bridging the gap between textuality and culture
 |
June 2004,
The nature of this ‘Text’ is
essentially rhizomatic in that each of its different sections can be seen as
‘plateaus’ or layers which can be read in any different order, meaning that the
reader is not expected to start at the beginning and gradually work through to
the end. Although this is the suggested
order, sections can be picked from the list below depending on the reader’s
area of interest, or alternatively it can be read from the last to the first
section in a backwards order.
SUMMARY: MODERNISM &
POSTMODERNISM
BOOKS,
TEXTS AND TEXTUALITIES
THE
CONTEMPORARY ‘ZEITSGEIST’
DECONSTRUCTION(S)
OF THE GRAND [AND/OR] META-NARRATIVES
NARRATIVE
STRUCTURE
EXAMPLES
OF INTERDISCURSIVE ENVIRONMENTS
SUMMARY: MODERNISM &
POSTMODERNISM
"Minister
(intransigently): A societal structure is
the greatest of all the works of art that man can make. Like the greatest art, it is perfectly
symmetric. It has the architectonic
structure of music, a symmetry imposed upon it in order to resolve a play of tensions
which would disrupt order but without which order is lifeless. In this serene and abstract harmony,
everything moves with the solemnity of the absolutely predictable and - …”
(Carter, 1982: 35)
"Ambassador: You are in the process of tabulating every
thing you can lay your hands on. In the
sacred name of symmetry, you slide them into a series of straitjackets and
label them with, oh, my God, what inexpressibly boring labels! Your mechanical prostitutes welcome their
customers in an alien gibber wholly denied to the human tongue while you, you
madam, work as an abortionist on the side.
You murder the imagination in the womb, Minister!” (Carter, 1982: 37)
Literature
is a complex sociocultural tool, often used by
individuals as a tool to model themselves against in a
positive or negative sense. A field
within any type of cultural Text which is adopted by any of the
characters, events or actions distinguish themselves in some way by providing
an alternative ‘point of view’ on the action that takes place in the work. These ‘fields’ are generally referred to as
‘discourses’; works that belong to what is referred to as ‘realist’ fiction
tend to use one ‘discourse’ or point-of-view at a time, or to carefully control
them so that there is no confusion between them. As readers usually start at the beginning,
read through the work, and end at the last page, literary works have narrative
structures imposed on them—even if that is not the author’s intention. The very nature of literary Texts, 'narratives'
and 'discourses' will be the subject of this paper, in particular the way a number
of discourses intertwine to provide the reader with unique insights into
reality. Thanks to a new type of what I
define as textuality, particular discursive environments have been
created for a generation of readers which provide them with an alternative
access to Text, environments which are more than necessary to make sense
of a disintegrating world. Literature
has been, and always will be, in a constant process of change, and as such Texts
(involved with literature in some way) will be read differently by each new
cultural episteme. In this
writing the intention is to explore some of the experimental techniques of
literary expression to represent this ‘disparate’ form of expression, an
ontology which can only be communicated thanks to the assistance of semiotic
communication from the ‘interdiscursive environment’ in which the narrative
that forms the piece of literature receives ultimate expression. I’ll be looking at a number of contemporary
novels to demonstrate the way literature can communicate information concerning
the cultural rather than literary state of both the ‘reader’ and
the ‘writer’.
The
structure of the article is relatively simple.
After the introduction, some time is taken to define clearly what I’m
referring to when I apply the words Text and textuality to a
given ‘literary’ or ‘cultural’ object.
Basically the major contrast to existing tradition is textuality
which differs from the initial meaning applied by the Parisian Tel Quel school. I use the word to refer to the way a given
culture is taught to ‘interpret’ a text, i.e. the cultural practices that are
involved with textual interpretation.
After this, to understand the ‘disparate’ nature of a lot of
multidiscursive works in contemporary literature—much of it belonging to the postmodern
school of writing—we take a look at what was introduced by Lyotard as the
‘Deconstruction of the Grand Narrative’ so important to works which stood
against the set of rules which had come to be accepted during the modernist
movement. The ‘Grand Narrative’ theory
forms the basis for a more general theoretical survey of textual events taking
place in other fields such as psychoanalysis and musicology. To draw the discussion away from the strictly
‘postmodern’ theory applied by Lyotard, a move is taken towards a discussion of
the contemporary ‘Zeitsgeist' or 'Weltanschauung'
which is referring to the set of habits, both hermeneutical and cultural,
adopted by contemporary occidental culture.
In this respect, Deleuze & Guattari’s Rhizome
is particularly useful because of its multireferential nature allowing it
to be applied to many different aspects of the contemporary paradigm we find
ourselves in presently. The whole
article, in fact, is intended to be rhizomatic in structure, meaning that the
reader is free to start and stop at any of the different points; although they
obviously fit together to become a whole, the intention is for the reader to be
able to attain the same amount of knowledge by reading the article backwards! Unfortunately, because of the fact that this
article is non-fiction, combined with the fact that the reader is only
presented with my point of view, it is difficult to present ‘interdiscursive
environments’ for the reader’s pleasure and to provide him or her with a greater
understanding of how these environments are intended to work. Instead, the reader is directed towards
specific parts of other literary works, so hopefully this on its own will be
sufficient. In any case, the discussion
of ‘contemporary Weltanschauung' is followed by a
section devoted to semiotic processes which take place in the narrative
structure, specifically its temporality.
The definition of interdiscursivity, and then a set of examples from a
number of contrasting works of fiction, is then presented, which leads
inevitably to the conclusion completing the article.
So
what do the words modernism and postmodernism actually refer
to? According to Best & Kellner, Modernity “entered everyday life through the
dissemination of modern art, the products of consumer society, new
technologies, and new modes of transportation and communication” (1991:
2). The dynamics by which modernity
produced a new industrial and colonial world can be described as
‘modernization’; as Best & Kellner put it, “a
term denoting those processes of individualization, secularization,
industrialization, cultural differentiation, commodification,
urbanization, bureaucratization, and rationalization which together have
constituted the new world.” The ‘modern’
movement in both art and literature has been very much informed by cultural
development, which is one of the main themes of this paper. Postmodern theories in contrast to modernism
but in a similarly cultural sense “claim that in the contemporary high tech
media society, emergent processes of change and transformation” have produced a
new type of society which requires a contrasting set of principles on which to
base its sense of logic and reality.
This has resulted in “increased cultural fragmentation, changes in the
experience of space and time, and new modes of experience, subjectivity, and
culture” (Best & Kellner, 1991: 3). In this article, one of the primary
intentions is to demonstrate the role what I have referred to as interdiscursive
processes, are involved with contemporary literature which belongs to or
has grown from its origins in the postmodern age.
To
provide a more exact definition, interdiscursivity is a term which can
be applied to literary ‘environments’ in which two or more contrasting
perspectives are presented to the reader.
While in the dynamic process of reading, the multidiscursive patterns
influence the way the text is interpreted.
What ‘interdiscursivity’ is, however, is not such a simple matter. It is similar to metafiction which is
also a literary tool used self-consciously by authors and also associated with
‘post-modernism’. Metafiction is
generally used to communicate to the reader the very fact that they are
‘reading’ or interacting in a textual way with a work of literature of some
kind. Interdiscursivity, however,
is not always intended to have this effect; it is a given that works are interdiscursive
– it is almost an ontology for many readers today. The affect of interdiscursivity is
rather to present a world in which many voices speak, like in real-life, not
always easily dissociable from one another.
Metafiction self-consciously addresses the devices of fiction,
whereas interdiscursivity takes these devices as a given and
communicates through those discourses.
