Andrea Lesic-Thomas

Behind Bakhtin: Russian Formalism and Kristeva’s Intertextuality

Published in: Paragraph: A Journal of Modern Critical Theory, Vol. 28, no. 3,

November 2005, pp. 1-20.

Intertextuality is one of those extremely useful and yet strangely vague theoretical

concepts: the liberal definition would be that it refers to any form of interrelation

between any number of texts, from the instances of clear reactions of one text to

another (as in parody, for example) to the more general idea that there is not a single

text that does not possess traces of other texts within itself. As Graham Allen points

out, the term in its variety of meanings and use has become ‘akin to such terms as “the

Imagination”, “history”, or “Postmodernism”’; it is far from being ‘transparent’ and

‘cannot be evoked in an uncomplicated manner’.1

If the diversity of the current use of the term can be seen as somewhat

troubling, its origins appear to be beyond dispute: in 1966, Julia Kristeva, a young

Bulgarian scholar, gave a presentation on Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the novel and

the nature of the word/utterance/discourse in the novelistic genres in Roland Barthes’s

seminar.2 This presentation was later published as a paper in Critique, and then

included in Kristeva’s book Sémiotikè: Recherches pour une sémanalyse under the

title ‘Le mot, le dialogue et le roman’ (‘Word, Dialogue and Novel’). The new term

was introduced to replace Bakhtin’s own notion of dialogism where it refers to the

text as a ‘mosaic of quotations, an absorption and transformation of another text’. 3

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Taken on since as one of the key terms of literary scholarship, 4 intertextuality has

become a term widely used to denote any form of interrelation between any number

of texts, and the conceptual change which accompanied this terminological change

from ‘dialogism’ to ‘intertextuality’ is probably one of the great intellectual

repackaging and marketing schemes in recent history. 5 It served the double purpose of

helping Kristeva establish herself as a voice to be reckoned with in French

structuralist circles, as well as introducing those same circles to the world of

Bakhtinian thought.

In her recent book Intertextuality: Debates and Contexts, Mary Orr tells a

similar version of this familiar story, but at the same time proposes a revision of the

‘agreed canon’ of theoretical texts on intertextuality, 6 arguing that although Kristeva,

Barthes, Genette and Jenny are by now well established in it, German and to some

extent also Slavic contributions (such as Russian Formalism and the Bakhtin Circle)

are generally ignored.7 However, Orr herself does not discuss the Slavic theories to

any greater extent, mentioning Russian Formalism in passing a few times (and

Lotman and Soviet Semiotics only as part of a quote from Plottel and Charney’s 1978

Intertextuality: New Perspectives in Criticism) and presenting Bakhtin mostly through

her analysis of Kristeva. In this context, Orr suggests that Kristeva’s role in

introducing Bakhtin to the West is, regardless of the fact that Kristeva’s views are

‘integral to the debate’, underrated and that it ‘has yet to be fully mapped’ (24).

Although Kristeva’s part in the creation of Western European understanding

of Bakhtin does deserve much closer scrutiny and a considerable reassessment,

Kristeva’s marginalisation in the matter—on which Orr insists (23)—is not the

reason; far from it. Furthermore, Orr’s assessment that Kristeva’s discussion of

Bakhtin’s ideas in ‘Le mot, le dialogue et le roman’ may be ‘less Kristeva's manifesto

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for “intertextuality” than her advocacy of various aspects of Bakhtin's extensive

œuvre’, which she rendered ‘faithfully’, although casting it in a different, Saussurean

French context (25-6), is also rather problematic. Instead of having been the neglected

pioneer of Western Bakhtinian scholarship, as Orr sees her, Kristeva determined the

tone and the terminology of the discussion for a considerable period of time, and her

influence is still very strongly felt today. Having been invented by her, the term

‘intertextuality’ soon caught on not only as a useful terminological tool in

structuralist, post-structuralist, post-colonial and feminist literary theory, but also as a

term in the newly born Western European Bakhtinian scholarship (or, to be more

precise, in the discourse of those literary theorists who acquainted themselves with

Bakhtin’s thought, rather than of Slavicists who did the same). The full implications

of this terminological shift were not fully assessed, and the conceptual change that

was implied in it is to a large extent still going unchallenged. I would argue that

Kristeva’s piece, with its playful simultaneous presentation of several different, and

not always fully compatible, theoretical positions, was a highly original intellectual

collage, and that its purpose is largely misunderstood. As a playful riff on an already

existing theoretical tradition, ‘Le mot, le dialogue et le roman’ is perfect; its problems

start when it is read as a straightforward introduction to Bakhtin’s thought. Tzvetan

Todorov even suggested that Bakhtin’s own term ‘dialogism’, which he found too

imprecise to be helpful, should be replaced by Kristeva’s term ‘intertextuality’ as the

most general and inclusive term for the relations between different utterances, leaving

the term ‘dialogism’ to refer to the actual verbal exchange between two interlocutors,

and to Bakhtin’s conception of human personality. 8 Although his suggestion has not

been fully accepted, one often finds the terms dialogism and intertextuality presented

as synonymous. For example, Judith Still and Michael Worton present Bakhtin’s

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ideas very much through Kristeva’s reading of him, and for them their main term

exists as ‘dialogism/intertextuality’. 9 Although they stress that Kristeva ‘privileges the

term “text” in order to remove any apparent bias in Bakhtin toward the spoken word’

(16),10 they never assess the full implications of this terminological merging of two

perhaps slightly different concepts. Robert Stam cites Bakhtin as ‘one of the source

thinkers of the contemporary discussion of “intertextuality”’, which was as a term

‘introduced into critical discourse as Julia Kristeva’s translation of Bakhtin’s

conception of the “dialogic”’;11 the choice of words here would suggest that Kristeva

simply changed Bakhtin’s word but that the concept remained the same.

