JULIA KRISTEVA &THE THEORY OF INTERTEXTUALITY: AN

INTRODUCTION
by Dudu BAL ZBEK

In 1966 Paris witnessed not only the publication of Jacques Lacan's Ecrits and Michel
Foucault's Les Mots et les choses (The Order of Things), but also the arrival of a young linguist
from Bulgaria. At the age of 25, Julia Kristeva, equipped with a doctoral research fellowship,
embarked on her intellectual encounter with the French capital (Moi,1986:1). Since the mid-
1960s, Julia Kristeva has become influential in international critical analysis, cultural theory,
linguistics, semiotics, psychoanalysis and feminism. She is a Bulgarian-
French philosopher, literary critic, linguist, psychoanalyst, feminist, and most
recently, novelist. Though she was influential in various disciplines, this paper will primarily
focus on her concept of intertextuality and the relevant social theories that led to the
presentation of the concept as a term.

Intertextuality as a term was first used in Julia Kristeva's "Word, Dialogue and Novel" (1966)
and then in "The Bounded Text" (1966-67), essays she wrote shortly after arriving in Paris from
Bulgaria. Kristeva referred to texts in terms of two axes: a horizontal axis connecting the author
and reader of a text, and a vertical axis, which connects the text to other texts. The literary word
is an intersection of textual surfaces rather than a point (a fixed meaning). It is a dialogue among
several writings. The communication between author and reader is always paired with an
intertextual relation between words and their prior existence in past texts; that is, the text is
constructed as a mosaic of quotations and any text is the absorption and transformation of
another. (Kristeva, 1986)

While explaining the term, Kristeva argues that authors do not create their texts from their own
mind, but rather compile them from pre-existent texts. Thus, the text becomes a permutation
of texts, an intertextuality: in the space of a given text, several utterances, taken from other
texts, intersect and neutralize one another (Kristeva, 1980: 36). So, we can say that there are
always other words in a word, and other texts in a text. The concept of intertextuality requires,
therefore, that we understand texts not as self-contained systems but as differential and
historical, as traces and tracings of otherness, since they are shaped by the repetition and
transformation of other textual structures. Rejecting the New Critical principle of textual
autonomy, the theory of intertextuality insists that a text cannot exist as a self-sufficient whole,
and so, that it does not function as a closed system (Martinez-Alfaro, 1996:268).

The term intertextuality was first introduced by Julia Kristeva during 1960s but she was
highly influenced by the previous work of Ferdinand de Saussure and Mikhail Bakhtin. It can
be said that her own work on intertextuality is also an example of the term itself. Both of these
theoreticians and the social, cultural and the political atmosphere of the time were influential in
the process of formalizing the theory of intertextuality. There is no doubt that this concept was
not created ex nihilo out of the fertile brain of Julia Kristeva. But she was the first to use it in
print in an article on Bakhtin, whom she had read in Russian while still a student in Bulgaria,
before she settled in France (Haberer,2007:56).

It was, then, this specific and relatively unusual intellectual background that enabled Kristeva
to take up a critical position towards structuralism right from the beginning. With this
background, she inspired even her teachers at university in Paris such as Roland Barthes and
Lucien Goldmann. The reason why Kristeva right from the start of her career in Paris was in
a position to inspire her own teachers is to be found in her unique intellectual background.
Having equipped with fluent Russian, her Eastern European training enabled her to gain first-
hand knowledge of the Russian Formalists, and - more importantly - of the great Soviet theorist
Mikhail Bakhtin, whose work she (along with Tzvdtan Todorov) was instrumental in
introducing to Western intellectuals (Moi,1986:2). Actually, in her essays The Bounded
Text and Word, Dialogue and Novel, Kristeva introduces the work of the Russian literary
theorist M. Bakhtin to the French-speaking world. Bakhtins work is, today, extraordinarily
influential within the fields of literary theory and criticism, and in linguistics, political and
social theory, philosophy and many other disciplines. However, in the 1960s, his work was
relatively unknown, much of it still unpublished (Allen, 2011:14).

