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Home , Intertextuality, Transtextuality

351

Pauline Rafferty - Department of Information Studies, Aberystwyth University, UK

Genette, , and Knowledge Organization

Abstract Recent approaches to KO have explored the notion of intertextuality and considered ways in which such abstract concepts derived from might form the foundation for the design of and rich information retrieval systems. In this paper, the notion of intertextuality is examined, and its use by knowledge organization researchers explored. Gerard Genette’s work in particular has been used with some success to map out the possibilities offered by applying the concept of intertextuality to the design of information retrieval systems. The paper will examine some KO systems which reveal the traces of intertextual poetics in their design, including the FRBR model which in its mapping of intertextuality, articulates some of Genette’s categories while stopping short of actualising the more subjective and interpretative categories. The paper concludes with speculation about whether and how these categories might be accommodated in a Web 2.0 interactive digital bibliosphere.

Background For centuries, librarians have constructed catalogues, classification schemes and other search and discovery tools with a view to making texts accessible to readers. Underpinned by a philosophy that is optimistic about the emancipatory possibilities of knowledge, librarians seek to promote their collections. The concept of intertextuality is of some interest in theorizing the relationship between text and metadata models, both in and beyond library catalogues, and the influence of intertextual poetics can be seen in the design of models such as FRBR.

Intertextuality Although term intertextuality was coined by Kristeva (1986), the concept has been explored in various ways, and using various terminologies, by many philosophers and literary theorists (Bakhtin, 1981, Kristeva, 1986, Barthes, 1981, Bloom, 1973). For Barthes, who wrote about intertextuality in idealist terms, the traditional notion of the individuality of the author is subverted through the concept of intertexts and the web of textuality. He argued that: ‘[a]ny text is a new tissue of past . Bits of code, formulae, rhythmic models, fragments of social languages, etc., pass into the text and are redistributed within it, for there is always language before and around the text.’ (Barthes, 1981, p. 39). This idealist approach to intertextuality is far removed from the interpretations of interrelationships between texts found in Harold Bloom’s thesis about ‘the anxiety of influence’ (1973), but an interest in the notion of what might be broadly called intertextuality permeates the writing of a range of literary critics of the 20th and early 21st century (Worton, M. J., & Still, J.,1991, p. 15). Humanist and materialist approaches to the interrelationships between texts see documentation as practice, so that material documents have relationships through human agency with other documents, anterior in historical time, and also contemporaneous. The idea of ‘influence’, however, has significance across a broad range of positions. While intertextuality as a concept came to the fore through the works of Kristeva and Barthes, it would be inappropriate at the very least to suggest that either theorist should be considered a point of origin. For Kristeva, the text is considered as ‘a mosaic of ; any text is the absorption and transformation of another’ (Kristeva, 1986, p. 37). Barthes, as mentioned earlier, makes a distinction between ‘work’ and ‘text’. 352

For him, ‘work’ is the ‘material book offering up the possibility of meaning, of closure, and thus of interpretation’ (Allen, 2011, p. 66). ‘Text’ is used to refer to the force of writing which although it is ‘potentially unleashed in some works, is in no sense the property of those works’ (p.66). For Barthes and Kristeva, it seems that only Modernist and Postmodernist really offer text, space for the reader to become fully active in the production of meaning (p. 68). Thus defined, there would seem to be little space for intertextuality in librarianship and bibliographic description, however there is another approach to intertextuality, through the works of structuralist literary theorist, Gerard Genette, that has proved to be quite productive. In Palimpsests: literature in the second degree (1982), Genette outlines five types of transtextual relationships (Genette uses the term to denote what others generally mean by intertextuality). These relationships are: • Intertextuality: which he defines in a more restricted way than Kristeva to mean a ‘relationship of copresence between two texts or among several texts’ (Genette, 1982, pp.1-2) and ‘the actual presence of one text within another’ (p. 2). Its most literal form is , but it also covers and . • Paratextuality: those elements which help to direct and control the reception of a text, for example titles, subtitles, intertitles, prefaces, postfaces, notices, forwards (p. 3). This set of relationships also includes interviews, publicity, reviews by critics. Allen describes paratextuality as being the threshold of the text (Allen, 2011, p. 101). • Metatextuality: ‘is the relationship most often labeled ‘commentary’ (Genette, p. 4). It unites a given text to another, of which it speaks, without necessarily citing it (without summoning it), in fact sometimes without naming it. Genette’s example is of Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Mind ‘allusively and almost silently’ evoking Diderot’s Neveau de Rameau (p. 4). • Hypertextuality: by which he means ‘any relationship uniting a text B (which I shall call the hypertext) to an earlier text A (I shall of course call it the hypotext) upon which it is grafted in such a manner that is not that of commentary’ (p. 5). He draws attention to the provisional status of this definition. The derivation may be direct, such as when one text ‘speaks’ about another, or it may be that the hypertext cannot exist without the hypotext, a relationship Genette calls a ‘transformation’. An example of this might be the relationship between the and Joyce’s . A text derived from an earlier text through simple transformation, Genette refers to as a transformation. If it is an indirect transformation, he refers to it as an (6). that are officially hypertextual are , and travesty (9) but Genette moves beyond those to discuss also self-expurgations, excision, and reductions. He produces a table which maps out a whole range of hypertextual relations according to mood, from serious to playful. • Architextuality: which refers to the genres and models of discourse: ‘the entire set of general or transcendent categories – types of discourse, modes of enunciation, literary genres – from which emerges each singular text’ (p. 1).

