Ways of Reading Third Edition - Martin Montgomery, Alan Durant, Nigel Fabb, Tom Furniss, Sara Mills 2007

13.2 Intertextuality
Unit 13 Intertextuality and allusion
Section 3 Attributing meaning

Intertextuality is used in literary criticism to describe the variety of ways that texts interact with other texts; in particular, the notion of intertextuality stresses the idea that texts are not unique, isolated objects but are actually made out of numerous other texts, both known and unknown. Allusion is a form of intertextuality that works largely through verbal echoes between texts; however, texts may also interact with one another through formal and thematic echoes and through recycling the voices and registers of other literary texts and the general culture that they exist within (see Unit 7, Language and context: register).

13.2.1 Intertextuality through genre

The very idea of genre - that texts can be divided into different groups according to certain shared characteristics - necessarily involves a degree of interconnection between texts (see Unit 4, Recognizing genre). No text is an island. Any poem, for example, will draw on certain poetic conventions that will distinguish it from prose (even if only to undercut or resist those conventions).

The idea that texts belong to intertextual ’families’ is even truer of the various sub-genres, such as the sonnet. The sonnet was developed in Italy and was introduced into English poetry in the sixteenth century. Its first practitioners in English generally followed the formal and thematic conventions established by Italian poets such as Petrarch: thus most sonnets have fourteen lines of iambic pentameter (close to Petrarch’s endecasillabo metre) arranged into an elaborate rhyme scheme and - at least in the Renaissance - tend to have a male speaker who addresses his words to an unavailable woman to whom he professes eternal love. Following the example of Petrarch, English Renaissance poets - such as Spenser, Sidney and Shakespeare - tended to arrange their love sonnets into sonnet sequences that chart the changing fortunes and feelings of the male sonneteer in his quest for his beloved. Although the thematic range of the sonnet has been greatly extended since then, the form continues to be associated with the unrequited passion of a male speaker for an unavailable woman. Thus Edna St Vincent Millay’s sonnet, ’I, Being Born a Woman and Distressed’ (1923), is intertextually related to the sonnets of the past not only because it conforms to the formal requirements of the sonnet, but because it reverses and flouts these thematic conventions:

I, being born a woman and distressed

By all the needs and notions of my kind,

Am urged by your propinquity to find

Your person fair, and feel a certain zest

To bear your body’s weight upon my breast:

So subtly is the fume of life designed,

To clarify the pulse and cloud the mind,

And leave me once again undone, possessed.

Think not for this, however, the poor treason

Of my stout blood against my staggering brain,

I shall remember you with love, or season

My scorn with pity, - let me make it plain:

I find this frenzy insufficient reason

For conversation when we meet again.

Millay’s speaker is clearly a woman who informs a man she has had sex with that she is so far from feeling eternal love for him that she feels no urge even to make conversation with him when they meet again. Part of the impact of the poem arises from the fact that the woman rejects the role conventionally ascribed to women in such situations. But the poem’s full impact can only be registered by a reader who realizes that it uses the sonnet form in order to transgress those thematic conventions we have come to expect in sonnets. Thus part of the meaning of the poem derives from the intertextual relationship it sets up between itself and the sonnet tradition.

13.2.2 Intertextuality through parody

A second way in which intertextuality occurs specifically through genre is in parody, satire and mock forms. These sub-genres rely upon intertextual relations with other genres for their effect. For example, Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock(1712/14) depends upon the reader’s familiarity with the conventions of the epic genre that it mocks. Thus the poem opens:

What dire offense from amorous causes springs,

What mighty contests rise from trivial things,

I sing - This verse to Caryll, Muse! is due.

These lines echo the ritualistic opening gesture of the epic mode - an example of which can be seen in the opening lines of Paradise Lost:

Of man’s first disobedience, and the fruit

Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste

Brought death into the world, and all our woe,

With loss of Eden, till one greater man

Restore us, and regain the blissful seat,

Sing heavenly Muse . . .

As its opening indicates, The Rape of the Lock uses these epic conventions in order to treat a ’trivial’ event in high society (a man snips a lock of hair from a woman’s head) as if it were an epic matter.

From these examples, we can see that part of the significance of a literary text exists not within itself but in the relationships it sets up with other texts. These examples also show that the intertextual dimensions of cultural texts can only have effects and meaning through the active knowledge that a reader brings to them. Thus Pope’s poem has a much-reduced impact on readers unfamiliar with the tradition it parodies.

