Literary Intermediality

The Transit of Literature through the Media Circuit

von
Maddalena Pennacchia Punzi

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Literary Intermediality – Pennacchia Punzi

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Inhaltsverzeichnis: Literary Intermediality – Pennacchia Punzi

 9

MADDALENA P ENNACCHIA PUNZI

Literary Intermediality: An Introduction

Imagine entering one of the multilevel bookstores which can be found

in any large city around the globe and asking, for example, for Charles
Dickens’s Oliver Twist. Together with a wide variety of book formats
– hardcover, paperback, abridged, illustrated, and so on – you will
also be offered comic-strip adaptations, audio-books, in cassette or
CD, and many a movie adaptation, in VHS and DVD. If you are
an internet-surfer, you might prefer to go on line and look for an
e-book version to download and read on your laptop, perhaps in an
edition with critical notes and links to useful related sites. If the
object of your search is a more recent best-seller, like Harry Potter for
instance, you will very likely find video-games and internet sites with
which you can extend the ‘pleasure’ of the story. If your favourite
singer is someone like Bruce Springsteen or Nick Cave, you will be
able to find their lyrics published in book format, like any poetry
book; if you like Philip Larkin or T. S. Eliot, you might want to listen
to their poems set to jazz music; and if you are a passionate reader of
Tony Harrison you might want to look at his video-poems.
Although the examples given here may seem quite heterogeneous,
when observed from a distance they all appear within the domain of
a common dynamics: in each case a ‘literary message’ has been dis-
seminated in many different media, undergoing a transformation, or
mediamorphosis (Fidler). We can refer to this general phenomenon as
‘literary intermediality’.
Let us, for the moment, put the adjective ‘literary’ between brackets,
being aware that the definition of what is specifically ‘literary’ in a
10 MADDALENA P ENNACCHIA PUNZI

message has been the theoretical problem of the XXth century, and
let us focus on the more urgent question of what the meaning of
‘intermediality’ might be. It is, in fact, a fairly new term which is
gaining ground in the crowded panorama of contemporary critical
jargon. It is a term, though, whose semantic field has not been thor-
oughly defined, although intense work on the subject has been done
since 1997, among others, both by the ‘Centre de recherche sur
l’intermédialité’ (Montréal University) and the ‘Center for Philoso-
phy and Arts’ (Rotterdam University).
The term profits much from its Latin prefix ‘inter’, which means
‘between’. ‘Being between media’ stresses the idea of a message per-
petually crossing the boundaries separating media; a message that is,
i. e. exists, only as and through an incessant movement, never attain-
ing an ultimate shape, and living as many lives as the number of the
media crossed. If we think of inter-mediality as a ‘differing’ move-
ment of the message through a system of interrelated but different
media (Oosterling), we may agree to make a meaningful contrast
with the much more renowned term multi-mediality, where the
emphasis is placed on a centripetal movement, i. e. on the storage of
a plurality of technical codes in the same device, whether off-line or
on-line (Parascandolo). I would also add that while on the multimedial
horizon the ‘literary’ work seems to enjoy a plural identity, condensed
in the same storage device, in intermediality the ‘literary work’ is in
transit, in other words: it is continually translated from one medium
into another, thus acquiring a plurality of identities, generated as a
trace of the movement itself. In this perspective, the idea of ‘inter-
medial movement’ might theoretically be conceived as a further
expansion, in specific technological terms, of Roland Barthes’s theory
of the ‘writerly text’.
It is true that the crossing of media boundaries, as well as those
of genres, is a phenomenon that has always existed in the realm of
‘Literature’ – let us keep those brackets in place for a moment longer
Literary Intermediality: An Introduction 11

