Swati Moitra explains how reading can be a subversive and even revolutionary act in certain socio-historical contexts. She draws especially from her own work in the history of women’s reading practices in nineteenth and early twentieth century India, in particular the region of Bengal. She talks about the dual indices of literacy and pleasure in her work, and its affiliations to fields like book history and print cultural studies.
Swati Moitra (M.Phil., Ph.D.) is Assistant Professor at the Department of English at Gurudas College, University of Calcutta. Her areas of interest include book history and histories of readership. She is the recipient of the SHARP Research Development Grant for BIPOC Scholars 2022.
Chad is a friend of the pod! He writes about fact checking and literature, and he’s a postdoc in the English Department at NYU.
Today’s image is a photograph of the “Staircase of the National Museum of Slovenia” taken by Petar Milošević, posted under a creative commons attribution share-alike license on Wikimedia Commons.
So today we are here to talk about intertextuality. Hi, Chad.
Chad
Hi Kim!
Kim
Do you want to introduce yourself?
Chad
Sure, yeah. My name is Chad Hegelmeyer. I’m a postdoctoral fellow at NYU in the English Department, where I was formally–just a few minutes–ago a PhD candidate there with Kim. I study 20th-century contemporary American literature, a lot about narrative, and I wrote a dissertation about fact-checking and literature.
Kim
Excellent. So Chad, what the heck is intertextuality?
Chad
Okay, so intertextuality refers to just the way that a text meaning is shaped by other texts. And sometimes the way that this gets talked about is, you know, the intertextuality refers to influences or just the sources of a literary work, but actually, it’s much more radical than that. So one way of thinking about intertextuality–and actually, this is a way that Julia Kristeva herself, the person who coined this term encouraged us to think about it–is to picture a text as a 3D space. So, think about a situation in which words are not just floating out there by themselves totally independent, meaning things. They are never quite fully detached from the texts or contexts in which they are used. So they have all these strings attached to them that connect them to all the places in which they’re used, and they drag those other texts into the text that we are currently reading. So every word, certain phrases or sentences, will not just evoke but, like, have these deep connections to other texts. What this means is that a text’s meaning is not in it: it’s between it and all the other texts that it’s related to. So reading kind of plunges us into a network of relations rather than a text. And we read, or we interpret, by tracing those relations.
Kim
Cool. And so you said that Kristeva coined this term, which is not a thing I knew before you said it.
Chad
Yeah, isn’t that wild? Yeah, she coined it. So if you don’t know Julia Kristeva, she is a Bulgarian literary theorist who spent, I think, most or all of her life in Paris. The field of literary theory that Kristeva was sort of thrust into in Paris is called Structuralism. And it’s really devoted to seeing literature and language as this edifice or this structure that we can take apart and find out how it works. And she’s really bothered by how static that is. For her things are not static; they’re not these unchanging structures. They are moving and changing in time. That’s why intertextuality is not an unmoving connection of texts. It’s this, like, constantly changing network.
Kim
Okay, nice because I was gonna ask you how intertextuality is different from modernist references. I don’t think what Kristeva means and what we often now mean by intertextuality is something like “The Wasteland” with all its footnotes, and all of it sort of like reaching back into a grand literary past.
Chad
Yeah. I mean, I actually think it’s sort of similar in a way, like, so, the school of literary theory that sort of comes before Structuralism in some way is called New Criticism, as you know, and even though a lot of new critics were kind of champions of Modernist literature, there were some things about Modernist literature that at least in my view, they were very uncomfortable about. Yeah, so some new critics like Wimsatt and Beardsley and the verbal icon are actually deeply uncomfortable with like, the referentiality and the citation and the illusion that’s really heavy in modernist poetry. They’ll put up with all of the allusions to other texts in “The Wasteland,” but they hate the notes that explain them. And their solution is to say that even if the notes were fake, even if all the allusions were to made-up texts, like totally fictional texts, that they would still work. And actually, they want you to read the notes that way. So they want you to read the things in the notes as if they are just, like, the same thing as the lines of the poetry in the poem. They’re just a creation of the poet. They don’t actually reference anything outside of the poetry or into the world.
