Behind Bakhtin: Russian Formalism and Kristeva's Intertextuality Andrea Lesic-Thomas

Intertextuality is one of those extremely useful and yet strangely vague theoretical concepts: the liberal definition would be that it refers to any form of interrelation between any number of texts, from the instances of clear reactions of one text to another (as in parody, for example) to the more general idea that there is not a single text that does not possess traces of other texts within itself. As Graham Allen points out, the term in its variety of meanings and use has become 'akin to such terms as "the Imagination", "history", or "Postmodernism" '; it is far from being 'transparent' and 'cannot be evoked in an uncomplicated manner'. If the diversity of the current use of the term can be seen as somewhat troubling, its origins appear to be beyond dispute: in 1966, Julia Kristeva, a young Bulgarian scholar, gave a presentation on Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of the novel and the nature of the word/utterance/discourse in the novelistic genres in Roland Barthes's seminar.^ This presentation was later published as a paper in Critique, and then included in Kristeva's book Semiotike: Recherches pour une semanalyse under the title 'Le mot, le dialogue et le roman' ('Word, Dialogue and Novel'). The new term was introduced to replace Bakhtin's own notion of dialogism where it refers to the text as a 'mosaic of quotations, an absorption and transformation of another text'.-^ Taken on since as one of the key terms of literary scholarship,"^ intertextuality has become a term widely used to denote any form of interrelation between any number of texts, and the conceptual change which accompanied this terminological change from 'dialogism' to 'intertextuality' is probably one of the great intellectual repackaging and marketing schemes in recent history.^ It served the double purpose of helping Kristeva establish herself as a voice to be reckoned with in French structuralist circles, as well as introducing those same circles to the world of Bakhtinian thought. In her recent book Intertextuality: Debates and Contexts, Mary Orr tells a similar version of this familiar story, but at the same time proposes

Paragraph

a revision of the 'agreed canon' of theoretical texts on intertextuality, arguing that although Kristeva, Barthes, Genette and Jenny are by now well established in it, German and to some extent also Slavic contributions (such as Russian Formalism and the Bakhtin Circle) are generally ignored.^ However, Orr herself does not discuss the Slavic theories to any greater extent, mentioning Russian Formalism in passing a few times (and Lotman and Soviet Semiotics only as part of a quote from Plottel and Charney's 1978 Intertextuality: New Perspectives in Criticism) and presenting Bakhtin mostly through her analysis of Kristeva. In this context, Orr suggests that Kristeva's role in introducing Bakhtin to the West is, regardless of the fact that Kristeva's views are 'integral to the debate', underrated and that it 'has yet to be fully mapped' (24). Although Kristeva's part in the creation of Western European understanding of Bakhtin does deserve much closer scrutiny and a considerable reassessment, Kristeva's marginalisation in the matteron which Orr insists (23) is not the reason; far from it. Furthermore, Orr's assessment that Kristeva's discussion of Bakhtin's ideas in 'Le mot, le dialogue et le roman' may be 'less Kristeva's manifesto for "intertextuality" than her advocacy of various aspects of Bakhtin's extensive oeuvre', which she rendered 'faithfully', although casting it in a different, Saussurean French context (25-6), is also rather problematic. Instead of having been the neglected pioneer of Western Bakhtinian scholarship, as Orr sees her, Kristeva determined the tone and the terminology of the discussion for a considerable period of time, and her influence is still very strongly felt today. Having been invented by her, the term 'intertextuality' soon caught on not only as a useful terminological tool in structuralist, poststructuralist, post-colonial and feminist literary theory, but also as a term in the newly born Western European Bakhtinian scholarship (or, to be more precise, in the discourse of those literary theorists who acquainted themselves with Bakhtin's thought, rather than of Slavicists who did the same). The full implications of this terminological shift were not fully assessed, and the conceptual change that was implied in it is to a large extent still going unchallenged. I would argue that Kristeva's piece, with its playful simultaneous presentation of several different, and not always fully compatible, theoretical positions, was a highly original intellectual collage, and that its purpose is largely misunderstood. As a playful riff on an already existing theoretical tradition, 'Le mot, le dialogue et le roman' is perfect; its problems start when it is read as a straightforward introduction to Bakhtin's

Behind Bakhtin 3

thought. Tzvetan Todorov even suggested that Bakhtin's own term 'dialogism', which he found too imprecise to be helpful, should be replaced by Kristeva's term 'intertextuality' as the most general and inclusive term for the relations between different utterances, leaving the term 'dialogism' to refer to the actual verbal exchange between two interlocutors, and to Bakhtin's conception of human personality.^ Although his suggestion has not been fully accepted, one often finds the terms dialogism and intertextuality presented as synonymous. For example, Judith Still and Michael Worton present Bakhtin's ideas very much through Kristeva's reading of him, and for them their main term exists as 'dialogism/intertextuality'.^ Although they stress that Kristeva 'privileges the term "text" in order to remove any apparent bias in Bakhtin toward the spoken word' (16),^ they never assess the full impHcations of this terminological merging of two perhaps slightly different concepts. Robert Stam cites Bakhtin as 'one of the source thinkers of the contemporary discussion of "intertextuality" ', which was as a term 'introduced into critical discourse as Julia Kristeva's translation of Bakhtin's conception of the "dialogic"';^ ^ the choice of words here would suggest that Kristeva simply changed Bakhtin's word but that the concept remained the same. I propose here that the notions behind Bakhtin's terms 'dialogism', 'heteroglossia' and 'polyphony', and Kristeva's term 'intertextuality' belong to different conceptual worlds, and that, in creating her concept of intertextuality, Kristeva was probably far more influenced by Russian Formalism than by Bakhtin. I shall first examine the faithfulness of Kristeva's reading of Bakhtin's ideas; I hope to show that her Saussurean interpretation misrepresented some of the basic tenets of Bakhtin's notion of dialogism. Her erasing of the concept of subjectivity from Bakhtin's thought is particularly pertinent here; so is her 'textualised' understanding of the interrelations between literature and language, on the one hand, and history and society, on the other. My argument is that 'intertextuality' and 'dialogism' are two very different concepts that refer to rather different things; it is a testament to the seductiveness of Kristeva's invention that her interpretation of Bakhtin, though misleading in some of its main points, still continues to be highly influential. Secondly, I am going to show the similarities between Kristeva's 'intertextuality' and Russian Formalism's thoughts on the functioning of the literary text, arguing that 'intertextuality' probably owes as much (if not more) to the ideas of Shklovskii, Jakobson and Tynianov as to those of Bakhtin. Through their rejection of the role of the author as an agent in