Works which communicate interdiscursively, however, can also
deliberately perform similar functions, but this isn’t always the
intention. Llosa’s
Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter is a perfect example of this; further on
I’ll be demonstrating both the metafictional and the
interdiscursive elements of textual interpretation. Interdiscursivity could also be
compared with intertextuality, which is the way a textual work relates
to other texts; it is similar in terms of the rules which apply towards the way
texts work intertextually just as the discourses communicate with one
another.
Interdiscursivity
as will be demonstrated, can also be applied to situations external to
metafiction. The importance of
interdiscursivity is to bridge the disparate holes set up by ‘postmodern’ verfremdung
[alienation], and in this way as well, the dynamic processes involved with interdiscursivity
can also be compared to intertextuality. Interdiscursivity, then, can help to
provide the readers with tools to make sense of the narrative, which of course
consists of the many discourses which it uses.
Argyros' interpretation of the seminal
importance of narrative: "If narrative
is indeed a seminal component of the dialectic human beings entertain with
their cultural and natural environments, then it should be possible to affirm
traditional narratival forms as crucial forces in the dynamics of cultural
change” (Argyros, 1991: 660). Here narrative is defined in terms of the way
it comments upon the writer who produced it, but rather the dynamic
contents of the cultural environment in which it was written and to which the reader
could also belong. It is to this
class of dynamic literary terms that the word interdiscursivity refers. A certain class of postmodern writing is
involved very much with a questioning of the realist tradition connected to
modernity, and sometimes superficially provides little more than metafictional devices to question the
form. interdiscursivity, however,
goes far further in communicating themes and ideas not possible according to
the tradition of realism.
BOOKS,
TEXTS AND TEXTUALITIES
"Therefore,
every minute of the day, they were all, male and female alike, engrossed in
weaving and embroidering the rich fabric of the very world in which they lived
and, like so many Penelopes, their work was never
finished. The whole point of their
activity was that it was endless, for they unravelled their work at the end of
the year and they, with the return of the sun after the shortest day, began on
it again.”
(Carter,
1982: 183)
The
word ‘text’ actually evolved from the Latin word textus
which refers to the waft and weave of a fabric, evoking the essentially
‘interdiscursive’ nature of complex cultural creations such as novels. Deleuze
provides us with a dynamic model which attempts to encompass their complexity
by presenting creations of this proportion as assemblages:
"A book has neither object
nor subject, it is made of variously formed matters, and very different dates
and speeds. To attribute the book to a
subject is to overlook this working of matters, and the exteriority of their
relations. It is to fabricate a beneficent
God to explain geological movements. In
a book, as in all things, there are lines of articulation or segmentarity, strata and territories; but also lines of
flight, movement of deterritorialization and destratification.
Compare rates of flow on these lines produce phenomena of relative
slowness and viscosity, or, on the contrary, of acceleration and rupture. All this, lines and measurable speeds, constitutes
an assemblage."
(Deleuze & Guattari,
1987)
This
model is particularly true of postmodern novels which present narratives
contoured by multiple discourses. These
texts don’t try to ‘soften the edges’ or to make the structure make more sense. This will be related to the episteme in
the next point (i.e. what contemporary texts can teach us about the way our
culture is developing/has developed). An
important contrast exists between the modern and the postmodern ‘text’ as
presented in the Summary opening this article; Barthes, a semiotician
who participated in the Parisian Tel Quel school,
wrote a ground-breaking article commenting upon the contrast between the Work
and the Text, the Work being a static object which sits in a library and is a
product of the ‘father’ in the linguistic paternal sense. The Text, in contrast, is volatile,
non-permanent and constantly undergoing processes of change. Deleuze’s model of
the Tree is similar to Barthes understanding of the Work in its artificiality
and its attempt to imitate or reflect nature in some way:
"This
is the classical book, as noble, signifying, and subjective organic interiority
(the strata of the book). The book
imitates the world, as art imitates nature: by procedures specific to it that
accomplish what nature cannot or can no longer do. The law of the book is the law of reflection,
the One that becomes two. How could the
law of the book reside in nature, when it is what presides over the very
division between world and book, nature and art? One becomes two: whenever we encounter this
formula, even stated strategically by Mao or understood in the most
“dialectical” way possible, what we have before us is the most classical and
well reflected, oldest, and weariest kind of thought. Nature doesn’t work that way: in nature,
roots are taproots with a more multiple, lateral, and circular system of
ramification, rather than a dichotomous one.
Thought lags behind nature. Even
the book as a natural reality is a tap-root, with its pivotal spine and surrounding
leaves. But the book as a spiritual
reality, the Tree or Root as an image, endlessly develops the law of the One
that becomes two, then of the two that become four. Binary logic is the spiritual reality of the
root-tree. Even a discipline as “advanced”
as linguistics retains the root-tree as its fundamental image, and thus remains
wedded to classical reflection (for example, Chomsky and his grammatical trees,
which begin at a point S and proceed by dichotomy). This is as much as to say that this system of
thought has never reached an understanding of multiplicity: in order to arrive
at two following a spiritual method it must assume a strong principal unity.”
(Deleuze, 1987: 5)
Barthe’s description of the almost dichotomously opposed Text describes
clearly the contrast:
"In opposition to the
notion of the work-a traditional notion that has long been and still is thought
of in what might be called Newtonian fashion-there now arises a need for a new
object, one obtained by the displacement or overturning of previous
categories. This object is the Text… the
Text is experienced only in an activity, a production… The Text is that
which goes to the limit of the rules of enunciation (rationality, readability,
and so on). The Text tries to situate
itself exactly behind the limit of doxa.
One could literally say that the Text is always paradoxical."
(Barthes, 1982b: 74-75)
We’ll
be looking at a number of ‘Works’ which do sit in libraries, but I’ll be
pointing out characteristics of these works which encourage the reader to
experience the inherently Textual nature of interaction with cultural
creations of any kind. To do this, particular aspects of these texts are
concentrated upon which sets them aside from other ‘texts’; one of the most
important aspects is the very fact that these novels are inherently ‘textual’
in that they go to a great deal of trouble to point out the fact that they have
been created in the process of writing.
The ‘process’ of writing, therefore, plays a more important role than in
more traditional types of literature which attempt to create an imaginative
world in which the reader ‘loses’ any sense of connection with the processes
gone through to create the work of art. Varga Llosa’s Aunt Julia and
the Scriptwriter, is involved more with the writing process than it is with
anything else, for example; the story of both Aunt Julia and the many
stories presented by Seņor Camachos,
for example, all point towards the writing (and to a lesser extent the reading)
process either as the romantic figure Varga Llosa (‘Marito') fantasises
becoming, or the absurd, theatrical impossibility of the soap-opera
scriptwriter. The reflexive nature of
the comedic stories connecting the discourses of Marito,
his aunt and the scriptwriter are intended to play with the reader who is very
much involved with exploring the writing process. The following example making this clear is
taken from Elisondo’s opening passage which begins
the novel:
"I write. I write that I am writing. Mentally I see myself writing that I am
writing and I can also see myself seeing that I am writing. I remember writing and also seeing myself
writing. And I see myself remembering
that I see myself writing and I remember seeing myself remembering that I was
writing and I write seeing myself write that I remember having seen myself
write that I saw myself writing…”
(Llosa:
1)
Ondaatje’s
The English Patient, in contrast, goes to a great deal of trouble to
point out the contrasts between this type of textual communication and alternative
types created and recreated in constantly new and dynamic fashions by ‘oral’
(as opposed to ‘literary’) culture. This
provides us with an insight into the communicative abilities of other cultures,
cultural contrasts between the West and the East, memory, and the different
ways ‘memory’ is used to help a culture hold on to their cultural ‘Texts’. The English Patient may be fragmented
and the discourses sometimes ambiguous and confused, but this is often for the
purpose of demonstrating cultural contrasts and it remains at all times
essentially textual in nature. An
important signifier connecting the oral cultures of the desert with the antique
‘literate’ culture of the occident is Herodotus’ important work which has
signified intercultural communication through the ages. The title hero (the patient) carries his copy
of the Histories everywhere he goes, just as Madox
carries Anna Karenina: “I carried Herodotus, and Madox-a
saint in his own marriage-carried Anna Karenina, continually rereading
the story of romance and deceit” (Ondaatje: 237); characters are created thanks
to the way they identify themselves with certain books, narratives or
participants. The title protagonist
actually accuses the Italian thief, Caravaggio, of treating him like a ‘book’: "Or am I just a book? Something to be read, some creature to be
tempted out of a loch and shot full of morphine, full of corridors, lies, loose
vegetation, pockets of stone” (ibid.: 253).