I propose here that the notions behind Bakhtin’s terms ‘dialogism’,

‘heteroglossia’ and ‘polyphony’, and Kristeva’s term ‘intertextuality’ belong to

different conceptual worlds, and that, in creating her concept of intertextuality,

Kristeva was probably far more influenced by Russian Formalism than by Bakhtin. I

shall first examine the faithfulness of Kristeva’s reading of Bakhtin’s ideas; I hope to

show that her Saussurean interpretation misrepresented some of the basic tenets of

Bakhtin’s notion of dialogism. Her erasing of the concept of subjectivity from

Bakhtin’s thought is particularly pertinent here; so is her ‘textualised’ understanding

of the interrelations between literature and language, on the one hand, and history and

society, on the other. My argument is that ‘intertextuality’ and ‘dialogism’ are two

very different concepts that refer to rather different things; it is a testament to the

seductiveness of Kristeva’s invention that her interpretation of Bakhtin, though

misleading in some of its main points, still continues to be highly influential.

Secondly, I am going to show the similarities between Kristeva’s ‘intertextuality’ and

Russian Formalism’s thoughts on the functioning of the literary text, arguing that

‘intertextuality’ probably owes as much (if not more) to the ideas of Shklovskii,

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Jakobson and Tynianov as to those of Bakhtin. Through their rejection of the role of

the author as an agent in literary development, their discussions of the interaction

between ‘high’ literature with popular genres, their gradual dismantling of the

distinctiveness of the literary text and the eventual conclusion that the literariness of

the literary text is perceptible only in contrast with other forms of language use,

Formalists are present in Kristeva’s discussion of Bakhtin and in her conception of

‘intertextuality’ much more than it is immediately obvious.

Bakhtin’s dialogism and Kristeva’s intertextuality

Let us first have a closer look at Kristeva’s famous essay ‘Le mot, le dialogue et le

roman’ as a piece of Bakhtinian scholarship, rather than as an ‘autonomous’ piece of

literary theory. Considering that this was the text which introduced Bakhtin to the

West, and which for many has served as an introduction to his theory, it is important

to assess how faithful it is to Bakhtin’s own ideas.

Firstly, however, we should note that Kristeva’s presentation of Bakhtin was

based on two of his most important works: the book on Dostoevsky and the book on

Rabelais. Kristeva mentions in her first footnote to ‘Le mot, le dialogue et le roman’

that Bakhtin was at that point working on a book on speech genres. Furthermore, to

what extent she was at that point familiar with the essays which were later published

in Voprosy literatury i estetiki (in 1975) is difficult to tell, but she probably had at

least some idea of what was contained in them, at least judging by her references to

Bakhtin’s differentiation between the novel and the epic. 12 Nevertheless, even if she

had no access to any of these essays, the books on Dostoevsky and Rabelais would

have given her a very clear idea of most of Bakhtin’s main concepts, such as

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dialogism, polyphony, ambivalence and carnival. Since the first two are quoted as the

main source for her concept of intertextuality, I shall concentrate specifically on how

Kristeva defined Bakhtin’s dialogue and polyphony.

In the opening paragraphs of ‘Le mot, le dialogue et le roman’, Kristeva puts

Bakhtin, significantly, in the context of Russian Formalism and the later Structuralist

development of that school, with the claim that he was one of the first to replace a

static structural analysis of texts with a more dynamic model which sees the literary

structure not as existing by itself, but developing in relation to another structure. 13 In

this model the literary word, as the smallest analytical unit, is not a point of fixed

meaning, but the crossroads of ‘textual surfaces’, a dialogue of different ‘écritures’:

that of the writer, the addressee (or the character) and of cultural context, past or

present. According to Kristeva, by establishing the word as the smallest unit of

literary structure Bakhtin places texts within history and society, which are

themselves seen as texts that the writer ‘reads’ and within which he places himself by

‘rewriting’ them in his texts (82-3). Furthermore, by defining the literary text as a

‘mosaic of quotations’, as an ‘absorption and transformation of another text’ Bakhtin,

writes Kristeva, replaced the concept of ‘intersubjectivity’ with the concept of

‘intertextuality’ (85). It is at this crucial claim that the problems of Kristeva’s

interpretation begin.

Kristeva’s privileging of the word ‘text’, which, as we have already seen, was

noted by Michael Worton and Judith Still as a strategy for removing ‘any apparent

bias in Bakhtin towards the spoken word’, also serves a much larger purpose. In

Kristeva’s essay, writers, readers, cultural contexts, history and society, all appear as

‘texts’ and ‘textual surfaces’, rendering the notion of the human subject, agency and

intentionality largely irrelevant. However, as Tzvetan Todorov found troubling,

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Bakhtin’s theory of the novel is, through the concept of dialogue, closely bound up

with his theory of human subjectivity, and his ideas about dialogism have as a basis

the notion that language itself represents the contradictions and conflicts of the society

to which it belongs. The picture that emerges from Bakhtin’s various writings on the

voices and the languages represented in the novel is a very complex one: the character

is an ideologue, his or her actions are fully motivated by the ideas in which he or she

believes. These ideas are not something which is mechanically grafted onto the

character, but are taken up by the whole of their ‘personality’, as his or her words and

ideas enter into dialogical relations with the words and ideas of other characters and

those of the author, and, as a result, the character is, much like the human subject,

always open to change and never truly finalised. Furthermore, behind this

interpersonal and intersubjective dialogue, the broader cultural and social dialogue of

different social languages takes place and the perpetual buzzing of the human beehive

