Intertextual competence: The reader’s key to the treasure

While the inescapable osmosis of texts and their dependence one on another has always been a feature of literature, the term intertextuality which gives justice to this phenomenon was coined only in the 1960s. term denoted a focus on the text and its correspondences with other works, the waning interest in the person of the author and the mounting interest in the reader, who was for the first time perceived as the (inter-) text's true maker. Since the 1960s, there have been a vast number of metatextual (Genette 1992: 82) (1) studies that have dealt with the process by means of which the recipient of a work of art acclimates the text at hand. Many of the above studies, independently of one another, assumed that reading is basically a two-phase cognitive phenomenon, and the reader's activity consists in a bilinear deciphering of a text. Reading is seen, then, as intertextual by nature; the boundary of a single work is transcended and (theoretically, at least) the whole of literature becomes accessible to the reader. One of the earliest attempts at a definition of processes at work during reading was made by Stanley Fish in Self-consuming artifacts (1972). In the encounter between the text and the reader, the latter moves forward through the linear succession of lexical, syntactic, and semantic items realizing every now and then that some of them are unsettling and disturbing. Thus, at the superficial level the reader is faced with the resistance of meaning; he is bewildered and uncertain. reaching of the end of an unclear sentence (paragraph, page, chapter, text) provokes one to return to its beginning in search for disambiguation. Confined to the level of lexemes, however, the search proves futile, hence the indispensability of venturing outside of it onto other planes of signification. Fish points to St. Augustine who was instrumental in placing significance outside of the purely textual surface: Augustine, in effect, has made language defeat itself by making it point away the temporal-spatial vision it naturally reflects what [the language] does is alert the reader to its inability ... to contain, deal with, capture, say anything about its putative subject, Christ. sentence is thus a ploy in the strategy of conversion, impressing upon the reader or hearer, the insufficiency of one way of seeing in the hope that he will come to replace it with better (Fish 1972: 41-42). something better which according to Fish can be accountable for textual significance was subsequently scrutinized in one of the most influential analyses of the process of reading, written by the French critic Michael Riffaterre. In his Semiotics of poetry (1984) Riffaterre, the pope of intertextual studies, reiterates the dual division of reading proposed by Fish, defining somewhat more precisely the two stages of readerly activity. To provide a backdrop for his analysis of reading the French critic proposes a term literary phenomenon. He defines it in terms of a communicative situation, as a dialectic between text and reader (Riffaterre 1984:1). In his subsequent book, carrying a telling title Text production, the critic extends the definition of the above communicative act as follows: The phenomenon is not only the text, but also its reader and all of the reader's possible reactions to the text - both enonce and enonciation (Riffaterre 1983: 3). As to the stages of the deciphering, they take place on two planes concurrently. Initially, the reader decodes a text beginning to end, in line with the linear succession of signifiers, from top to bottom of the page, and follows the syntagmatic unfolding. This first, heuristic is where the first interpretation takes place, since it is during this reading that meaning is apprehended. second stage is that of retroactive reading. This is the time for a second interpretation, for the truly hermeneutical reading. …