At the same time, the patient’s ‘experience’ of Herodotus and its
importance to his sense of self is made real for both Hana-of
the other major characters-and by extension the reader, how intertwined the
text is with the patient's life in an 'interdiscursive' sense; the text
stretches very much out of the book and into the life of the individual. This is made real through a set of information
which has been attached to the patient’s ‘personal’ copy of the book:
"She [Hana]
picks up the notebook that lies on the small table beside his bed. It is the book he brought with him through
his fire—a copy of The Histories by Herodotus that he has added to,
cutting and gluing in pages from other books or writing in his own
observations—so they are all cradled within the text of Herodotus.”
(Ondaatje: 16)
It
retains also in many other ways an essential connection to the novel:
"She had come to love
these books dressed in their Italian spines, the frontispieces, the tipped-in
colour illustrations with a covering of tissue, the smell of them, even the
sound of the crack if you opened them too fast, as if breaking some minute
unseen series of bones. She paused
again. The Charterhouse of
(Ondaatje: ?)
The
other novel we look at from an interdiscursive perspective, is also inherently
about the writing process—as well as alternative forms of communication
associated with nomadic and illiterate cultures: Lessing’s
Memoirs of a Survivor is presented as an attempt at 'Autobiography'. An autobiography is itself a form of writing
that calls attention to subject of the contents of the book. The realisation of
the ‘autobiography’ is at best highly ambiguous in this unique interdiscursive
novel. This is an example of the
typical habit of one of the discourses in interdiscursive literature
which points self-reflexively towards how the author structures the text, as we
have seen in commenting upon the text as
a whole in a meta-fictional fashion.
It’s at this point that we can introduce an alternative idea of Text and
Textuality; as Ondaatje makes clear, there are many different ways of
expressing and understanding bodies of ‘knowledge’, most often made up of
words, but also music and other discourses, which are transferred in dynamic textual
processes such as ‘reading’ (a book), ‘gazing upon’ (a painting),
‘listening to’ (a piece of music) or ‘experiencing’ (many other types of
complex cultural communicative vehicle).
Texts,
then, are
complex cultural vehicles of expression in which interdiscursive environments
can take place and which are usually made up of a complex set of signs. As suggested in novels such as The English
Patient, Text, however, can be more than this alone. I define it as a ‘frame’ for any type of
communication, meaning that understanding a Text means knowing when one
stops and another starts. Examples of ‘Texts’
include musical compositions (recorded, live or in the form of scores), a fashionable outfit, paintings (the borders
of which literally are frames) and, of course, books which are
inherently textual. This is where the
notion of Textuality becomes important.
I define Textualities as being the way a culture teaches its
members to interpret or make sense of given Texts. Texts, then, are the bodies in which
knowledge is contained and passed on to people who interact with it in some
way, i.e. if in the form of books, via the process of reading, if in the form
of graphic art, in the form of gazing. Textualities,
in comparison, do not have a ‘form’ as such, but are instead the set of
ideas passed on by a culture to a set of individuals in order to interpret the Texts. This definition of Textuality contrasts
with the original meaning applied by the Parisian Tel Quel
school, but by using it this way, Texts become again an object of
knowledge storage and transferral.
DECONSTRUCTION(S)
OF THE GRAND [AND/OR] META-NARRATIVES
by
contemporary philosophers, scientists, theorist, writers and other
practitioners
"Since the
inception of the mode of consciousness we refer to as 'the world', man has
always thought of time as in itself a movement forward, an onward flow leaving
only a little debris behind it.
Evanescence is the essence of time.
And since temporality is the medium in which this mode of consciousness
has itself been expressed, since time is, as it were, the canvas on which we
ourselves are painted, the empirical investigation of the structure of time
possesses certain acute methodological problems. Could the Mona Lisa turn
round, scratch her own background and then submit to a laboratory analysis the
substance she found under her nail…?”
(Carter, 1982:
99-100)
Out of the demise of the end of the modern era, which for many is
considered to have ended with the discovery of a whole field of horrors at the
end of the Second World War when Germany finally fell (and which for many still
hasn’t ended), a period began which was filled with a whole sub-set of what at
best can be called periods of ambiguity during which the ‘Grand Narratives’ of
modernity and structuralism were called into question (and which finally
crumbled). According to Lyotard, for
example, modernity had been liquidated by history, “a history whose tragic
paradigm was the Nazi concentration camp and whose ultimate delegimizing
force was that of capitalist ‘technoscience' which
has changed for ever our concepts of knowledge" (Hutcheon,
1989: 24). Both Lyotard and Baudrillard
countered ideas where the development of theories of knowledge became dependent
on the socioeconomics of our production and reproduction of signs. Many consider that ‘science’ in the
traditional sense has also come under the influence of postmodernism, forcing
change that has brought about the sort ‘disparate discourses’ which can run in
opposition or in any case in different directions both temporally,
theoretically and spatially that make up the interdiscursive environments
being discussed in this paper. According
to Best & Kellner for example, Newtonian
determinism, Cartesian dualism and representational epistemology has given way
to “principles of chaos, indeterminacy, and hermeneutics, which some call a ‘reenchantment of nature’” (1991: 28).
It is interesting to note that some of the most important early
expressions of post-modern aesthetics which involved interdiscursivity where
specifically involved with the Second World War, such as Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse
Five (which is set primarily around the firebombing of Dresden even though
its temporal and spatial discourses are somewhat fluid), ‘s Catch-22, and
Stanley Kubrick’s comic masterpiece of film making Dr
Strangelove. Although there are a
number of different theories about when exactly ‘post-modernism’ as an artistic
movement began, it is generally considered to have taken place during this
field of ambiguities. The Interdiscursive
Environments which received uncensored prevalence during this period
represent contrasting expressions of the deconstruction of what Lyotard referred
to symbolically as ‘meta-narratives’.
One of the main criticisms of postmodernism has been towards the
tendency of its writers to express their distrust of culturally suspect
‘meta-narratives’. Lyotard defined
metanarratives as ways of thinking that unite knowledge and experience to seek
to provide a definitive, universal truth, which can be seen to have received
most complete expression in the form of structuralist theory and modernist
literature. It has been suggested that
one of the tendencies of postmodernism has been to express their
dissatisfaction with the broad claims of theory and art through a complete abandonement of narrative itself, presenting instead
‘antinarratival’ Texts which completely disobey the rules of narrative
in any traditional sense. Some have
found this approach a superficial way of bringing such a complex cultural
entity into question especially since its readers, as Argyros
comments, will apply to a ‘narratively suspect’ text
the next best thing, in other words their own narrative structure which will be
far simpler than any the author could have hoped to have applied (Argyros, 1991). Argyros goes so far to apply a metaphor taken directly from
World War II mythology:
"I suggest
that to blame grand narrative for the evils of sch
world views as Nazi eschatology is as meaningful as savaging the printing press
on account ofu Mein Kampf. We must abandon the reductive and vaguely
paranoid belief that all grand narrative is equally linear, rigid, and
imperialistic.”