(reporting and interpreting each other’s words) can be heard in the background; and

all of this enters into a dialogue with the reader, future and present, and with their own

dialogic relationship of the heteroglossia in which they live, and their own personal,

social and historic point of view with which they approach both life and the literary

text before them.14

Bakhtin sees the representation of social languages in the novel as bustling

with intentionality, subjectivity and agency, and this is a crucial component of his

thought which Kristeva, nevertheless, chooses to omit. It is difficult to ignore the fact

that one of the two Bakhtin’s works on which she based her essay was Problems of

Dostoevsky’s Poetics, in which Bakhtin postulates that Dostoevsky’s great

achievement is the creation of the polyphonic novel, a literary form whose ‘dominant’

is the self-aware and self-knowing hero.15 The whole purpose of novelistic polyphony

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(to borrow the terminology from Bakhtin’s early work16) is that the hero, at long last,

can talk back at the author and the reader, and assert their presence not as an

objectified representation of an unchanging human soul but as an evolving, creating,

future-oriented spirit. The reason for Kristeva’s omission of the concept of

subjectivity, therefore, could not have been caused by a lack of awareness of certain

aspects of Bakhtin’s theory, but is clearly an intentional strategy. Clayton and

Rothstein note that Kristeva ‘transforms Bakhtin’s concepts by causing them to be

read in conjunction with ideas about textuality that were emerging in France in the

mid-sixties’.17 According to them, ‘this textualisation of Bakhtin changes his ideas—

changes them just enough to allow the new concept of intertextuality to emerge’.

More precisely, a Derridian notion of ‘writing’ ‘supplies a dimension that was not

present in Bakhtin originally, the dimension of indeterminacy, of différance, of

dissemination’ (19). In addition to this, they emphasise that ‘Kristeva’s conception of

intertextuality opens several lacunae’ not present in Bakhtin, the most important being

‘a vagueness about the relation of the social to the literary text’ (20).

The ‘vagueness’ can be largely attributed to the omission of the concepts of

subjectivity, agency and intentionality, and their replacement by a radically expanded

notion of ‘textuality’ to include all of history and society. It is as if Kristeva takes

Derrida’s notion of the written text and applies it to the whole of human

communication, severing her concept of intertextuality almost completely from

Bakhtin’s thought. If we compare Bakhtin’s extremely complex and vibrant theory of

dialogism, heteroglossia and polyphony to Kristeva’s notion of ‘intertextuality’ as the

absorption and transformation of texts by texts, somehow the latter does not seem to

do much justice to the former, unless we are prepared to radically redefine the

meaning of the word ‘text’ to include not just speech, and social and unconscious

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symbolic systems (as Laurent Jenny proposes Kristeva has in effect done), but also

intersubjectivity and a much more agency-driven concept of the interaction of

historical and social languages.18 Quite the contrary to what Kristeva claims, one of

Bakhtin’s true concerns when it comes to the dialogue between texts is that of

‘intersubjectivity’, should we really insist on replacing Bakhtin’s own term

‘dialogism’ with another term. As Celia Britton puts it, ‘the idea of a dialogic text

depends upon an extension of the meaning of “dialogue”’, and she identifies three

stages of this extension.19 The first is that of the most common notion of dialogue,

where both participants are present and expressing their views. The second

‘disembodies’ the voice, making it ‘assignable to a particular reference point which is

no longer a person, but a fairly coherent set of principles, interests and attitudes’. In

the final stage, ‘the dialogue consists solely of the interplay of various unattached

voices, perceptibly different, yet whose various distinctive features do not add up to a

particular body of opinion—but, instead, to a rather more diffuse original context’

(56). Britton notes that Bakhtin’s notion of the dialogic text ‘contains all three of

these levels of dialogue’. Kristeva’s reading of him, however, takes just the third

meaning into account, diffusing further the notion of context. Instead of ‘levels’ of

dialogism, we are left with ‘textual surfaces’; Britton rightly asks ‘whether there is

much left of Bakhtin’s theory once one has eliminated the suspect psychologism’,

considering that he ‘defines characters exclusively in terms of their consciousness’

(58).

Simon Dentith makes a similar argument. His main point is that Kristeva’s

interest ‘remains a predominantly epistemological one, concerned to show the

impossibility of the “truth speaking” authorial voice escaping the same deconstructive

considerations which afflict all language’. Bakhtin’s focus, on the other hand, ‘is at

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once ethical and social, in which the objection to the monologic “discursive

hierarchy” is that it represents a politically unacceptable arrogation of authority’. 20

Like Britton, Dentith sees in Kristeva’s reading of Bakhtin a tendency ‘to take one

possible emphasis from Bakhtin and draw its implications provocatively’ (95).

Quite apart from the problem of Kristeva’s interpretation of Bakhtin, however,

it seems to me that an extremely significant source of Kristeva’ ‘intertextuality’

remained hidden from view. It can hardly be argued that it was Bakhtin who invented

‘intertextuality’, since the question of relations between texts was one of the main

problems occupying the Russian Formalists since the mid-1920s. And this is

something Kristeva would have been as aware of as her compatriot Tzvetan Todorov,

who edited the Seuil 1965 anthology of Formalist texts. 21 After all, she herself puts

Bakhtin in the Formalist context. If we take into account that most contemporary

Bakhtinian scholarship tends to read Bakhtin outside of and against Formalism, 22 let

us now see what happens to Kristeva’s intertextuality if we bypass Bakhtin, and

focus on the Formalists instead.

Russian Formalists’ intertextual theory

As a matter of fact, Laurent Jenny in his 1976 essay ‘La stratégie de la forme’ brought

the intertextuality debate back to where one of its origins lay in his reference to Iurii

Tynianov, one of most interesting Formalist critics, and to his study of literary parody

and literary system in general. 23 Although Tynianov’s work belongs to a later stage of

Formalist thought, the seeds of it already lay in Viktor Shklovskii’s famous early

Formalist article ‘Art as Device’ and its introduction of the concept of ostranenie or

defamiliarization, which can only be perceived against the background of other texts.