13.2.3 The changing role of intertextuality

Between the Middle Ages and the end of the eighteenth century education in Britain was limited to a privileged minority and was based on the study of the literature of ancient Greece and Rome (the ’classics’). Authors assumed that their readers would recognize allusions to the ’authorities’ (the classics, Aristotle, the Bible), and tradition was valued at least as much as innovation. For example, in the ’neoclassical’ period (roughly 1660-1785), authors demonstrated their respect for classical writers by writing thematic and formal imitations of them. Examples include Andrew Marvell’s ’An Horatian Ode’ (1681) and Alexander Pope’s ’Imitations of Horace’ (1733-9).

In the Romantic period (roughly 1790-1830), however, with its emphasis on ’originality’ in a period in which literacy and education in the vernacular (i.e. English rather than the classical languages) began to increase rapidly, the importance of the ’classics’ as authorities began to dwindle. The relation of authors to past texts became less that of reverential imitation and more an attempt to break with the past. Wordsworth’s allusions to Paradise Lost, for example, both acknowledge Milton’s importance and register Wordsworth’s rebellion against him (Wordsworth begins where Milton ends).

13.2.4 Intertextuality and originality

The fact of intertextuality and allusion thus raises questions about originality: how far do literary texts originate in an author’s mind and how far are they composed out of other literature? In modernist literature (roughly 1910-40), allusion becomes a constitutive principle of composition. If T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) is read alongside the notes Eliot printed with it, we get a sense of the poem as a collage of quotations from and allusions to other texts. In the postmodernist period (roughly 1960 to the present), writers such as Angela Carter (e.g. The Magic Toy Shop (1967)) and Umberto Eco (e.g. The Name of the Rose (1980)) seem to have set aside attempts to be original in the narrow sense in order to participate in an intertextual free-for-all in which the possibility that all writing is allusive and/or intertextual is celebrated for its own sake.

13.2.5 Post-structuralist accounts of intertextuality

Traditional literary criticism is often concerned with the texts that influenced a particular writer: influence is most usually established through tracing allusions. If an editor spots an allusion, he or she will typically say something like ’Keats is thinking of Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis here’. But this assumption begs a number of questions: how do we know that? What if the allusion were unconscious? Or accidental? Or created by the editor’s own associations? What if texts inevitably interact and reading is necessarily an intertextual process? For post-structuralist theorists such as Julia Kristeva and Roland Barthes, all language usage is inevitably intertextual in several senses: first, because individuals do not originate or invent language - we are always born into a language or languages that precede us; and, second, because without pre-existing forms, themes, conventions and codes there could be no such thing as literature at all. For Barthes (1971), ’a text is . . . a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centers of culture.’ In claiming this, Barthes transforms the idea of literary or cultural tradition from being a selected body of earlier work available as a stable resource behind the text into a potentially infinite network of links and echoes between texts of all kinds. Such a theory of intertextuality is radically different from traditional understandings of the functions and significance of allusion.

13.2.6 Intertextuality in children’s literature

Our initiation into intertextuality begins with the very beginning of our encounter with stories as children. The formulaic opening ’Once upon a time’ signals to the young reader or listener that this is the beginning of a story because he or she has encountered that formula before. It signifies because it is intertextual. Many children’s books are intertextual in that they draw on and revise the kinds of plots, characters and settings that children become familiar with through listening to and reading other texts. This is the case with some of the most successful and innovative of children’s books. The Harry Potter series (1997-), for example, mixes the genre conventions of two long-standing children’s genres - fantasy (with wizards and witches, and so on) and the boarding school story (which goes back to Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857) and includes classic series such as Enid Blyton’s Malory Towers (1946-51)). Children do not have to be conscious of these intertextual relations in order to understand and enjoy the Harry Potter series, though subliminal recognition of them may contribute to the pleasure. A more complex example is Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials series (1995-2000), which draws on Blake in order to reread and critique the Book of Genesis, Milton’s Paradise Lost, C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia (1950-6) and institutionalized Christianity in general. While many of Pullman’s young readers may have read The Chronicles of Narnia, not many will have read Genesis, Milton or Blake or be wholly aware of the theological issues that His Dark Materials engages with. Nonetheless, His Dark Materials has been hugely successful with young readers and can be understood and enjoyed at the level of character and plot alone. In this case, the allusions and intertextual context seem to produce two levels of reading, with adult or more widely read readers being able to understand Pullman’s trilogy in a different way to those who don’t realize the texts’ intertextual significance.