Narrative Allusiveness: The Interplay of Stories in Two Renaissance Writers, Spenser and Cervantes

Abstract

N A R R A T I V E A L L U S I V E N E S S : T H E I N T E R P L A Y O F S T O R I E S I N T W O R E N A I S S A N C E W R I T E R S , S P E N S E R A N D C E R V A N T E S “ . . . (il y en a tant et tant eu). . . . ” Roland Barthes, S /Z RO BERT R. W ILSO N The University of Alberta I Liiterary texts bear upon each other in many complex ways. How they do this, in what ways precisely, to what extent, under what conditions, has been one of the more attractive problems of literary theory in recent years. It has become possible, with the help of a freshly sharpened critical vocabulary, to distinguish between, for example, influence, quotation, citation, allusion, and intertextuality. The latter concept is the one that seems to cap the others: all concepts of literary “bearing upon” may be seen as instances of inter­ textuality if, as Jonathan Culler remarks, “intertextuality is the general dis­ cursive space that makes a text intelligible.” 1 This discursive space consti­ tutes the realm of echoes, of resonances: the locus of the reader’s active mind. Whatever else it may be, intertextuality is, in Michael Riffaterre’s words, a “modality of perception, the deciphering of the text by the reader in such a way that he identifies the structures to which the text owes its quality of work of art.” 2 And intertextual reading, Riffaterre continues, is either the “perception of similar comparabilities from text to text” or the assumption that “ such comparing must be done even if there is no intertext at hand.” 3 A reader, one must admit, confronts a number of hard cognitive tasks. The concept of intertextuality, first formulated by Kristeva in 1969,4 reflects the textual revolution in literary studies. This postulates (as Saussurian linguistics does in the logically prior question of language) a system for literature, a vast conceptual field in which all literature is necessarily, if invisibly, related, and out of which (or back into which) specific textual manifestations tremble. This idea of literature’s systematicness marks a revolution in literary theory (though one that may be unaccepted, short­ lived, or prove to be, like non-Euclidean geometries, of interest only to an E n g l is h S t u d ie s in C a n a d a , x ii, 2, June 1986 élite) and, in being revolutionary, it has made possible, even commonplace, perceptions that previously had been unthinkable. One such perception is that of intertextuality, or of an intertext (a “corpus” with flexible boun­ daries that the reader brings to mind when he reads) ,5 in terms of which invisible, though necessary, connections may be discerned. All the versions of intertextuality in contemporary criticism since Kristeva claim to provide ways of seeing diverse modes of literary “bearing upon” in which another text, a part of a text, a genre of texts or a conceptual space filled by many texts, can be made visible in the particular text being discussed. In this sense intertextuality is an analytic, isolating tool of considerable power. Further­ more, as such an analytic tool, intertextuality projects the possibility of dis­ covering empirical relationships between actual texts and it predicts, as Riffaterre’s second formulation of reading claims, the discovery of intertexts even when these are obscured, hidden, inaccessible, or otherwise “ not at hand.” (Laurent Jenny considers the modes of representation according to which non-verbal texts, such as paintings or mosaics, can serve to inform written texts.6 The concept of intertextuality subsumes the transpositionality of semiotic systems.) The reader’s task in discovering an absent intertext, always perplexing, may never be more difficult than in those cases when the orectic, sought-for text is strictly inaccessible because non-existent. Thus the purpose of this discussion is to analyze some of the ways in which untold stories (that is, the never-narrated, or literarily non-existent) bear...