Paragraph

literary development, their discussions of the interaction between 'high' literature with popular genres, their gradual dismantling of the distinctiveness of the literary text and the eventual conclusion that the literariness of the literary text is perceptible only in contrast with other forms of language use. Formalists are present in Kristeva's discussion of Bakhtin and in her conception of'intertextuality' much more than it is immediately obvious.
Bakhtin's dialogism and Kristeva's intertextuality

Let us first have a closer look at Kristeva's famous essay 'Le mot, le dialogue et le roman' as a piece of Bakhtinian scholarship, rather than as an 'autonomous' piece of literary theory. Considering that this was the text which introduced Bakhtin to the West, and which for many has served as an introduction to his theory, it is important to assess how faithful it is to Bakhtin's own ideas. Firstly, however, we should note that Kristeva's presentation of Bakhtin was based on two of his most important works: the book on Dostoevsky and the book on Rabelais. Kristeva mentions in her first footnote to 'Le mot, le dialogue et le roman' that Bakhtin was at that point working on a book on speech genres. Furthermore, to what extent she was at that point familiar with the essays which were later published in Voprosy literatury i estetiki (in 1975) is difficult to tell, but she probably had at least some idea of what w^as contained in them, at least judging by her references to Bakhtin's differentiation between the novel and the epic.^^ Nevertheless, even if she had no access to any of these essays, the books on Dostoevsky and Rabelais would have given her a very clear idea of most of Bakhtin's main concepts, such as dialogism, polyphony, ambivalence and carnival. Since the first two are quoted as the main source for her concept of intertextuality, I shall concentrate specifically on how Kristeva defined Bakhtin's dialogue and polyphony. In the opening paragraphs of 'Le mot, le dialogue et le roman', Kristeva puts Bakhtin, significantly, in the context of Russian Formalism and the later Structuralist development of that school, with the claim that he was one of the first to replace a static structural analysis of texts with a more dynamic model which sees the literary structure not as existing by itself, but developing in relation to another structure.^"' In this model the literary word, as the smallest analytical unit, is not a point of fixed meaning, but the crossroads of 'textual surfaces', a dialogue of different 'ecritures': that of the writer, the

Behind Bakhtin

addressee (or the character) and of cultural context, past or present. According to Kristeva, by establishing the word as the smallest unit of literary structure Bakhtin places texts within history and society, which are themselves seen as texts that the writer 'reads' and within which he places himself by 'rewriting' them in his texts (82-3). Furthermore, by defming the literary text as a 'mosaic of quotations', as an 'absorption and transformation of another text' Bakhtin, writes Kristeva, replaced the concept of 'intersubjectivity' with the concept of'intertextuaUty' (85). It is at this crucial claim that the problems of Kristeva's interpretation begin. Kristeva's privileging of the word 'text', which, as we have already seen, was noted by Michael Worton and Judith Still as a strategy for removing 'any apparent bias in Bakhtin towards the spoken word', also serves a much larger purpose. In Kristeva's essay, writers, readers, cultural contexts, history and society, all appear as 'texts' and 'textual surfaces', rendering the notion of the human subject, agency and intentionality largely irrelevant. However, as Tzvetan Todorov found troubling, Bakhtin's theory of the novel is, through the concept of dialogue, closely bound up with his theory of human subjectivity, and his ideas about dialogism have as a basis the notion that language itself represents the contradictions and conflicts of the society to which it belongs. The picture that emerges from Bakhtin's various writings on the voices and the languages represented in the novel is a very complex one: the character is an ideologue, his or her actions are fully motivated by the ideas in which he or she believes. These ideas are not something which is mechanically grafted onto the character, but are taken up by the whole of their 'personaUty', as his or her words and ideas enter into dialogical relations with the words and ideas of other characters and those of the author, and, as a result, the character is, much like the human subject, always open to change and never truly finalised. Furthermore, behind this interpersonal and intersubjective dialogue, the broader cultural and social dialogue of different social languages takes place and the perpetual buzzing of the human beehive (reporting and interpreting each other's words) can be heard in the background; and all of this enters into a dialogue with the reader, future and present, and with their own dialogic relationship of the heteroglossia in which they live, and their own personal, social and historic point of view with which they approach both life and the literary text before them. Bakhtin sees the representation of social languages in the novel as bustling with intentionality, subjectivity and agency, and this is

