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the limits of intertextuality barthes, burroughs, gysin, culler

THE AMERICAN NOVELIST WILLIAM S. Burroughs and his compatriot and sometime collaborator, the poet and artist Brion Gysin, are particularly fond of alluding to Hassan i Sabbah, the “Old Man of the Mountains, Master of the Assassins” who, some thousand years ago, spread terror throughout the Moslem world from the heights of his mountain fortress at Alamout by exercising the secret powers that “enabled him to control and activate his assassins from a distance.”¹ Those of his adepts who were not accomplishing remote-controlledassassination assignments remained apparently at Alamout, of which Gysin reports: “like, uh, it must be fucking cold up there in the wintertime… uh…very dangerous, cold and uncomfortable spot…which I guess Hassan i Sabbah dug a lot, and he must’ve been very hard to live with is all I can think of.”²

More by accident than by design, Roland Barthes appears to have become the Hassan i Sabbah of contemporary literary theory: the involuntary master of an international school of assassins pledged to the ideals they perceive in his celebrated essay on “The Death of the Author.”³ Carrying this analogy a little further, it seems that just as the followers of Hassan i Sabbah lacked the unusual ability to weather the bitterly cold conditions that their master “dug a lot,” surviving only when tranquilized with liberal helpings of hashish or opium, so too Barthes’s followers seem to lack their master’s breadth of vision, and only “live with” his ideas by reducing them to a dogmatic, quite un- Barthesian vision that tranquilizes the tensions within Barthes’s teachings by ignoring them. Yet these tensions—and conflicts—like the tensions and conflicts in the works and theories of William S.Burroughs and Brion Gysin— should surely not be tranquilized, but scrutinized, since they indicate the limitations that Barthes appears to have identified in his theory of intertextuality.

Perhaps the most revealing tension in Barthes’s writing is that between his efforts to create more or less scientific analytical systems that deny the existence of the author and dismantle texts into as many codes as he had currently invented, and his conflicting compulsion to locate loopholes within these systems for symptoms of authorial presence and originality, be these the “grain of the voice” in performances, the “third meaning” in the film still, or the “accent” in works by cinematic and noncinematic authors. The implications of these are considerable, for they unexpectedly undermine two of Barthes’s famous declarations: “the text is henceforth made and read in such a way that at all its levels the author is absent” (145), and “The intertextual in which every text is held, it itself being the text between of another text, is not to be confused with some origin of the text…the citations which go to make up a text are anonymous, untraceable, and yet already read: they are quotations without inverted commas.” (160; emphasis in the original) These two highly influential statements from “The Death of the Author” and “From Work to Text” are usually taken literally by the Barthesian “assassin”; an error of judgement that surely obscures their function and significance as prime examples of Barthes’s ability to invent what Chion would term irresistibly “pure” utopian “laws” in order to legitimize reams of equally seductive, subsequent “hybrid” illuminations.⁴

There is surely something slightly ludicrous in Barthes’s apocalyptic announcement that “henceforth” the text will be both made and read in such a way that the author will be eliminated from it at all levels. Indeed, this vision rings with the same all-encompassing megalomania as that more forcefully outlined in Burroughs’s Exterminator!, when a veteran from The Naked Lunch, “A.J. the laughable, lovable eccentric,”⁵ steps forward in his Uncle Sam suit and assures his supporters: “I pledge myself to turn the clock back to 1899 when a silver dollar bought a steak dinner and good piece of ass…I pledge myself to uphold the laws of America and to enforce these hallowed statutes on all violators regardless of race, color, creed or position…. We will overcome all our enemies foreign and domestic and stay armed to the teeth for years, decades, centuries.’”⁶ As the cover of Barthes’s Barthes sur Barthes ironically demonstrates, it is impossible to stop time and then turn the clock forward to a new era in which all trace of the author is removed from every text. On the contrary, technological advances such as audiotape and videotape proliferate signs of the authorial presence as never before.

In much the same way, Barthes’s equally apocalyptic suggestion that creative time has somehow stopped, and that every text, however new, is implicitly “already read,” is not so much the statement of some literal truth or “law,” as it is an act of conceptual provocation sharing the beguiling theoretic licence that similarly informs Burroughs’s recent—and no less provocative—declaration that “Immortality is the only goal worth striving for: immortality in Space. Man is an artefact created for the purpose of Space travel. He is not designed to remain in his present state anymore than a tadpole is designed to remain a tadpole We are not fighting for a scrap of sharecropper immortality with the strings hanging off it like mafioso spaghetti. We want the whole tamale.”⁷ A master of such stimulating overstatement (though lacking the extravagance and the dry humor of Burroughs), Barthes redeems what must surely have been the self-conscious myopia of his overenthusiastic assertions regarding the permanently dead quality of the author and the already read quality of the intertextual cosmos, by offering antidotes to these claims in some of his companion pieces to “The Death of the Author” and “From Work to Text.”

Thus Barthes’s essay entitled “The Grain of the Voice” juggles somewhat uneasily with his speculation that upon apprehending the “grain” of a voice (or what he terms “the materiality of the body speaking its mother tongue” [182]), the listener enters into a “relation with the body of the man or woman singing” and then necessarily evaluates this performance according to “a new scheme of evaluation…made outside of any law,” and “outplaying not only the law of culture but equally that of anticulture” (188). Turning his attention to the “grain” of instrumental music, Barthes emphasises once again that his evaluation “shall not judge a performance according to the rules of interpretation, the constraints of style…but according to the image of the body…given me” (188– 89). Contemplation of the “grain of the voice,” then, trig-gers off a relationship between the listener and the unfamiliar “body” of the performer, rather than that between the decoder and the familiar “tissue of quotations” (146) with which “The Death of the Author” associates textual matter.

Barthes never explicitly concedes that this new relationship between the listener and the performer approximates to the reader-author relationship that he mockingly evokes as “the important task of discovering the Author… beneath the work” (147). But were Barthes’s object to change ever so slightly from that of listening to a singer singing a song, to the experience of listening to an author reading from one of their own works—for example, Burroughs reading from The Naked Lunch⁸—then this experience might well have to be defined as the process of evaluating the “grain” of the authorial voice, and as the problematic rediscovery of the author “beneath” the authorial performance. Briefly, Barthes’s meditations upon the extra-literary genres of the song and of instrumental music lead him to a position from which he is virtually obliged to reassess his previous assumptions about the literary text. Having identified the body of the singer and the instrumental performer, Barthes is but one step away from discovering the musical “author” in performances by composers of songs and instrumental music, and but two steps away from the resurrection of the literary author in the authorial performance of the text. Significantly, Barthes also insists that this evaluation of the “grain” of the performing voice is outside of any law.

