Lecture
4.3. The text in the world of texts
Texts do not exist in isolation, but in interaction with
one another, forming a world of texts — a separate domain of reality filled with texts.
At the basis of the interaction of texts lie dialogic relations between them. The idea of dialogic relations between
texts belongs to M.M. Bakhtin, who holds that
dialogic relations are relations of meaning. In order to
explain the manifestation of dialogic relations, the scholar compares an utterance belonging to a single speaker (speech subject, in his terminology): «Hunger, cold!»,
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and two utterances by different speakers (speech subjects):
«Hunger!» — «Cold!». Dialogic relations occur
only in the second case: these two utterances are dialogically correlated8
.
There are many grounds on which texts are grouped.
Among them, for example, are the following:
l the natural language in which the texts are created. One distinguishes sets of texts in Russian, Balkar, Catalan, and other languages;
l the text's belonging to a single genre. See the genre
groupings of texts: novels, short stories, anecdotes, autobiographies, greetings, complaints, and others;
l the texts' belonging to a single author. Such are, for example, the sets of texts by A. Blok, V. Pelevin, academician
P.P. Semenov-Tyan-Shansky, academician I.Yu. Krachkovsky, a first-grade pupil of school No. 000 in the town of N-sk, Ivan Ivanov, and others.
Relatively recently (since the 1960s) a further set of
relations between texts has been distinguished: intertextual and text-formative.
Intertextual relations (Latin inter — between) are relations between a text and the already existing texts (or fragments of them) included in it. The term was introduced by J. Kristeva in developing M.M. Bakhtin's ideas about dialogic relations
between texts.
In V. Pelevin's novel «Chapaev and Void», on the opposition between the Western myth (of the Eternal Return) and the Eastern
myth (of the Eternal Non-Return), an image is created of the non-returning dissident, to whom the author lends the features of one of the four types of noble Buddhist personalities, namely the «anagami» — the one who does not return from nirvana to samsara. Chapaev, Petka,
and Anna, having plunged into the Ural (Ural being an acronym for the Conditional River
of Absolute Love), become «non-returners» who have passed into such a state of being in which reality becomes equal to pure mind, emptiness equal to form, and space
(radiant emptiness) — to consciousness. The Buddhist philosophical-mythological foundation of V. Pelevin's novel, through the simultaneous sacralization and parody, demythologizes
the Soviet conception of history and ideology. (N.S. Olzko.
A Semiotic-Synergetic Interpretation of the Features of the Realization
of the Categories of Intertextuality and Interdiscursivity in Postmodernist Artistic Discourse: abstract of doctoral dissertation.
Chelyabinsk, 2009. P. 25.)
Each of the texts, not only literary ones, exists
within its own intertextual space. This space includes texts
to which the given text is, in a sense, a «reaction». Such a
space reveals that fragment of contemporary culture and of the culture of the past to which the text refers and which is «transformed» within the text.
A text included in a given specific text does not necessarily
have universal cultural significance; the sphere of cultural
significance of a text may be the speech of some association
of people — a family, a circle of friends, a company of friends, a work collective, and so on. (See fragments of N. Piegay-Gros's book in the reading materials
given below.)
Text-formative relations. Text-formative are the
relations between texts one of which is derived from another (others). Compare a similar example from word-formation: vozit' (to carry) → voz-chik (carter), stol (table) → stol-ik (little table), Moskva (Moscow) → moskovskii (Moscow, adj.).
Examples: the text of an abstract is a derivative of the text of the work being abstracted; the text of a newspaper issue is a derivative of the texts that make up that issue; the text of an advertisement
and the «same» advertisement text transferred, for example, into a literary text; a rumor and the text that spreads it.
Let us give one more example from V. Pelevin. In the speech of the characters of the novel «Generation “P”» there are the following derivative text fragments, formed on the basis of advertising
texts:
...Morkovin, in a denim jacket embroidered with gold, strolls in a shop window, while Tatarsky, dressed in a military quilted jacket,
hurls a brick at the armored glass, shouting:
«It was tougher near Kandahar!» (the slogan «Enjoy the Gap»);
...People in shrouds rushed about on the screen — Mr. Yokohori
was being dragged off somewhere, a pale girl in a kimono began making
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apologetic bows, and over all this disgrace the «Panasonic» logo appeared. A deep voice said: «Panasonic.
Yapona mat'!»
In the texts from this novel by V. Pelevin, the participation of the source
advertising texts in the formation of derivative texts creates
sharply parodic situations.
The world of texts is not a closed but an open system. Each
individual text exists not only in interaction with other texts, but is also open to other worlds — culture, society,
nature, the individual human being.
The concepts of the world of texts and of the world of a specific text give an idea of the sphere of a text's existence, help to interpret
its meaning, and to comprehend the life of the text.
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