Paragraph

a crucial component of his thought which Kristeva, nevertheless, chooses to omit. It is difficult to ignore the fact that one of the two Bakhtin's works on which she based her essay was Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, in which Bakhtin postulates that Dostoevsky's great achievement is the creation of the polyphonic novel, a literary form whose 'dominant' is the self-aware and self-knowing hero. The whole purpose of novelistic polyphony (to borrow the terminology from Bakhtin's early work ) is that the hero, at long last, can talk back at the author and the reader, and assert their presence not as an objectified representation of an unchanging human soul but as an evolving, creating, future-oriented spirit. The reason for Kristeva's omission of the concept of subjectivity, therefore, could not have been caused by a lack of awareness of certain aspects of Bakhtin's theory, but is clearly an intentional strategy. Clayton and Rothstein note that Kristeva 'transforms Bakhtin's concepts by causing them to be read in conjunction with ideas about textuality that were emerging in France in the mid-sixties'.^^ According to them, 'this textualisation of Bakhtin changes his ideas changes them just enough to allow the new concept of intertextuality to emerge'. More precisely, a Derridian notion of 'writing' 'supplies a dimension that was not present in Bakhtin originally, the dimension of indeterminacy, of differance, of dissemination' (19). In addition to this, they emphasise that 'Kristeva's conception of intertextuality opens several lacunae' not present in Bakhtin, the most important being 'a vagueness about the relation of the social to the literary text' (20). The 'vagueness' can be largely attributed to the omission of the concepts of subjectivity, agency and intentionality, and their replacement by a radically expanded notion of 'textuality' to include all of history and society. It is as if Kristeva takes Derrida's notion of the written text and applies it to the whole of human communication, severing her concept of intertextuality almost completely from Bakhtin's thought. If we compare Bakhtin's extremely complex and vibrant theory of dialogism, heteroglossia and polyphony to Kristeva's notion of'intertextuality' as the absorption and transformation of texts by texts, somehow the latter does not seem to do much justice to the former, unless we are prepared to radically redefine the meaning of the word 'text' to include not just speech, and social and unconscious symbolic systems (as Laurent Jenny proposes Kristeva has in effect done), but also intersubjectivity and a much more agency-driven concept of the interaction of historical and social languages. Quite the contrary to what Kristeva claims, one of Bakhtin's true concerns

Behind Bakhtin

when it comes to the dialogue between texts is that of 'intersubjectivity', should we reaUy insist on replacing Bakhtin's own term 'dialogism' with another term. As Celia Britton puts it, 'the idea of a dialogic text depends upon an extension of the meaning of "dialogue" ', and she identifies three stages of this extension.^^ The first is that of the most common notion of dialogue, where both participants are present and expressing their views. The second 'disembodies' the voice, making it 'assignable to a particular reference point which is no longer a person, but a fairly coherent set of principles, interests and attitudes'. In the final stage, 'the dialogue consists solely of the interplay of various unattached voices, perceptibly different, yet whose various distinctive features do not add up to a particular body of opinion but, instead, to a rather more diffuse original context' (56). Britton notes that Bakhtin's notion of the dialogic text 'contains all three of these levels of dialogue'. Kristeva's reading of him, however, takes just the third meaning into account, diffusing further the notion of context. Instead of 'levels' of dialogism, we are left with 'textual surfaces'; Britton rightly asks 'whether there is much left of Bakhtin's theory once one has eliminated the suspect psychologism', considering that he 'defines characters exclusively in terms of their consciousness' (58). Simon Dentith makes a similar argument. His main point is that Kristeva's interest 'remains a predominantly epistemological one, concerned to show the impossibility of the "truth speaking" authorial voice escaping the same deconstructive considerations which afflict all language'. Bakhtin's focus, on the other hand, 'is at once ethical and social, in which the objection to the monologic "discursive hierarchy" is that it represents a politically unacceptable arrogation of authority'.^'^ Like Britton, Dentith sees in Kristeva's reading of Bakhtin a tendency 'to take one possible emphasis from Bakhtin and draw its implications provocatively' (95). Quite apart from the problem of Kristeva's interpretation of Bakhtin, however, it seems to me that an extremely significant source of Kristeva's 'intertextuality' remained hidden from view. It can hardly be argued that it was Bakhtin who invented 'intertextuality', since the question of relations between texts was one of the main problems occupying the Russian Formalists since the mid-1920s. And this is something Kristeva would have been as aware of as her compatriot Tzvetan Todorov, who edited the Seuil 1965 anthology of Formalist texts.^^ After all, she herself puts Bakhtin in the Formalist context. If we take into account that most contemporary Bakhtinian scholarship tends to read Bakhtin outside of and against Fomialism,^^ let us now

Paragraph

see what happens to Kristeva's intertextuality if we bypass Bakhtin, and focus on the Formalists instead.
Russian Formalists' intertextual theory