Presumably then, this evaluative process is necessarily outside the system of prior discourses within which Barthes’s “From Work to Text” locates “every text,” and within which such subsequent theorists as Jonathan Culler restrict all acts of textual explication. Converting the inventions of Barthes’s theoretic licence into the legislation of his Structuralist Poetics, Culler decrees: “A work can only be read in connection with or against other texts, which provide a grid through which it is read and structured by establishing expectations which enable one to pick out salient features and give them a structure.”⁹ Culler elaborates the implications of this law throughout The Pursuit of Signs in passages such as the following synthesis of Barthes’s and Julia Kristeva’s theories of intertextuality (characteristically pivoting upon “only” that most suspect of four-letter words): “literary works are to be considered not as autonomous entities, ‘organic wholes,’ but as intertextual constructs: sequences which have meaning in relation to other texts which they take up, cite, parody, refute, or generally transform. A text can be read only in relation to other texts, and it is made possible by the codes which animate the discursive space of a culture. The work is a product not of a biographically defined individual about whom information could be accumulated, but of writing itself.”¹⁰

This definition hovers ambiguously between the two poles of intertextual theory. On the one hand, it specifies that intertextual relations inhabit the relatively closed discursive space between the prior literary texts of writing itself. On the other hand, it intimates that intertextual relations embrace the infinitely wider spectrum of that plurality of “codes which animate the discursive space of a culture.” Culler reiterates this more open-ended concept elsewhere in The Pursuit of Signs, defining intertextuality as “the relationship between a text and the various languages or signifying practices of a culture and its relation to those texts which articulate for it the possibilities of that culture” (103) and suggesting that intertextuality designates “everything that enables one to recognize pattern and meaning in texts” (104). Once again, Culler faithfully paraphrases and synthesizes the theories of his forbears. Barthes, for example, equates the intertextual with such panoramic points of reference as “citations, references, echoes, cultural languages…in a vast stereophony” (160); while Julia Kristeva argues still more generously that “The term intertextuality designates the transposition of one (or several) system(s) of signs into another (“Le terme d’inter-textualité désigne cette transposition d’un [ou de plusieurs] système[s] de signes en un autre”)¹¹

Like Barthes’s conception of the relations between “cultural languages,” Kristeva’s notion of the relations between different signifying systems obviously extends beyond “writing itself.” Indeed, as Laurent Jenny remarks in his oft-cited survey of intertextual theory entitled “La Stratégie de la forme,” Kristeva’s use of the term “intertextuality” is misleading insofar as it extends “beyond all literary and aesthetic problems” (“au-delà de toute problématique littéraire ou esthé-tique”), foregrounding relations between two or more systems of signs, rather than examining relations between two texts.¹² Nevertheless, in a subsequent article about literary collages, Jenny advocates the same kind of open-ended definition of intertextuality as that adumbrated in Barthes’s and Kristeva’s most flexible speculations, concluding that: “that which is known as ‘intertextuality’ is doubtless nothing other than the sum of all the procedures necessary for the decoding of every discourse” (“ce qu’on appelle ‘intertextualité’ n’est sans doute que la somme des procedures nécessaires au déchiffrement de tout discours”).¹³

At this point, intertextuality becomes what Culler—paraphrasing Kristeva— defines as “the sum of knowledge that makes it possible for texts to have meaning” (104). Ironically. the implications of this catholic—or “hybrid”— approach to intertextuality are seldom realized. Culler’s theoretical writings certainly acknowledge the importance of the plurality of codes animating a culture; associate intertextuality with everything facilitating the recognition of pattern and meaning in texts; and confirm Kristeva’s and Jenny’s suggestion that intertextuality designates the sum of knowledge permitting texts to be decoded. Yet most of the time, Culler’s definitions, and—more significantly— Culler’s intertextual practice, restrict this everything and this sum of codes to the written text. Rather than looking to extraliterary variants of the kind of “additional experience” and “supplementary knowledge” that he advocates in his Structuralist Poetics (95), or contextualizing new literary discourse within a wide range of literary and extraliterary “schemata or knowledge frames” of the kind discussed by Dieter Freundlieb,¹⁴ Cul ler appears content to cultivate those intertextual relations growing within the well-walled garden of prior literary discourse. Indeed, almost all intertextual theorists tend to work primarily on the relations between literary texts, as though the conventions of prior written discourse were the only conventions determining the production of texts.

As this article will presently suggest, this predominantly “literary” variant of intertextuality appears incapable of distinguishing the ways in which certain radical contemporary texts arise from or within the conventions of extra-literarydiscursive spaces, such as the fine arts, music, or new dimensions of technological creativity. Despite claims to embrace “everything,” the practice and polemics of Culler and other intertextual theorists suggests that intertextuality simply denotes the study of those written texts—usually poems or novels—that makes best sense in terms of previous poetic and fictional practices. This conservative, over-literary mode of intertextuality is perhaps predicated upon one of Barthes’s more misleading hypotheses: his wayward suggestion that ever since the epistemological break precipitated by Freudianism and Marxism, writing has undergone “no further break,” so that “in a way it can be said that for the last hundred years we have been living in repetition” (156).

This cosy centennial concept inexplicably overlooks the innumerable conceptual and technological “breaks” inaugurated by the successive waves of modernist and postmodernist culture. Far from displaying “repetition,” it is arguable that the twentieth century is notable above all as an era of explosive cultural crisis and of incessant cultural renewal. In this respect, Laurent Jenny’s “La Stratégie de la forme” convincingly postulates that contemporary intertextual creativity (which he associates with the French novelists Claude Simon and Michel Butor), might be characterized in terms of the attempt “to identify those static syntagms (mythologies) ossified within phrases, to distance oneself from their banality by exaggerating them, and finally to release the signifier from its sclerosis in order to reinstate it within a new system of signification” (“mettre en lumière les syntagmes figés [les ‘mythologies’] ankylosés dans les phrases, se distancier par rapport à leur banalité en les outrant et enfin dégager le signifiant de sa gangue pour le relancer dans un nouveau procès de signification” ) (279).