(1991: 663)
The intention within this written work is to demonstrate to the
reader how much further this can be taken by contemporary writers who make use
of interdiscursivity; although this is sometimes associated with the
nihilistic aspect of writing and the postmodern movement considered ‘to
blame’ for these developments. I hope to
demonstrate, however, that these writers have far more in their minds than
simply the destruction of existing narratival structures. Lyotard suggests, however, that there are
overriding feelings that one can pick up in ‘postmodern’ works and which I
would at least to some extent agree as far as they refer to the works discussed
in this writing. He suggests that the
‘disparate’ nature of post-modern environments are not ‘devoid’ of feeling,
“but rather that such feelings—which it may be better and more accurate,
following Lyotard, to call ‘intensities’—are now free-floating and impersonal
and tend to be dominated by a peculiar kind of euphoria,” (Jameson, 1997: 16)
suggesting that the a detached set of emotions connected by forms of the sublime
could be responsible for this highly disparate emotional environment.
THE
CONTEMPORARY ‘ZEITGEIST’
the
world according to the brain, the central nervous system, the Rhizome and Dasein
"But
you must never forget that the Doctor's philosophy is not so much
transcendental as incidental. It utilises all the incidents that ripple the
depthless surfaces of, you understand, the sensual world. When the sensual world unconditionally
surrenders to the intermittency of mutability, man will be freed in perpetuity
from the tyranny of a single present.
And we will live on as many layers of consciousness as we can, all at
the same time. After the Doctor
liberates us, that is. Only after that.”
(Carter, 1982: 99-100)
What
are the primary influential factors still having an impact on our epistemes;
what sort of Texts are we ‘experiencing’; how do we form our ‘model of
the world’? Our world is getting
increasingly more complex, as is our technology, so why isn’t technology
influencing our ‘Zeitgeist’ in the same way it used to. Jameson comments on the fact that technology
of our own moment, although more ‘complex’ technologically, it no longer possesses
the “same capacity for representation” as it did during the Futurist era
(Jameson, 1997: 36). The computer, which
is emblematic of a radical change during the last 40 years, has shrunk in size
and has become increasingly less dramatic, whereas the television “articulates
nothing but rather implodes, carrying its flattened image surface within
itself” (ibid. 37). Representations of new technology has become “the
production and reproduction of the simulacrum” (ibid.). Technology has created boredom, some of the
reason for interdiscursivity. Other ways include the ‘representation’
problematic; questioning what is real.
Making
use of interdiscursivity can represent an increased need to represent
the hidden complexity of our society, or other problematic issues not
representable in any other way. Seeing that
our world is evidently getting increasingly more difficult to encompass,
finding models to help us understand these givens will certainly be helpful,
and I intend to demonstrate a useful model taken from the philosophy of Deleuze
and Guattari. Argyros
comments on the fact that one of the primary tasks of the mammalian brain is to
create ‘models’ of its surroundings (1994: 664) so that it can make sense of it
and interact with it in some way, usually for the purpose of attaining food,
escape or reproduction. The environment
of man, however, is primarily that of culture, which considering the complexity
of even the simplest of cultural structures, makes the human brain an
impressive model-making machine. Recent
cultural development which has resulted in postmodern literature and
interdiscursive communication suggests that new sections of the brain are being
made use of to cope with the enormous amount of change. To encompass this in theory, Deleuze & Guatari’s rhizome seems a magnificent model for just
this purpose, especially in its applicability to many other structures within
the confines of both nature and culture, and I think that understanding the
potential of the rhizome and its alternatives is an important step
towards understanding the purpose and potential of interdiscursivity in
contemporary literature. In many cases
it provides us with appropriate tools for discovering complex metaphors in
these works, such as the deeply symbolic role of ‘the desert’ in The English
Patient (Ondaatje, 1998). Argyros makes an interesting analogy comparing narrative to
the role of the nervous system, which is a first step on a journey towards the rhizome. According to Argyros
"narrative is best conceptualized as a hypothesis about the nature of an
existing slice of reality or about the potential consequences of certain
variations on a model of the world" (Argyros, 1987:
667). He goes on say that the way we
interpret this reality is similar to the way our central nervous system makes
use of incoming sensuous data: “models of reality are generated and compared
with either other models or with incoming sensory data” (ibid.: 668). This, of course, resembles the function of
the mammalian brain introduced above, suggesting that new types of narrative
combining discourse in new ways is requiring new ‘models’ of reality. The shape that this ‘model’ takes can differ;
in order to explain their point, Deleuze and Guattari present a variety of
contrasts spreading from trees, to roots, to tubers, orchids, weeds and a variety
of other non-vegetable metaphors (such as the ‘map’ and the ‘tracing’). This will form a part of further discussion.
Deleuze
& Guattari first describe the rhizome in terms of natural metaphors;
they present first the ideal image of the ‘tree’ which has formed a sturdy
foundation for occidental culture since the Middle-Ages, just as the equally
ideal concept of the ‘roots’ heading in the opposite direction have helped us
form foundational ideas relating to subjects such as the genealogy of a family. The rhizome, however, is everything
which the tree in all its forms, is not.
According to Deleuze & Guattari, bulbs and tubers are rhizomes, and
“even some animals in their pack form” such as rats (1987: 6-7). A rhizome may be broken as it is made
up of lines, whereas the ‘tree’ cannot as it is made of up points which have
been mapped; it demands, therefore, being put back together in the same way it
was taken apart. The ‘tree’ is very much
the ideal ‘made out of reality’ whereas the rhizome is a practical
realization of the far more complex structures put out by reality itself. If a rhizome is ‘broken’, it will
start up again on “one of its old lines, or on new lines” (ibid.: 9). We form a rhizome with our languages,
but also with other less predictable systems, such as viruses, structures we
don’t necessarily have control over. An
interesting and important notion is that of the book. According to Deleuze & Guattari, the book
doesn’t produce an ‘image’ of the world, or map out a set of points; it has a dynamic
relationship with reality in a textual sense: the book forms a rhizome
with the world it ‘reproduces’ (although this isn’t actually what it’s
doing). This notion is particularly
important to the books we’ll be looking at, novels which make use of interdiscursive
environments embrace the rhizome they create with the world; they
encourage the reader to participate in it (although interdiscursivity whose
only function is to imitate for meta-fiction is a tracing). Music, which can also be seen as a type of
discourse, is also a rhizome. When
it is realised as musicality in an environment, there is no other way for its
dynamism to receive expression, but even when it is coded in a structure that
attempts to ‘arborify’ it (turn it into a ‘tree model a la Deleuze), it
ruptures these codes (Deleuze & Guatari, 1987: 11-12); it is a map, functioning
as the entire discourse, whereas a musical ‘score’ attempts to be its tracing
which is another important term from Deleuze & Guattari. The tracing is an attempt to arborify
a rhizome: “it has organized, stabilized, neutralized the multiplicities
according to the axes of significance and subjectification belonging to it”
(ibid: 13). When it thinks it is
reproducing a rhizome by copying something else, it is only copying itself;
even though ‘postmodernism’ in the works it is expressed and the interdiscursive
form it makes use of may be a rhizome, our interpretations of it in
many ways can never become much more than ‘tracings’. According to Deleuze & Guattari, psychoanalysis
and linguistics are dangerous fields because they have only been successful at
making tracings of or taking photos of the subconscious (or language): “Once a rhizome
has been obstructed, arborified, it’s all over, no
desire stirs; for it is always by rhizome that desire moves and produces”
(ibid: 14).
