MOHAMMED N. NIAZI

        ENCOUNTERING THE OTHER IN GENERAL TEXT:

        AN APPROACH TO INTERTEXT THROUGH POETRY OF THE GERMAN SENSIBILITY 

OF DISPUTABLE MEANING but nonetheless useful to the most divergent positions, intertext serves both as an associative springboard into meditations on semiotic and cultural codification and, at the other end of the spectrum, as a modern euphemism for traditional forms of source study. The least contentious meaning of intertextual designates any allusion in one text to another text and serves as a handy label for signaling some sort of interconnectedness: a statement such as "Intertextuality involves the relation of one text to other texts" represents in definitional terms the lowest common denominator, whose banality, at first glance, seems to be offset by the indisputable nature of its content. Yet almost immediately one is struck by a tacit assumption in this definition concerning the given object of inquiry: namely, that a "text" is a singular, discrete entity. It is between groups of such entities (texts) that the intertextual presumably takes place. Asking ourselves what else a text might be, however frustrating and inconclusive an enterprise this ends up being, is the first necessary step towards introducing my primary aim in this inquiry: animating the term intertext as an interpenetrative relation between "texts" and forms of exteriority usually excluded from a text, such as referential effects usually designated as objective reality. Any more refined formulation of my problematic must await its emergence from a preliminary foray into the question of the text; it suffices to say for the moment that the usual disagreement about whether intertextuality is to be regarded as a general state of affairs textual or as an inherent quality of specific texts, can only be a potentially misleading, secondary affair until we approach the intertext through the question of the text.

The most compact way of introducing the question of the text in between which intertext is supposed to occur probes the morphological self evidence of the decomposition inter-text which, so divided, assumes in advance that texts are discrete entities admitting of the spatial in-between signified by the inter. We would be well advised to suspend the inclinations of common sense when we regard the separable meaning of inter and the multitude of prefixes available in theoretical discourse (in Genette for example, responsible for five of the following), prefixes that seem to modify and compound a base morpheme text: sub-, intra-, extra-, geno-, pheno-, con-, para-, hypo-, hyper-, arche-, meta-, crypto-, trans-, and so on. Rather than take text for granted and explore the plethora of interrelations induced by this multiple compounding, we could do just the opposite; we could train our attention on text rather than inter through the insights of the deconstructive discourse that grapples with the vexed limits of the text with the most rigor, if also the least definitional certitude. Derrida preempts the desire to identify and instrumentalize intertext as a relation "between" texts with a notion of general text (perhaps best written in the light of the morphology discussed above as generaltext, but I will stick to convention) that disabuses us of a belief in a bounded, autonomous signifying "text," itself related to the traditional literary critical object of investigation, the discrete work of a great, great-ish or great enough author. The sense of general text as a differential, deferred, purely relational pseudo-structure of the trace, of indefinitely postponed presence, renders the bounds and limits of the autonomous text, the demarcated phallocentric corpus of writing, untenable. Within such a pattern of thought, the in-between is no longer a tenable concept, as self-differing general text is shot through with the other text, drawing in the marginal in-between of texts into their center and vice versa.

In this reverberation the purely dichotomized relation between text and the other of text, be it the "in-between" in the usual sense of intertext or the referential outside of the text, is deconstructed: general text is, first of all, always self-differing, incapable of asserting itself as a discrete textual region and thus exploding the common in-between notion of intertext; and second, it does not allow for the sharp demarcation of intratextual and extratextual (social, psychological, political, historical) codes. General text ingests, but does not digest, "reality" or the referential effects ideologically bound with that term, and respects (in admittedly unusual form) those boundaries to the extratextual that hinder infinite textualization.