Barthes’s suggestion that the twentieth century is an era of unbroken textual “repetition” is doubly disadvantageous. It not only distracts attention from the peculiarly contemporary problem of explicating the innovations of radical discourse, but (what is worse) encourages the conservative intertextual practitioner’s tendency to privilege the very banalities of prior discourse that least resemble radical discourse.

Laurent Jenny offers an interesting exception to the rule of conservative intertextual practice, in so far as his reflections upon literary variants of collage in “Sémiotique du collage intertextuel” advocate the comparison of literary and pictorial practices (176). At the same time, Jenny acknowledges that literary and visual images inhabit different semiotic systems (170), thereby hinting at the way in which a literary text may be explicated in the context of extra-literarydiscursive conventions. Barthes similarly looks beyond the purity of “writing itself” from time to time, as for example in his reflections upon the “grain” of the voice, or in his comparison of “the (readerly) text” with “a (classical musical score” in S/Z.¹⁵ Culler rarely makes such excursions into extra-literary territories, though The Pursuit of Signs momentarily contextualizes the evolution of criticism in terms of the musical conventions of “what Schoenberg achieved in his Erwartung: a chromatic plenitude” (47), and thus exemplifies the advantages of employing references from contexts outside “writing itself.”

By deliberately venturing beyond the over-literary intertextuality confined within “writing itself,” the intertextual critic may enter a more expansive field of studies. Here radical contemporary textual experiments—or interextual experiments—may best be explicated by analogy with the extra-literary conventions peculiar to artistic, musical and technological discursive spaces, rather than in terms of the literary conventions informing the literary discourse within which conservative theory and practice locates intertextual relations.

Returning to Barthes’s theories and practice, it might be argued that the beauty of Barthes’s breadth of vision arises from its capacity to evade the counterproductive caution of theorists such as Culler. Barthes certainly postulates that all texts are explicitly or implicitly déjà vu and déjà lu, and “come from codes which are known” (159); and yet he also speculates that certain verbal phenomena, such as the “grain” of the performer’s voice, inhabit an uncharted discursive space outside of any “law of culture” and “rules of interpretation.” In other words, having announced the death of the author, Barthes’s explorations of creativity outside the restricted intertextual grid from which Culler would derive his analytical “expectations” all but bring him to rehabilitate the author in terms of the listener’s relationship with the body of the authorial performer. Having made rules, Barthes has the happy knack of locating their breakingpoints by complementing his literary studies with the implications of his studies of extra-literary creativity, thereby productively transgressing the Barthesian theory that—in Culler’s formulation—requires that “A text can be read only in relation to other texts,” being a product of “writing itself” (38).

Precisely by looking beyond “writing itself” to the performance of the song and of instrumental music, Barthes generates reflections which, by analogy and extension, might well prompt new strategies for explicating authorial readings of writing itself and for analyzing such recent creative practices as performance poetry and sound poetry.¹⁶ In much the same way, Barthes’s research notes upon “The Third Meaning” of Sergei Eisenstein’s film stills are pregnant with insights applicable both to “writing itself” and to recent technological experiments with language, despite the fact that these insights derive from forbidden fruit, or more precisely, from the contemplation of authorial subject-matter(which Barthes repeatedly identifies in terms of “Eisensteinian meaning” [56], “Eisensteinian realism” [57], and other equally telling concepts), drawn from a hybrid discursive space outside “writing itself.”

It is difficult to define precisely what Barthes understands by the “third meanings” of Sergei Einstein’s film stills, since this kind of meaning (like the “grain” of the voice) exists “outside (articulated) language,” so that it “disturbs, sterilizes…metalanguage (criticism)” (61). It inhabits “that region where articulated language is no longer more than approximative and where another language begins” (65), and is therefore something which “will not succeed in existing, in entering the critic’s metalanguage” (61). Put another way, the third or “obtuse” meaning is “not situated structurally, a semantologist would not agree as to its objective existence” (60); “but then” as Barthes immediately reflects, “what is an objective reading?” (60).

Reading these notes one discovers what Samuel Beckett has felicitously evoked as “a great mind in the throes”;¹⁷ the revelation of one of the great contemporary manufacturers of “objective” critical metalanguages wrestling with the subjective impact of a film still which evokes ambiguous gestures that somehow elude his most precocious systems—which “my intellection cannot succeed in absorbing” (54). Thus, while in 1971 “From Work to Text” confidently affirms that the written text is composed of “citations which…are anonymous, untraceable, and yet already read” (160), these notes from 1970 identify a mode of technological creativity in which the components of a photographic image—or visual “citations”—appear anonymous, untraceable, and moreover unreadable in so far as their image “outplays meaning—subverts not the content but the whole practice of meaning” (62). At best, Barthes confesses, “My reading remains suspended… between definition and approximation” (61).

Confronted by something that (according to his metalinguistical preconceptions) should not be there—something which “appears to extend outside culture, knowledge, information” (55)—Barthes is as it were in the position of a latter-day Christopher Columbus setting eyes for the first time upon discursive continent he would rather not have discovered. Despite Ludwig Wittgenstein’s affirmation to the contrary, Barthes appears to become aware that the limits of his critical language do not coincide with the limits of his world: a dilemma indeed. One might well compare Barthes’s position with that of such epitomes of postmodern subjectivity as Jean-Paul Sartre’s Roquentin, or Beckett’s Watt. Like Barthes, Watt is tormented by the discovery of something which he cannot define and which therefore should not be there—the discovery that “nothing had happened, that a thing that was nothing had happened.”¹⁸

Barthes’s immediate response to this dilemma (which at first sight bids well to topple “pure” Barthesian theory into “impure” Beckettian angst) is, in his own words, “derisory.” Since the third meanings emerging from Eisenstein’s film stills are outside culture, and, moreover, “Indifferent to moral or aesthetic categories,” Barthes argues that they are best conceptualized as being part of “the family of pun, buffoonery, useless expenditure,” and are thus “on the side of the carnival” (55). Barthes’s rhetoric is curiously puritanical here. One senses that having remained innocent and ignorant of these troublesome third meanings, he would like at least to remain innocent of espousing their cause (if not ignorant of their existence) by delegating them to the insignificant conceptual territory of the “useless” and the “carnival”—a limbo which presumably exists in the lower depths of that kind of textual hierarchy he dismisses elsewhere as “a crude honours list” (156).