Angela
Carter uses an eloquent metaphor in her novel The Infernal Desire Machines
of Dr Hoffman. Here, a symbolic
world is created somewhere between surrealism and metaphor to represent a clear
contrast between the ‘tracing’ and the ‘map’ or the rhizome; a contrasts
between stasis and dynamism; a system which assumes constant stability and a
dynamic changing environment which assumes and encompasses constant
change. The short excerpt below demonstrates
these contrasts:
"Minister (intransigently): A societal structure is the greatest of all
the works of art that man can make. Like
the greatest art, it is perfectly symmetric.
It has the architectonic structure of music, a symmetry imposed upon it
in order to resolve a play of tensions which would disrupt order but without
which order is lifeless. In this serene
and abstract harmony, everything moves with the solemnity of the absolutely
predictable and - …” (Carter 1982: 35)
"Ambassador: You are in the process
of tabulating every thing you can lay your hands on. In the sacred name of symmetry, you slide
them into a series of straitjackets and label them with, oh, my God, what
inexpressibly boring labels! Your
mechanical prostitutes welcome their customers in an alien gibber wholly denied
to the human tongue while you, you madam, work as an abortionist on the
side. You murder the imagination in the
womb, Minister!” (Carter 1982: 37)
Our
cultural history shows many clear examples of ‘tracings’, attempts at creating rhizomes
but presenting instead facile imitation-like tracings. The false reproduction of ancient archealogical remains created to propagate myths about
ancient Arian culture for the purpose of Nazi fascism. Although the UN is a rhizome with its
complex and often indecisive decision making processes, the US—especially under
Bush—is very much a ‘tracing’ of everything that it says it is; it abuses the
world by applying a very simplistic tracing to it. The example below from Pynchon’s
The Crying of
"Look what's happening to
them. In school they got brainwashed,
like all of us, into believing the Myth of the American Inventor – Morse and
his telegraph, Bell and his telephone, Edison and his light bulb, Tom Swift and
his this or that. Only one many per
invention. Then when they grew up they
found thy had to sign all their rights to a monster like Yoyodyne;
got stuck on some “project” or “task force” or “team” and started being ground
into anonymity. Nobody wanted them to
invent – only perform their little role in a design ritual, already set down
for them in some procedures handbook.”
(Pynchon:
61)
Short-term
memory and long-term memory are also distinguished from one another by Deleuze
& Guattari: the former is considered to be essentially rhizomatic or
a diagram, and the latter an imprint or a tracing: “Short-term memory is in no
way subject to a law of contiguity or immediacy to its object; it can act at a
distance, come to return a long time after, but always under conditions of
discontinuity, rupture, and multiplicity” (Deleuze & Guattari: 16) where
the unconscious remains an uncentered system. As introduced by Lacan, schizophrenia
represents a breaking away from centered systems and
a set of formal signifiers answering ‘in the name of the father’; Deleuze &
Guattari propose a system to analyse the unconscious based on ‘schizoanalysis’
(as opposed to psychoanalysis) which views the unconscious not as a centred
imprint, rather a dynamic and changing whole which takes account of the complex
rules of the system, the diagram rather than the tracing alone. Bateson’s unfortunate
misappropriation of Balinese culture is cited as an example of a westerner
applying to the ‘mystical east’ an occidental model based very much on “expressions
and actions to exterior or transcendent ends, instead of evaluating them on a
plane of consistency on the basis of their intrinsic value” (ibid.: 19). It seems that the ‘pack’ of children
(comparable in more ways than one to rats) that surfaces during the narrative
of Lessing’s The Memoirs of a Survivor could
only be analysable thanks to assistance from schizoanalysis; no one in
the book has any luck in taming them:
"Gerald had apparently
actually believed that they could be taught rules which had been made for
everyone's sake. Rules? They could hardly understand what was said:
they had no idea of a house as a machine.
They wrecked everything, tore up the vegetables in the garden, sat at
windows throwing filth at passers-by like monkeys.”
(Lessing,
1982: 155)
The
communal centre for children where Gerald on the one hand makes positive
efforts to improve things for children without support but on the other it is a
place where he sets up a hierarchical power structure with himself as king and
Emily as his queen; unfortunately it is also where he abuses his power to form
a ‘harem’ among the female youth. In any
case, in the novel, it is an important symbolic structure which has a number of
the characters attempting to bring about social change, which in terms of Sufi
mysticism—an important foundational influence for Lessing’s
writing—still can assist one in leading towards spiritual transcendence. In any case, the ‘house’ is an attempt at a rhizome,
although the entrance of the children who Gerald is ultimately unable to tame
with his existing static system, brings it down (he loses all the other’s who
lived with him, including Emily, and ends up under the control of the rhizomatic
children who live according to their own unpredictable and sometimes violent
rules. At the end of Lessing’s
novel, ‘the survivor’, Emily, Gerald AND ‘the pack of children’ are able to
receive transcendence by walking together through the symbolic metaphor of the
wall. This demonstrates the complex
observations Lessing’s novel is making about the
structure of society, social change and individual development, and suggests the importance of structures
like the rhizome introduced into static ‘tracing’ environments to bring
about this change.
NARRATIVE
STRUCTURE
spatiality and temporality
In a
large part of the article, we’ve concentrated upon the broad context into which
Texts are realised. In the
following division, we take a look at narrative structures and how they are
able to communicate information themselves to the reader. Narrative structure can communicate
information semiotically over a given text on many
different levels. The ‘narrative’ has to
be considered, because as long as the reader starts from page one and finishes
at the end of the text, the reader will supply a number of ‘given’ ideas about
narrative, even if interdiscursivity is made use of and traditional
ideas of temporality and spatiality are played with; this means that interdiscursivity
can be made use of to assist the reader in experiencing the rhizomatic structure
of the work, whereas the narrative itself will make the work accessible to most
readers. At the same time, some aspects
of the narrative itself has been influenced by postmodern developments as I
hope to demonstrate here.
Argyros is a supporter of narrative structures;
for him, narrative forms of “a score of strategies” to help us process the
complex cultural information which constitutes a major portion of our world:
“both in the form of neural structures and extrasomatic
prosthetic aids—our rituals, art works, libraries, computer networks,
institutions, and so on” (Argyros, 1991: 665). According to Argyros,
works that are primarily ‘anti-narritival' are doomed
to fail because "the mind will automatically cast into a narrative mould even
the random and unconnected information" (ibid: 667). In other parts of this work I hope to
demonstrate that interdiscursivity is not automatically anti-narritival, in fact it plays itself off within the borders
of narrative structures so that the reader has an automatic point of access
with it, even though its intentions are often to point away from the automatism
of realist narrative by playing with traditional notions of temporality and
spatiality. Jameson presents an
interesting example of an author who adopts the traditional tools of narrativity and historicity, but plays with it in such a
way as to force the reader to use different interpretative tools to make sense
of it, discussing in particular Doctorow’s Ragtime:
“Yet other more visible technical ‘innovations may supply a clue to what is
happening in the language of Ragtime: it is, for example, well known
that the source of many of the characteristic effects of Camus’s
novel The Stranger can be traced back to that author’s wilful decision
to substitute, throughout, the French tense of the passé compose for the other
past tenses more normally employed in narration in that language. I suggest that it is as if something of that
sort were at work here; as though Doctorow had set
out systematically to produce the effect or the equivalent, in his language, of
a verbal past tense we do not possess in English, namely, the French preterit
(or passé simple): “whose ‘perfective’ movement, as Emile Benveniste
taught us, serves to separate events from the present of enunciation and to
transform the stream of time and action into so many finished, complete, and
isolated punctual event objects which find themselves sundered from any present
situation (even that of the act of story telling of enunciation)” (Jameson: 24).