– but within a paradigm based on a hierarchical opposition between

the centre and periphery, the original and its reproductions or adapta-
tions (having in mind, for example, adaptations for theatre or cinema
of literary classics).
The transition from the ‘Gutenberg Age’ to the ‘Age of Inter-
mediality’ is marked by the move from a monocentric to a poly-
centric type of logic. The new logic is thus a logic without a centre: it
is the logic of the network. From a monocentric point of view the
adaptation for cinema of great theatrical and narrative masterpieces
was perceived as a migration from the original birthplace towards a
new communication territory to which the ‘literary’ work had to
adapt itself in order to survive (Giuseppe Martella wittily suggested
during the seminar that the word ‘adaptation’ reveals, in this meta-
phorical context, a telling Darwinian connotation). In the metaphor
of migration, therefore, there is an implicit value judgement, fuelled
by a sort of nostalgia, and finally attributing to the written medium
a higher dignity in comparison to the audiovisual ones. I wonder,
however, if this approach to the question is still valid today, when
not only the ‘literary’ message seems to leave the printed page in
order to travel indefinitely through the entire media circuit but, and
even more relevantly, the younger generations do not even perceive,
let alone acknowledge, a priority of the written word over other
semiotic systems. Seen in this perspective, the transit of the ‘literary’
work through different media has become nomadic rather than
migratory (Rosi Braidotti). The ‘literary’ work seems not to have a
fatherland anymore – a birth-place to be left in exchange for asylum
in a new mediatic, definitive homeland – but it keeps moving, seem-
ingly acquiring at any stage a new identity.
This new status of ‘literary’ messages was prompted also by the
extraordinary development of new communication technologies. As
many media critics have pointed out, starting with Nicholas Negro-
ponte, the passage from the analog to the digital marked a revolution
12 MADDALENA P ENNACCHIA PUNZI

in communication practice and theory because digital message

processing transforms lines, colours and sounds into bits, i. e. binary
digits, a sequence of zeros and ones – that Negroponte imagines as
the electronic equivalents of atoms – which can be decoded by the
same data medium thus making any traditional difference among
sign-systems even more fuzzy.
Over the last two or three decades, in fact, the rapid spread of
digital technologies has been creating an increasingly closer inter-
connection among the so-called new-media, speeding up the move-
ment of the message through the whole communication system.
Images, sounds, written texts, recoded in the language of binary
digits can freely circulate in media as different as the radio and tele-
vision, personal computers and mobile phones, digital fax machines,
and so on. It is the conversion from the analog to the digital which
creates an epochal difference between the electric age and the electronic
age, with one crucial consequence for ‘literature’: the book as we
have learnt to know it – an object made of a number of paper pages
where a sequel of letters is printed and spatially arranged in lines
forming columns to be read according to a linear and sequential logic
– becomes only one of the many possible information-storage devices
and not necessarily the first, chronologically speaking, when a ‘literary’
message is involved.
What happens, then, to this most traditional ‘literary’ medium,
the book? Does the technological revolution spell the death of the
book, as some prophets of a near-future brave New World would seem
to suggest (Negroponte)? Or is it rather the logic of intermediality –
a logic that not only calls for the passage from one medium to
another but also refers to the constant exchange between old and
new media – that guarantees, specifically, the survival of the book?
After all, the contemporary debate on the relationship between old
and new media is ever more asserting the idea that new media do not
replace the old ones but establish a symbiosis with them. Old media,
Literary Intermediality: An Introduction 13

on the other hand, while maintaining their own specific traits, generate
new features in the presence of new media (Bolter and Grusin).
But what kinds of alterations affect the book as a specific medium?
This is one of the most important conundrums discussed in the
articles in this volume. But, in order to introduce the question, it is
necessary to go back to the issue of the literary message.
What is a ‘literary’ message? Which is tantamount to asking ‘what
is literature’?
It is almost a commonplace that the very concept of literature has
become more and more difficult to pin down. “There is no essence
of literature whatsoever […] ‘literature’ is a functional rather than
an ontological term”: stated Terry Eagleton in the 1980s (Eagleton,
1983: 8). And I cannot but agree with him that the definition of
literature depends on “how somebody decides to read, not [on] the
nature of what is written” (7). In other words, from a materialistic
point of view, a literary work is a piece of writing to which we
agree to give importance through a series of largely concealed and
historically variable value-judgements generated and reiterated by social
institutions such as schools, libraries, universities, book-prizes, and so
on. Eagleton himself comes to the conclusion that, generally speak-
ing, we could think of ‘literature’ “as a number of ways in which people
relate themselves to writing” (8).
I would suggest, therefore, going back to the very etymology of
the word literature, which in Western cultures, comes from litera, a
letter, that is a single written sign which ‘stands’ for a sound. It is the
same root of literacy, which means being capable of writing and
reading. ‘Literature’ is therefore culturally and historically linked to
phonetic writing; actually we could say that, even today, a ‘literary
message’, in the Western tradition, still has to do with its written
form, whatever be the imaginative experience it conveys.
Many anthropologists, philosophers and scientists consider phonetic
writing as the most revolutionary technology ever invented by the
14 MADDALENA P ENNACCHIA PUNZI