As a matter of fact, Laurent Jenny in his 1976 essay 'La strategie de la forme' brought the intertextuality debate back to where one of its origins lay in his reference to Iurii Tynianov, one of most interesting Formalist critics, and to his study of literary parody and literary system in general.^^ Although Tynianov's work belongs to a later stage of Formalist thought, the seeds of it already lay in Viktor Shklovskii's famous early Formalist article 'Art as Device' and its introduction of the concept ofostranenie or defamiliarization, which can only be perceived against the background of other texts. However, the development of Formalist ideas beyond this famous article by Shklovskii needs to be carefully traced out, following Boris Eikhenbaum's often neglected warning that in 'discussing the Formal method and its evolution, it is essential always to keep in mind that a great many of the principles advanced by the Formalists during [1916-1921] had value not only as scientific principles but also as slogans (.. .) spiked with paradoxes in the interest of propaganda and opposition'.^'^ It is important to understand the logic by which Formalists had collectively arrived at their mature view of the functioning of the literary text, and at their own theory of what we now term 'intertextuality'. In the early years of the 'struggle' (as Eikhenbaum puts it) with positivism and symbolism. Formalists discarded the old opposition of 'form' and 'content' as an irrelevant and 'unscientific' mode of looking at literature which can only succeed in turning the literary texts into second-rate philosophy, theology, politics or psychology embellished by pretty words. From the 1860s, literary journalism in Russia was mainly preoccupied with the philosophical and social concerns dealt with in literary works, seeing in literature primarily a vehicle for political, philosophical and religious debate. By insisting that literature does not consist of ideas but of words, not of what is said but how it is said, and thus insisting on the primary importance of form in literary studies. Formalists were in effect trying to 'rescue' literature from the critical approach based on 'a concoction of home-made disciplines' practised by the older generation of literary historians, who, in the words of Roman Jakobson, seemed 'to have forgotten that those subjects pertain to their own fields of study to the history of philosophy, the history of culture, psychology, and so on, and

Behind Bakhtin 9

that those fields of study certainly may utilise literary monuments as documents of a defective and second-class variety among other materials.'^^ Thus, by insisting that the autonomous, literary properties of literature can be found not in the content of literary texts but in their form, they were aiming to free literary studies and, indeed, literature itself from the prevailing subservience to other humanistic disciplines which they deemed unable to grasp the specific properties and with them the intrinsic value of literary works. In this spirit, according to Shklovskii in 'Art as Device', novelty in poetry and the originality of individual poets is observable only in the new ways of treating language (in creating 'devices' for making language look strange and new), and not in the imagery which is historically static, handed down from one generation of poets to the next virtually unchanged.^^ Furthermore, the concept of'art as device' also attacked Symbolists' metaphysical view of poetry as a door into the spiritual understanding of the world and replaced it with the view, shared with the Futurists, that literature is simply a craft that does not need any other purpose beyond its own existence, and that the word does not need to offer any glimpses of other hidden worlds, as it is a world in itself, sufficient and whole.^^ However, once the perceived need for the militaristic and revolutionary spirit diminished, the need to put such radical statements so strongly disappeared as well. As the Formalists' writings shifted from opposition to previous generations of literary critics and historians to the self-assured pronouncements of an established critical school, so the concept of form changed from an autonomous subject of literary study which leaves the questions of the content aside, to a more encompassing view which regarded form as a system whose every 'formal' element has semantic properties. A change in the understanding of the concept of the 'device' accompanied this shift. As Roman Jakobson put it in 1935, Formalism moved from looking at the individual artistic devices to looking at their interconnections:
In the earlier work of Shklovskii, a poetic work was defined as a mere sum of artistic devices, while poetic evolution appeared nothing more than a substitution of certain devices. With a further development of Formalism, there arose the accurate conception of a poetic work as a structured system, a regularly ordered hierarchical set of artistic devices.^^

In his outline of the development of the Formalist method Boris Eikhenbaum traces the evolution of the concept of device in a similar way:

10 Paragraph

The fact of the matter is that the Formalists' original endeavour to pin down some particular constructional device and trace its unity through voluminous material had given way to an endeavour to qualify further the generalised idea, to grasp the concrete function of the device in each given instance. This concept of functional value gradually moved out to the forefront and overshadowed our original concept of device. (TFM, 29-30)

Tynianov's study 'The Problem of Verse Language', according to Eikhenbaum, played a significant role in clarifying this new concept of form beyond its old opposition with content, with the result that 'the concept of form in the Formalist usage, having accrued a sense of complete sufficiency, had merged with the idea of the w^ork of art in its entirety' (27). Together with the evolution of the concepts of the Hterary work and its form, from 'a sum of artistic devices' to system, the need to define more precisely the role that the devices play within that system (their 'function') led the Formalists into a comparative, historical study of literature. The realisation that a function of a device in a text cannot be properly understood if not compared to the functions of the same or similar devices in other texts, in Eikhenbaum's words, 'required branching out into history', as literary periods and their changes provided them with a ready-made context in which to look at literary works (TFM, 30). Literary history itself became the subject of debate, at first along the lines proposed by Shklovskii, who typically extravagantly declared that 'each new literary school is a new revolution, something in the nature of a new class'.^*^ Tynianov revised this initial notion by proposing the word 'evolution' as a more accurate description of literary-historical matters:
If we agree that evolution is the change in interrelationships between the elements of a system between function and formal elements the evolution may be seen as the 'mutations' of systems. (...) They do not entail the sudden and complete renovation or the replacement of formal elements, but rather the new
function of these formal elements?^

In the beginning, this interest in literary evolution was based on principles similar to those of the study of literature in general in the early years of Formalism: the stress was on the literariness of literature, on its specific characteristics independent of its author's biography or of the history of culture in general. This insistence on the 'immanent historical laws' of literary evolution was, however, largely a tactical hypothesis to simplify matters, not an ignorance of other possible ways of studying literature. As Eikhenbaum put it, 'we limit the factors so