Narrativity in essence has something of the
temporal and inevitably also the spatial; because of these aspects narrative
theory has been able to borrow from other fields which in themselves are seeing
‘narrativity' spring up in the environments in which
they work. Jameson points out a good
example of this, namely architectural theory which have begun to attempt to see
“our physical trajectories through such buildings as virtual narratives or
stories, as dynamic paths and narrative paradigms which we as visitors are
asked to fulfil and complete with our own bodies and movements. This relates, of course, to the textuality
which is now eminent in many fields.
Narratives, therefore, have been able to adopt a sense of ‘postmodern
space’ which transcends “the capacities of the individual human body.”
There is no doubt, in any case, that narrative is still a powerful
tool, as it probably always will be, as long as the field of literature
exists. Argyros
has a positive statement in this regard about narrative in postmodern
literature:
"Narrative
offers culture both a powerful data bank in which to store and transmit
cultural knowledge, and a flexible and turbulent laboratory in which to invent
new knowledge."
(Argyros, 1991: 670)
DEFINING
INTERDISCURSIVITY
Interdiscursivity and the interdiscursive environments in which a
number of discourses find themselves in a particular genre of novels which use intradiscursivity to restructure the way its
readers interpret the experience of its characters, is any easy concept to
define but a harder one to explain because of the variety of different ideas
that can and have been communicated through interdiscursivity. Basically, when a novel is
‘interdiscursive’ it makes use of a number of different discourses, sometimes
communicating at the same time. I define
novels that are ‘interdiscursive’, in nature, as being novels that use interdiscursivity
to communicate common themes, possibly about the fragmented nature of
reality and so forth. In other words,
they do not use a number of discources for the pure
reason of demonstrating how single discourse realism is an ineffective way of
communicating; this belongs more to some forms of metafiction. Hutcheon comments
on the fact that postmodern “cannot be but political”(3), an important part of
the definition of how interdiscursivity is used to communicate complex
political messages:
".it is difficult to separate the 'de-doxifying' impulse of postmodern art and culture from the
deconstructing impulse of what we have labelled poststructuralist theory. A symptom of this inseparability can be seen
in the way in which postmodern artists and critics speak about their
‘discourses’- by which they men to signal the inescapably political contexts in
which they speak and work.”
(Hutcheon, 1989: 8)
The important point here is
that she is not referring to postmodern ‘pastiche’ which is there simply for
the purpose of such deconstruction, but rather the “the postmodern parody in
the world of Salman Rushdie or Angela Carter or
Manuel Puig" which has become one of the means by
which culture deals with both its social concerns and its aesthetic needs (ibid.). This means that the political and the
artistic are not separable, i.e. that they both need to be considered together
(as discourses) in ‘postmodern’ (interdiscursive) works to provide the
reader with an insight into how his or her culture works. She points out that from the perspective of a
‘neoconservative’ critic, ‘postmodernism’ may seem to be a threat to cultural
preservation (Hutcheon: 16), when in actual fact it
is thanks to this unique combination of discourses present in these novels that
preservation of the culture we now live in—as complex and as fragmented as it
may appear—are the only ways to save it, at least in a literary form. This is an approach which is supported by
Best & Kellner, commenting on the fact that “most
postmodernist art often took delight in the world as it is and happily
coexisted in a pluralism of aesthetic styles and games” (Best & Kellner, 1991: 11).
EXAMPLES OF INTERDISCURSIVE ENVIRONMENTS
According to Baudrillard,
television is a paradigmatic form of postmodern signification “because its
transparent sign seemingly offers direct access to a signified reality” (Hutcheon: 10). It
seems a good place to begin discussing examples of interdiscursive environments.
Lars Von Trier celebrated television by playing with
the discourses in his television work The Kingdom (which was considered
‘good enough’ to become a film in the cinematic sense). The Kingdom is actually the name of
the hospital in which the ‘television drama’ is set. Hospitals, as we know them in everyday
existence, are very much rhizomatic structures in the way they are constantly
in motion creations of humanity which send ‘lines’ outwards of themselves and
interact with humanity in the way a virus does with individual humans. It becomes the means in this work to express interdiscursive
environments which point towards soap operas, medical dramas and horror-films,
and at the same time to communicate a ‘rupture’ which works from the bottom-up
through the hospital itself and its patients, a rupture of horrific
proportions which although changing the nature of the hospital, the rhizomatic
environment is able to take it up into its general structure. Some of these typical structural elements are
typical of interdiscursivity and will return in further discussion.
Interdiscursivity, then, is a familiar tool used to help structure
works written during the postmodern period; as will be demonstrated in the
following examples, however, it has been adopted in many different ways. We’ll be looking at interdiscursivity primarily
in the following works: Aunt Julia & the Scriptwriter, The Crying of Lot
49, The English Patient, Memoirs of a Survivor and Slaughterhouse Five,
although even novels as diverse as Ballard’s Crash make use of such
devices. In Crash the characters involved
in the narrative become involved with a group of people who achieve sexual
pleasure through applying the blueprints of rhizomes from the past,
making sense of their lives through the violence expressed in the deaths of
Thomas Pynchon’s
novel shows some aspects of interdiscursivity even though the nihilism
of its structure and its attitude towards contemporary western culture suggests
that it lives up to the negative image generally used by neoconservative
critics who find his work problematic. Pynchon was born on
"She looked down a slope, needing to squint for the
sunlight, on to a vast sprawl of houses which had grown up all together, like a
well-tended crop, from the dull brown earth; and she thought of the time she'd
opened a transistor radio to replace a battery and seen her first printed
circuit. The ordered swirl of houses and
streets, from this high angle, sprang at her now with the same unexpected,
astonishing clarity as the circuit card had.”
(Pynchon, 14)
The very name of the city she
is viewing, San Narciso, suggests that the
author is using this as a tool to question the nature of American reality. 'Narciso' calls up
images of 'narcissus', a culture constantly viewing itself; Oedipa
constantly attempts to link disparate events by making sense of a set of signifiers
which according to our sense of logic have no signifieds,
but in a ‘narcissistic’ attempt to make sense of her society, eventually seems
to make some sot of sense to Oedipa. One of the other characters also attempts to
use a form to help structure his reality, one Lacan suggests is essentially
‘narcissistic’: the cinema and television.
This is undoubtedly a biting attempt by the author to use interdiscursivity
to parody his own culture:
"'But our beauty lies,' explained Metzger, 'in this
extended capacity for convolution. A
lawyer in a courtroom, in front of any jury, becomes an actor, right? Raymond Burr is an actor, impersonating a
lawyer, who in front of a jury becomes an actor. Me, I’m a former actor who became a
lawyer. They’ve done the pilot film of a
TC series, in fact, based loosely on my career, starring my friend Manny Di Presso, a one-time lawyer who
quite his firm to become an actor. Who
in this pilot plays me, an actor become a lawyer reverting periodically to
being an actor. The film is in an
air-conditioned vault at one of the
(ibid.: 21)
The reality of Pynchon’s characters is at best distended to the point of
being totally ‘schizophrenic’; perhaps as a result of drugs or simply the
nature of the characters, meaning becomes more and more abstracted from the
objects they should be connected to. Oedipa as ‘voyeur and listener’ creates an enormous set of signifiers
without apparent signifieds in the following
fragment:
"So it went.