Yet as Barthes observes in the early pages of S/Z, there is no such being as the “innocent subject”: rather, the reader is “already…a plurality of other texts, of codes which are infinite” (10). The disturbing discovery of the film still’s third meaning merely extends the infinity of codes—or approximate codes—with which Barthes is familiar, demonstrating perhaps that the subject’s “I,” the occupants of intertextual discursive spaces, and the conventions underlying these discursive spaces are all in a constant state of flux and renewal. The citations that make up a text are clearly not all “already read” as Barthes suggests in “From Work to Text.” Rather, certain citations are necessarily recent since, like Eisenstein’s film stills, they derive from twentieth-centurytechnology, and like the stills discussed by Barthes, still await comprehensive decoding.

Abandoning his initial derisory response, Barthes formulates two very interesting counter-arguments to his earlier suggestion, in “The Death of the Author,” that “the writer can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original” (146). Firstly, having conceded that the impact of Eisenstein’s stills may arise from what Baudelaire spoke of as “the emphatic truth of gesture in the important moments of life” (56; emphasis in original), having located this gestural impact within such details as “the excessive curve of the eyelids” or “the upward circumflex of the faded eyebrows” (57), Barthes toys with the possibility that such third meanings may be produced by both cinematic and non-cinematic authors, speculating: “Obtuse meanings are to be found not everywhere…but somewhere: in other authors of films (perhaps). In a certain manner of reading ‘life’ and so ‘reality’ itself” (60; emphasis in original). Barthes extends this speculation by suggesting that, unlike the writers he discusses in “The Death of the Author” (whose meanings are never original because they may “only imitate a gesture that is always anterior” [146]), the various authors who generate third meanings may well claim to be original in so far as their work “does not copy anything” (61), and is thus so excruciatingly difficult to read, describe and contextualize. After musing briefly upon the limited categories in the kind of “objective reading” obstinately resisted by the third meaning, Barthes interestingly identifies it with “an accent” or “the very form of an emergence, of a fold…marking the heavy layer of informations and significations.” This “accent” denotes “A new—rare—practice affirmed against a majority practice” (62).

Since Barthes’s notes do not elaborate this concept of the accent, it remains more useful as a heuristic image rather than as a precise concept contributing to an objective definition. Nevertheless, Barthes is in excellent company, since he unwittingly duplicates—or quotes without inverted commas—the very image employed by Marcel Proust to indicate that textual quality which, although objectively undefinable, signals the existence of a “new—rare— practice.” Meditating upon the originality of the writer Bergotte, and virtually identifying a “grain of the text,” Proust’s narrator muses:

This accent is not designated in the text, nothing indicates that it is there and yet it emerges of its own accord in the phrases, they cannot be read aloud in any other way, it is at once that which is most ephemeral and yet most profound in a writer’s work, and it is this that bears witness to the quality of his personality…

Cet accent n’est pas note dans le texte, rien ne l’y indique et pourtant il s’ajoute de lui-même aux phrases, on ne peut pas les dire autrement, il est ce qu’ily avait de plus éphémère et pourtant de plus profond chez l’écrivain, et cest cela qui portera témoignage sur sa nature…¹⁹

Considered collectively, Barthes’s successive comments upon the various authors who might create new and rare modes of third meanings characterised by some kind of accent add up to form the first of the counter-arguments that we have associated with this essay. Instead of confirming Barthes’s early suggestion in “The Death of the Author” that the writer may merely mix and remix prior discourse into works without originality, this argument suggests that both cinematic and non-cinematic authors may create original works.

The second counterargument in this essay implies that new, original works may be created not only by authors but also by their media—by new technology producing creative effects without counterpart in the intertextual happy hunting ground of prior discourse. Like third meanings, these technological innovations are not simply anti-theoretical, and therefore buffoonery or symptoms of “the carnival”; nor indeed are they literally outside culture; rather, they are ante-theoretical, or outside the predictably limited present terminology of those who would define culture. In Barthes’s formulation, such innovations may be “born technically, occasionally even aesthetically,” but have “still to be born theoretically” (67). Barthes refers here to the film, but his remarks apply equally illuminatingly to other similar technological modes of creativity, such as sound poetry, radio drama and various modes of literary and musical performance which use live and recorded language and sound.²⁰ It seems reasonable to assume that certain authors exploring these recent genres might similarly activate new modes of “third meaning” within puzzlingly original works.

It is of course difficult to defend the claim that a work is absolutely original; indeed, if this were the case, it seems unlikely that such a work would make any sense at all. Discussing extreme experiments that approximate to this curious condition, Burroughs comments: “I’ve done writing that I thought was interesting, experimentally, but simply not readable,” adding, “I think Finnegans Wake rather represents a trap into which experimental writing can fall when it becomes purely experimental. I would go so far with any given experiment and then come back…. It’s simply if you go too far in one direction, you can never get back, and you’re out there in complete isolation.”²¹ In this respect, Burroughs confirms Claudio Guillén’s lucid definition of “the new work” as being “both a deviant from the norm…and a process of communication referring to the norm.”²²

Nevertheless, despite the fact that most intertextual practitioners would probably locate both this process of deviation and these “norms” within written discourse, it seems possible to distinguish two distinct modes of “original” work. The first of these would obviously be the “original” work composed within the parameters of written discourse and both deviating from its norms and referring back to them. A second and more complex mode of “original” creativity would be the radical work which not only deviates from the conventions of written discourse and then refers back to them, but which also refers forward to the conventions of discursive spaces beyond written discourse, be these the prior conventions of painting or music, or the potential “theoretically unborn” conventions of new modes of technological creativity. The complexity of this twofold originality offers revealing challenges to the assumptions of orthodox intertextuality. For example, despite the fact that Culler’s The Pursuit of Signs advocates a poetics that is “less interested in the occupants of that intertextual space which makes a work intelligible” than in “the conventions which underlie that discursive activity or space” (118), such radical creativity virtually obliges the critic to scrutinize individual works before aspiring to chart more general conventions, since they may be the only available representation of their new discursive practice. How, then, does one come to terms with rare examples of new creativity, particularly new forms of technological creativity? How does one place such works within the most elementary conceptual context?

Culler’s reflections upon the somewhat less daunting project of analyzing the different interpretative operations applied to conventional texts provide a useful preliminary warning. He remarks that “since facts of interpretation constitute a point of departure and the data to be explained, a semiotic discussion will simply be judged irrelevant if it starts from a blatantly unrepresentative range of interpretations” (51).

In much the same way, it seems evident that any attempt to read, describe and analyze new forms of technological creativity modulating “writing itself” requires that the new work be contextualized and explained within a relevant and representative range of references. Yet how can this relevant and representative range of references be identified, if a new work is itself to all intents and purposes the solitary evidence of, and the solitary occupant of, a new discursive space?