Kim
Right because they can’t handle texts that are not complete unto themselves
Chad
Totally–they want, they want that. They want the text–the poetic text–to be this work of art that has its own separate ontological existence. That’s, like, totally independent, right? So they hate it when you know, to understand a text you have to like put it down for a second and go pick up another book on the bookshelf, right? They don’t want that at all.
Kim
Okay, so this seems like the exact right moment to ask how do I use intertextuality?
Chad
Yeah, so what Kristeva is saying is like, you actually can’t do that–that’s completely impossible. That’s not how texts mean. You don’t necessarily have to get up, pick up that other book. But just by reading and interpreting a text, you’re already sort of doing that in your brain, you’re already drawing on the other texts in which you’ve encountered these words or phrases, right? And for her, it’s even more radical than just allusion or citation. Every word. So here’s a direct quote from Kristeva: “Each word (text) is an intersection of word (texts, plural) or at least one other word (text) can be read.” So let me reread that in two different ways. So you can read it first as, “each word is an intersection of Word, or at least one other word can be read.” Or we can read it, “each text is an intersection of texts where at least one other text can be read,” right? So there’s never we’re never only reading just one text or we’re reading a text we’re reading other texts as well. And we’re using those other texts to read the texts that we’re reading.
Kim
Okay, so for her intertextuality is like a basic function of language?
Chad
Kind of, I mean, so she does a lot of complex theoretical stuff that comes out of semiotics and linguistic traditions about, like, denotative meeting and other types of meaning. And she also has this really weird insistence that I don’t totally understand where she says that there’s some logic, there’s some extra-linguistic logic at work here. It’s not just, like, the logic of language itself–there’s some other kinds of logic at work. According to Kristeva, and also according to Barthes here a bit, too, Roland Barthes, we’re already doing–or using–intertextuality and we’re doing it in two ways as writers and readers. When we’re writing, we’re actually performing a kind of reading, right? As a writer–so they really want to get rid of this notion of the writing subjects that, like, think of the Romantic poet and like the poetry just comes from inside of him, right? No, that’s not how we do that. As a writer, you’re just sort of like a language processor. You’re taking in all this language from other places in your life and then you’re processing it into this new thing, this new text, right? Kristeva actually calls this a writing, hyphen, reading process or “writing-reading process.” So that’s the writing side. As a reader, you’re not just receiving a message or a signal from the writer through the text–you’re actually decoding a highly complex network, a network of relationships to produce an interpretation. So reading itself is a kind of writing, right? You’re, you’re producing the text insofar as you are reading it in this particular way using this particular web of associations. So this kind of goes into, like, you can, maybe, if you know anything about Roland Barthes, you kind of start to see where something like “The Death of the Author” comes from.
Kim
And if you are a listener of this podcast, you might have heard our episode on “The Death of the Author.”
Chad
Excellent. We’re already an intertext!
Kim
But I see what you’re getting, I mean, I see where you might go to get something that is a little bit beyond just the basic functions of language, because it’s not just meaning that’s at stake here, but interpretation, which is a little bit bigger.
Chad
Yeah, absolutely. And interpretation isn’t trying to recover the web of associations that the author had in mind when they wrote it. It’s using the ones that you are, you’re in contact with as a reader.
Kim
Cool. Okay, then. Here’s the big dramatic question. How will intertextuality save the world?