Oedipa played the voyeur and listener. Among her other encounters were a
facially-deformed welder, who cherished his ugliness; a child roaming the night
who missed the death before birth as certain outcasts do the dear lulling
blankness of the community; a Negro woman with an intricately-marbled scar
along the baby-fat of one cheek who kept going through rituals of miscarriage
each for a different reason, deliberately as others might the ritual of birth,
dedicated not to continuity but to some kind of interregnum; an ageing
night-watchman, nibbling at a bar of Ivory Soap, who had trained his virtuoso
stomach to accept also lotions,
air-fresheners, fabrics, tobaccos and waxes in a hopeless attempt to assimilate
it all, all the promise, productivity, betrayal, ulcers, before it was too
late; and even another voyeur, who hung outside one of the city’s still-lighted
windows searching for who knew what specific image. Decorating each alienations, each species of
withdrawal, as cuff-link, decal, aimless doodling, there was somehow always the
post horn.”
(ibid.: 84)
The interdiscursivity
results in playing games with sense and nonsense, signifiers and logic, rather
than with time, space and/or genre.
Because of the games, jokes and puns provided by the author, The
Crying of
"You're like Romantic
writers," I unfortunately remarked.
"In point of fact they’re
like me," he shot back in a resentful tone of voice, bouncing up and
down on his chair. "I've never
plagiarized anybody. I’m quite willing
to put up with every sort of carping criticism of my work, save that infamous
libel. On the other hand, there are
people who have stolen from me in the most nefarious way imaginable.”
I endeavoured to explain to
him that my remark about his resembling the Romantics had not been made with
any intention of offending him, that it had been a mere feeble pleasantry, but
he didn’t hear me, because all of a sudden he had fallen into a seething rage.”
(Vargas Llosa, 1982: 50)
The examples taken from
Camacho’s soap-operas are highly amusing, and exciting to read; each of them
ends with an ambiguously leaving us in a situation where we are not sure what
will happen; the readers are put into the position of Lima radio listeners who
listened urgently to find out what had happened to their characters created by
this Bolivian ‘genius’:
"But two, three, several seconds went by and he
didn't shoot. Would he do so? Would he obey? Would the shot ring out? Would the dead body of the mysterious
immigrant rollover onto the heap of unidentifiable rotting garbage? Or would his life be spared, would he flee,
blindly, wildly along the beaches… as an irreproachable sergeant stood there,
amid the putrid stench and the surge of the waves, confused and sad at heart at
having failed to do his duty? How would
this tragedy of El Callao end?”
(ibid.: 83)
The second major occurrence
is the love affair with his ‘Aunt by marriage’, Julia. It is the love affair with his aunt that
becomes the means to relate to the second major discourse in this work; that of
the ‘soap-operas’ by the scriptwriter Pedro Camacho which interrupt Mario’s discourse
every second chapter, and it is thanks to Aunt Julia’s insights that Mario
begins to realise this.
"The love affair of a baby
and an old lady who's also more or less your aunt," Julia said to me one night
as we were crossing the Parque Central. “A perfect
subject for one of Pedro Camacho’s serials.”
I reminded her that she was
only my aunt by marriage, and she replied that on the
(ibid.: 90)
"I Know what it's like,
down to the very last detail, I saw it in a crystal ball," Aunt Julia said to
me, without the least trace of bitterness.
"In the best of cases, our love affair will last three, maybe four years
or so; that is to say, till you meet up with a little chick who'll be the
mother of your children. Then you’ll
throw me over and I’ll have to seduce another gentleman friend. And at that point the words THE END appear.”
As I
kissed her hands, I told her she’d been listening to too many serials for her
own good.
"It's quite obvious that you never
listen to them,” she retorted. "In Pedro
Camacho's soap operas there are hardly ever any love affairs or anything like
that. Right now, for example, Olga and I
are all caught up in the one that comes on at
(ibid.: 170-171)
Aunt Julia seem more aware of
ways to compare discourses and to use this to make sense of her world than Marito who is so wrapped up in his Parisian fantasies that
he is unable to notice. By the end of
the novel, Camacho begins to mix up the reality’s just as the reader begins to
make sense of the dynamic realisation of Mario’s real-life and his goal as a
writer. Mario realises how important
writing is to the life of Camachos; he may be
‘illiterate’ but in order to make his creations, he actually ‘becomes’ his
characters, and it is no doubt that just as his realities become the means by
which his listeners make sense of their reality, writing them becomes Camacho’s
way to make sense of his own:
"Then, with sacerdotal slowness, he rose to his
feet (he had been sitting on the windowsill, next to the Primus stove), went
over to his suitcase, opened it, and began to pull out of the depths of it,
like a prestidigitator pulling rabbits or flags out of a top hat an incredible
collection of objects: an English magistrate's court wig, false moustaches of
various sizes, a fireman's hat, military badges, masks of a fat woman, an old
man, an idiot child, a traffic policeman's stick, sea dog’s cap and pipe, a surgeon’s white
smock, false ears and noses, cotton beards… Like a little electric robot, he
showed us these props, and—the better to demonstrate their effect to us? out of
some intimate inner need?—he began putting them on and taking them off, with an
agility that betrayed a long-standing habit, constant practice. As Aunt Julia and I watch in open-mouthed
amazement, by changing props and costumes Pedro Camacho transformed himself,
before our very eyes, into a doctor, a sailor, a judge, an old lady, a beggar,
a bigot, a cardinal… And all during this series of lightning-quick changes he
kept talking in a fervent tone of voice.”
(ibid.: 134)
The more crazed Camacho
becomes, the more Marito seems to want to become a
writer, which is an important part of the interdiscursivity. It is thanks to the interdiscursive means
that this novel becomes both hilarious and poignant; it is far more than just a
parody of soap operas, but a means by which our lives become very much mixed-up
with the ‘discourses’ that become part of lives, which now includes television and
to a lesser extent cinema. It is thanks to the use of interdiscursivity that
the reader can attain an insight into the complex forces behind a writer’s
decisions.
In contrast, Lessing’s Memoirs of a Survivor uses interdiscursivity
to achieve more serious ends, but are in a similar way ‘disparate’ in that
if read following a normal set of narrative rules, the whole is difficult to
make sense of, as are the individual parts.
