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Inventiveness in IntertextualityHimawan Pradipta

Student, Department of English, Faculty of Arts, University of Padjadjaran,Jatinangor, Sumedang, West JavaEmail: himawansuprapto@gmail.com

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,

and Story: The Construction and Reconstruction of Self and Society, ed. by Edward

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

Research. London and New York: Routledge.

Kristeva, Julia. 1980. Desire in Language: Semiotic Approach to Literature and

Art. New York: Columbia University Press.

Khosravi Sakib, M. 2012. “Inevitability of Arts from Intertextuality”. Frontiers of

Language and Teaching, Vol. 3 183-189.

Mukarovsky, Jan. 1977. The World and Verbal Act. Selected Essays translated and

edited by John Burbank and Peter Seiner. Foreword by Rene Wellek. New Haven and

London: Yale University Press.

Moore, Suzanne. 1988. “Getting a Bit of the Other -- The Pimps of

Postmodernism”. Male Order: Unwrapping Masculinity. Chapman and Rutherford.

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