1 A Work and Œuvre
Intra/Intertextuality
The link between an individual literary work and the whole corpus of texts by an author has often been the subject of debates and of insights about unexpected analogies. There is a hypothesis about the identity of the intra- and inter-textual links; in other words, the same forces of cohesion and disintegration operate in both the single work and the intertextual space between works. This idea was expressed in semiotics, though in most general terms in the early’1970s; later, in the mid 1980s, it was launched by Igor Smirnov (Smirnov 1985, 105) and Nikola Georgiev (Georgiev 1999, 200–201).
At the core of the hypothesis lies the idea of the shifting line of demarcation between texts in the system of culture: on different levels the same message may appear as a text, part of a text, or an entire set of texts. Thus “Puškin’s Povesti Belkina may be regarded as an integral text, as an entire set of texts or else as part of a single text – the Russian short story of the 1830’s” (Uspensky et al. 1973, 6). This shift of viewpoint within the space of the intertextual network cognitively changes the aspect of the object under observation, focusing on one or another type of link.
Obviously, what appears from one point of view to be the interaction between the parts of a whole, is, from another point of view, an interaction between several wholes, and vice versa. In this way, integrality and multiplicity are attributes whose juxtaposition is relative and depends on the point of view of the observer. Observation from within intensifies entropy and lack of organization, while observation from without highlights information and connectivity. I shall try to ascertain analytically the productivity of this idea, transferring it onto the level of modelling – the ability of work and œuvre to mutually reflect essential features of theirs, each concept serving as an instrument for the analysis of the other.
For the purposes of this study, I propose the following thesеs:
- Every system (text) must be observed simultaneously from two points of view – internal and external. The combination of data from both types of observation forms a continuum of features of the system (text).
- We can describe the intra- and intertextual links as mutually reversible and complementary, using two mutually reversible points of view – one localized within the literary work and corresponding to the notion of an isolated text, and the other situated in the intertextual space – in our case, the intertextual space of an author’s œuvre.
The œuvre will be viewed through the prism of the work and, conversely, the work will be viewed through the prism of the œuvre – they both could serve as a model for each other, having a uniform methodological basis making use of the analytical tools of both textual analysis (of the individual work) and intertextual theory.
The connection between a single work and a whole œuvre is so obvious that in some languages, they are designated by the same word – work (in English), œuvre (in French). Despite the organic connection between the two concepts, it can hardly be said that elucidation of their interplay enjoys great interest. In general, the notion “literary work” was the subject of heated debates in the field of literary theory. We have been witnesses of the discrediting of the concept of “work” at the expense of the expansion of the concept of “text” (Barthes, From Work to Text), as well as of the attempt to reconcile the two concepts in the hybrid compromise “work-text” (see for instance the special issue of the journal ‘Revue des Sciences Humaines’ 1989, 3, 215).
As far as the concept “œuvre” is concerned, it is used in another field: that of literary historical research, where the waters are more still. And yet this concept is susceptible to being problematized by literary theorists, and it often gets a “yes” or “no” vote as a separate object of investigation. Let me sum up briefly some of these evaluations.
The fields which study the individual work – structuralism, Spitzerian criticism, literary semiotics – do not favour the separate study of the assemblage of texts by a single author. For Tzvetan Todorov, this notion is “problematic” (Todorov 1971, 250). In a letter to George Poulet, Leo Spitzer criticizes his method which he considers to be “а priori”: in his view, the study of the whole œuvre “destroys” (détruit) the single works (Spitzer 1980, 367, 369). Мichael Riffaterre denies the legitimacy of the method which connects several works by the same author into one whole unity, basing his argument on their stylistic non-identity, “the largest analyzable corpus that we conceive in literature should be the text and not a collection of texts” (Riffaterre 1983, 5).
Clearly, the œuvre is presented as not only a welcome but also a crucial object of analysis by critical schools which focus on the author’s mentality. Here, by investigating the author’s complete corpus of texts, the analogy with individual work appears – the work can serve as a model for œuvre. The œuvre is likened to a large work. Jean-Pierre Richard, a representative of the Geneva School sees the author’s corpus of texts as “one whole unity, an extended poem which emerges as its echo…. The work of the critic is … to spin a spider’s web, to construct a rosette, to build an edifice of resonances” (Richard 1961, 16). The founder of psycho-criticism, Charles Mauron (1962), expresses the same idea in his own figurative way:
The whole œuvre of a writer no longer looks to us like an archipelago of separate works. We know that these islands are connected by one common structure. This formation is not conscious: we need to find it if we are to unveil the unity of the whole œuvre and the meaning of each island.
(see Hutcheon 1984, 136–137)
The notion of the œuvre as a single work is also accepted outside of literary theory as a widespread opinion, a metaphor intuited by the authors of verbal art themselves. “Great authors have never written anything but a single work,” claims Proust (Proust 1954, III 376). Faulkner, for his part, admits the same, “I am telling the same story over and over, which is myself and the world” (see Kawin 1972, 115).