In addition to her intellectual background, any assessment of Julia Kristevas launching of the
notion of intertextuality must surely begin by recalling the social and political context of the
1960s. The late 1960s were in Paris the years when the human sciences made a quantum leap
forward in all directions, with a number of hyper-active, avant-gardist intellectuals trying to
apply the theories and methodologies of those sciences to the study of literature. Foremost were
the fast-developing sciences of post-Saussurean linguistics (Roman Jakobson, mile
Benveniste), post-Freudian psychoanalysis (Jacques Lacan), semiology (Roland Barthes) and
anthropology (Claude Levi- Strauss). It was the heyday of theorists, the years of transition from
structuralism to poststructuralism (not clearly distinguished from what later came to be known
as postmodernism) with also Jacques Derrida, Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault all at work,
the years when all forms of authority were challenged the Government, de Gaulle, tradition,
capitalism, reason, the Establishment, the Author, etc. They were the years that led to the great
libertarian subversive explosion of May 1968 in France, echoed and sometimes amplified in
the campuses of many other countries, notably in Prague, in Belfast, and in North America
(Haberer,2007). Meanwhile in Russia, during the late 1960s and early 1970s, after years of
censorship, many valuable works of certain writers including those of Bakhtins, began to be
rediscovered and republished.

All these developments led to harsh questioning and attacks towards the existing theories in the
intellectual world and finally led to post-structuralist and post-modern theories.
Postmodernism can be viewed as a development of modernism which manifested itself during
the first decades of the 20th century, in the years preceding and following the great fracture of
the first World War. Modernism was characterized by the loss of stable values, by the loss of
belief in the possibility of an objective truth and in the validity of totalizing ideologies, by the
rejection of formal aesthetic theories, the emphasis given to subjectivity, to the discontinuous
and the fragmentary, also by the place given to reflexivity and selfconsciousness in the
production of texts (Haberer,2007:54).

Within this framework, Julia Kristeva presented the theory of intertextuality along with these
developments in the social and scientific context. She used her intellectual background to
introduce the ideas of Mikhail Bakhtin and Russian formalists to the Western scholars and
added her own understanding and conceptualization to the discussion. At this point we should
note that any analysis of Kristeva's theory about intertextuality must begin with her views on
language, since the former is a direct consequence of the latter. Kristeva studied both
Saussurean and Bakhtinian models in linguistics and used their ideas while establishing her
theory of intertextuality. It is viable to cite the Russian literary theorist M.M.Bakhtin as the
originator, if not the term intertextuality, then at least of the specific view of language which
helped others articulate theories of intertextuality. Bakhtin, as we will see, takes a very different
approach to language and is far more concerned than Saussure with the social contexts within
which words are exchanged (Allen, 2011:10). Saussure views language as a generalized and
abstract system but for Bakhtin, language is related to specific social sites, registers, specific
moments of utterance and reception. Saussurean linguistics remains something describable as
abstract objectivism. However, to produce an abstract account of literary language or any
language is to forget that language is utilized by individuals in specific social contexts. Thus,
while Saussure is interested in language as an abstract and ready- made system, Bakhtin is
interested only in the dynamics of living speech (Allen 2011; Martinez-Alfaro 1996).

It is true enough to say that the basis upon which many of the major theories of intertextuality
are developed takes us back to Saussures notion of the differential sign. With the developments
in the specific context of the problematics in linguistics during 1960s, the sign itself being split
into signifier and signified, the very notion of meaning as something fixed and stable, even
though it sometimes had to be deciphered, was lost and replaced by that of the sliding, shifting,
floating signified. Meaning could no longer be viewed as a finished product, it was now caught
in a process of production All the imaginary representations of a solid, identifiable self, or
ego, in control of language and capable of expressing himself, were denounced and replaced by
the notion of a subject intermittently produced by his parole literally spoken by language
(Haberer,2007:56). These post-structuralist views towards the nature of language resulted in a
different perception related to the function of language in forming identities. Influenced with
the ideas of Lacan, post-structuralists viewed language as part of a cultural system which
directly constructs and produces the self. The notion of the self or ego in control of language is
replaced by the idea that language is in control of the self. Similarly, language is not just a tool
to express ideas but it is rather the system which forms those ideas and concepts as well as the
identities. If culture and language are so effective on how people think, then it is difficult to talk
about the originality of the things that the mind produces. When we question originality, we
finally reach the concept of intertextuality in the literary context. Graham Allen (2011) shows
this direct relationship between linguistic perceptions and intertextuality with following words:

