Dear Chinedu:

Your article is very suggestive and intellectually stimulating. When I read it, I could not help wondering if there is a single sophism associated with certain conceptions of intertextuality or, rather, you can recognize different sophisms or ideologems in some contemporary conceptions of intertextuality. Namely:

1. The ideology of the absolute text: there is nothing outside writing; there is no outside of the text. It contradicts the opening of the literary work, inevitably exposed to the triple contingency of its situational inscription or contextual production, its textuality or symbolic organization and its reception or reading horizons.

2. The ideology of the continuous (or providential) cultural and literary sense: there is only a linear influence of some texts in others, or of some intellectual traditions in others, without discontinuities or ruptures. It contradicts the contextual displacements of the horizons of production and reception of the literary work, as well as the modalities of cultural genres hybridization and enunciative dispersion.

3. The ideology of textual determinism: every text is only a replication, with some possible variations, of previous socio-historical codes or repertoires of received texts. The possibility of an agency in the reappropriation of textual practices and initiative in the response to other people's utterances is denied (without implying consecrating the ideology of a self-sufficient and full authorship, such as the one that the modern literary institution and the romantic aesthetic consecrated frequently).

4. The ideology of intertextual homogeneity: there is only one modality of textual transfer of some texts in others or a single mode of intellectual influence. It is thus unknown that transtextual remission can occur in the form of intertextuality, but also of hypertextuality, architextuality or metatextuality (among other forms of transtextuality mentioned by Genette). On the other hand, the anatomy of the influence is also variable and exhibits different forms of creative appropriation: the equivocal deviation with respect to a precursor, its completion, the deflation of the source, the demonization of the precursor, etc. (as Harold Bloom states).

The notion of spirotextuality and the spirotextual model may clearly elude the ideology of textual determinism, by incorporating a recycling format that maintains continuity with the old, but gives an option for the irruption of the new. However, it is worth asking whether it continues to reproduce the ideology of the absolute text, the assumption of a continuous (or providential) meaning and the intertextual homogeneity. Apparently, the spirotextual model continues to favor the privilege of the self-referential textual inscription, the linear continuity of literature and a single influence model without nuances. ¿I am wrong?

Best regards

Juan Antonio González de Requena Farré

@Juan Antonio González de Requena Farré

That was a very informative and critical reflection you did there. Indeed, certain conceptions of intertextuality have levels of sophism at their cores.

One significant acomplishment of my thesis of spirotextuality is that all conceptions of textual interconnections that deny, negate, preclude or irrationalize possibilities and actualities of the literary production of the new through the creative ingenuity of the individual in themselves miss the mark (hamartia). Many opinions have, in the name of intertextuality, for too long now denied the creative potential of individual subjectivities and collective subjectivities.

Texts mirror and borrow from each other but that in no way implies that the present, moreso the future, is a slave of the past, bound, as it were, to chains forged by the ancients. On the contrary, gifted individuals can, even as they avail themselves of existing or old stock of knowledge, bring in something new to that old stock.

Of course, that act or process by means of which something new is added amounts to an irruption or a disruption but that too is a manifestation of continuity in knowledge, a manifestation of an essential link between the old and the new.

There is continuity, yes, but not that the old repeats itself as the old or metamorphoses into newer textual forms (let alone, textual determinism) but that something actually new comes on stage and docks with the old by means of commonly shared textual indices.

Nice discussion.

My question is whether or not there is a reasonable caution against intertextuality. There appears to be a kind of indictment here that I'm not sure is largely accepted. As such, I wonder if a distinction between intertextuality and spirotextuality is yet fully defined.

There is no indictment against intertextuality in the sense you seem to present it. Intertextuality is a worldview in its own right. What is rather the concern is that there have been a number of misrepresentations or misinterpretations of what textual interrelationships are all about and they have all been placed under the umbrella of intertextuality. It is this sophism that inspires spirotextuality as a more meaningful, comprehensive and historically sensitive worldview about textual interrelationships.