Traces of Genette’s poetics are to be found in some recent developments in knowledge organization systems, which in itself might be said to provide evidence of the all- pervasive nature of intertextuality. 353

Intertextuality in Knowledge Organization systems Genette’s categories have been used by Vernitski (2007) and Bartlett and Hughes (2011) in an explicit way in attempts to construct frameworks through which to theoretically describe and illustrate innovative bibliographic tools for fiction. Vernitski, designing a potential intertextuality-orientated fiction retrieval tool for academic use, argues that the work to work relationship in FRBR is the most relevant for an intertextuality-oriented fiction classification scheme. Writing in 2006/7, and using an earlier version of FRBR, she felt that there are some FRBR relationships that would be useful in developing an intertextual retrieval tool, however, even they were not without their limitations. Eventually Vernitski decided that neither FRBR’s set of relationships, nor Beghtol’s EFAS set of relationships (1994) provided her with quite what she needed to map out literary intertextuality, so she devised her own categories: Quotation, Allusion Variation and Sequel (Vernitski, 2007).

Table 1: Notations in Vernitski’s Fiction Intertextually-orientated classification

Quotation Q Exact Quotation Q/Ex Misquotation Q/Mis Allusion A Title A/T -Title of Work A/T/Wor -Title of a Section or Chapter in a work A/T/Sec Name A/N -Character Name A/N/Cha -Place Name A/N/Pla -Institution Name A/N/Ins -Concept Name A/N/Con Variation V Theme V/Th Form V/Fo Sequel S

Bartlett and Hughes show how Genette’s typology can be used to create a mapping of intertextual relations using ‘’ as an example. They include a diagram showing their mapping expressed in Linked Data, and they suggest that such an approach could result in the creation of rich retrieval tools, such as library catalogues and reading lists. In their model, they trace the relationships beyond literary texts, using LCSH, and suggest that through ‘modeling literary relationships within a broader context, we can see the development of literature in a wider cultural context’ (p.164). 354

Both Vernitski and Bartlett and Hughes refer not only to Genette but also to IFLA’s FRBR model in their exploratory studies. The Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) entity-relationship module is the product of a working party set up by IFLA in 1997 to develop new approaches to bibliographic description and is documented in FRBR (2009). FRBR’s entity-relationship model identifies groups of entities and the relationships between them. Group 1 includes the entities: work, expression, manifestation and item. Work is described by FRBR as ‘a distinct intellectual or artistic creation.’ ‘A work is an abstract entity; there is no single material object one can point to as the work. We recognize the work through individual realizations or expressions of the work, but the work itself exists only in the commonality of content between and among the various expressions of the work’. (p 17) The second entity defined in the model is expression which is defined as: ‘the intellectual or artistic realization of a work in the form of alpha-numeric, musical, or choreographic notation, sound, image, object, movement, etc., or any combination of such forms. An expression is the specific intellectual or artistic form that a work takes each time it is "realized." Expression encompasses, for example, the specific words, sentences, paragraphs, etc. that result from the realization of a work in the form of a text, or the particular sounds, phrasing, etc. resulting from the realization of a musical work. The “expression” entity has boundaries but in relation to the “work” entity, boundaries are more fluid and seem to be dependent to some extent on cultural relativity: “the concept of what constitutes a work and where the line of demarcation lies between one work and another may in fact be viewed differently from one culture to another.’ (FRBR 2009, p. 19)

The third entity defined in the model is ‘manifestation: the physical embodiment of an expression of a work’ (p. 21), while the item is a single exemplar of the 355 manifestation. There is much debate about the expression and work entity levels in the literature and some commentators suggest that in practice, these two levels might end up being dissolved into one level (Carlyle, 2006). While on the one hand the FRBR model imposes the logocentrism of the ideal signfied, on the other hand the FRBR model, through its emphasis on relationships, allows for the development of rich intertextual bibliographic information systems in a way that, arguably, AACR and other earlier bibliographic standards did not. In the FRBR model, we can see evidence of Genette’s influence in the mapped relationships. The work-to-work relationships include the following types: successor, supplement, complement, summarization, , transformation, imitation. The inclusion of the categories ‘transformation’ and ‘imitation’ seem in particular to reveal the trace of Genette’s intertextual poetics (see Tables 2 and 3).