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However, the development of Formalist ideas beyond this famous article by

Shklovskii needs to be carefully traced out, following Boris Eikhenbaum’s often

neglected warning that in ‘discussing the Formal method and its evolution, it is

essential always to keep in mind that a great many of the principles advanced by the

Formalists during [1916-1921] had value not only as scientific principles but also as

slogans (…) spiked with paradoxes in the interest of propaganda and opposition’. 24 It

is important to understand the logic by which Formalists had collectively arrived at

their mature view of the functioning of the literary text, and at their own theory of

what we now term ‘intertextuality’.

In the early years of the ‘struggle’ (as Eikhenbaum puts it) with positivism and

symbolism, Formalists discarded the old opposition of ‘form’ and ‘content’ as an

irrelevant and ‘unscientific’ mode of looking at literature which can only succeed in

turning the literary texts into second-rate philosophy, theology, politics or psychology

embellished by pretty words. From the 1860s, literary journalism in Russia was

mainly preoccupied with the philosophical and social concerns dealt with in literary

works, seeing in literature primarily a vehicle for political, philosophical and religious

debate. By insisting that literature does not consist of ideas but of words, not of what

is said but how it is said, and thus insisting on the primary importance of form in

literary studies, Formalists were in effect trying to ‘rescue’ literature from the critical

approach based on ‘a concoction of home-made disciplines’ practised by the older

generation of literary historians, who, in the words of Roman Jakobson, seemed ‘to

have forgotten that those subjects pertain to their own fields of study—to the history

of philosophy, the history of culture, psychology, and so on, and that those fields of

study certainly may utilise literary monuments as documents of a defective and

second-class variety among other materials.’25 Thus, by insisting that the autonomous,

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literary properties of literature can be found not in the content of literary texts but in

their form, they were aiming to free literary studies and, indeed, literature itself from

the prevailing subservience to other humanistic disciplines which they deemed unable

to grasp the specific properties and with them the intrinsic value of literary works.

In this spirit, according to Shklovskii in ‘Art as Device’, novelty in poetry and

the originality of individual poets is observable only in the new ways of treating

language (in creating ‘devices’ for making language look strange and new), and not in

the imagery which is historically static, handed down from one generation of poets to

the next virtually unchanged.26 Furthermore, the concept of ‘art as device’ also

attacked Symbolists’ metaphysical view of poetry as a door into the spiritual

understanding of the world and replaced it with the view, shared with the Futurists,

that literature is simply a craft that does not need any other purpose beyond its own

existence, and that the word does not need to offer any glimpses of other hidden

worlds, as it is a world in itself, sufficient and whole. 27

However, once the perceived need for the militaristic and revolutionary spirit

diminished, the need to put such radical statements so strongly disappeared as well.

As the Formalists’ writings shifted from opposition to previous generations of literary

critics and historians to the self-assured pronouncements of an established critical

school, so the concept of form changed from an autonomous subject of literary study

which leaves the questions of the content aside, to a more encompassing view which

regarded form as a system whose every ‘formal’ element has semantic properties. A

change in the understanding of the concept of the ‘device’ accompanied this shift. As

Roman Jakobson put it in 1935, Formalism moved from looking at the individual

artistic devices to looking at their interconnections:

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 In the earlier work of Shklovskii, a poetic work was defined as a mere sum of

artistic devices, while poetic evolution appeared nothing more than a substitution

of certain devices. With a further development of Formalism, there arose the

accurate conception of a poetic work as a structured system, a regularly ordered

hierarchical set of artistic devices.28

In his outline of the development of the Formalist method Boris Eikhenbaum traces

the evolution of the concept of device in a similar way:

The fact of the matter is that the Formalists’ original endeavour to pin down some

particular constructional device and trace its unity through voluminous material

had given way to an endeavour to qualify further the generalised idea, to grasp the

concrete function of the device in each given instance. This concept of functional

value gradually moved out to the forefront and overshadowed our original concept

of device. (TFM, 29-30)

Tynianov’s study ‘The Problem of Verse Language’, according to Eikhenbaum,

played a significant role in clarifying this new concept of form beyond its old

opposition with content, with the result that ‘the concept of form in the Formalist

usage, having accrued a sense of complete sufficiency, had merged with the idea of

the work of art in its entirety’ (27). Together with the evolution of the concepts of the

literary work and its form, from ‘a sum of artistic devices’ to system, the need to

define more precisely the role that the devices play within that system (their

‘function’) led the Formalists into a comparative, historical study of literature. 29 The

realisation that a function of a device in a text cannot be properly understood if not

compared to the functions of the same or similar devices in other texts, in

Eikhenbaum’s words, ‘required branching out into history’, as literary periods and

their changes provided them with a ready-made context in which to look at literary

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works (TFM, 30). Literary history itself became the subject of debate, at first along

the lines proposed by Shklovskii, who typically extravagantly declared that ‘each new

literary school is a new revolution, something in the nature of a new class’. 30

Tynianov revised this initial notion by proposing the word ‘evolution’ as a more

accurate description of literary-historical matters:

If we agree that evolution is the change in interrelationships between the elements

of a system—between function and formal elements—the evolution may be seen

as the ‘mutations’ of systems. (…) They do not entail the sudden and complete

renovation or the replacement of formal elements, but rather the new function of

these formal elements.31

In the beginning, this interest in literary evolution was based on principles similar to

those of the study of literature in general in the early years of Formalism: the stress

was on the literariness of literature, on its specific characteristics independent of its

author’s biography or of the history of culture in general. This insistence on the

‘immanent historical laws’ of literary evolution was, however, largely a tactical

hypothesis to simplify matters, not an ignorance of other possible ways of studying

literature. As Eikhenbaum put it, ‘we limit the factors so as not to wallow in an

endless quantity of vague “connections” and “correspondences”, which, in any case,

cannot elucidate the evolution of literature as such. (…) The central problem of

literary history for us is the problem of evolution outside individual personality—the

study of literature as a social phenomenon sui generis’ (TFM, 33).