In this novel, there are two primary discourses, one of ‘outer’ and the
other of ‘inner’ space; influenced by Sufi mysticism, Lessing
found that a dream-like commentary could provide an alternative insight into
what takes place in the outside world; it was a chance to use metaphoric and
archetypal symbols to comment on everyday action. The two discources
taking the form this time of contrasting ‘realities’, are essentially
intertwined with one another. As the
‘dream-like’ world which is available to the ‘survivor’ (remaining unnamed
throughout the novel) who witnesses the outside world from her apartment
provides her with ever more insights into the suffering of the outside world,
and the difficult childhood of Emily who is put into ‘the survivors’ care, in
the world outside this dream-like reality, more and more people leave their
homes, form ‘gangs’ making the traditional family superfluous and leave the
city, perhaps never to return. Hugo, the
half-cat, half-dog, chimera-like mythical creature whose whole purpose in life
seems to be the protection of Emily, is an interesting product of the mythical
dream-like universe that has crossed from one world into the other for the
purpose of protecting Emily. This
strange animal also received a horrifically ugly form; we meet an (impossible)
half-cat half-dog as if the transcendent reality that produced it did it’s best
to create something vaguely recognisable in the world of the apartment and the
city. It also plays the function of
‘verfremdung’; immediately placing something ‘incomprehensible according to the
traditional rules of realism’ in the discourse which seems to follow the rules
of temporality. Emily, Hugo and the
‘survivor’s’ role becomes clearer in the transcendent ending which finishes the
novel, but even at the beginning of the novel they are used to describe the
role of the archetypal ‘wall’:
"Looking back I see myself sitting in the long room
with its comfortable old furniture, with Emily's things in the little space she
allotted for them, and the yellow beast lying quietly, suffering. And there for backdrop was the ambiguous
wall, which could so easily dissolve, dissolving, too, all this extraneous
life, and the anxieties and pressures of the time – creating, of course, its
own. Shadowily
present, there it stood, its pattern of fruits and leaves and flowers
obliterated by the dim light. That is
how I see it, see us, see that time: the long room, dimly lit, with me and Hugo
there, that shifted and ebbed and thinned and left – and behind us that other
indefinite region, shifting and melting and changing, where walls and doors and
rooms and gardens and people continually recreated themselves, like clouds.
(Lessing, 1982: 68)
In addition to these two
realities, we also have the discourse of ‘they’ or ‘them’ who are also referred
to as ‘the Talkers’; the bureaucracy which forms a hierarchical upper-class and
which attempts to explain these happenings (but which it ultimately is unable
to do). Lessing,
or ‘the survivor’, describes them as follows:
"Attitudes towards authority, towards Them and
They, were increasingly contradictory, and we all believed that we were living
in a peculiarly anarchistic community.
Of course not. Everywhere was the
same.”
(Lessing, 1982: 8)
".the shops were really used only by the administrating
class, by - as most people called them - The Talkers."
(ibid.: 46)
Finally there is the
discourse of the ‘wild gang’ of children which emerge from the underground,
comparable in more ways than one with a pack of rats in their suspected
cannibalism; the wild pack is very much a rhizome forced onto the
comparatively stable reality of city life.
They form very much the ‘rupture’ to the existence of the people of the
city, forcing more people onto the street and others to question the reason for
their existence.
"Some had been born in the underground and
abandoned. How had they survived? No one knew.
But this was what these children knew how to do. They stole what they needed to live on, which
was very little indeed. They wore
clothes – just enough. They were … no,
they were not like animals who have been licked and purred over, and,
like people, have found their way to good behaviour by watching exemplars. They were not a pack either, but an
assortment of individuals together only for the sake of the protection in
numbers. They had no loyalty to each
other, or, if so, a fitful and unpredictable loyalty. They would be hunting in a group one hour,
and murdering one of their number the next.
They ganged up on each other according to the impulse of the moment.”
(Lessing, 1982: 154)
In a rhizomatic sense,
interdiscursivity in Memoirs is essential to questioning each of the
realities and forcing the reader to apply another sense of logic to the
discourses that are intertwined. 'Interdiscursivity',
however, becomes more than simply a narrative tool or a way to question
traditional forms of logic applied to 'realist' narrative; in this novel interdiscursivity
passes over into the encompassing nature of intradiscursivity,
suggesting that it is an alternative way of experiencing literature, which
forms a metaphor for an alternative way of experiencing reality. These notions are discussed in more detail in
my companion paper Intradiscursive
Environments (Laskewicz: 2004).
Ultimately, the reader is presented with an ambiguous narrative. To begin there are three discourses which are
intertwined irrevocably wth one another, some of
which point towards a reality we can recognise (such as the bureaucracy or the
society which is disintegrating) and others which are incomprehensible
according to these rules. Here already, interdiscursivity
requires a ‘rhizomatic’ approach.
Interdiscursivity is also essential to Ondaatje’s The English
Patient. It is ‘set’ at the end of
the Second World War, and in a number of earlier historical periods as the
discourses blow around one another. Each of the characters has a discourse
which refers to his or her past; that discourse, however, is ambiguous because
it is often related to the reader in the form of storytelling, about the past,
a past which is confusing. There is also
the discourse related to what the characters are realising in the
present-tense, very much involved with the dynamism of the actions they are
performing, particularly for Kip the Sikh bomb-defuser;
we are very much brought into the present moment as he is ‘in the process of’
defusing bombs’. Morphine, similar to
the abuse of drugs in The Crying of Lot 49, can also be considered a
discourse of its own, one that changes the way the characters experience the
moment and also how they relate their pasts to the reader or other characters
in a ‘story-telling’ fashion. The
English patient’s stories are perhaps the most remarkable and fascinating to
read because of his incredible skills and the unique relationship he has to
both the desert—perhaps a rhizomatic rupturing discourse of its own—and
the Bedouin culture who saves him. Their
means of interpreting reality provide a new way for the reader to comprehend the
text itself. Kip’s
discourse, also influenced by his rich Sikh traditions, are also
fascinating. Kip and Hana,
‘the cultural bastards’, share a lot, and through her relationship with Kip,
the English patient and Caravaggio, she is allowed to develop and is able to
leave the ‘purgatory’ of the Italian Villa and move on in her life. The English patient (or the Hungarian spy),
thanks to Hana and Caravaggio who need to hear his
stories, is also able to leave the ‘purgatory’ of his burnt and useless body by
‘confessing’ his love for Katherine.
Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse
Five is similarly ‘set’ (at least partly and thematically) during the
Second World War, although interdiscursivity frees the ‘hero’ Billy
Pilgrim to become lost in time and space. It is involved with Vonnegut’s own
imprisonment in a German POW camp in 1945 where he witnessed the horrific fire-bombing
of
"'Welcome aboard, Mr. Pilgrim,’ said the loudspeaker. ‘Any questions?’ Billy licked his lips, thought a while, inquire at last: ‘Why me?’ ‘That is a very Earthling question to ask, Mr. Pilgrim. Why you? Why us for that matter? Why anything? Because this moment simply is. Have you ever seen bugs trapped in amber?’ ‘Yes.’ Billy, in fact, had a paperweight in his office which was a blob of polished amber with three lady-bugs embedded in it. 'Well, here we are, Mr. Pilgrim, trapped in the amber of this moment. There is no why.’”(Vonnegut: 76-77)
The discourse of the Trafalmadorians become means to understand the horrors of the war he has left behind. We also meet a number of other characters such as Eliot Rosewater, Howard W. Campbell and Kilgore Trout, each who are present in earlier Vonnegut novels and who provide an alternative insight into what Pilgrim has to go through. Pilgrim’s name itself suggests the journey he has to undergo, and its inevitability. Because so much is experienced, it is sometimes hard to tell exactly what Vonnegut is trying to communicate. It is a novel about war, about the cruelty and violence done in war, about people and their nature, their selfishness, about love, humanity, regeneration, motion, and death. But this is the nature and beauty of interdiscursivity; the intention is to allow the author to communicate so many things, but at the same time giving the reader the freedom to make of it what her or she wants to. The intention of these examples has been to demonstrate the potential power of such a communicative medium so important to both contemporary literature, cinema and television.
Š May 2008 Nachtschimmen
Music-Theatre-Language Night Shades,
Ghent (Belgium)*
Send mail to zachar@nachtschimmen.eu with questions or
comments about this website.
*LAST MODIFIED: September 27 2013.
Major Writings