Behind Bakhtin

11

as not to wallow in an endless quantity of vague "connections" and "correspondences", which, in any case, cannot elucidate the evolution of literature as such. (...) The central problem of literary history for us is the problem of evolution outside individual personality the study of literature as a social phenomenon sui generis' (TFM, 33). However, Iurii Tynianov clearly asserted that this initial working hypothesis was not good enough and that, if the 'facts of the past' are to be observed, then those facts would have to be defined more clearly within the set of cultural standards belonging to a given epoch of literary history:
The very existence of a fact as literary depends on its differential quality, that is, on its interrelationship with both literary and extraliterary orders. Thus, its existence depends on its function. What in one epoch would be a literary fact would in another be a common matter of social communication, and vice versa, depending on the whole literary system in which a given fact appears. (...) We cannot be certain of the structure of a work if it is studied in isolation. (OLE, 69)

The literary function of a device thus becomes, to use the image used by Medvedev in his poletnical essay 'The Formal (Morphological) Method or Scholarly Salieri-ism', like mortar holding together not only the 'architectonics' of a literary work, but also connecting it to other literary works."'^ Tynianov argued for a comparative, 'intertextual' concept of the literary function and of the Hterary text as a whole:
The interrelation of each element with every other in a literary work and with the whole literary system as well may be called the constructional function of the given element. On close examination, such a function proves to be a complex concept. An element is on the one hand interrelated with similar elements in other works in other systems, and on the other hand it is interrelated with different elements within the same work. (OLE, 68)

Thus an immanent study of a literary work becomes an impossibility. As Tynianov suggests, even with literary criticism of contemporary works that tends to look at each text in isolation, such an abstraction is possible only because 'the interrelationship of a contemporary work with contemporary literature is in advance an established, although concealed, fact' (69). Studying textual interrelations will not only help a critic understand the function of an element, but can also make the registration of its 'tactical' effacement possible (Hke the efFacement of a specific meter or plot structure).

12

Paragraph

However, the study of literary genres and periods also requires their analysis in a wider context and their definition not through their immanent characteristics but through their differential quality with other genres or periods: again, a notion which is clearly based on a theory of 'intertextuality'. For example, Roman Jakobson in his essay On Realism in Art shows that 'realism' (in its broad sense) is a shifting concept based on cultural assumptions, authorial intentions and readers' expectations, and that different artistic devices were intended and perceived as 'realistic' at different points in literary and art history. Whereas at some points those texts (or art works) which used conventional forms and formulations were seen as 'true to life' (by the writer and/or his readers), at other times the breaking of the artistic conventions was perceived as bringing art and its subject matter 'closer to life'. Having shown that the very concept of how reality was conceived of differed in the hands of various artistic schools and movements, Jakobson concludes that 'when a literary historian brilliantly declares that "Russian literature is typically realistic", his statement is tantamount to saying: "Man is typically twenty years old" '. Furthermore, it is not only literary works, periods, genres, etc., that need to be examined within their wider literary context to be understood properly but, according to Tynianov, the whole of the literary system needs to be defined 'first of all' in its relation with other (cultural) systems, keeping in mind that just because they are interconnected, cultural systems in their evolution are not mirror-images of each other (OLE, 72). This branching out does not represent a shift in the Formalists' interest towards the 'extraliterary orders', but simply the relativisation of the concept of literariness and the a'wareness that 'Literature' as such existed in many different guises and under many different definitions throughout its history. Tynianov provides a conceptual space for literature's 'interrelationship with neighbouring orders' through language, as shared by both literature and culture in general, suggesting that Hterature places itself amongst and against them through its 'verbal function' (73). And although Tynianov would argue that literature's interrelationship with other cultural systems is of interest to a literary critic or a literary historian only inasmuch as it helps him define the area that is to be studied, his methodological suggestion takes the literary text apart in ways that will later be associated with Kristeva's intertextuality. Thus, according to Tynianov, the literary historian needs to be aware that the 'lexicon of a given work is interrelated with both the whole hterary lexicon and the general lexicon of the language, as well as

Behind Bakhtin

13

with other elements of that given work' (68). We can see here the very same point that Kristeva attributed to Bakhtin, about the word in the literary text being on the cross-roads of textual surfaces which hnk it to history and society. However, although Bakhtin does say something similar, his theory of language, unlike Tynianov's, includes concepts of agency and subjectivity, which Kristeva's interpretation of him ignores. Kristeva may have been referencing Bakhtin, but she was far more accurately paraphrasing Tynianov. We have seen an extremely significant shift happen in the FormaUst approach: along with the change in the concept of hterary text from a 'sum of devices' to a 'system' or a 'structure', literature is no longer taken for some autonomous phenomenon that exists of and by itself Although Formalists defined it as a social phenomenon 'suigeneris', the awareness that the borders between the Hterary and the extraHterary could be mobile and unpredictable opened up a whole new series of issues that needed to be dealt with. The absolute autonomy from other discipHnes and other domains of culture and society which defined early FormaHsm was replaced by a considered and methodical engagement with them. Roman Jakobson in 1935 made a considerable alteration to his old definition that 'poetry is language in its esthetic function', by saying that 'a poetic work is not confined to aesthetic function alone, but has in addition many other functions.'^"^ This recognition that diverse cultural and social functions coexist within a Hterary text, organised by the aesthetic function as its dominant, rather than as its sole purpose,"^^ called for a new approach to Hterary works. Jakobson and Tynianov, in their 1928 article 'Problems in the Study of Literature and Language' created a programme that the Prague structuralists were already taking up in the Formalists' stead.'^ 'Problems in the Study of Literature and Language' is a very dense short text, organised into eight main points."'^ Although the title suggests an overview of a wide range of topics connected with the study of literature and language, the article itself focuses on two main themes: the problems of literary history and the definition of linguistics and the study of literature as seen through Saussure's Hnguistic project (therefore, using the very language into which Kristeva was 'translating' Bakhtin). Jakobson and Tynianov relate the history of Hterature to other 'historical series' (different aspects of culture in general), and suggest that the correlation between the different historical series should be investigated by elucidating the 'complex of specific structural laws' that characterizes each of them. In order to do that, every element, literary or extraHterary, which is