Table 2: Work-to-Work Relationships

Relationship Type Referential Work Autonomous Work Successor Sequel Sequel has a successor  Succeeding work is a successor to Supplement Index Supplement has a supplement  Concordance Appendix supplements Teacher's guide Gloss Supplement Appendix Complement Cadenza Incidental music has a complement Libretto Musical setting for a text  Choreography Pendant complements Ending for unfinished work Summarization Digest has a summary  Abstract is a summary of Adaptation Adaptation has adaptation  Paraphrase is an adaptation of Free Variation (music) Harmonization (music) Fantasy (music) Transformation Dramatization has a transformation  Novelization is a transformation of Versification Screenplay Imitation Parody has an imitation  Imitation is an imitation of Travesty 356

Table 3: Whole/part work-to-work relationships

Relationship Type Dependent Part Independent Part Whole/Part Chapter, Section, Part, etc. Monograph in a series has part  Volume/issue of serial Journal article is part of Intellectual part of a multipart work Intellectual part of a Illustration for a text multipart work Sound aspect of a film

In relation to hypertextuality, and indeed metatextuality, Genette points out that some of the recognition of such relationships comes from the reader(s). This is of some interest in developing a model for bibliographic description because it takes us to the very threshold of authority and interpretation, and there might well be differences of opinion on how far intertextual mappings should go. Vernitski, for example, is very clear about the need to locate the source of any relationship claim in her approach. For her system, any claim should be sourced in published and textual analysis, and the source for any relationship claim should be cited (see Table 4).

Table 4: An example using Vernitski’s intertextuality based classification

Work 1: Mary Shelley, Frankenstein Work 2: Cornelius Agrippa, Three Books of Occult Philosophy Type of link: Allusion – Character A/N/Ch Source: David Margolies, ‘From Social Bond to Contract: Debt in Rabelais and Shakespeare,’ New Comparison 33 – 34 (Spring – Autumn 2002): 27 – 37

LibraryThing is another system that reveals traces of intertextual poetics and is of some interest in relation not only to FRBR and intertextual approaches to knowledge organization, but also in relation to the ‘work’ category that underpins FRBR. Although it is a home cataloguing system rather than an authoritative library system, and works as a wiki, its implementation of relationship information in LibraryThing, to enrich its system, is very successful, however, where FRBR is a four level model which includes the abstract concept, ‘work’, LibraryThing, does not seem particularly concerned with the Platonic notion of ‘work’ but has its own ‘work’ category which is roughly equivalent to FRBR’s ‘manifestation’ level. The current list of permitted LibraryThing work-to-work relationships, which incorporate a number of relationships identified by Genette, is shown in table 5. It is not clear whether the echoing of some of Genette’s categories (e.g. parody, reply and inspired point to Genette’s hypertext category) is done consciously because there does seem to be an explicit reference to Genette, but nonetheless we can see the intertextual influence or trace of Genette and the notion of hypertext operating in this system. Of some interest is the fact that LibraryThing operates as a wiki and that the analysis and cataloguing of relationships is done through its members’ work. 357

Table 5: Work-to-work relationships permitted in LibraryThing

• Contains: where Work B is entirely contained within Work A. Examples include His Dark Materials which contains The Golden Compass • Is a retelling of: where Work B interprets Work A from a different perspective or viewpoint. Examples are: The Wind Done Gone is a retelling of Gone With the Wind and Beowulf is retold in Grendel. • Is a (non-series) sequel to: where “Work B is a sequel to Work A (same characters/setting, later in time) but by a different author”. • Is a (non-series) prequel to: where “Work B is a prequel to Work A (same characters/setting, earlier in time) but by a different author’ • Is an adaptation of: which is used when Work B is Work A in a different format or for a different audience. Examples are The Diary of Anne Frank (play) which is an adaptation of The Diary of a Young Girl and Dracula which has the adaptation Dracula: Blood of Nosferatu: A Play in Three Acts • Is an abridged version of • Is an expanded version of • Is a parody of: where Work B Work A, “generally but not always in a humorous or mocking way’. • Is a reply to: where Work B is a direct response to Work A. Examples are The Dawkins Delusion? is a reply to The God Delusion and Heart of Darkness is replied to in Things Fall Apart • Was inspired by: where Work B was inspired in some way by Work A, or draws on Work A for certain aspects. Examples are March, inspired by Little Women and The Odyssey which inspired Ulysses • Is a study of • Reference guide/companion to • Is a supplement to • Is a commentary on the text of: • Is a concordance to: • Is a student's study guide to • Is a teacher's guide to

