Literature, Intertextuality - Essay Example

These results not only in what Roland Barthes calls as the "Death of the Author", but also makes the issue of authorship debatable. According to Barthes, the text [is] woven entirely with citations, references, echoes, cultural languages . . . which cut across it through and through in a vast stereophony. . . The citations which go to make up a text are anonymous, untraceable, and yet already read 1(Barthes 194-5) If intertextuality is a problematization of the inside-outside ratio of the text and context game, a classic example would be John Barth's Dunyazadiad.

The text not only explicitly refers to the original work of The 1001 Nights, which is historically seen as an act of unoriginality, of plagiarism, but manages to create something original out of the reference. In the story, when Scheherazade and the genie (John Barth) are discussing the ending of the story the reader is currently reading, her epiphany illustrates one of the central ideas behind Barth's reworking: "Sherry asked with a smile whether by 'his version' the Genie meant that copy of the Nights from which he'd been assisting us or the story he himself was in the midst of inventing.

" The fact that Barth consciously subverts the original reference and recasts Dunyazade, the younger sister of the doomed Queen Scheherazade, the original protagonist of the Arabic tale, as the main stay of his text, shows Barth not only toying with the idea of form (as represented by the canon of Queen Scheherazade), but also illustrates the idea of post modern fiction to venture into the realms of 'might have been's' rather than following the filiated history. The greatest triumph of Barth lies in breaking this discourse of filiation, of canonization, by producing a pastiche of the probable.

The intertextuality in the text thus, capillarizes the power lying inherently with the omniscient author of The 1001 Nights.If intertextuality celebrates the concept of art imitating art, it is true that Barth's text is a pluralistic discourse. However, the question of whether the text owes more to other texts than itself becomes difficult to analyze simply because the meta-narratives which evolve from Dunyazadiad are themselves a part of the world of intertextuality. The recursive tale structure is a treasure-house of narratives, but is at the same time confounding as it is held in the semiotics of language whose meaning can neither be ascertained nor be fully comprehended.

Thus, "I can't conclude it," the narrator admits at the end of "Dunyazadiad," "but it must end in the night that all good mornings come to."The function of intertextuality in Alejo Carpentier's Like the Night has a function which is similar and at the same time dissimilar to Barth's Dunyazadiad. Whereas the similarity is evident in both the text's ability to challenge and break the canon of filiality, the difference becomes one in degree. Alejo's text, one could argue is a conscious effort to defer the issue of authorship at such an ad infinitum pace that its elasticity could combine the aesthetic concerns of multi-cultural traditions and focus on broader social issues regarding cultural identity.

A typical example would be the use