Such recognitions about the linguistic and the literary sign force us to reconsider the nature
of literary works themselves. No longer the product of an authors original thoughts, and no
longer perceived as referential in function, the literary work is viewed not as the container
of meaning but as a space in which a potentially vast number of relations coalesce. A site of
words and sentences shadowed by multiple potentialities of meaning, the literary work can
now only be understood in a comparative way, the reader moving outwards from the works
apparent structure into the relations it possesses with other works and other linguistic
structures. (p.12)
With these discussions related to the originality of the literary work, Roland Barthes published
The Death of the Author in 1968 in which he questioned the role of the author and the
meaning of the literary texts. In that essay Barthes states that we know now that a text is not a
line of words releasing a single theological meaning (the message of the Author-God) but
a multidimensional 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 (Barthes, 1978:
146). While formulizing his theory particularly in that essay, Barthes was influenced by
Kristevas intertextuality. Drawing on the concept, we can assume that his ideas were not
original as well. The main ideas related to the originality of the literary work and the authorship
which Barthes later developed had been presented by Jorge Luis Borges and W.K. Wimsatt in
earlier years. On the whole, the death of the Author means that nobody has authority over the
meaning of the text, and that there is no hidden, ultimate, stable meaning to be deciphered
(Haberer, 2007: 58).

Intertextuality has been adapted by non-literary art forms as well. Since Kristeva uses the term
in a general sense in her essays, writers, readers, cultural contexts, history and society, all appear
as texts and textual surfaces. She does not limit it to the actual literary context only. So,
Kristevas semianalytical approach extends beyond the literary text and includes other art
forms, such as music, painting, and dance. Even if intertextuality is by no means a time-bound
feature, it is obvious that certain cultural periods incline to it more than others and that our
century has already witnessed two such phases. In the modernist era, intertextuality is apparent
in every section of culture: literature (Eliot, Joyce), art (Picasso), music (Stravinsky, Mahler),
photography (Heartfield, Haussmann), etc., even if it is interpreted in different ways.
Postmodernism shows an increase of this tendency which now includes films (e.g. Woody
Allen's Play it Again, Sam) and architecture (e.g. Charles Moore's Piazza d'Italia, New
Orleans). Risking some degree of oversimplification, one could say that the pretexts of the
modernist work are normative (these pretexts come from a wide range of epochs and cultures
but the privileged ones are always the canonized and classical texts). The postmodernist work,
by contrast, has as its very aim the levelling down of all traditional distinctions between high
and low: past and present, classic and pop, art and commerce, they all are reduced to the same
status of disposable materials. All in all, the production of art and literature during our century
has become an act of creation based on a re-cycling of previously existing works. (Lesic-
Thomas 2005:5; Martinez-Alfaro 1996: 271)
Direct influence of intertextuality can be observed in many fields. Both some of the modern
and mostly the post-modern work of art convey traces of intertextuality that Kristeva put
forward during late1960s. Many art works produced in accordance with the postmodern sense
of intertextuality, are simply evaluated as attacking traditional art in order to promote some
avant-garde movements and ideals. For example, Marcel Duchamps well known ready-made
L.H.O.O.Q is a pun. It is a humorous use of words to create several possible meanings. It is
generally assumed that Duchamp decided to use his ready-mades, not only to critique
established art conventions, but also to force the audience to discard their preconceived ideas
and look at something with a completely different point of view. Moreover, by making the
personal image of the portrait, (or feminine gender of the Mona Lisa) ambiguous, Duchamp
presents his observers a new perspective on a classical work of art. (Gen, n.d.)

