Situated Intertextuality: Networks, Borders, and the Space of Literature

Part of the way in which any culture "declares its presence" is, of course, through the texts it produces, for as Roland Barthes says in "The Death of the Author," "The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture." Such a statement immediately implies an intertextual understanding of the text, placing the text within a vast network which it can never contain but which forever bridges its boundaries to connect with other texts. The purpose of this paper, however, will not be to study the nature of intertextuality as such but rather to investigate the ways in which this intertextuality is conceived of and produced, specifically dealing with the spatial form of this intertextual network and its interaction with our own social space.

This paper will discuss literary representations of intertextual spaces, such as the Library of Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose, and texts like Paul Auster's City of Glass and Gustave Flaubert's The Temptation of Saint Anthony, which place themselves within the space of intertextuality. Particular attention will be drawn to the fact that these texts suggest an increasing identity, or at least similarity, between reality and textuality, so that even as text is defined by its nature as a network, so, very often, is our social reality. Indeed, Michel Foucault argues, in "Of Other Spaces," that "our experience of the world is less that of a long life developing through time than that of a network." Attention will be focused on the nature of the interaction between textuality and reality, and the extent to which our reality is influenced by the fragmented, heterotopic, and atemporal nature of the intertextual space.

Using, then, the work of Henri Lefebvre and Edward Soja, it will be argued that intertextual space is, in fact, nothing less than an extension of our social space, and that, in contrast perhaps with the way in which this intertextual space is commonly perceived, this space is less like the infinite and inclusive domain of Jorge Luis Borges' labyrinthine Library of Babel, and more like the limited and marginalising space of Eco's Library, which is the product of a very particular culture and society. It will be shown how our textual space, too, is a product of the spatial practices of society, and reflects the distribution of power within society, so that textual marginalisations often reflect social marginalisations. Finally, it will be seen that textual space contains the potential to produce what Lefebvre calls a "differential space," which Soja describes as "a space of radical openness." By understanding textual space in this way, it becomes a new site for social transformation.