The inclusion of some of Genette’s relationships in the more conventional and institutionally disciplined FRBR model takes us some way towards describing intertextual relationships, but FRBR perhaps stops short at some of the more subjective hermeneutics of intertextuality. It is noticeable that while the relationship category ‘transformation’ is included, it is defined in a fairly restricted way to focus on transformations of form. There are other forms of discursive transformation that could be usefully included in a map of the bibliosphere. Generic transformations have been modeled in relation to fiction and literary works and offer a possible framework through which transformation might be mapped. Fowler’s (1982) model is an historically orientated model which maps out at least three principal phases in the history of : • Phase 1: the genre-complex assembles until a formal type emerges (212); • Phase 2: a ‘secondary’ version of the phase develops as authors consciously base their writings on earlier primary versions; • Phase 3: is when the author uses the secondary form in a radically new way. The form may then be burlesque, or antithetic, or a ‘symbolic modulation of the secondary’ (213). These phases are not always distinct; moreover, they may interpenetrate and may even be in doubt in a single work (213). Fowler distinguishes between genre and mode, the difference being that genre is ‘limited by its rigid structural carapace’ (214), while 358 mode is more pliable. The mode is an attitude, a structure of feeling perhaps. Gothick as a genre in the British novel is passé, but the gothic mode lives on even in the teenage Twilight series. The mode might generate new genres, as ‘[m]uch of literature’s proper enjoyment depends on interweaving the pleasurably familiar with the strangely novel’ (215). It would of some interest to explore how useful such a model might be in mapping not only fiction but other kinds of discourse as the notion of generic codes and conventions underpins discursive practice beyond the fictional. Another example of the kind of relationship model that could be included in an intertextual bibliographic mapping tool is the transformative popular culture ‘replication’, ‘modification’ and ‘challenge’ model suggested in Rafferty (2008). Perhaps it would be possible to design systems that could include the authoritative elements, up to and including parody, imitation and pastiche, from FRBR, and retelling, inspiration and reply from LibraryThng, and then to include more hermeneutic and interpretative responses through some form of crowdsourcing, and systems such as LibraryThing might offer some ideas about how interpretative bibliographic wikis might be designed and implemented. Or, perhaps for some this would take us too far from the authority of bibliographic description. Either way, the concept of intertextuality materialized through Genette’s categories offers us a starting point for such ruminations.

References Allen, G. (2011). Intertextuality. London: Routledge. Bakhtin, M. M. M. (1981), The dialogic imagination: Four essays (No. 1). University of Texas Press. Barthes, R. (1981), Theory of the text, in Young, R. (ed), Untying the text: a post-structuralist reader Routledge and Kegan Paul, pp. 31-47. Bartlett, S and Hughes, B. (2011), Intertextuality and the Semantic Web: Jane Eyre as a test case for modelling literary relationships with Linked Data, Serials, 24(2), pp. 160-165 Bloom, H. (1973), The anxiety of influence: A theory of poetry. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Carlyle, A. (2006), Understanding FRBR as a conceptual model. Library Resources & Technical Services, 50(4), 264-273. Fowler, A. Kinds of literature: an introduction to the theory of genres and modes, Oxford: Clarendon, 1982. Genette, G. (1997), Palimpsests: literature in the second degree (Vol. 8). U of Nebraska Press. Kristeva, J. (1986), The Kristeva Reader. London: Blackwell. IFLA, (2012), Functional requirements for bibliographic records, [Online] Available at: http://www.ifla.org/publications/functional-requirements-for-bibliographic-records LibraryThing [Online] Available at: http://www.librarything.com/home# Rafferty, P. (2008), Identifying Diachronic Transformations in popular culture genres: A cultural-materialist approach to the history of popular literature publishing, Library History, 24(4), pp.262-272. Vernitski, A. (2007). Developing an intertextuality-oriented fiction classification. Journal of Librarianship and Information Science, 39(1), 41-52. Worton, M. J., & Still, J. (Eds.). (1991). Intertextuality: Theories and practice, Manchester: Manchester University Press.