I found your paper fascinating and provocative. As a burgeoning fiction writer, I had to stop and think about the “source” of what is written. Sometimes authors don’t know where the source of the material is from in that it channels through them for lack of a better term. When you speak of spiral textuality or spirotexuality I immediately thought of the archaic spiral seen in many cultures to denote the unfolding of the universe. I was thinking of the spiral and what is the beginning point and what is the end. If cosmology is heading in a certain direction with a paper released a few years back then the spiral has no more an end or beginning as the universe. So, the “stories” have always been. Or should I say consciousness. I think of Native American thinker Paula Gunn Allen who said that Natives don’t see the world from “I think therefore I am” but “I am therefore I think” consciousness preceding thought and by extrapolation the word or original demiurge in some cultures.

I think it has been the error for those in the dominant western culture thinking from the position of white and male to conscript the idea that all stories are merely reruns on the television of our minds. I would agree with you that the new is in contact with the old or there is a running dialectic where the living are in constant conversation with those who have come and gone. There may be some similarity of course (intertextuality) across time in human vs human; human vs nature; and human vs self (of course speculative fiction expands this). Typically, this is put in masculinist terms of “man” but I take the liberty of expanding in it as the term human can be debated too. But not to digress, I was thinking of spirotexuality and something like The Trojan Women and Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Both are texts central to women and trauma under patriarchy a term neither time frame would use but a modern observer would connect the lines. The women are framed by different times, different questions of survival and such. Intertextuality does not necessary demand a contextual connection that would distinguish race, class, gender, sexuality and such as I see the term jumping the fence to political discourse about intersectionality which disenfranchised groups on opposite ends of a spectrum might take umbrage with.

Does spirotexuality allow for the respect of the point in time so that the particular question of the work is not lost to time and an overriding reductionist idea like “all pain is the same.” It is not. You don’t give a person with a migraine chemotherapy no more than you give a person with a cancer diagnose two aspirin and call the doctor in the morning. Spirotexuality makes demands of the pinpoint in time while at the same time making connections in other points in time and art, both points respected for what they offer to the human endeavor.

The gifted one, author, is open to something that breaks the bank of time and rides or enters the spiral with something to say. The word. I am an academic librarian and with the proliferation of information is the descriptions of things by the proliferation of words. There are days where the story is getting away fast as the words are changing because the narrative is shifting fast to fast to find the information. As a librarian words are sometimes under metempsychosis, palingenesis and reincarnation. But as a burgeoning writer, I also find story coming to me from out of nowhere, some of it from things known, seen, experienced by self and other and things empathized from nature and humanity. At the same time, I can understand the sacred duty of the artist.

I can’t recall what writer intimated something of this but I want to say it was William Faulkner commenting on people asking him where the stories come from and he was honest to say he didn’t know. I could be wrong about the author on this though. I believe Amy Tan observed when a story was formulating in her mind that stuff came to her, places she visited offered a bit or piece for the story, something seen or experienced as if the universe were co conspiring to create the story. Toni Morrison is always trying to answer a question in her head with her work. I think its’s the universe discovering itself while offering the scrap pieces of itself to create something useful of art. My mind is flowing now, but I just wanted to comment on your work. I think it is a brilliant investigation of the source of…

@Conrad Pegues, I must confess, your reflection on textual interconnections particularly in respect of the newly evolved concept and theoretical framework I termed "spirotextuality" is quite interesting and very informative. Indeed, people in ancient times or bygone civilizations who adopted the "spiral" form in architecture and other related aspects of life really had a point. It is an infinite universe out there and while history is considered to "repeat" itself, that in no way precludes the new. On the contrary, the old and the new exist in progressive dialectical interconnections and this is what makes history progress rather than stagnate. Applied to literary and artistic works and academic research, we already have existing literature and works of art (the "old") which span from ancient times to this moment but creative writers and artists will still go on to generate or produce new ideas or contributions to this existing heritage. This phenomenon is a credit to human creative ingenuity.

Your inquiry is suggestive, I shall read it and provide you with an insight into it.