid considered, are not “readily
formulated” (1984:84). Suppose the reader is subject to the conventions, then the
interpretation arising may have become strictly limited, for dynamism is one of the
most important aspects that enact strong literary works. In addition, knowing that the
literary convention--that which “the eminent 18th-century rationalists and scientists”
(Diderot) agreed (the gentleman’s agreement)--is by any means a “universal
oppression” (1984:83). This in a sense dichotomizes the border between the work and
the reader’s inventiveness so that the reader would annyhow be surprised (or
disappointed?) if, for example, as demonstrated by Teeuw, “a detective story does not
in the end reveal a case of murder” just like a fairy tale such as “The Sleeping
Beauty” does not end up in a happy ending, without a wake-up kiss or drama-queen
prince-princess very first encounter thingy. This inventiveness of one’s point of view
is exempt from, for instance, the remake of “The Sleeping Beauty”, released in 2014
with the new title “Maleficent”, in which many literary conventions toward the
“constructed” belief of how the story should have ended are disobeyed. The fact that
how the reader, whether or not he has before read the original story, prepares their
presuppositions on the movie and turns out on the other way round (as the “wake-up
kiss” in fact works from, surprisingly, with the “true love:” the Maleficent herself,
and not from the prince charming!) becomes revealing in the concept of
intertextuality.
In conclusion, what Culler has proposed in his article on the subject of one’s
culture being interlinked with how he comprehends a text, is reasonably weak. This
could be shown by the fact that when one reads a text, then it is merely the text
owning the reader, not the other way around. It may have absorped the reader so
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deeply both textually and culturally, all in a similar tangent, in a horizontal axis. The
immediate respond to the text through interpretation that the reader executes is no
doubt inevitable to intertextuality. Furthermore, provided that Culler persists on his
incredulous proposal, it should be reminded that literature works in a dynamic flow of
time and a series of events, for which reason culture becomes necessarily
insignificant to this context. In the end, any literary piece must “barge ahead” or
“rebel against” the literary convention, knowing that it indeed “oppress[es]” our
universe, from which we ouselves intend to escape.
Bibliography
Allen, Graham. 2000. Intertextuality: The New Critical Idiom. London and New
York: Routledge.
Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, Michael
Holquist (ed.) and Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (trans.). Austin: University
of Texas Press.
Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1986. Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, Vern W. McGee
(trans.), Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (eds.). Austin: University of Austin
Press.
Becker, A.L. 1984. “Biography of a Sentence: A Burmese Proverb”. Text, Play,
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M. Brunet, 135-55. Washington, DC: American Ethinological Society. Rpt Prospect
Heights, IL: Waveland Press 1988. Rpt Becker (1995:185-210).
Culler, Jonathan. 1976. Presuppositions and Intertextuality. Vol. 91, No. 6,
Comparative Literature. London: The John Hopkins University Press.
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Fairclough, Norman. 2003. Analysing Discourse: Textual Analysis for Social
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