Chad
Yeah, so, I’m obviously very attracted to the idea of intertextuality and I think it’s extremely important for interpreting texts like I, you know, a lot of my work starts here. At the same time, there’s something lost in Kristeva, in Barthes, and in a lot of these post structuralist thinkers for me, they’re very cold and like the human subject kind of drops out of them, you know, or is like something we have to dismantle even. I don’t like that. I think that human beings are not just, like, little notes, connecting webs of text together. I mean, that’s not exactly what they would say either. But I think there’s something interesting going on there that is kind of lost here. What Kristeva thinks is good about this is that there’s something revolutionary–there’s a revolutionary possibility in language and literature. So here’s another quote from her: “by showing how much of the inside of the text is indebted to its outside, interpretation reveals the inauthenticity of the writing subject. The writer is a subject in process, a carnival, a polyphony without possible reconciliation, a permanent revolt.”
Kim
Chad, that was so beautiful, you’re gonna read it again.
Chad
Okay, here we go. “By showing how much of the inside of the text is indebted to its outside, interpretation reveals the inauthenticity of the writing subject. The writer is a subject in process, a carnival, a polyphony without possible reconciliation, a permanent revolt.” So we lose the writer subject, but we get process, we get time, we get carnival, we get permanent in revolt and the possibility of, like, things actually changing, you know, we can have the possibility of revolution and not just this static structure that we have to dismantle, then put back together like it’s a machine or something.
Kim
Yeah. Awesome. All right. We should say goodbye to our listeners, farewell. Thank you for listening.
Chad
Goodbye. And yeah, thanks for listening to me talk about Julia Kristeva intertextuality for a little bit.
In this episode, Kim and Saronik discuss Roland Barthes’ essay “The Death of the Author” printed in Image Music Text, translated by Stephen Heath, New York: Hill and Wang, 1977.
Brilliant. In this episode I, Saronik, talk with Kim about “The Death of the Author.” So Kim, what the heck is the death of the author?
Kim
“The Death of the Author” is the title of an essay written by Roland Barthes.
Saronik
Let me just stop you right there: is that the way we pronounce his name because I always get confused. Well, I sometimes get confused…
Kim
Let us try, in order, pronouncing all of the possibilities okay. “The Death of the Author,” by Roland Bart, Barthe, Barthes…
Saronik
I mean, so my French pronunciation is atrocious. We can move ahead with the podcast, please.
Kim
No, I like this plan.
Saronik
Well, I thought it was, like, “Row-lahnd.” Isn’t it?
Kim
[pronounces Roland Barthes in more and more chaotic sounds]
Saronik
I really hope you don’t speak French and listen to this. Anyway, so, this was… listen to… essay written by some… [more chaotic French pronunciation and laughter from Kim].
Kim
BARTHESES. Okay, so the death of the author is this idea by our friend Roland Barthes, however we want to say it, that the intention of the author matters not. The author, very simply, as the title says, is dead. We don’t need the author anymore. We don’t need criticism to try to discover the intentions of the author and thereby explain the work itself. It’s against the idea of intentionality; that authorial intention doesn’t exist and what does he substitute instead? The reader. So I’ll read you the famous last line of the text: “The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the author.”
Saronik
Oh god, that sounds oedipal.
Kim
Yes, it is. In fact, the Father is, the author is a father figure. The author is thought to nourish the book, which is to say that he exists before it, thinks sufferers, lives for it, in the same relation of antecedents to his work as a father is to his child.
Saronik
That is creepy, but also interesting because it’s sort of like a deistic conception of God, a God who recedes from creation after creating.
Kim
Yeah, but it is much more Nietzschean. It’s like okay, God is dead, because there’s a bit of violence to it. So it’s not just that the author has made the thing and now we should let the author recede from view. But in fact, Barthes wants to argue that in order to privilege the reader, you have to kill off the author, you have to imagine the text is born with the reading, rather than the writing.
Saronik
How do you think we can use this idea? Like I mean, I mean this question semi-seriously, because I can’t remember the last time that I’ve used Barthes in my own work, to return to the question, how can we use it?