At this point a conservative intertextual approach focusing almost exclusively upon the “references” of prior written discourse seems likely to break down, since its data would prove “blatantly unrepresentative” and incapable of explicating the new. Yet it might be argued that the creative strategy of experimental artists and writers such as Brion Gysin and William S.Burroughs provides some indication of the way in which the critic may extricate themself from this intertextual impasse. Moreover, attention to the specific theories of Gysin and Burroughs suggests that the creative speculations of the avant-garde may also helpfully complement—and at times, even partially anticipate—the analytical speculations of experimental theorists like Barthes.

For example, in 1968, Barthes’s “The Death of the Author” cautioned that “the writer can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, ever original. His only power is to mix writings Did he wish to express himelf, he ought at least to know that the inner “thing” he thinks to “translate” is itself only a readyformed dictionary, its words only explainable through other words…” (146). Ten years earlier, Gysin’s “Statement on the Cut-Up Method and Permutated Poems” had already declared: “Words have a vitality of their own and you or anybody can make them gush into action. The permutated poems set the words spinning off on their own…. The poets are supposed to liberate the words…. Who told poets they were supposed to think? Poets have no words “of their very own.” Writers don’t own their words. Since when do words belong to anybody?”²³ The general rationale leading to Gysin’s conclusion that “poets don’t own words,” and that language should be permutated and cut up, is perhaps still more interesting than these particular conclusions.²⁴ For arguably²⁵ its premises exemplify a creative variant of the theoretical approach most likely to facilitate the explication of radically new works of literature.

Gysin outlines this approach in the opening paragraph to his statement on the cut-up method and permutated poems, revealing that his experiments were motivated primarily by the wish to manipulate words with the same facility with which visual materials are manipulated by the modernist artist. Commencing with one of the key statements in contemporary cultural criticism, this paragraph declared: “Writing is fifty years behind painting. I propose to apply the painter’s technique to writing; things as simple and immediate as collage or montage. Cut right through the pages of any book or newsprint…lengthwise, for example, and shuffle the columns of text. Put them together at hazard and read the newly constituted message.” The crucial concept here is Gysin’s wish to bring writing up to date with painting, or to put it another way, his wish to animate the discursive space of writing with some of the conventions underlying the discursive space of experimental painting.

This aspiration first challenges Barthes’s theory of textual production, which maintains that a text is a mixture of “words only explainable through other words” (146), and thus makes no provision for texts predicated upon artistic conventions or painterly techniques that are neither reducible to the conventions of prior literary discourse, nor explainable in terms of other words. Secondly, and reciprocally, Gysin’s poetics challenges Barthes’s theory of textual explication, since his work is best explained not so much in terms of a merely verbal or literary mode of intertextuality, as in the extra-verbal, extra-literary context of artworks which employ collage and montage techniques.

To argue that written texts, such as Gysin’s poems, are explainable only in terms of “other words” in the literary context of “writing-itself” is surely to assume that writers are peculiarly innocent of extra-literary creativity. This assumption would make little sense at the best of times, but it makes no sense at all in the context of a poet like Gysin, who is not only a poet but also a painter, and moreover, a painter who writes poems according to the plastic conventions of prior artworks, rather than according to the literary conventions of prior “wordworks” in which conservative intertextual theory locates the foundations of all literary creativity. Accordingly, the intertextual critic should surely look to a more open mode of intertextuality in order to work within conceptual parameters commensurate not only with literary codes but also with such extra-literary codes as the collage and montage conventions underlying Gysin’s poetry.

This stipulation may be unduly modest, predicated as it is upon such earlytwentieth-century artistic conventions. For as William S.Burroughs intimates in the following passage from his novel Nova Express, the conventions underlying the now venerable and even rather quaint pre-technological manifestations of collage and montage (such as the pioneering works of the Cubist, Futurist, and Dadaist artists), are considerably less sophisticated than the conventions underlying their radical technological counterparts within the contemporary, postmodern discursive space of intermedia.²⁶ This discrepancy finds foul-mouthed formulation when the irrepressible “Mr Winkhorst” of “Lazarus & Co” triumphantly remonstrates:” “‘Sure, sure, but you see now why we had to laugh till we pissed watching those dumb rubes playing around with photomontage—Like charging a regiment of tanks with a defective slingshot.’”²⁷ Like many of the verbal outbursts in his fiction, this odd tirade dramatizes Burroughs’s preoccupation with the ways in which variously sophisticated recorded words and images might be exploited as weapons, or means of social control. In this respect, photomontage is but a “slingshot” in comparison with the potency of the electronic mass media. The substance of this memorable simile is readily applicable to conventional, predominantly literary modes of intertextuality, which would somehow explain all textual innovation in terms of “pure” prior literary discourse. Lacking literary terms to conceptualize such basic extraliterary concepts as the verbal equivalent of photomontage, this conservative intertextual approach is worse than a “defective slingshot” when confronting the “tanks” of recent technological experimentation.²⁸

It might be argued that Barthes’s speculations upon the “grain” of the performer’s voice and upon the “third meaning” of Eisenstein’s film stills represent a wider, more satisfactory intertextual approach, insofar as they investigate extraliterary discourses, and implicitly illuminate analogous issues within radical literary discourses. Significantly, though, this illumination is only implicit. Unlike Gysin and Burroughs, Barthes neither seems particularly conversant with the collage narratives, visual poems, sound poems and multimedia performances that characterize the postmodern literary avant-garde, nor manifests any systematic desire to relate his general theories of “writing itself” to these radical practices. Indeed, reading Barthes, Kristeva, and Culler, it rapidly becomes apparent that the conservative quality of what Culler’s The Pursuit of Signs succinctly defines as their “facts of interpretation”— their “point of departure” and their “data to be explained” (51)—necessarily restricts what one might term the “point of arrival” of their intertextual activities. By intentionally or accidentally remaining innocent of avant-garde discursive practices since the mid-fifties, their intertextual strategies become curiously obsolete before the extra-textual energies of the radical multimedia “text.” This does not imply that the infinitely less rigorous speculations of Gysin and Burroughs offer any substitute for the complexity of orthodox intertextual theory. But it seems clear that Gysin’s and Burroughs’s experience of recent avant-garde discursive practices allows them to commence their speculations from an advantageously extra-literary “point of departure,” focusing upon exemplarily contemporaneous “data to be explained.” The “innocent” intertextual critic might benefit considerably from what Culler’s Structuralist Poetics might term the “additional experience” (95) of Gysin and Burroughs.