However, Iurii Tynianov clearly asserted that this initial working hypothesis

was not good enough and that, if the ‘facts of the past’ are to be observed, then those

facts would have to be defined more clearly within the set of cultural standards

belonging to a given epoch of literary history:

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 The very existence of a fact as literary depends on its differential quality, that is, on

its interrelationship with both literary and extraliterary orders. Thus, its existence

depends on its function. What in one epoch would be a literary fact would in

another be a common matter of social communication, and vice versa, depending

on the whole literary system in which a given fact appears. (…) We cannot be

certain of the structure of a work if it is studied in isolation. (OLE, 69)

The literary function of a device thus becomes, to use the image used by Medvedev in

his polemical essay ‘The Formal (Morphological) Method or Scholarly Salieri-ism’,

like mortar holding together not only the ‘architectonics’ of a literary work, but also

connecting it to other literary works.32 Tynianov argued for a comparative,

‘intertextual’ concept of the literary function and of the literary text as a whole:

The interrelation of each element with every other in a literary work and with the

whole literary system as well may be called the constructional function of the

given element. On close examination, such a function proves to be a complex

concept. An element is on the one hand interrelated with similar elements in other

works in other systems, and on the other hand it is interrelated with different

elements within the same work. (OLE, 68)

Thus an immanent study of a literary work becomes an impossibility. As Tynianov

suggests, even with literary criticism of contemporary works that tends to look at each

text in isolation, such an abstraction is possible only because ‘the interrelationship of

a contemporary work with contemporary literature is in advance an established,

although concealed, fact’ (69). Studying textual interrelations will not only help a

critic understand the function of an element, but can also make the registration of its

‘tactical’ effacement possible (like the effacement of a specific meter or plot

structure).

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 However, the study of literary genres and periods also requires their analysis

in a wider context and their definition not through their immanent characteristics but

through their differential quality with other genres or periods: again, a notion which is

clearly based on a theory of ‘intertextuality’. For example, Roman Jakobson in his

essay On Realism in Art shows that ‘realism’ (in its broad sense) is a shifting concept

based on cultural assumptions, authorial intentions and readers’ expectations, and that

different artistic devices were intended and perceived as ‘realistic’ at different points

in literary and art history. Whereas at some points those texts (or art works) which

used conventional forms and formulations were seen as ‘true to life’ (by the writer

and/or his readers), at other times the breaking of the artistic conventions was

perceived as bringing art and its subject matter ‘closer to life’. Having shown that the

very concept of how reality was conceived of differed in the hands of various artistic

schools and movements, Jakobson concludes that ‘when a literary historian brilliantly

declares that “Russian literature is typically realistic”, his statement is tantamount to

saying: “Man is typically twenty years old”’.33

Furthermore, it is not only literary works, periods, genres, etc., that need to be

examined within their wider literary context to be understood properly but, according

to Tynianov, the whole of the literary system needs to be defined ‘first of all’ in its

relation with other (cultural) systems, keeping in mind that just because they are

interconnected, cultural systems in their evolution are not mirror-images of each other

(OLE, 72). This branching out does not represent a shift in the Formalists’ interest

towards the ‘extraliterary orders’, but simply the relativisation of the concept of

literariness and the awareness that ‘Literature’ as such existed in many different

guises and under many different definitions throughout its history.

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 Tynianov provides a conceptual space for literature’s ‘interrelationship with

neighbouring orders’ through language, as shared by both literature and culture in

general, suggesting that literature places itself amongst and against them through its

‘verbal function’ (73). And although Tynianov would argue that literature’s

interrelationship with other cultural systems is of interest to a literary critic or a

literary historian only inasmuch as it helps him define the area that is to be studied,

his methodological suggestion takes the literary text apart in ways that will later be

associated with Kristeva’s intertextuality. Thus, according to Tynianov, the literary

historian needs to be aware that the ‘lexicon of a given work is interrelated with both

the whole literary lexicon and the general lexicon of the language, as well as with

other elements of that given work’ (68). We can see here the very same point that

Kristeva attributed to Bakhtin, about the word in the literary text being on the cross-

roads of textual surfaces which link it to history and society. However, although

Bakhtin does say something similar, his theory of language, unlike Tynianov’s,

includes concepts of agency and subjectivity, which Kristeva’s interpretation of him

ignores. Kristeva may have been referencing Bakhtin, but she was far more accurately

paraphrasing Tynianov.

We have seen an extremely significant shift happen in the Formalist approach:

along with the change in the concept of literary text from a ‘sum of devices’ to a

‘system’ or a ‘structure’, literature is no longer taken for some autonomous

phenomenon that exists of and by itself. Although Formalists defined it as a social

phenomenon ‘sui generis’, the awareness that the borders between the literary and the

extraliterary could be mobile and unpredictable opened up a whole new series of

issues that needed to be dealt with. The absolute autonomy from other disciplines and

other domains of culture and society which defined early Formalism was replaced by

17
a considered and methodical engagement with them. Roman Jakobson in 1935 made a

considerable alteration to his old definition that ‘poetry is language in its æsthetic

function’, by saying that ‘a poetic work is not confined to æsthetic function alone, but

has in addition many other functions.’ 34 This recognition that diverse cultural and

social functions coexist within a literary text, organised by the æsthetic function as its

dominant, rather than as its sole purpose,35 called for a new approach to literary

works. Jakobson and Tynianov, in their 1928 article ‘Problems in the Study of

Literature and Language’ created a programme that the Prague structuralists were

already taking up in the Formalists’ stead.36

‘Problems in the Study of Literature and Language’ is a very dense short text,

organised into eight main points.37 Although the title suggests an overview of a wide

range of topics connected with the study of literature and language, the article itself

focuses on two main themes: the problems of literary history and the definition of

linguistics and the study of literature as seen through Saussure’s linguistic project

(therefore, using the very language into which Kristeva was ‘translating’ Bakhtin).

