intertext (03 April 2015)
“Just a moment, please.” Walking with a friend along a side-street, I had (out of the corner of my eye) spotted a ‘photo-op’ – a wheelie-bin outside the rear entrance to a hotel. My friend’s arched eyebrow and crooked smile told me he didn’t ‘get it’. But that’s okay …
The digital camera makes it easy for me to grab stuff in passing. I rely on being able to act quickly, without stopping to analyse what I am seeing. (There’s always time for that later.) But, in what can take as little as a few seconds, I often find myself with an image that seems to make some sort of sense – even if not everybody gets it.
I explain this to myself in terms of Roland Barthes’s theory of “intertextuality” …
“The intertextual nature of writing turns both the traditional author, and the traditional critic, into readers,” explains Voicu Mihnea Simandan, in a blog piece titled Barthes’s elements of intertextuality (see Note 1). The blogger elucidates further: “Barthes’s theory of text involves the theory of intertextuality because the text offers a plurality of meanings and is also woven out of numerous already existing texts. The text is not a unified, isolated object that gives a singular meaning, but an element open to various interpretations.”
Roland Barthes concludes The Death of the Author with the following lines: “… a text is made from multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation, but there is one place where this multiplicity is focused, and that place is the reader, not, as hitherto said, the author. The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up the writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination … the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author” (Barthes, 1977: p 148).
NOTES:
1/ Voicu Mihnea Simandan is a Bangkok-based Romanian expatriate who lives in Thailand. His blog is called A Romanian in Bangkok.
2/ This citation is the final passage in “The Death of the Author,” in Image-Music-Text, by Roland Barthes, translated by Stephen Heath (1977).
Your post came to my notice seconds after I had responded to a person’s comment on a post I put up on LinkedIn. My post had an article on the Harry Potter book and film series at its centre. My post is not central to my comment here; your reference to Roland Barthes’ 1967 essay Death of the Author is. I used Barthes’ ideas in my response and, like you, credited Barthes as my source. It is indeed a small universe – rich and diverse universe I must add!
A matter of days after the death of Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag wrote of him in her journal:
“People called him a critic, for want of a better label; and I myself said he was ‘the greatest critic to have emerged anywhere …’ But he deserves the more glorious name of writer.
“His body of work is an immense, complex, extremely discreet effort at self-description.
“Eventually he became a real writer. But he couldn’t purge himself of his ideas.”
(I found this quote here: http://www.brainpickings.org/2013/06/18/barthes-likes-and-dislikes-illustrated-lynore-avery/)
I really appreciate being offered these links and reflections, thanks heaps.
Reblogged this on Nothing Sacred and commented:
“Barthes’s theory of text involves the theory of intertextuality because the text offers a plurality of meanings and is also woven out of numerous already existing texts. The text is not a unified, isolated object that gives a singular meaning, but an element open to various interpretations.” (Voicu Mihnea Simandan, in a blog piece titled Barthes’s elements of intertextuality.)
So many words!
The photo says it all, to me.
But what a sophisticated glance you have —
Thanks, Judith.