human race, the watershed between prehistory and history, and the
very invention that changed the human way of perceiving the world.
Phonetic writing, born in Greece and spread by Latin culture, is the
invention through which men have been able to store information
with relatively little effort and in a limited space. Derrick de Kerck-
hove, the Canadian philosopher who has further expanded McLuhan’s
reflection on the media, coined the term homme littéré (man of let-
ters), a ‘misspelling’ of homme littré (literate man), in order to stress how
much the alphabet code changed the neurobiological response of
men to the world, previous to any cultural apprehension of it (2002:
268). For his part, the Italian philosopher Carlo Sini, in an essay
entitled Filosofia e scrittura (Philosophy and Writing), suggests that it
is precisely through the invention and use of phonetic writing that
Ancient Greeks ‘invented’ Philosophy, i. e. a critical, detached way of
reflecting on a world translated into language and dissected by
logic. It is perhaps to the loss of that critical distance that modernist
intellectuals as F. R. Leavis and T. S. Eliot, in England, or T. Adorno
in Germany, were referring when they gave vent to their anxieties on
the new illiteracy brought about by mass-media such as the radio,
cinema and television. It cannot be denied that the loss of a critical
distance involves the real risk of becoming ideologically involved with
the content of apparently transparent messages; at the same time,
however, it is also true that new media always betray their artful
nature exactly as they are trying to efface it (what Bolter and Grusin
in their updated critical jargon would call “the double logic of
remediation”).
As I see it, writing remains, when compared to audiovisual forms
of communication, an intrinsically opaque medium, which forces
the user to exert a high degree of involvement to extract meaning. But
more important still is the fact that the act of reading requires a peculiar
quality of time, which is different for each user and intolerant of any
standard, as Proust suggested throughout his work (On Reading).
Literary Intermediality: An Introduction 15

The mediatic specificity of the book seems to me more interest-

ing today than ever, when, after centuries of predominance as the
unchallenged site of writing and, consequently, as the literary
medium par excellence, it has lost its pivotal place, becoming one of
the many possible concretions of a literary message. The logic of
intermediality, in fact, cannot but conceive the book as a communica-
tive ‘stage’, ready to be left in order to be modulated somewhere else,
in another medium (think, for example, of the complex process
through which a written script turns into a film). All the same, it is
precisely in the intermedial perspective that the book, as an object
and a medium, can find again its reason of being; I am convinced
that the book may be considered not only a gymnasium of the
critical spirit, but also a paradigm of the critical distance needed by
the user of the literary work, whatever the medium in which the
latter takes its form, in order for the former to remain subject of the
whole intermedial system.
***
The variety of issues and case studies dealt with in this volume are
evidence both of the transversal nature of intermediality and of the
interest it arouses in all literary fields. For reasons strictly linked
to the contents of the articles, I have divided the volume into four
thematic sections.
The first section, Literary Intermediality and Cinema, is devoted
to one of the most fruitful critical areas in terms of intermediality:
film and literature. Here most of the discussion is about the issue of
adaptation and how writing gradually gets transformed into dynamic
recorded images and sounds.
In Writing, the Body, and Cinema: Peter Greenaway’s ‘The Pillow
Book’, Joy Sisley opens new critical perspectives on adaptation
theory. Sisley’s analysis of Peter Greenaway’s The Pillow Book aims at
demonstrating how the English film director succeeds in overturn-
16 MADDALENA P ENNACCHIA PUNZI