Jakobson and Tynianov relate the history of literature to other ‘historical series’

(different aspects of culture in general), and suggest that the correlation between the

different historical series should be investigated by elucidating the ‘complex of

specific structural laws’ that characterizes each of them. In order to do that, every

element, literary or extraliterary, which is introduced into the investigation must be

considered ‘from a functional point of view’. The article also presents a very early

discussion and critique of the Saussurean distinction between synchronic and

diachronic axes of investigation and suggests that, since ‘this fruitful hypothesis’ has

shown that language has a systemic character at every point of its existence, the same

might prove to be true of diachronic series, the study of which must also begin. We

18
have seen that Russian Formalists, and Tynianov in particular, had by that point

already embraced the idea of the systemic nature of literary evolution, and of the way

the very concept and corpus of literature changes through history and through its

relation with other historical series. Jakobson and Tynianov phrase this clearly: ‘The

history of a system is in turn a system. Pure synchronism now proves to be an

illusion: every synchronic system has its past and its future as inseparable structural

elements of the system’ (79-80). Literary periods contain in themselves their own past

and intended future, by embracing ‘not only works of art which are close to each other

in time but also which are drawn into the orbit of the system from foreign literatures

or previous epochs’, and rearranging the hierarchy of periods and genres (80).

Furthermore, Jakobson and Tynianov address yet another crucial distinction of

Saussure’s linguistics: that of langue and parole. While admitting that this distinction

has been ‘exceedingly fruitful’ for linguistics, they insist that the relationship between

‘the existing norm and individual utterances’ must be reworked independently for the

purposes of literary study. As they put it, in literature ‘the individual utterance cannot

be considered without reference to the existing complex of norms’ (80). What is

implied in this assertion is that, while linguistics defines itself through its study of

langue, literary studies are defined by their interest in literary texts, in literary parole,

which, however, cannot be understood properly without an understanding of the

literary langue. The reason why they insist on the importance of the study of the

complex of literary norms is that they believe that any study of a literary work which

disregarded this complex would ‘inescapably deform the system of artistic values

under consideration, thus losing the possibility of establishing its immanent laws’. A

literary text is thus intertextual in its essence. As they say, ‘a disclosure of the

immanent laws of the history of literature (language) allows us to determine the

19
character of each specific change in literary (linguistic) systems’ (80). However,

immanent laws are certainly not all we need to know in other to understand the way

literature functions and changes:

These [immanent] laws do not allow us to explain the tempo of evolution or the

chosen path of evolution when several, theoretically possible, evolutionary paths

are given. This is owing to the fact that the immanent laws of literary (linguistic)

evolution form an indeterminate equation; although they admit only a limited

number of possible solutions, they do not necessarily specify a unique solution.

The question of a specific choice of path, or at least of the dominant, can be solved

only by means of an analysis of the correlation between the literary series and

other historical series. (80-1).

Thus, not only has the literary text as an early Formalist autonomous entity been all

but dissolved into intertextual relations, but literature itself became closely bound to

history and society. And all of this is achieved through a notion of textuality that,

unlike Bakhtin’s theory of literature and language, does not engage with the questions

of agency and intersubjectivity. We can see Kristeva’s concept in the Formalists’ idea

that the changes in literature come about through parody and writers’ literary reaction

to each other; in the idea that ‘differential quality’ determines the nature of literary

phenomena and that the structure of a text cannot be understood if studied in isolation;

in the idea that, as Kristeva puts it, a literary text is a structure which does not exist

autonomously, but develops in relationship to another structure; it can be seen even in

the very idea of literary evolution in that literary context influences the individual

work and the individual work brings changes to the context. It can certainly be seen in

Jakobson and Tynianov’s reworking of Saussure. According to Tynianov:

20
 ‘Word’ as an abstraction resembles a vessel that is filled anew with each

appearance, depending on the lexical structure in which it occurs and on the

functions borne by each aspect of speech.

It is a sort of cross-section of these various lexical and functional structures.38

This is both the idea and the terminology of Kristeva’s discussion of Bakhtin; the

notion of ‘intertextuality’ can be derived almost entirely from the Formalists’ theories

of literature and language. So why did Kristeva need Bakhtin as a vehicle for its

creation; what did his theories give her that the Formalists could not?

Conclusion: A Bakhtinian legacy in the concept of ‘intertextuality’

By 1928 and the end if its official life as a movement, Russian Formalism was already

addressing Saussurean legacy, questioning it and developing it. As we have seen, one

can find Kristeva’s concept of ‘intertextuality’ in Russian Formalist notions of literary

interrelations and her Saussurean language was shared by mature Formalism. The

same can most certainly not be said of the Bakhtin of the texts to which she would

have had access. However, there is one aspect of Kristeva’s notion of intertextuality

which is very Bakhtinian: a deductive approach to the problems of literature and

language. It seems to me that Kristeva combined this aspect of Bakhtin’s thought with

mature Formalism’s hypotheses, which were also shared to some extent by the French

structuralists whom she was addressing at the time.

Bakhtin created a complex set of theories about literature and culture by

combining his early theories of the dialogic nature of the human personality with his

later dialogic theories of language. The words ‘voice’ and ‘intention’ are of crucial

importance in Bakhtin’s theory, as much as ‘function’ and ‘literary interrelations’ are

21
in the theory of late Formalism. However, Bakhtin is more interested in the way

literature relates to the dialogism of language and culture than in the way literature

relates to itself. Bakhtin’s idea of ‘intertextual’ relations in literature is an extension of

his initial premise that each word uttered carries with it a whole set of resonances of

other voices uttering the same words with other intentions; it is just that literary texts,

and the novel in particular, are generically best equipped to allow that dialogism to be

heard. His method is purely deductive.