As Laurent Jenny comments in “La Stratégie de la forme” definitions of intertextuality become most problematic during “periods of intertextual crisis” (“Les périodes de crises intertextuelles”) that follow the introduction of new media; a notion that Jenny derives from Marshall McLuhan, whose argument— paraphrased by Jenny—locates the origins of these crises “not in the history of the creative subject but in the evolution of the media” (“non dans l’histoire du sujet créateur mais dans l’évolution des media” [259]). The last three decades can be seen as just such a period of crisis, and the work of avantgarde writers like Gysin and Burroughs is especially valuable in terms of the ways in which it exemplifies and pinpoints the quality of this crisis. As I have already remarked, Gysin’s proposals to permutate and cut up language according to the discursive conventions of early-twentieth-century artistic experiments annunciated the predominantly conceptual intertextual crisis that came about when poets and painters systematically explored and appropriated each other’s methods and materials in the late fifties, the sixties, and the seventies. (This conceptual crisis is anticipated, of course, by the experiments of the Futurist and Dadaist poets and artists.) It was certainly accelerated by the availability of new printing techniques permitting the inexpensive reproduction of graphic, typographic and photographic materials, but not all of these conceptual borrowings depended upon this new technology for their realization. The fact that such experiments have received negligible attention (or none at all) from most intertextual theorists typifies the way in which a pre-occupation with “prior discourse” has led contemporary intertextuality to neglect contemporaneous discourse.²⁹

More recently, Gysin has amusingly and perspicaciously alluded to the parallel and unambiguously technological intertextual crisis of sound poetry, or what he terms “machine poetry”: that is, experiments with tape-recorded words and sounds that similarly date from the late fifties, when inexpensive taperecorders first became widely available. Defining his own aspirations, and deploring the conservative creativity of his acquaintances, Gysin ruefully reminisces:

I understand poetry really mostly as it is called in French poésie sonore, and what I would preferably have called “machine poetry.”…I don’t mean getting up there and saying it once off, or declaiming it, or even performing it the way people do nowadays, but actually putting it through the changes that one can produce by tape-recording and all of the technology, or the even just minimal technology that one has in one’s hands in the last few years…and all the rest is really a terrible waste of time, I think. I’m sorry…sorry for all the poets who don’t think that… some of them very charming friends…but I don’t know what they’re doing, I really don’t…just don’t know…seems to me that they’re doing nothing. (49)

Making much the same criticism of his contemporaries, Burroughs has commented: “Most serious writers refuse to make themselves available to the things that technology is doing. I’ve never been able to understand this sort of fear. Many of them are afraid of tape-recorders and the idea of using any mechanical means for literary purposes seems to them some sort of a sacrilege.”³⁰ Unlike such “serious” writers, and unlike most “serious” intertextual theorists, Burroughs has deliberately made himself available to “the things that technology is doing,” and the things that technology may be made to do. While Burroughs’s essays in Electronic Revolution discuss the destructive potential of the tape-recorder in terms of the ways in which “prerecorded cut/up tapes played back in the streets” may be used as “a revolutionary weapon” to “spread rumors” “discredit opponents” “produce and escalate riots,” and “scramble and nullify associational lines put down by mass media,”³¹ Burroughs’s interviews in The Job and his essays in other publications offer splendidly succinct analyses of the tape-recorder’s creative potential. For example, just as Barthes’s condusion to “The Third Meaning” carefully defines the way in which “The still, by instituting a reading that is at once instantaneous and vertical, scorns logical time” (68), Burroughs’s response to a question in The Job regarding the advantages of the tape-recorder cogently analyses the difference between written and tape-recorded variants of simultaneity: “Of course you can do all sorts of things on tape-recorders which can’t be done anywhere else—effects of simultaneity, echoes, speed-ups, slowdowns, playing three tracks at once, and so forth. There are all sorts of things you can do on a tape-recorder that cannot possibly be indicated on a printed page. The concept of simultaneity cannot be indicated on a printed page except very crudely through the use of columns, and even then the reader must follow one column at a time.” (13) More recently, Burroughs has alluded to the potential of “elaborate sound equipment” surpassing the tape-recorder, affirming that: “By using ever-expanding technical facilities, sound poetry can create effects that have never been produced before, thus opening a new frontier for poets.”³²

It should be obvious at this point that Gysin’s and Burroughs’s interviews and theoretical writings offer extremely valuable adjuncts to the insights of theorists such as Barthes. But as I have previously hinted, Gysin and Burroughs seem even more important in terms of the way in which their creative and theoretical strategies indicate how critics might resolve the seemingly impossible problem of explicating radical literary works without counterparts in prior literary discourse—the problem I have termed the “intertextual impasse.” This strategy is perhaps best defined as an “intercontextual” approach to creative and theoretical problem.³³ For experimental writers like Burroughs and Gysin, this approach involves either the adoption of radical discursive conventions from an alternative, extra-literary genre, such as art, or the exploration of a new technological possibility resulting from what Jenny defines as an “intertextual crisis.” In both cases, the writer abandons the conventions and the context of familiar, literary discourse, and moves into the unfamiliar and new context of discursive practices which, in Barthes’s terms, may still not yet be “born theoretically” (67). For the theorist and analyst, an intercontextual approach involves the process of systematically looking beyond the contexts of previous literary discourse, and of explicating radically new literary work by analogy with other and similarly radical works from an extra-literarycontext. Although some aspects of radical works may be analyzable within the various intertextual systems of theorists such as Culler, Michael Riffaterre, Jenny, Harold Bloom, and Ann Jefferson, these systems—which are all designed to explicate such conventional genres as the poem or the novel— seem unlikely to account for the innovatory quality of such works.³⁴ Quite simply, radical works require radical contextualization.

