11
Intertextuality
Christine Wilkie
The term ‘intertextuality’ is now common in literary discourse. It is used most often and
most simply to refer to literary allusions and to direct quotation from literary and non-
literary texts. But this is only one small part of the theory, which has its origins in the
work of Julia Kristeva (1969) and Mikhael Bakhtin (1973).
Kristeva (1969:146) coined the term ‘intertextuality’ when she recognised that texts
can only have meaning because they depend on other texts, both written and spoken,
and on what she calls the intersubjective knowledge of their interlocutors, by which she
meant their total knowledge—from other books, from language-inuse, and the context
and conditions of the signifying practices which make meanings possible in groups and
communities (Kristeva 1974/1984:59–60). The literary text, then, is just one of the
many sites where several different discourses converge, are absorbed, are transformed
and assume a meaning because they are situated in this circular network of
interdependence which is called the intertextual space.
Kristeva was keen to point out that intertextuality is not simply a process of
recognising sources and influences. She built on the work of Bakhtin, who had identified
the word as the smallest textual unit, situated in three coordinates: of the writer, the
text and exterior texts. For the first time in literary history, the literary text (the word)
took on a spatial dimension when Bakhtin made it a fluid function between the writer/
text (on the horizontal axis) and the text/context (on the vertical axis). This idea replaced
the previous, Formalist notion that the literary text was a fixed point with a fixed
meaning. Bakhtin described this process as a dialogue between several writings, and as
the intersection of textual surfaces: ‘any text is a mosaic of quotations; any text is the
absorption and transformation of another’ (in Kristeva 1980/1981:66).
The theory of intertextuality has also been refined and extended by Jonathan Culler
(1981), and by Roland Barthes (1970/1975), who have included the reader as a
constituent component of intertextuality. Culler described intertextuality as the general
discursive space in which meaning is made intelligible and possible (1981:103), and
Barthes invented the term ‘infinite intertextuality’ to refer to the intertextual codes by
which readers make sense of literary works which he calls a ‘mirage of citations’. They
dwell equally in readers and in texts but the conventions and presuppositions cannot be
traced to an original source or sources. ‘The “I” which approaches the texts [says
Barthes] is already a plurality of other texts, of infinite, or more precisely, lost codes
(whose origins are lost)’ (Barthes 1975/1976:16).