The Formalists’ method, however, is one of empirical induction: by looking at

a large body of literary texts and studying the devices employed in those texts, they

came to the conclusion that all these devices had different functions which were

defined by their differential quality and not by some immanent properties; the logic of

the argument brought them to the conclusion that literature itself can only be

differentially defined in the context of other cultural systems. The idea that the literary

system was interrelated with other systems and defined against them led to the idea

that words themselves are defined by their context and in perpetual interplay with

each other, just as literature is in perpetual interplay with itself.

Kristeva is much closer to the Formalists’ conclusions than she is to Bakhtin’s;

however, it would appear that she combined Bakhtin’s deductive logic about the

nature of language and its behaviour in literature with the Formalists’s inductive

conclusions about the nature of literary textuality, which excluded agency and

intersubjectivity. Her interpretation of Bakhtin shows both how close Bakhtin was to

some Formalist ideas (there are obvious similarities between Bakhtin and Tynianov,

for example), but also how difficult it would be to reconcile his intersubjective

dialogism and their literary evolution.39

22
 Kristeva’s concept of intertextuality, like the Russian Formalists’ ideas on

literary evolution, literary system and the functioning of the individual text within

them, implies a largely agency-free process of structuration, of texts reacting to other

texts. Furthermore, her notion that the dialogic text transgresses the ordinary linearity

of discourse and its links with the established order, 40 although based on the

combination of Bakhtin’s notions of dialogism and carnival, can also be traced to

Shklovskii’s defamiliarization or ostranenie. Although the dialogic and the

carnivalesque share an overlapping conceptual space through their roles in Bakhtin’s

theory of the novel and its development, Bakhtin leaves them largely separate from

each other, to the extent that he does not claim that the dialogic text is necessarily

transgressive, and even the degree of carnival’s perceived level of transgression is

debatable; arguably, its role is to provide a vent for frustrations, so that the established

order can re-establish itself and escape unharmed. The role of Shklovskii’s ostranenie,

however, is far more revolutionary: it produces a complete perceptual overhaul,

sensitizing us to the strangeness and sensuality of the world. Bakhtin was no

revolutionary in the sense in which Kristeva reads him; Shklovskii, on the other hand,

along with most other Formalists, was. The modernist references of Kristeva’s essay

also point squarely to the Russian Formalist championing of modernist texts and away

from Bakhtin’s decidedly more conservative literary taste (his appreciation of

literature pretty much stops with Dostoevsky).

So, if Bakhtin gave Kristeva some of his seductive terminology, I believe that

the Formalists gave her most of the theories behind it. In a way, ‘Le mot, le dialogue

et le roman’ is as much a representation of Formalist thought through Bakhtinian

terminology, as it is a representation of Bakhtin’s thought through Saussurean

terminology. Through its double-voiced construction, Kristeva’s own text not only

23
proposes but also performs its own intertextuality, and the word is here used in its

precisely Kristevan meaning; it is an inventive montage of ideas that come from a

variety of sources, an ‘interplay of various unattached voices’ (as Britton puts it),

whose identity and historical subjectivity are not always considered relevant. The

result is, of course, an entirely Kristevan term without which literary theory would be

much poorer.

24
1
Graham Allen, Intertextuality (London, Routledge, 2000), 2.
2
In his short article from 1970 entitled ‘L’ étrangère’, Barthes stressed as one of her great

achievements the introduction of the notion that the science of languages is a necessarily dialogic

endeavour, thinking of itself as simultaneously science and writing, analysing itself and its own

critical procedures as it analyses different types of languages (Roland Barthes, Oeuvres complètes

II: 1966-1973 (Paris, Seuil, 1994), 860-2).

3
Julia Kristeva, ‘Le mot, le dialogue et le roman’, Sémiotikè: Recherches pour une sémanalyse

(Paris, Seuil, 1969), 82-112; 85.

4
But also of other disciplines within cultural studies; see, for example, Intertextuality and the

Media: from Genre to Everyday Life, edited by Ulrike H. Meinhof and Jonathan Smith

(Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2000).

5
According to Dosse, Kristeva chose to present Bakhtin, because she ‘had immediately understood

structuralism’s historical limitations and intended to palliate these shortcomings with Bakhtin, and

lend “dynamism to structuralism”’ (François Dosse, History of Structuralism, 2 vols, translated by

Deborah Glassman (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1998), vol. 2, 55). Or, as Kristeva

herself put it in an interview with Dosse: ‘It was at that point that I created the gadget called

intertextuality’ (Ibid.=?).
6
Mary Orr, Intertextuality: Debates and Contexts (Cambridge, Polity Press, 2003), 6.
7
On the German side, Orr in particular cites the following volume: Intertextualität: Formen,

Funktionen, anglistische Fallstudien, edited by U. Broich and M. Pfister (Tübingen, Niemeyer,

1985).
8
Tzvetan Todorov, Mikhail Bakhtine: le principe dialogique (Paris, Seuil, 1981), 95. It needs to be

said that Todorov’s presentation of Bakhtin’s thought is on the whole much more faithful to

Bakhtin than to Kristeva’s notion of intertextuality.

9
Michael Worton and Judith Still (eds.), Intertextuality: Theories and Practices (Manchester,

Manchester University Press, 1990), 17.

10
However, the radical (Derridian) distinction between the spoken and the written use of language is

not particularly important to Bakhtin, and does not play a large part in his thought. Besides, as

Laurent Jenny notes, Kristeva enlarged the notion of ‘text’ to the point where it refers not just to

literary works and written texts, but also to oral use of language, and social or unconscious

symbolic systems (Laurent Jenny, ‘La Stratégie de la forme’, Poétique 27 (1976), [article pages?]