The intercontextual approach is primarily concerned, therefore, with the problem of explicating radical, actual creativity (as opposed to prior creativity). As has been suggested, it is possible to identify two kinds of intercontextual problems. The first of these, exemplified by Gysin’s appropriation of collage and montage techniques from the fine arts, concerns work in which discursive conventions from an extra-literary discursive space are used within a literary discursive space. The advantages of intercontextualizing this kind of problem become particularly clear if one considers the case of concrete poetry, an international movement with practitioners in Europe, North and South America, Australia and Japan. The conservative intertextual analyst, pledged to explain literary discourse in the context of prior literary discourse, might dwell for years upon the complex literary “citations” linking these five cultures without ever identifying the central convention in concrete poetry—a convention adopted from the “concrete art” of Swiss painters like Max Bill and their international counterparts. To relate concrete poetry simply to “writing itself,” and to such prior writings as the poems of George Herbert or Ezra Pound, is to overlook the far more significant extra-literary conventions of European and Brazilian concrete art.³⁵

The second and perhaps still more challenging intercontextual problem concerns works which do not borrow conventions from what one might think of as prior extra-literary discourse (as in the case of Gysin’s cut-ups and the work of the concrete poet), but which participate with extra-literary works in the exploration of some new discursive space made available by those technological innovations that Jenny associates with the “intertextual crisis.” This kind of problem can be partially exemplified with reference to the varied works of William S.Burroughs. Burroughs is an ideal subject for conventional intertextual studies in so far as some of his novels, such as Nova Express, cut up his manuscripts with texts by his favorite authors, and thus constitute what Burroughs himself terms “a composite of many writers living and dead.”³⁶ He is also an author who has both written about and worked with the new technology, experimenting with tape-recorded works, with performances involving live actions and projections, and with collaborative films which fuse the discoveries made in his written cut-ups, his taped work and his performances.³⁷

A conventional intertextual approach such as Jenny attempts in his article “La Stratégie de la forme” rapidly constructs a very misleading account of Burroughs. To be fair, the article includes several revealing generalizations, but Jenny confuses these insights by attempting to justify them in terms of Burroughs’s prior writing. Diagnosing Burroughs’s work as a clear case of “Intertextualmania” (“La manie intertextuelle” [281]), Jenny also very interestingly alludes to “the audiovisual medium that determines the work of William S.Burroughs” (“le médium audiovisual qui détermine l’oeuvre de William Burroughs” [259]). Unfortunately Jenny’s observation functions thematically rather than intercontextually. Instead of tracing the way in which Burroughs has employed audiovisual media not only as a theme in his fiction and essays but also as the means of production of his tapes, performances and films, Jenny establishes an over-reductive connection between speculations in Electronic Revolution and Burroughs’s oeuvre as a whole, arguing that Burroughs’s primary achievement is his formulation of an anarchic writing which offers an antidote to the stupefying discourses of the mass media. Over-reacting to the claim in Electronic Revolution that prerecorded cut-ups might serve to “nullify associational lines put down by mass media” (126), Jenny’s analysis of Burroughs’s use of intertextuality concludes:

It’s a matter of rapidly throwing together various cut-up “techniques” in order to respond to the omnipresence of transmitters feeding us with their dead discourses (mass media, publicity etc.). It’s a question of unchaining codes—not the subject any more—so that something will burst out, will escape: words beneath words, personal obsessions.
Another kind of word is born which escapes from the totalitarianism of the media but retains their power, and turns against its old masters.

Il s’agit de bricoler en hâte des “techniques” de mise en pièces pour répondre à l’omniprésence des émetteurs qui nous nourrissent de leur discours mort (mass media, publicité etc.). Il faut faire délirer les codes—non plus les sujets—et quelque chose se déchirera, se libérera: mots sous les mots, obsessions personnelles.
Une autre parole naît qui échappe au totalitarisme des media mais garde leur pouvoir, et se retourne contre ses anciens maîtres. (281)

At best, this conclusion suggests that Burroughs exemplifies our first mode of intercontextuality, in so far as his writings may be said to adopt the conventions of the mass media (albeit in order to sabotage them). At worst, Jenny’s account transforms Burroughs into some kind of T.S.Eliot, shoring fragmentary language against contemporary ruin. Overall, it seems to reiterate the “carnival” approach to the radical text, caricaturing Burroughs’s writing as delinquent discourse, kicking against the pricks of majority practice.

In a sense, Burroughs’s work is often doing just this. Yet to conclude one’s analysis of Burroughs at this point is merely to confirm Andy Warhol’s maxim that “People do tend to avoid new realities; they’d rather just add details to the old ones.”³⁸ Burroughs does not simply add negative “details” or negative variants to old discursive practices; he does not just formulate anti-discoursespredicated upon and preying upon the familiar written discourses of linear fiction and the familiar technological discourses of the mass media. Rather, his achievement is surely to have discovered the “new reality” of the unfamiliar “hybrid” technological discursive possibilities with which he has modulated language in his various experiment with tape and film. Jenny’s error then, is to contextualize Burroughs’s work in terms of his familiar and earlier writings, a process that Jean Ricardou terms “restricted intertextuality” (“intertextualité restrainte” [the relation of a text to other texts by the same writer]) as opposed to “generalized intertextuality” (“intertextualité générale” [the relation of a text to works by other writers]).³⁹ Had Jenny employed a more rigorous mode of what one might term “restricted intercontextuality,” he might have made more profitable connections between Burroughs’s work with both written and technological discourses. Had Jenny placed Burroughs within the context of “generalized intercontextuality,” his conclusions might have been even more fruitful.

For as an archetypally intercontextual explorer—a writer fascinated by what he terms “effects that have never been produced before”⁴⁰—Burroughs necessitates contextualization among comparable innovators. And in the absence of obvious literary peers, these points of comparison are often best located in extraliterary discursive spaces, such as the one occupied by the German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, who has similarly advocated “sounds and sound relationships…that lead us to believe that we have never heard them before.”⁴¹ One might multiply examples of this aspiration towards hitherto unrealized effects. The advantage of contextualizing Burroughs among fellow researchers such as Stockhausen is that he may then be defined and evaluated more precisely in terms of his particular use of the new media explored simultaneously by other contemporaries, instead of being clumsily typecast as just another tiresome “carnival” artiste, and deemed inconsequential because incompatible with the literary expectations generated by prior literary discourse.

