Pictures Worth a Thousand Words: Metaphorical Images of Textual Interdependence

The forty-year history of the notion of intertextuality has witnessed the proliferation of an increasing number of divergent and even contradictory approaches to the unavoidably connective nature of texts. Many of such approaches, however, display a common tendency to portray textual interdependence in visual terms, resorting to metaphorical images in their conceptualisation of the intertextual phenomenon. This article aims at studying some of the most significant of those „metaphorical images‟, or „pictures‟ that, standing for theories of textual relationality, are in themselves „worth a thousand words‟. In the course of the study, special attention will be paid to two sets of images that relate to major trends in contemporary Anglo-American criticism: tropes of artistic creativity, and figures of presence-in-absence. Kristeva‟s 1967 description of the text as „a mosaic of quotations‟ stands not only as the foundational statement about the notion of intertextuality, but also as the earliest instance of a tendency to conceptualise the intertextual phenomenon through the use of a wide range of images. Mosaics, weavings, palimpsests, networks, or refractions, among others, have emerged at different points in the forty-year history of the concept in a sustained effort to provide a visual characterisation of the inescapably relational nature of texts. Whether long-standing like Genette‟s palimpsest, or more recent like Calinescu‟s invisible ink, such images figure prominently in the successive (and as yet failed) attempts to develop a unified and stable theory of intertextuality. They give metaphorical expression to the complexities of a theoretical domain in which the pivotal term is re-interpreted and given new meanings by almost every individual critic. In the light of this, the aim of the present article is to trace the changing interpretations of the intertextual notion through the analysis of some of the most influential metaphorical pictures applied to the interdependence of texts. This exploration will pay special attention to the afterlives of two imagery fields that can be connected with prevailing trends in contemporary Anglo-American criticism. On the one hand, the Carmen Lara-Rallo 92 use of images of artistic creativity; on the other, the recurrence of images of presence-in-absence in the wake of the palimpsest. The earliest use of the term „intertextuality‟ goes back to the publication of “Word, Dialogue, and Novel”, where Julia Kristeva began to introduce the writings and theories of the Russian thinker Mikhail Bakhtin to a French audience. In this essay, published for the first time in Critique in 1967, Kristeva pays special attention to the novel, which Bakhtin considered the most dialogical system, full of opposing and divergent voices. Together with the novel, Kristeva also shows interest in poetic language, in relation to which she coined the concept of intertextuality: „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 1980 [1967]: 66). 1 Following Bakhtin‟s ideas, Kristeva argues that every word is an intersection of textual surfaces, and so the concept of intertextuality is necessary because no text is self-sufficient, but depends on its relationships with other texts and discourses. Since each expression is pervaded by the traces of earlier uses, the text is not a finished or closed product, but a plural productivity in which multiple voices—textual, socio-historical and ideological—coexist and communicate. Significantly, Kristeva encapsulated her notion of textual interaction in the simile of the mosaic, an image of artistic creativity already used by Bakhtin himself in “From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse”. As he 1 Apart from the use of the image of the „mosaic of quotations‟ to evoke the intersectional quality of texts, another aspect of this statement deserves to be highlighted. Kristeva‟s association of the notion of intertextuality with the dual nature of poetic language can be linked to the centrality of the concept of doubleness in different approaches to the intertextual phenomenon. For instance, while Roland Barthes referred to the „second-order memory‟ of words in “Writing Degree Zero” (Barthes 1970 [1953]: 16), Gérard Genette devoted his most influential study on textual relationality, Palimpsests, to what he described as „literature in the second degree‟. As will be discussed later, this doubleness makes it possible to discover a connection between intertextuality and the critical discourse of spectrality through the image of the palimpsest. Metaphorical Images of Textual Interdependence 93 discussed the uses of the quotation in the Middle Ages, Bakhtin argued that at that time, [t]he role of the other‟s word was enourmous [. . .]: there were quotations that were openly and reverently emphasized as such, or that were