In music, famous composer Nikolaus Decius, adapted J.S.Bachs Matthaus Passion to his
cantatas. Although the musical structure of the cantatas are different, the text follows Bachs
work. The composer composed the same text with different music by using pastiche
method.(nal,2013)

William Blakes work can be another example to show the intertextuality even between
different art forms. Blake's illustrated books were much imitated in the early twentieth century,
and the emergence of radical ideas about alternative futures heightened the appeal of Blake's
prophetic literature. Aldous Huxley took up the idea of The Doors of Perception, in a 1954
book of the same name about mind expansion through ingestion of mescaline. The book takes
its title from a phrase in William Blake's 1793 poem The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. In The
Doors of Perception Huxley told his experiences when taking mescaline. This book was the
influence behind Jim Morrison's naming his band The Doors in 1965. C. S. Lewis took up the
theme of Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell in the preface of his book The Great
Divorce, in which he describes Blake as a "great genius." William Butler Yeats edited a
collection of Blake's poetry and considered himself the inheritor of his poetic mission.

CONCLUSION

Since 1960s, when Julia Kristeva presented the concept of intertextuality by using her
intellectual background in Russian Formalism and especially the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, the
term has been used as an umbrella word for any critical analysis between two or more texts.
With the term intertextuality Kristeva proposed that the text is not an individual, isolated object
but a compilation of cultural textuality. She believes that the individual text and the cultural
text are made from the same textual material and cannot be separated from each other.

Today, intertextuality is used in many other fields in addition to the literary context. Its effects
can be seen in music, painting, movies and dance. With various uses in different fields of art,
the term has had different meanings as well. The fact that the inventor of the term, Julia
Kristeva, has objected to what she sees as the dispersal and devaluation of its meaning, and
even sought at one point to replace it with the term transposition, has done little to dampen
the enthusiasm either of purists keen to preserve her original formulation or of many others who
use the word in a looser sense (Duff, 2002: 54). Because Kristevas theory raises questions
related to the matter of originality, the corpus of texts which are all related to each other is like
a bunch of wires which blend and clash with each other. Thus, the intertext has been compared
with Gilles Deleuzes notion of the rhizome, a network that spreads and sprawls, has no origin,
no end, no hierarchical organization. Analogies have also been made between intertextuality
and the development of hypertexts and of the World Wide Web, free from the dominant linear,
hierarchical models. Postmodern systems of communication have thus created the conditions
for what Ihab Hassan calls the intertextuality of all life. For him, a patina of thought, of
signifiers, of connections, now lies on everything the mind touches. (Haberer, 2007: 57).

REFERENCES
1. Allen, G. (2011). Intertextuality (2nd ed). England: Routledge
2. Barthes, R. (1978). Image-Music-Text. New York: Hill and Wang
3. Duff, D. (2002). Intertextuality versus Genre Theory: Bakhtin, Kristeva, and the Question
of Genre. Paragraph. vol.25, n.1, 54-73.
4. Gen, A. (n.d.). Influence and Intertextuality. Retrieved from www.academia.edu
5. Haberer, A. (2007). Intertextuality in Theory and Practice. Literatura. vol.49, n.5,54-67.
6. Kristeva, J. (1980). Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art. USA:
Columbia University Press
7. Kristeva, J. (1986). Word, Dialogue and Novel. In Toril Moil (ed.), The Kristeva Reader.
New York: Columbia University Press. pp: 34-62
8. Lesic-Thomas, A. (2005). Behind Bakhtin: Russian Formalism and Kristevas
Intertextuality. Paragraph. vol.28, n.3, 1-20.
9. Martinez-Alfaro, M.J. (1996). Intertextuality: Origins and Development of The
Concept. Atlantis. vol.18,n.1/2. 268-285.
10. Moil, T. (1986). The Kristeva Reader. New York: Columbia University Press
11. nal, A. (2013). Metinleraraslk Balamnda Mzik Sanatnda Alnt ve Yeniden retim.
SD Sosyal Bilimler Enstits Dergisi. vol.1, n. 17.