Despite Jonathan Culler’s surprising hostility in The Pursuit of Signs to comparative studies (especially as practiced by Harold Bloom), a comparative approach is obviously fundamental to this intercontextual perspective. First, the comparison of radical works from both literary and extra-literary discursive spaces permits radical literary works to be identified in two main categories: those which are predicated upon discursive conventions appropriated from the prior discourse of some extra-literary discursive space (such as the collage technique first elaborated in the fine arts), and those which explore concurrently with extra-literary occupants a new, technological discursive space, born of some intertextual crisis (such as the recorded works precipitated by the availability of the tape-recorder). Secondly, the process of gradually comparing different works predicated upon extra-literary discursive conventions, or exploring new, technological, extra-literary discursive spaces, eventually permits evaluation of both the quality and originality of these individual works, and the creative potential of these new discursive practices. This hypothesis may seem singularly unfashionable, particularly since the concept of originality has been decried by theorists like Barthes and poets like Gysin, who have respectively insisted that originality is impossible since the writer may only mix pre-existing words, and that there is thus no such thing as “‘the very own words’ of anyone…living or dead.”⁴²

Nevertheless, as we have already suggested, Barthes’s consideration and inevitable comparison of different occupants of the new technological discursive space of the cinema revealingly prompts his undisguised admiration for what he takes to be the originality of Eisenstein’s film stills. Accordingly, Barthes employs the adjective “Eisensteinian” throughout “The Third Meaning,” and in addition labels at least one verbal formulation “SME’s own word” (53). It would appear, then, that having replaced the myth of the author with the myth of scientific objectivity, Barthes finally refutes this second myth by asking, “but then what is an objective reading?” (60), and by suggesting that new discursive spaces such as the cinema not only precipitate original creativity such as Eisenstein’s film stills, but also permit the original theoretical activity exemplified by Eisenstein’s new terminology.

In much the same way, Brion Gysin’s consideration and inevitable comparison of different occupants of the new discursive space of the “cut-up” has led him to concede that startling originality may well arise even within a textual convention intended to treat words anonymously, “like mere material” (184). Judging Burroughs to be the supreme master of cut-ups (just as Barthes suggests that Eisenstein exhibits a rare mastery of the cinema), Gysin attributes the success of Burroughs’s cut-ups to the fact that they were applied to his own unusually original material. According to Gysin, “He covered tons of paper with his words and made them his very own words…. Used by another writer who was attempting cut-ups, one single word of Burroughs’s vocabulary would run a stain right through the fabric of their prose…. One single high-powered Burroughs word could ruin a whole barrel of good everyday words, run the literary rot right through them. One sniff of that prose and you’d say, “Why, that’s a Burroughs.” (187, 191)

Like Burroughs and Barthes, Gysin has a gift for provocative overstatement The implication of these remarks seems to be that Burroughs’s texts generate something approximating to the “accents” discussed by Barthes and Proust, thereby remaining potent even within a mechanical, cut-up structure. In other words, if Barthes and Gysin assassinate the author when considering texts hypothetically—as mere materials—in order to delineate the conventions of literary competence, they also resurrect the author when they compare different texts—or different literary performances—and discover traces of authorial “accent” in a writer’s own words.

The tension between these responses to the author is salutary, for it suggests that far from being “trivial” or “useless,” as one might naively suppose the radical text to be, intercontextual creativity is more than likely to precipitate manifestations of what “The Third Meaning” terms the “rare” and the “new” (62), and thereby present fascinating challenges to our habitual assumptions about the production and explication of texts. For some critics, appropriate points of departure for the analysis of texts arising from contemporary intertextual crises will be found only by venturing beyond that conservative intertextuality, situated within the confines of the written text, to problematic intercontextual relations that make sense only in the wider context of the “sum” of old, new and nascent discursive practices and performances. This emphasis upon manifestations of the “rare” and the “new”—which emerge only in performances located beyond the parameters of literary competence—is of course at odds with Culler’s defence, in The Pursuit of Signs, of an intertextual approach which “courts banality” in being “committed to studying meanings already known or attested within a culture in the hope of formulating the conventions that members of that culture are following” (99).

Yet there is something discomfortingly paradoxical in Culler’s modest claim that he would merely “attempt to describe ‘literary competence,’” (50), and that within his approach “notions of…a superreader ought to be avoided” (51), since in the very process of trouncing such intertextual rivals as Riffaterre for liking “nothing better than outdoing previous readers” (93) and thereby aspiring to be “superreaders” Culler’s own critical performance is itself patently “outdoing” Riffaterre and company, and profiling Culler as a “superreader” or “supercritic.”

It should be evident, then, that while certain texts and certain critical writings both court and evince the banality of mere “competence,” other texts and other critical writings similarly court and evince the rare and the new, in performances “outdoing” the conventions of mere competence, and thereby validating the notion of the “super-writer” or the “super-reader.” To deny the existence of such levels of extracompetent super-performance in one’s theories, while exemplifying them in one’s practice, is a curious delusion, liable to prompt the incompetent and embarrassed silence manifested by no less a rare and new super-reader than Barthes himself, when charged with his authorial—or superauthorial—status by John Weightman. Weightman relates, “In the early days I once asked him how it was, if he did not exist as a subjectivity, that I could recognise his style in everything he said or wrote. His reply was a pitying, ironical smile: trust a crass Englishman to pay a compliment in the form of a sceptical question!”⁴³

Burroughs appears to make the same kind of sceptical criticism of this obsession with objectivity in the following passage from The Naked Lunch, characteristically intermingling his fascination with riots, his knowledge of obscure medical terminology, and his literary theories: “A battalion of rampant bores prowls the streets and hotel lobbies in search of victims. An inteliectual avant-gardist—“Of course the only writing worth considering now is to be found in scientific reports and periodicals”—has given someone a bulbocapnine injection and is preparing to read him a bulletin” (38). Like Weightman, Burroughs intimates that avant-garde intellectuals such as Barthes and Culler are surely mistaken if they consider that everything may be reduced to scientific reports and bulletins. Yet the myth of objectivity appears to have convinced intertextual theorists that the objective concepts of the scriptor, the “banal” act of textual competence, and the anonymous reader whom Barthes would have “without history, biography, psychology” (148) have somehow displaced and replaced the subjectivity of the author, the “original” textual performance, and the super-reader.

If there is obviously a place for the text and the critic that would court “pure” objective banality, it is equally evident that the conceptual and technological intertextual crises of the last three decades have opened up radically new intercontextual creative possibilities which necessitate radically new intercontextual theoretical strategies. Writing to Alan Ansen, in the late fifties, Burroughs memorably formulated his case for “outdoing” the banalities of prior fictional discourse, confessing to feel “complete dissatisfaction with everything I have done in writing Unless writing has the danger and immediacy, the urgency of bullfighting, it is nowhere to my way of thinking I am tired of sitting behind the lines with an imperfect recording device receiving inaccurate bulletins…. I must reach the Front”⁴⁴ Intertextual theory and practice should similarly look beyond the banalities of prior literary discourse and prior literary expec-tations in order to assess the immediate implications of the intercontextual “Front.”