Intertextuality and the Collaborative Construction of Narrative: J. M. Coetzee's Foe

Abstract

Intertextuality and the Collaborative Construction of Narrative:J. M. Coetzee's Foe Tisha Turk (bio) [A] text is all the words that are in it, and not only those words, but the other words that precede it, haunt it, and are echoed in it. —A. S. Byatt, On Histories and Stories (46) Transformative narratives may take a wide range of forms: an author may fill in the outlines of a tale with greater detail; move the story to a different setting; tell it from a different point of view or focalize it through a different character; offer a new interpretation of a story or invoke a story in order to subvert it, producing what José Ángel García Landa calls "counter-narratives" (422); or combine these approaches in various ways. The most exhaustive account of these possibilities is Gérard Genette's Palimpsests, which, as Seymour Chatman observes, "sifts eruditely through literary tradition" (269) to produce a detailed taxonomy of what Genette calls "literature in the second degree," including hypertexts, literary texts that transform, either directly or indirectly, other literary texts (Genette 5, 7).1 Genette's analysis of transformative narratives is especially useful if we wish to "classify" or "situate" a particular text, to ask, as Chatman does, "What kind of a narrative is The Hours? How best to describe its relation to Mrs. Dalloway—narratologically, stylistically, thematically?" (269). If we wish to ask how readers actually make sense of such a narrative, however, we will find Palimpsests less helpful, for Genette is almost entirely uninterested in audiences; he regards literary transformation as a fundamentally textual rather than rhetorical phenomenon. Though he acknowledges that understanding such texts does to some extent "depend on constitutive judgement: that is, on the reader's interpretive decision," he explicitly states that he "cannot sanction" the practice of "invest[ing] the hermeneutic activity of the reader" with too much "authority" and "significance" (9). In Genette's view, the texts themselves, not the processes of reading them, are of [End Page 295] primary importance. For those of us who do ascribe significance to readerly activity and who understand readers' responses to literature not as inherently idiosyncratic affairs inspired by personal associations but as sharable experiences cued by textual phenomena and interpretive conventions, Genette's account of transformative narratives is necessarily incomplete. All reading, of course, involves some degree of participation by the reader. On the level of an individual novel, we track and respond to characters, anticipate and react to plot developments, and otherwise connect the textual dots in various ways. More generally, we apply our knowledge of genres, the aggregations and mutual influences of texts that share assumptions or traditions. Even before we open a book, Peter Rabinowitz argues, our "prior knowledge of conventions of reading shapes [our] experiences and evaluations" of the text (3). Rabinowitz's metaphor of text as unassembled swingset (38-39) dramatizes the work that goes into any act of reading: the author supplies the pieces, and the reader must put them together. But reading a transformative narrative requires a particular, and particularly pleasurable, kind of work: readers must not only assemble the swingset pieces we are given but also contribute some of the pieces ourselves based on our memory of the text that is being transformed. Individual readers' experiences are affected by our ability to provide these pieces. In practical terms, a narrative functions as transformative only to the extent that a reader recognizes and reads it as such: if readers do not collaborate in the construction of the narrative, the narrative does not work the way it was designed to. A reader who encounters Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea without having read Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre may still enjoy the novel; she may still find it interesting, engaging, effective. But what she reads will be, in a very real sense, a different text than it would be for someone who brought to it a knowledge of Jane Eyre. Part of the transformative narrative's meaning therefore lies outside the text, in the space between text and intertext. The more we know about the overlaps and gaps between the two texts, the more complicated the project of...

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