ing the conventional relationship between word and image, drawing

attention to the very materiality of the written sign. Being a film on
writing, written words continually appear on the screen when the
protagonist, Nagiko, inscribes them on the skin of her lover, remind-
ing us, in Sisley’s analysis, that writing is a visual medium. Therefore,
The Pillow Book ideally closes the semiotic gap between word and
image that has been felt as a longstanding contradiction by adapta-
tion theory. From her convincing post-structuralist critical horizon,
Joy Sisley stresses that, “unlike the metaphor of translation in adap-
tation theory, which implies a movement from one place to another
and by default a starting point and a destination, ‘inter’ implies a
place, a position in relation to other places […] Like the metaphor
of the signpost, ‘inter’ points in many directions at once” (41). Sisley’s
bold suggestion, in the end, is that the term intermediality replaces
other terms such as ‘adaptation’ and ‘inter-semiotic translation’ in
Film Studies terminology.
Celestino Deleyto’s essay, From Among the Dead: Identity and Truth
in Filmic Letters, draws our attention to the fact that cinema seems to
be literally ‘haunted’ by the presence of written language, in the form
of letters written by dead characters, letters which, in some cases,
seem even to gain the power to ‘direct’ the filmic action. Starting
from the analysis of the function of the “most famous letter in the
history of cinema” (44), Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948)
by Max Ophüls, Deleyto sets out to analyse three contemporary
examples, Love Liza (2002), My Life without Me (2002) and Happy
Times (2002), in order to find out how they subvert, each in its own
way, the convention that, “the written word feels reliable whereas the
image has a more ephemeral quality” (43). The fixity of written words
on paper, Deleyto suggests, acquires a metaphorical sense by being
linked, in the plot, to dead people, i. e. to those whose identity can-
not change anymore, and makes a meaningful contrast to the flux of
moving images which is the very stuff cinema is made of. There is, in
Literary Intermediality: An Introduction 17

other words, a sort of wrestling between the written and the audio-
visual medium to win the spectator’s trust, which results, in the
examples discussed, in the questioning of the capacity traditionally
attributed to writing to fix human identity once and for all.
In Jane Austen on Screen: Deference and Divergence, Lydia Martin
focuses on the discrepancy between the pre-1995 and the post-1995
productions of Jane Austen’s film adaptations, considering it not so
much in terms of historical accuracy, but in terms of style, acting,
use of camera and sound work. If before 1995 adaptations from Jane
Austen’s novels were static, almost theatrical and mostly indoors,
after 1995, a taste for freedom and ‘fresh air’ pushed its way through
taking the viewers on a journey through the English delightful land-
scape: exterior settings were employed, in Martin’s view, as a technical
means to see Austen’s narratives under an entirely new light, more
palatable to a contemporary audience. In order to carry out her read-
ing, Martins relies on Geoffrey Wagner’s classification of adaptations
into three categories, “a transposition, which tries to remain as close
to the novel as possible; a commentary, which modifies the novel by
bringing to light certain elements or by modifying the overall structure;
an analogy, which only uses the novel as a point of departure” (68).
Leaving aside the first category, Martin reflects on the other two closely
analysing Northanger Abbey (1986), Sense and Sensibility (1995),
Mansfield Park (1999), Clueless (1995), Kandukondain Kandukondain
(2000).
In the section Literary Intermediality and Theatre I have collected
the articles that deal with contemporary theatre. Live performance
has changed radically in the age of analog and digital technology,
and so has the work of playwrights and performance artists.
Johan Callens building on current developments in media theory
and stressing the critical concept of ‘remediation’ launched by Jay
David Bolter and Richard Grusin (1999), presents an essay entitled
Intermediality in David Mamet’s ‘ The Water Engine’, where he evalu-
18 MADDALENA P ENNACCHIA PUNZI

ates the medium-specific transformations this text has undergone

over the years. The story (a melodramatic thriller that takes place in
Chicago during the ‘Century of Progress’ Exhibition) was concocted
by Mamet for the movies, but first put on stage on the basis of its
transformation into a radio play. It was only after several years that it
was adapted for the small screen. This restless media-changing has
had, in Callen’s view, “a profound impact on the work,” causing it to
be “no dead art ‘object’ but a medium similar to radio and television
or cars and planes, or the road and corridors travelled,” (84) thus
widening its scope to a very articulated critique of performance and
media in the postmodern society.
Bruce Barton’s Imaginary Spaces in MacIvor’s ‘House’ focuses on
a specific group of Canadian film productions, i.e. the screenplays
adapted from stage plays by the original dramatists, thus highlight-
ing the relation between cinema and theatre which is becoming, in
Canada, ever more worth investigating. Barton, in his analysis of
House by MacIvor, a one-person play, defines it “a ‘reverent demysti-
fication’ of the concept of theatrical truth” (107), for the only char-
acter, a man whose life has been a chain of unsuccessful events, ironi-
cally called Victor, continually forces the audience to acknowledge
the ‘lie’ on which the ‘house’ of theatre is built. What happens to
this very theatrical model, where the presence of the audience is ab-
solutely necessary to operate the central issue of authenticity and
fraudulence, when it moves to a different medium, i. e. cinema?
Barton’s answer – conceived in the context of an updated audience-
response criticism – is that the film generates and exploits “a specifi-
cally cinematic imaginary space” (107), thus reproducing an effect
on the audience which is an analogue of, but not identical to, that
produced by the play, so that “what the film spectator witnesses is the
potential plenitude in perception itself ” (118).
Karen Bennet in “Star-Cross’d Lovers” in the Age of AIDS: The
Intermediality of Rudolf Nureyev’s ‘Romeo and Juliet’, brings the reader
Literary Intermediality: An Introduction 19