half-hidden, completely hidden, half-conscious, unconscious, correct, intentionally distorted, unintentionally distorted, deliberately reinterpreted and so forth. The boundary lines between someone else‟s speech and one‟s own speech were flexible, ambiguous, often deliberately distorted and confused. Certain types of texts were constructed like mosaics out of the texts of others. (Bakhtin 69; my emphasis) This image of the mosaic has recurred regularly in different theories of intertextuality. It has been employed by Matei Calinescu in his discussion of the complex transformative exercise underlying Joyce‟s Ulysses and Nabokov‟s Pale Fire. According to Calinescu, both works provide representative examples—in the modernist and postmodernist paradigm, respectively—of the intertextual process of transposition of a wide range of referents to a new literary context. As they transformatively transpose „canonical texts‟ and „minor classics‟, Ulysses and Pale Fire give expression to a revised version of Kristeva‟s „mosaic of quotations‟, since they become „mosaics of rewriting‟ (Calinescu 247; my emphasis). More recently, the currency of the metaphorical picture of the mosaic in approaches to intertextuality can be attested in the observations made by Eric Griffiths in his contribution to the Times Literary Supplement, “Dante, Primo Levi and the Intertextualists” (2008). In his review of Dante and His Literary Precursors, Shakespeare’s Cues and Prompts, and The Cambridge Companion to Primo Levi, among other titles, Griffiths discusses the prevalence of the intertextual analytical framework, devoting a long passage to the metaphor of the mosaic: The simultaneously drab and lurid metaphor of „mosaic‟ usually recurs in intertextual studies uninvigorated by such attention to how and why mosaics are various, [. . .]. For the mosaic-metaphor to have a point, it needs to be taken both less seriously than is usual among literary academics [. . .] and more seriously. Taking it more seriously requires admitting that mosaics are normally representations of something other than their tesserae. [. . .] Mosaics, however, like all communicative processes, are asymmetrical. Those who look at a mosaic attentively spot its „andamento‟, the expressive, technical term for how it moves, its „gait‟, traditionally categorized as „vermiculatum‟, „masivum‟ and so on. Those categories generalize recurrences discerned in the body-language Carmen Lara-Rallo 94 of many mosaics, but any such category needs to be returned with interest to the particular settings whence it arose. (Griffiths 4-5) The allusion here to the structural constituents of the mosaic, the tesserae, is particularly significant because their image mediates the inscription of the mosaic metaphor by another leading scholar in the field of textual intersections, Harold Bloom. Though properly speaking a theory of influence, his Anxiety of Influence is often mentioned in studies on the interrelations of texts, which Bloom portrays in terms of an Oedipal struggle between young and old poets. In his outline of the six strategies of revision whereby the young poet (ephebe) copes with the anxiety of influence, Bloom gives the name of tessera to the process of completing or filling the gaps in the precursor‟s work: „In this sense of a completing link, the tessera represents any later poet‟s attempt to persuade himself (and us) that the precursor‟s Word would be worn out if not redeemed by a new fulfilled and enlarged Word of the ephebe‟ (Bloom 67). 2 As he resorts to the image of the ceramic, stone, or glass pieces making up mosaics, technically known as tesserae, Bloom illustrates two major trends in the metaphorical conceptualisation of the intertextual practice. First, as already explained, this image belongs to the fertile area of artistic creativity, whose productivity in the theoretical and critical study of intertextuality has found a parallel in the current prevalence of painting and music as intertextual referents for British fiction. There is a „recent fascination [. . .] with aesthetics that resist or complicate reading‟ which has led writers to turn to literature‟s sister arts (Wormald 227). At the same time, the growing appeal of different arts for writers of fiction is being accompanied by the careful attention devoted to the artistic „relational nexus‟ (Carvalho Homem and Lambert 13). The centrality of studies on word and image in the field of comparative literature, like the renewed interest in the theoretical investigation of the literature-music interface, is reflected in recent publications such as 2 Bloom illustrates his point with Wallace Stevens‟ poetical works, which he describes as a large tessera of Stevens‟ Romantic precursors. From this point of view, The Owl in the Sarcophagus represents an attempt to complete the imaginative universe of Walt Whitman‟s The Sleepers. Metaphorical Images of Textual Interdependence 95 Writing an