THE PATTERNS OF INTERTEXTUALITY
Lunkova L.N.
Doctor of Philology, Assistant Professor
Moscow Regional State Institute of Social Studies and Humanities
THE PATTERNS OF INTERTEXTUALITY
Summary
The article is devoted to the problem of textual interaction. A text is treated not only as a verbal unit but also as any semiotic entity. The aim of the article is to reveal the possible patterns of such interaction between literary texts as well as between texts belonging to different semiotic systems. The research is of large topicality to the field of text study, text analysis and literary text translation practice.
Key words: intertextuality, the source text, the recipient text
Nowadays it is universally recognized that any semiotic entity can be treated as a text. Thus, text interaction can be found in any sphere of human activity. In terms of general semiotics interaction of two texts is the interaction of two independent semiotic systems, such texts are signs with an individual denotatum and meaning. We are here interested in the text interaction within one semiotic system – literature. The nature and rules (if there are) of intertextual mechanisms provide endless questions and discussions. Not only literary critics and linguists focus their attention on it, it is also fiction writers who are absorbed with this popular phenomenon. And there is a question to all of those whether intertextuality is unavoidable in the contemporary world of information, whether there are limits to itsinfluence and if it is going to be the trouble for the whole world of literary texts leading to the total chaos or it is destined to make the new era of literature, to become the new driving force in its further development. Obviously, questions are more numerous than there are answers to them.
А Russian linguist L. A. Novikov wrote that «the mechanisms of a literary text processing and perception are the matter of the individual and the unconscious in our mind».[1] It means that every reader finds limitless unique meanings and connotations in literary texts. According to U. Eco «such connotations are not born by these particular texts only, it is a transformation of the previous sign and its denotatum into a new sign».[2] A similar transformation mechanism occurs when two texts are interacting. It follows that the new text is sure to obtain new meanings thus making a new sign of itself. In such a case intertextuality can be sooner treated as a positive phenomenon giving grounds to numerous text transformations.
Generally speaking the pattern of intertextuality in literature can hardly be simplified as a mathematical identity of two texts. This is very much artificial and in some sense flat. Intertextuality is far from one- or even two-dimentional scope. It is neither a line or a flatness. It is sooner a combination of many-dimentional spaces. In terms of mathematics it is a unique coordinate system with the author, the plot, a phrase, an event or a character as one of the coordinate axis.
The analysis of intertextual mechanisms brings to mind various metaphorical descriptions. Thus it also involves the images of macro- and micro-structures of the Universe. On the one hand the whole totality of the existing and ever produced verbal texts can be compared to the Cosmic Space full of objects different in size, significance, brightness or age, objects connected with each other by common qualities, characteristics, functions etc. Like objects in Space literary texts may disappear and leave their traces in the Universe as reflected light or warmth, may appear and change the order or relations among those already existing ones.
On the other hand intertextuality can be likened to a most complicated atomic lattice with every atom – a text – connected with the others. Such an atom can’t be destroyed or extracted from the structure without damaging the whole thing. The atom-texts are defined by a different size, magnetism, valence etc., which means in reference to literary texts the ability to merge with another text making up a new literary “substance”, new literary matter. The lattice is an ever growing entity, the number of links is getting larger and larger thus modifying the old “relations” and creating new.
Contemporary investigations also suggest other metaphors of a more fragile artistic character. But all those attempts to describe text relations by means of metaphors or out of language images have very little to do with science.
The intertextuality theory is still a new branch of the humanities, its terminology being developed and unified. It follows that quite a few ideas and statements on the nature and mechanisms of intertextuality can be recognized as true. Here belongs the statement about its two-member structure. Quite conditionally we put it as the vector Х→Y where X is the source text and Y is the recipient text. Theoretically the reverse vector is impossible since it’s based on the linear and one-way time development. But what is quite possible and natural is that the source-recipient chain may be endless: every recipient text becomes the source text as soon as its elements are borrowed by a new text. To make it clear Х→Y→ … →Z, and the number of the consequent borrowings can be neither limited nor stopped. Furthermore, in terms of quantity the unit on the right is never equal to the unit on the left. That is: Х≠Y is always true. And most often Х >Y is true since it is only a part of the original number of elements that pass on to the recipient. It is exactly this scheme that is activated for the most popular literary source texts. Here refers the Bible for instance. Within particular national cultures the source texts corpus is made up by the folk narrative literature or popular verbal texts.
As far as our research goes the borrowing scheme can be further modified and become more complicated for normally many source texts can donate their elements to a single one. In this case the relations can be described as every Х <Y. The inequality means that every Y is characterized by a much larger number of literary links and information units than X. It is this type of intertextual relations that is characteristic of contemporary science fiction writers like R. Sheckley, I. Asimov, J. Fforde and others.
The analysis held on the post-modernism literary texts shows that there are other patterns of text interaction and some of them may seem illogical in terms of the real world though quite natural within fiction. The source text and the recipient text change their places in the reader’s mind, the vector of the borrowing goes backwards.[3]
It goes without saying that the patterns suggested above do not represent the nature of the intertextuality phenomenon fully. The fact that they are confined to a particular number only proves that there are limits to human cognition.
Literature
- Лунькова Л.Н. Текст: интеллектуальное дежа-вю. - Коломна: 2010.
- Новиков Л.А. Избранные труды. Эстетические аспекты языка. MISCELLANEA: Т.2. - М.: 2001.
- Эко У. Отсутствующая структура. Введение в семиологию. - Спб.: 2004.