14 Paragraph

introduced into the investigation must be considered 'from a functional point of view'. The article also presents a very early discussion and critique of the Saussurean distinction between synchronic and diachronic axes of investigation and suggests that, since 'this fruitful hypothesis' has shown that language has a systemic character at every point of its existence, the same might prove to be true of diachronic series, the study of which must also begin. We have seen that Russian Formalists, and Tynianov in particular, had by that point already embraced the idea of the systemic nature of literary evolution, and of the way the very concept and corpus of literature changes through history and through its relation with other historical series. Jakobson and Tynianov phrase this clearly: 'The history of a system is in turn a system. Pure synchronism now proves to be an illusion: every synchronic system has its past and its future as inseparable structural elements of the system' (79-80). Literary periods contain in themselves their own past and intended future, by embracing 'not only works of art which are close to each other in time but also which are drawn into the orbit of the system from foreign literatures or previous epochs', and rearranging the hierarchy of periods and genres (80). Furthermore, Jakobson and Tynianov address yet another crucial distinction of Saussure's linguistics: that of langue and parole. While admitting that this distinction has been 'exceedingly fruitful' for Hnguistics, they insist that the relationship between 'the existing norm and individual utterances' must be reworked independently for the purposes of literary study. As they put it, in literature 'the individual utterance cannot be considered without reference to the existing complex of norms' (80). What is implied in this assertion is that, while Hnguistics defmes itself through its study of langue, literary studies are defined by their interest in literary texts, in literary parole, which, however, cannot be understood properly without an understanding of the literary langue. The reason why they insist on the importance of the study of the complex of literary norms is that they believe that any study of a literary work which disregarded this complex would 'inescapably deform the system of artistic values under consideration, thus losing the possibiUty of establishing its immanent laws'. A literary text is thus intertextual in its essence. As they say, 'a disclosure of the immanent laws of the history of literature (language) allows us to determine the character of each specific change in Hterary (Hnguistic) systems' (80). However, immanent laws are certainly not all we need to know in other to understand the way literature functions and changes:

Behind Bakhtin

15

These [immanent] laws do not allow us to explain the tempo of evolution or the chosen path of evolution when several, theoretically possible, evolutionary paths are given. This is owing to the fact that the immanent laws of literary (linguistic) evolution fomi an indeterminate equation; although they admit only a limited number of possible solutions, they do not necessarily specify a unique solution. The question of a specific choice of path, or at least of the dominant, can be solved only by means of an analysis of the correlation between the literary series and other historical series. (801).

Thus, not only has the literary text as an early Formalist autonomous entity been all but dissolved into intertextual relations, but literature itself became closely bound to history and society. And all of this is achieved through a notion of textuality that, unlike Bakhtin's theory of literature and language, does not engage with the questions of agency and intersubjectivity. We can see Kristeva's concept in the Formalists' idea that the changes in literature come about through parody and writers' literary reaction to each other; in the idea that 'differential quality' determines the nature of literary phenomena and that the structure of a text cannot be understood if studied in isolation; in the idea that, as Kristeva puts it, a literary text is a structure which does not exist autonomously, but develops in relationship to another structure; it can be seen even in the very idea of hterary evolution in that hterary context influences the individual work and the individual work brings changes to the context. It can certainly be seen in Jakobson and Tynianov's reworking of Saussure. According to Tynianov:
'Word' as an abstraction resembles a vessel that is fiHed anew with each appearance, depending on the lexical structure in which it occurs and on the functions borne by each aspect of speech. It is a sort of cross-section of these various lexical and functional structures.-'^

This is both the idea and the terminology of Kristeva's discussion of Bakhtin; the notion of 'intertextuaUty' can be derived almost entirely from the Formalists' theories of literature and language. So why did Kristeva need Bakhtin as a vehicle for its creation; what did his theories give her that the Formalists could not?
Conclusion: A Bakhtinian legacy in the concept of 'intertextuality'

By 1928 and the end if its official hfe as a movement, Russian Formalism was already addressing Saussurean legacy, questioning it and developing it. As we have seen, one can find Kristeva's concept of 'intertextuality' in Russian Formalist notions of literary interrelations