into the world of ballet, which, she claims, has always been a highly
intermedial art, at least since “many ballets take as their starting point
texts that already exist in other media, a verbal text, typically, which
has been transformed into a musical score” (127). It is the case of
Nureyev’s Romeo and Juliet, based both upon Prokofiev’s score and
on Shakespeare’s play. In Bennet’s analysis of the choreography, the
reader’s attention is also drawn to one important factor frequently
underestimated by those who are not ballet scholars, i. e. that, being
an ephemeral art, ballet, more than other performance arts needs
to be fixed with the aid of other media and this means that it must
rely on written and photographic records (for older works) or on
modern technological resources, like videos and DVDs. Stressing the
symbiosis between ballet and modern technologies, Bennet states
that they have even influenced the creation of choreography, since
Nureyev’s staging, in her view, imitates filmic devices such as ‘freeze-
frame’, ‘slow-motion’, ‘cross-dissolve’ and ‘multiple simultaneous
frames’.
In the section Literary Intermediality and Postmodernism I have
collected the essay that can be overtly related to a postmodernist
aesthetics.
In her essay Intermediality in Literature: Bret Easton Ellis and the
MTV Novel, Sonia Baelo Allué states that, “due to our global, image-
driven, electronic culture, we are witnessing a progressive approach
of literature to the languages of mass culture – cinema, television,
radio, popular music and consumer culture” (147) which may come
as a result of the progressive convergence of high and low culture
produced by postmodernism. Focusing on the ‘blank generation’, a
group of contemporary US writers who use intermediality in their
works to represent the reality they live in by mixing, in a very plain
register, references to mass popular products, characters and events,
Baelo Allué selects US author Bret Easton Ellis and the use of MTV
language and style in his first novel, Less Than Zero (1985). In Baelo
20 MADDALENA P ENNACCHIA PUNZI

Allué’s view, Ellis manages to transform MTV style into narrative

prose, imitating the language, style and concerns of MTV television
and aiming at the very same audience: young, fashion-conscious,
urban readers. As a result, the story is reinforced by the MTV-like
structure of the novel, which offers itself as a good example of inter-
mediality in literature.
Barbara Antonucci’s Mediatic Metamorphoses and Postmodern
Novels by Chuck Palahniuk, Bret Easton Ellis and Nick Hornby,
reflects on the way in which contemporary novels are thrown on the
market as if they were fast-consuming cultural products, undergoing
many a mediatic metamorphosis at a cybernetic speed, which seems
to deprive the novel’s author of his / her authorship. In analysing the
best-sellers written by Chuck Palahniuk, Bret Easton Ellis and Nick
Hornby, Antonucci stresses how their novels have been almost
immediately absorbed into cinema production precisely because of
their ‘intermedial elasticity’. In her view, in fact, these film adapta-
tions “look more like an extension of the written text rather than
an alien ‘other.’ As if the written text had been pre-arranged for a
filmic metamorphosis, cinema adaptation of [these] novels appears
complementary and parallel to the written text” (166). Reading the
novels and then watching the movies or vice versa is therefore like
‘zapping’ from one genre to the other, an act for which the “mediatic
body” (181) of the reader /spectator is very well equipped today.
Nancy Isenberg’s Repurposing ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’
in the Postmodern Age argues that the afterlife of Coleridge’s literary
masterpiece – a poem irrefutably in the English Canon – has been
assured by the same spread and development of mass-media that many
critics see as the main cause of the end of Literature: “the very techno-
logical advances responsible for the decline of interest in the written
text have provided new gateways to Coleridge’s poem. And as new
technologies evolved, those gateways soon proved also to be escape
routes for Rime out of the mainstream and into new, previously
Literary Intermediality: An Introduction 21