261).
11
Robert Stam, ‘Mikhail Bakhtin and Left Cultural Critique’, in Postmodernism and Its Discontents,

edited by E. Ann Kaplan (London, Verso, 1988), 116-45; 132.

12
‘Epic and Novel’ appeared in the 1975 collection, but was written in 1941.
13
Sémiotikè, 83.
14
Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four essays by M. M. Bakhtin, translated by Caryl

Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin, University of Texas Press, 1996).

15
Mikhail Bakhtin, Problemy poetiki Dostoevskogo (Moskva, Sovetskaia Rossiia, 1979), 58-68.
16
See Mikhail Bakhtin, ‘Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity’, in Art and Answerability: Early

Philosophical Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, edited by Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov,

translated by Vadim Liapunov (Austin, University of Texas Press, 1990).

17
Jay Clayton and Eric Rothstein, ‘Figures in the Corpus’, in Influence and Intertextuality in

Literary History (Madison, The University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), 3-36; 18.
18
I would argue, though, that with such an expanded meaning the term ‘text’ becomes rather

meaningless, as it covers nearly all types of human communication, both as process and as product,

without telling us very much about how such communication takes place. Soviet Semiotics, through

its concept of ‘semiotic modelling systems’, has found ways of discussing social communication in

similar ways to what Kristeva attempts to do here, but in a much more subtle and productive

manner. See, for example, B.A. Uspenskij’s 1974 article ‘Historia sub specie semioticae’ (in Soviet

Semiotics: An Anthology, edited by Daniel P. Lucid (Baltimore, The Johns Hopkins University

Press, 1988). Soviet Semioticians already started developing these ideas in the second half of the
1960s, and their influence on Kristeva’s concept of ‘intertextuality’ is something else that needs to

be closely examined.
19
Celia Britton, ‘The Dialogic Text and the Texte Pluriel’, Occasional Papers 14 (1974), 52-68; 55.

I am grateful to Karine Zbinden for pointing this paper out to me.

20
Simon Dentith, Bakhtinian Thought: An Introductory Reader (London, Routledge, 1995), 94.
21
Théorie de la littérature, edited by Tzvetan Todorov (Paris, Seuil, 1965).
22
A move which is not always productive, but that is a different story.
23
‘La stratégie de la forme’, 261. There is a discussion of Jenny’s article in Jonathan Culler, The

Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981),

101-18.
24
Boris Eikhenbaum, ‘The Theory of the Formal Method’, Readings in Russian Poetics: Formalist

and Structuralist Views, edited by Ladislav Matejka and Krystyna Pomorska (Cambridge, MA, MIT

Press, 1971), 3-37; 19. This article will henceforward be referred to as TFM.
25
Roman Jakobson, ‘Sketch 1’, Recent Russian Poetry, (‘Nabrosok pervyi’, Noveishaia russkaia

poeziia, Prague, 1921; quoted in RRP, 8).

26
Victor Shklovsky, ‘Art as Device’, Theory of Prose, translated by Benjamin Sher (Elmwood Park,

Dalkey Archive Press, 1990), 1-14.

27
Tzvetan Todorov comments on the disparity between the two concepts which seemed to exist

together in the Formalists’ (or at least Shklovskii’s) writing: the concept of artistic ‘autotelism, or

the absence of any external function’ with the concept of ostranenie (defamiliarization, ‘making it

strange’) which would imply that art does have an external function, namely to renew our

perception of the world. (Tzvetan Todorov, Literature and its Theorists, translated by Catherine

Porter (Ithaca, New York, Cornell University Press, 1987), 20-4).

28
‘The Dominant, Readings in Russian Poetics, 85.
29
A similar chronology, with a detailed discussion of the evolution of Formalist ideas from the

concept of ‘machine’ to ‘organism’ to ‘system’ can be found in Peter Steiner, Russian Formalism:
A Metapoetics (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1984).
30
Shklovskii, ‘Literature without a Plot: Rozanov’, Theory of Prose, 189-205; 190.
31
Tynianov, ‘On Literary Evolution’, Readings in Russian Poetics, 66-78; 77. Henceforward OLE.
32
Pavel Medvedev, ‘The Formal (Morphological) Method, or Scholarly Salieri-ism’, translated by

Ann Shukman, Bakhtin School Papers, Russian Poetics in Translation, vol. 10, 59. [Is this a

journal? If not, can you supply a more complete bibliographical reference?]

33
Roman Jakobson, ‘On Realism in Art’, Readings in Russian Poetics, 38-46; 43.
34
‘The Dominant’, 83.
35
In this text we can already see the basic idea behind Jakobson’s famous structuralist article

‘Linguistics and Poetics’.

36
In Russia itself, the problematic of Tynianov’s and Jakobson’s article would have to wait for the

end of Stalinism and the rise of Soviet Semiotics (with Iurii Lotman as its most talented

representative) in the 1960s to get a second hearing and a new lease of life.
37
Tynianov and Jakobson, ‘Problems in the Study of Literature and Language’, Readings in Russian

Poetics, 79-81.
38
Tynianov, ‘The Meaning of the Word in Verse’, Readings in Russian Poetics, 136-48; 136.
39
However, later Bakhtin comes closer to the Formalist theory of genres. See Bakhtin, Speech

Genres and Other Late Essays, translated by Vern W. McGee (Austin, University of Texas Press,

1999). See also Igor Shaitanov, ‘The Concept of the Generic Word: Bakhtin and the Russian

Formalists’ in Face to Face: Bakhtin in Russia and the West, edited by Carol Adlam, Rachel

Falconer, Vitalii Makhlin and Alastair Renfrew (Sheffield, Sheffield Academic Press, 1997), 233-

53.
40
‘Le mot, le dialogue et le roman’, 100.