16 Paragraph

and her Saussurean language was shared by mature Formalism. The same can most certainly not be said of the Bakhtin of the texts to which she would have had access. However, there is one aspect of Kristeva's notion of intertextuality which is very Bakhtinian: a deductive approach to the problems of literature and language. It seems to me that Kristeva combined this aspect of Bakhtin's thought with mature Formahsm's hypotheses, which were also shared to some extent by the French structuralists whom she was addressing at the time. Bakhtin created a complex set of theories about literature and culture by combining his early theories of the dialogic nature of the human personality with his later dialogic theories of language. The words 'voice' and 'intention' are of crucial importance in Bakhtin's theory, as much as 'function' and 'literary interrelations' are in the theory of late Formalism. However, Bakhtin is more interested in the way literature relates to the dialogism of language and culture than in the way literature relates to itself Bakhtin's idea of 'intertextual' relations in literature is an extension of his initial premise that each word uttered carries with it a ^vhole set of resonances of other voices uttering the same words with other intentions; it is just that literary texts, and the novel in particular, are generically best equipped to allow that dialogism to be heard. His method is purely deductive. The Formalists' method, however, is one of empirical induction: by looking at a large body of literary texts and studying the devices employed in those texts, they came to the conclusion that all these devices had different functions which were defined by their differential quahty and not by some immanent properties; the logic of the argument brought them to the conclusion that literature itself can only be differentially defined in the context of other cultural systems. The idea that the literary system was interrelated with other systems and defined against them led to the idea that words themselves are defined by their context and in perpetual interplay with each other, just as literature is in perpetual interplay with itself Kristeva is much closer to the Formalists' conclusions than she is to Bakhtin's; however, it would appear that she combined Bakhtin's deductive logic about the nature of language and its behaviour in literature with the Formalists's inductive conclusions about the nature of literary textuality, which excluded agency and intersubjectivity. Her interpretation of Bakhtin sho^vs both how close Bakhtin ^vas to some Formalist ideas (there are obvious similarities between Bakhtin and Tynianov, for example), but also how difficult it would be to reconcile his intersubjective dialogism and their literary evolution.

Behind Bakhtin

17

Kristeva's concept of intertextuality, like the Russian Formahsts' ideas on literary evolution, literary system and the functioning of the individual text within them, implies a largely agency-free process of structuration, of texts reacting to other texts. Furthermore, her notion that the dialogic text transgresses the ordinary linearity of discourse and its links w^ith the established order, although based on the combination of Bakhtin's notions of dialogism and carnival, can also be traced to Shklovskii's defamiliarization or ostranenie. Although the dialogic and the carnivalesque share an overlapping conceptual space through their roles in Bakhtin's theory of the novel and its development, Bakhtin leaves them largely separate from each other, to the extent that he does not claim that the dialogic text is necessarily transgressive, and even the degree of carnival's perceived level of transgression is debatable; arguably, its role is to provide a vent for frustrations, so that the established order can re-establish itself and escape unharmed. The role of Shklovskii's ostranenie, however, is far more revolutionary: it produces a complete perceptual overhaul, sensitizing us to the strangeness and sensuality of the world. Bakhtin was no revolutionary in the sense in which Kristeva reads him; Shklovskii, on the other hand, along with most other Formalists, was. The modernist references of Kristeva's essay also point squarely to the Russian Formahst championing of modernist texts and away from Bakhtin's decidedly more conservative literary taste (his appreciation of literature pretty much stops with Dostoevsky). So, if Bakhtin gave Kristeva some of his seductive terminology, I believe that the Formalists gave her most of the theories behind it. In a way, 'Le mot, le dialogue et le roman' is as much a representation of Formalist thought through Bakhtinian terminology, as it is a representation of Bakhtin's thought through Saussurean terminology. Through its double-voiced construction, Kristeva's own text not only proposes but also performs its own intertextuality, and the word is here used in its precisely Kristevan meaning; it is an inventive montage of ideas that come from a variety of sources, an 'interplay of various unattached voices' (as Britton puts it), whose identity and historical subjectivity are not always considered relevant. The result is, of course, an entirely Kristevan term without which hterary theory would be much poorer. NOTES
1 Graham Allen, Intertextuality (London, Routledge, 2000), 2.

18

Paragraph

2 In his short article from 1970 entitled 'L' etrangere', Barthes stressed as one of her great achievements the introduction of the notion that the science of languages is a necessarily dialogic endeavour, thinking of itself as simultaneously science and writing, analysing itself and its own critical procedures as it analyses different types of languages (Roland Barthes, Oeuvres completes II: 1966-1973 (Paris, Seuil, 1994), 860-2). 3 Julia Kristeva, 'Le mot, le dialogue et le roman', Semiotike: Recherches pour une semanalyse (Paris, Seuil, 1969), 82-112; 85. 4 But also of other disciplines within cultural studies; see, for example, Intertextuality and the Media:from Genre to Everyday Life, edited by Ulrike H. Meinhof and Jonathan Smith (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2000). 5 According to Dosse, Kristeva chose to present Bakhtin, because she 'had immediately understood structuralism's historical limitations and intended to palliate these shortcomings with Bakhtin, and lend "dynamism to structuralism"' (Francois Dosse, History of Structuralism, 2 vols, translated by Deborah Glassman (Minneapohs, University of Minnesota Press, 1998), vol. 2, 55). Or, as Kristeva herself put it in an interview with Dosse: 'It was at that point that I created the gadget called intertextuahty' {Ibid.). 6 Mary Orr, Intertextuality: Debates and Contexts (Cambridge, Polity Press, 2003), 6. 7 On the German side, Orr in particular cites the following volume: Intertextualitdt: Formen, Funktionen, anglistische Fallstudien, edited by U. Broich and M. Pfister (Tubingen, Niemeyer, 1985). 8 Tzvetan Todorov, Mikhail Bakhtine: le prindpe dialogique (Paris, Seuil, 1981), 95. It needs to be said that Todorov's presentation of Bakhtin's thought is on the whole much more faithful to Bakhtin than to Kristeva's notion of intertextuahty. 9 Judith Still and Michael Worton, 'Introduction' in Intertextuality: Theories and Practices, edited by Michael Worton and Judith Still (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1990), 1-44, 17. 10 However, the radical (Derridian) distinction between the spoken and the written use of language is not particularly important to Bakhtin, and does not play a large part in his thought. Besides, as Laurent Jenny notes, Kristeva enlarged the notion of 'text' to the point where it refers not just to literary works and written texts, but also to oral use of language, and social or unconscious symbohc systems (Laurent Jenny, 'La Strategie de la forme', Poetique 27 (1976), 257-81; 261). 11 Robert Stam, 'Mikhail Bakhtin and Left Cultural Critique', in Postmodernism and Its Discontents, edited by E. Ann Kaplan (London, Verso, 1988), 116-45; 132. 12 'Epic and Novel' appeared in the 1975 collection, but was written in 1941. 13 Semiotike, 83.