The attempt to explain something complex by something simpler, the entity by one of its constituent parts, (œuvre by work) is an application – transferring the case into theory – of the reductionist approach: searching for the alphabet, the grammar, the language which will account for the operation of the system, the whole. In the era of structuralism we could cite the various linguistic analogies – the sentence (Barthes), the grammatical categories (Todorov) as models in narratology, the deep patterns in generative semiotics (the notion of a matrix, kernel word, minimal sentence) (M. Riffaterre), the phonemic approach in the analysis of the myth in structuralist anthropology (Lévy-Strauss), etc. Alexander Potebnya, who belongs to another epoch (the philosophical-psychological trend in linguistics), applied the reductionist approach more than a century ago in observing the contraction of the fable into a one-word proverb suggesting that all properties of a poetic work had correspondences in the properties of the word (Potebnya 1976, 538).
However, as we have pointed out, one could change the direction of observation – instead of observing the object from the outside and thus reducing mentally its space, he/she could observe it from a point within, extending its space, whereby the distances between the parts increase and begin to be perceived as a number of objects. According to presented thesis saying that œuvre is like work, we could reverse the relation and say work is like œuvre. (At first glance it seems that the second point of view could be termed holistic or integrative, in so far as it approaches the whole, the complex system, the universum: with such an approach the isolated fact receives its explanation through being situated within the system. In this case however it would be more precise to say that rather than integrating itself into the system, the individual fact is trying to incorporate it in itself. We have here reductionism with an opposite sign, so-called perspectivism.)
The two observation points – from work to œuvre and from œuvre to work – describe a hermeneutic circle, the two terms are locked into an interrelation of asymmetric mutual reduction, mutually supplementing each other and modelling each other’s properties. Reciprocal features are compensatorilly appropriated and acquire a clearer outline – the set of text acquires integrity, while the single work acquires properties of a set. This procedure could – all of a sudden – modernize the two notions, carrying them over into the contemporary situation of literary studies. It could prove surprisingly helpful in reconciling the excesses in the sway of the pendulum between structuralist closeness of a literary work and post-structuralist boundlessness of the intertextual space: opposing extremes which could be connected in a non-eclectic unity.
What could a single work gain when likened to a multitude of texts? It is clear at first glance that this is a correction of the one-sided monistic model of the work as a balanced and harmonious static whole. More precisely, œuvre offers a model of a work without a centre. The earlier-mentioned analogy strongly emphasizes and magnifies the work’s centrifugal forces. The links between the parts are loosened. A process of dispersion widens the gaps between them and opens cracks in seemingly integral units.
An analogy with the perception of a painting or sculpture will be of good use in this case. “Every piece of sculpture or painting, even one that is placed under the aegis of a strict aesthetic order … offers a chaotic aspect to the eye if viewed at a close or microscopic level” (Gandelman 1991, 141).
The likening of the work to a multitude of texts transposes, so to speak, the outer boundaries between the individual texts in œuvre into the inner area of the isolated text, multiplying them. But this is nothing else but the practice of deconstruction which obliterates the settled boundaries, the “edges and ribs” between texts, to return and multiply them within the text as differences and delays. Œuvre, however, is not only a multitude of individual but also different works in terms of genre, style, subject matter, etc. This macro-polyglotism, characterized by partial mutual intranslatability of languages, lays bare the multiplicity of languages concentrated in the single text.
The proposed analogy throws into sharper relief certain notions about the ontology of the literary work. Creating on a metatextual level a certain integral notion of a semantic invariant called the “main theme” or conventionally an “author’s world,” œuvre evidently consists of works which represent autonomous ontological entities, individual “artistic worlds.” This peculiarity when transferred into the space of a literary work, suggests its tendency to undermine its own identity as an artistic world, to problematize its own ontological perspective, becoming, in the case of certain post-modernist authors, an inventory of mutually exclusive worlds.
Comparing the work to œuvre introduces certain ideas on the level of creativity. Seen through the prism of the entire writing career, the creation of a single work seems both problematized, delayed, and much more closely related to the personal and social context. The analogy I follow in principle rules out the anonymity applied to the work; it is impossible to regard the texts by a given author which are precisely connected with his name as an anonymous construction. The corpus of text is connected with the life of the author; it represents one of the two sides in the indivisible binomial bios-graphé, constituting an actualization of an artistic project, containing cardinal truths which the author wishes to communicate to the world. (Let us recall Faulkner’s “myself and the world.”) But this project cannot anticipate its concrete actualization. In the course of time it is modified and reformulated, being a function of social and personal circumstances, in which the author’s personality is immersed and which cannot be forecast. As Yuri Lotman points out:
We cannot imagine the creation of a literary text as an automatic unfolding of a firmly set algorithm. The creative process must be considered an irreversible process … so the transition from one stage to another inevitably includes in itself elements of chance and unpredictability.
(Lotman 1984, 213)
Situated in such a wide space, the creative blueprint of a single work i...