untrodden territories of cultural ‘otherness’” (184). Ranging from

the analysis of the ‘faithful’ radio drama of Rime broadcast in 1949
by the Canadian Broadcasting Company, to that of the ‘postmodern
classical’ musical score by British composer David Bedford (1970) to
that of animated film versions – in particular Raul DaSilva’s (1976)
and Larry Jordan’s (1977) – ending with the unusual translation of
Rime into ‘heavy metal’ music by Iron Maiden (1984), this essay
charts an updated and refreshing map of the long, ‘strange’ and
exciting journey of the ageless Mariner in the sea of new technology
media.
The last section, entitled Literary Intermediality and New Critical
Issues, aims at investigating how the impact of new media can deeply
change the critical perspective on theoretical issues such as the notion
of author and cultural industry, or the educational question, or the
relationship between the formation of national identity and the
literary imaginary in an intermedial cultural context.
Combining research on newspaper (re)presentation of fiction with
a study of popular media imaginary and depictions of contemporary
consumerism within fiction, Ana Vogrincic’s Literary Effects of Author-
Stardom, shows how reading a certain novel through the evaluation
of its non-literary, commercial context (i. e. as a certain book is
presented in the media) enables us to recognize otherwise perhaps
unnoticed characteristics of the literary work, and thus to open it to
new interpretation. Vogrincic’s essay stems from two different though
thematically connected research findings. The first arises from re-
search on changes in the representation of fiction, mostly novels, in
selected French and English dailies in the period from 1960 to 2000,
while the second derives from a reflection on how commercializa-
tion, popularization and mediatization are mirrored in contemporary
fiction, in the writing process and novelists’ self-presentations, and is
based on the case study of Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho (1991)
as the most representative example of the so-called ‘blank fiction’.
22 MADDALENA P ENNACCHIA PUNZI

The first part of the article deals with the socially mediated literary
context, while the second tries to show how it affects the actual
fiction-creation.
In his essay, Internet, E-Learning, and Critical Distance, Giuseppe
Martella discusses some of the issues concerning the deep changes in
our way of perceiving literature after the World Wide Web revolution.
Starting from the remarks that, “more than a medium, the internet
constitutes a media environment, a technological habitat […] pro-
ducing ways of behaviour and styles of discourse which, by and large,
we can call ‘post-modern’” (222), Martella states that the idea itself
of literacy acquires new meanings in our new hyper-medial environ-
ment. Since the knowledge /power maps of the global village are con-
stantly being re-drawn, we need, in Martella’s view, to re-design the
methods of transmission of this knowledge to the younger genera-
tions, both in the form of specific know-how (competence) and in
that of ways of behaviour (education). Martella extensively discusses
bonds and opportunities set out for literary teaching by the present
multimedia environment. He, therefore, focuses on the use of the
hypertext both as an instrument and as a model of knowledge, while
sketching, at the same time, his theory of ‘critical distance’.
In the last essay, Shaping G / Local Identities in Intermedial Texts:
The Case of ‘Bridget Jones’s Diary’, Maddalena Pennacchia Punzi ex-
plains her idea of intermediality through the example of Bridget Jones’s
Diary. Started by Helen Fielding in 1994 as a column on the Inde-
pendent newspaper, this first person narration of the ordinary life of
a single thirty-something woman living in London, soon became
a novel and a film and is now the model for many blogs on the inter-
net. Over the last ten years, “Bridget Jones has travelled incessantly
through the entire media circuit, winning a wider audience each time
a media boundary is crossed and gaining more and more energy from
the movement” (241). As a self-narrating character, she has suffered
as many mutations as are the number of media through which she
Literary Intermediality: An Introduction 23

(as a narrating I) has transmitted her story: different media have shaped
different Bridgets for different users. Through the intermedial re-
shaping of Bridget and the setting she moves in, a ‘commonplace’
English (local) identity comes to be fashioned for the global market,
one that is made to be laughed at, but that still is a form of national
identity; Pennacchia Punzi proposes to call it a ‘g / local’ identity.

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