Behind Bakhtin

19

14 Mikhail Bakhtin, T7je Dialogic Imagination: Four essays by M. M. Bakhtin, translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin, University of Texas Press, 1996). 15 Mikhail Bakhtin, Problemy poetiki Dostoevskogo (Moskva, Sovetskaia Rossiia, 1979), 58-68. 16 See Mikhail Bakhtin, 'Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity', in Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, edited by Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov, translated by Vadim Liapunov (Austin, University of Texas Press, 1990). 17 Jay Clayton and Eric Rothstein, 'Figures in the Corpus', in Influence and Intertextuality in Literary History (Madison, The University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), 3-36; 18. 18 I would argue, though, that with such an expanded meaning the term 'text' becomes rather meaningless, as it covers nearly all types of human communication, both as process and as product, without telling us very much about how such communication takes place. Soviet Semiotics, through its concept of 'semiotic modelling systems', has found ways of discussing social communication in similar ways to what Kristeva attempts to do here, but in a much more subtle and productive manner. See, for example, B.A. Uspenskij's 1974 article 'Historia sub specie semioticae' (in Soviet Semiotics: An Anthology, edited by Daniel P. Lucid (Baltimore, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988). Soviet Semioticians already started developing these ideas in the second half of the 1960s, and their influence on Kristeva's concept of 'intertextuality' is something else that needs to be closely examined. 19 Celia Britton, 'The Dialogic Text and the Texte Pluriel', Occasional Papers 14 (1974), 5268; 55. I am grateful to Karine Zbinden for pointing this paper out to me. 20 Simon Dentith, Bakhtinian Thought: An Introductory Reader (London, Routledge, 1995), 94. 21 Theorie de la litthature, edited by Tzvetan Todorov (Paris, Seuil, 1965). 22 A move which is not always productive, but that is a different story. 23 'La strategie de la forme', 261. There is a discussion of Jenny's article in Jonathan CuUer, The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), 101-18. 24 Boris Eikhenbaum, 'The Theory of the Formal Method', Readings in Russian Poetics: Formalist and Structuralist Views, edited by Ladislav Matejka and Krystyna Pomorska (Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1971), 3-37; 19. This article will henceforward be referred to as TFM. 25 Roman Jakobson, 'Sketch 1', Recent Russian Poetry, ('Nabrosok pervyi', Noveishaia russkaia poeziia, Prague, 1921; quoted in Readings in Russian Poetics, 8). 26 Victor Shklovsky, 'Art as Device', Theory of Prose, translated by Benjamin Sher (Elmwood Park, Dalkey Archive Press, 1990), 1-14.

20 Paragraph 27 Tzvetan Todorov comments on the disparity between the two concepts which seemed to exist together in the FormaUsts' (or at least Shklovskii's) writing: the concept of artistic 'autotelism, or the absence of any external function' with the concept of ostranenie (defamiliarization, 'making it strange') which would imply that art does have an external function, namely to renew our perception of the world. (Tzvetan Todorov, Literature and its Theorists, translated by Catherine Porter (Ithaca, New York, Cornell University Press, 1987), 20-4). 28 'The Dominant', Readings in Russian Poetics, 85. 29 A similar chronology, with a detailed discussion of the evolution of Formalist ideas from the concept of 'machine' to 'organism' to 'system' can be found in Peter Steiner, Russian Formalism: A Metapoetics (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1984). 30 Shklovskii, 'Literature without a Plot: Rozanov', Theory of Prose, 189205; 190. 31 Tynianov, 'On Literary Evolution', Readings in Russian Poetics, 66-78; 77. Henceforward OLE. 32 Pavel Medvedev, 'The Formal (Morphological) Method, or Scholarly Salieriism', translated by Ann Shukman, in Bakhtin School Papers, edited by Ann Shukman (Oxford: RPT Publications, 1983), 51-65; 59. 33 Roman Jakobson, 'On Realism in Art', Readings in Russian Poetics, 38-46; 43. 34 'The Dominant', 83. 35 In this text we can already see the basic idea behind Jakobson's famous structuralist article 'Linguistics and Poetics'. 36 In Russia itself, the problematic of Tynianov's and Jakobson's article would have to wait for the end of Stalinism and the rise of Soviet Semiotics (with Iurii Lotman as its most talented representative) in the 1960s to get a second hearing and a new lease of life. 37 Tynianov and Jakobson, 'Problems in the Study of Literature and Language', Readings in Russian Poetics, 79-81. 38 Tynianov, 'The Meaning of the Word in Verse', Readings in Russian Poetics, 136-48; 136. 39 However, later Bakhtin comes closer to the Formalist theory of genres. See Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, translated by Vern W. McGee (Austin, University of Texas Press, 1999). See also Igor Shaitanov, 'The Concept of the Generic Word: Bakhtin and the Russian Formalists' in Face to Face: Bakhtin in Russia and the West, edited by Carol Adlam, Rachel Falconer, Vitalii Makhlin and Alastair Renfrew (Sheffield, Sheffield Academic Press, 1997), 233-53. 40 'Le mot, le dialogue et le roman', 100.