Kim
I think there’s two ways of answering that question. And one is just to say that we already are using Barthes without thinking about it, like, this idea has crept into our ordinary engagement with texts. And we don’t even think about it anymore. The way that we are willing to privilege our own interpretations of the text over any sort of imagined authorial intention, which I think is really common in order to do any sort of really good close reading, in a way. What you’re looking for when you look at all those details is, you’re not looking for an omniscient author who is incredibly good at putting all the details in, you’re not looking for a realist, but you’re looking for the ways in which language acts through the author that the author is not aware of.
Saronik
How do you make the distinction between say, chasing authorial intentionality in the text and, like, the cult of the author? What I’m saying is, like, in some cases, the biographical details of the author are quite substantially important in the way that we read the text. We could always say that those are also part of the reading. It doesn’t matter who the author is, but…
Kim
OK, let’s hold the cult of the author on the side because I actually find that really fun. It’s, like, one of the reasons I enjoy writing about Gertrude Stein.
Saronik
She was quite a person.
Kim
Quite a life. But the other thing that I think is worth noting that might sort of help answer this question in a roundabout way, and it gets back to your “how do I use this” question. Is, maybe even how do you use it in a way that is not about reading literature, in a way that is not in our ordinary grad student lives, which is the idea of doubting individual intentionality in general. The idea that language and culture and the world acts through us much more than we act through it. That all of the words that are coming out of my mouth right now are not so much words that originated in some sort of romantic interiority of my sort of creative essence, but are in fact words that came into my head from outside it that like language is speaking through me, that I got this idea from Barthes and I got the language to articulate it from Barthes and I also got it from my, you know, I don’t know my MA Professor Ellen Rooney, and a bunch of other people and stuff I read online and like all like there’s not there’s like less of what you think is you in your head, and more of what you think is, like, consciousness is made up of the world around you as much as it is made up of you and the inside of your head.
Saronik
Yeah, I mean, like, I think you use the word “world” which is so great. My next question what I was gonna say is like, the moment we deprioritize interiority and intentionality and try to think of the world as this sort of, very, very intricately enmeshed manner, like we are all, everything is socialized to a degree that we couldn’t have imagined before. I think there will come, or there comes a point, where it becomes a little difficult, or let’s say challenging, to sort of define interpersonal relationships. They all sort of begin with two really opaque points of interiority: this it’s me and you, me with a capital “M” and you with a capital “Y.” So do you see a bridge here somewhere?
Kim
Yeah, I do. But actually, that’s not what I was thinking. So when you started talking about this, like, amazing intermeshed network of the, like, society is that much more socialized than we imagined, I thought, the sort of image of the networked world–so you were thinking about individual subjectivities and interpersonal relations, and I was thinking about the sort of individual versus society, the way that we imagined ourselves acting as individuals in terms of, like, the social contract and individual agents. And maybe if we didn’t think of ourselves so much as individuals to begin with, we wouldn’t be so worried about maximizing our individual interests.
Saronik
Yeah, I mean, it sort of totally reorients the idea of responsibility. Which is definitely something that we need in the world.
Kim
I think the responsibility of the reader is actually a really important thing to think about now in the world that we live in. Like, if we can’t expect responsibility from the writers of our public discourse, if we can’t expect responsibility from our political figures, then we can perhaps try to shift responsibility onto the readers, or by necessity, the responsibility has been shifted on to the readers, right?
Saronik
Right. So like in this scenario, the readers are the public and the author is the person spouting discourse.
Kim
Yes.
Saronik
Like, not spouting discourse, that was a terrible phrase, but like, saying things?
Kim
Can you imagine what the discourse fountain looks like?
Saronik
I will have nightmares tonight about that.
Kim
How about I read you the best line of the text as the ending? And so maybe this is in fact the answer to how the death of the author will save the world. “In precisely this way, literature–it would be better from now on to say writing–by refusing to assign a secret and ultimate meaning to the text and to the world as text, liberates what may be called an anti-theological activity. An activity that is truly revolutionary, since to refuse to fix meaning is in the end, to refuse God and His hypotheses: reason, science, law.”
Saronik
Oh dear God. And we’ll end on that note for listening.
