re-thinking textuality in literary studies today

Re-thinking Textuality in Literary Studies Today

Peter Barry*Aberystwyth University

Abstract

With theory no longer the dominant force in literary studies, the literary text itself has againbecome a major focus. The article argues the need to re-think notions of what ‘textuality’ consistsof, acknowledging the impossibility of merely returning to ‘close reading’ or merely continuingwith the ‘theorised reading’ of the recent past. Instead it advocates what it calls ‘textual reading’,which is an eclectic approach that takes elements from both. Textual reading requires attention tofive specific aspects of the text, which are named textuality, co-textuality, intertextuality, contex-tuality and multitextuality. These are defined and briefly illustrated, and some of the sub-categoriesof each are discussed in the course of the article.

In recent years, literary theory has become a residual rather than a dominant force inliterary studies, and consequently the literary text is again a major focus of classroomattention.1 So which aspects of the text should now be claiming our renewed attention?How can we re-formulate and re-vitalise our notions of how literary texts function? Inthis article the term ‘textual reading’ will be used to designate the kind of reading nowcalled for, in order to differentiate it from both the ‘close reading’ of the pre-theoryera, and the ‘theorised reading’ which was the product of theory.2 It is clear that therecan be no possibility of merely going back to the ‘close reading’ of old, for we cannotun-know what we learned about literature in the theory years, and equally, theorisedreading cannot meet the needs of a period in which theory is no longer dominant, fortheorised readers almost invariably read the literary text as holding up a mirror, not tonature, but to the particular brand of theory they themselves favoured. Textual reading,then, is distinct from both close reading and theorised reading, but it draws elementsfrom both.

Textual reading does not require a special kind of crypto-technique to unearth mean-ings which are en-coded somewhere deep beneath the surface of the text. On the con-trary, the meanings of works of literature are not usually hidden, nor are they oftenencrypted at the level of (for instance) patterns of assonance or alliteration in poetry. It istrue that poetry is often taught as if literary meanings were usually encrypted in that way,though the major effect of that kind of teaching is to convince most people that they arenot equipped to read literature, and had better give up trying to do so. Sometimes, ofcourse, meanings can be ‘hidden in the open’, and they may well be missed if we havedeveloped over-ingenious habits of mind and interpretation, probably in response to pres-sures in that direction from teachers and lecturers. But meaning, more often than not, isthere in full view on the mantelpiece, like the missing letter in Edgar Allan Poe’s detec-tive story ‘The Purloined Letter’. The meaning of a poem may well become invisible toreaders who are intent on such arcane activities as dismantling the metrical feet of poems(as the chair legs are dismantled by the Paris Police in ‘The Purloined Letter’) to see iffragments of meaning have by any chance been concealed within them. Poe said quite

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clearly in his exemplary tale what was wrong with this approach to the detection ofmeaning – he said that its over-ingenuity pretty well completely incapacitated it.

Textual reading centres jointly upon both the text and the notion of textuality, and itdevotes it attention to, firstly, textuality itself (here discussed last), by which is meant (inthe familiar term) ‘the words on the page’. However, those words do not exist in a vac-uum, but as part of a textual network; so secondly, we also have to consider co-textuality,that is, other texts by the author of the text we are studying, which deal with relatedthemes, or have a formal or informal relationship with that text; thirdly, we must con-sider intertextuality, which means those texts by other authors which are thematically orverbally related to our study text; fourthly, we must consider the field of multitextuality,meaning the different extant versions of the study text (such as drafts, variants, amendededitions and so on); and finally, we must take into account the contextuality of our studytext, meaning the contexts which it evokes, infers, or refers to. These five poles of ‘tex-tuality’ will not all be of major significance in every case (nor are they given equal lengthof treatment here), but together they indicate the main parameters of a notional ‘totaltextuality’, highlighting the key areas we need to consider if we wish to re-centre thetext within literary study without trying to go ‘back to basics’ in any reductive sense. Inwhat follows, the five categories are considered in turn.3

Co-textuality

The distinction between co-textuality and intertexuality should be clarified first. Bothconcern relationships between texts, between words on and off the page. Co-textuality atits most basic can be exemplified by a ‘composite’ literary form such as the sonnetsequence. Each individual sonnet is a complete literary text, with its own argument, tone,technique, and so on, but, at the same time, it is also part of a developing sequence oftexts, across which a situation, or narrative, or argument is gradually unfolded and devel-oped. By contrast, single acts in a play, or single chapters in a novel, do not have thiskind of individual integrity and completeness, and can only be judged effective or other-wise in the light of the larger whole to which they belong.

The kind of co-textualised composite structure seen in a sonnet sequence is also evi-dent in the so-called ‘composite novel’.4 Examples include Joyce’s Dubliners, in whichseparate narratives about separate characters are linked by recurrent themes, by a commonurban and chronological setting, and by an overall structure which focuses successively onrepresentations of youth, maturity and age. Another (and slightly looser) example is Hem-ingway’s story collection In Our Time, where one of the linking factors is the presence ofthe ‘inter-chapters’, with their ‘thematising’ sketches, and another is the fact that a sub-stantial number of the stories concern the Nick Adams character. Such composite novels,and the sonnet sequence, exemplify a formal kind of co-textuality in which the divisionswithin the work are explicitly marked by the author. Thus, the sonnets each have anindividual number or title (which is often just the opening line), and the stories too havetheir own titles. The task of the textual reader is to find a way of integrating the mean-ings of the individual sonnets or stories with the meaning of the composite whole. In thecase of Edmund Spenser’s sonnet sequence Amoretti, for instance, individual sonnetsembody the familiar Petrarchan tropes whereby courtship is imaged as a prolonged mili-tary campaign against a cruel and tyrannical mistress (Sonnet 10). So love is viewed aswarfare (11), with ambush (12), siege (14) and archers (16). But the over-mapping struc-ture of the whole work follows two cycles of the seasons, and of the Christian liturgicalyear, drawing parallels between human and divine love and their stages and phases, and

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enabling progress to be measured by comparing the tone and content of (say) the twoNew Year poems (4 and 62) or the two Easter poems (22 and 68).

Some texts, by contrast, are part of a co-textual grouping of a more informal kind, whereno collective title is used consistently by the author, or else the set of texts making up thegroup was changed by the author in successive publications. An example of such an ‘unsta-ble’ co-textual group is the ‘Marguerite’ set of poems by Matthew Arnold, which is aboutthe poet’s presumed relationship, when he was a young man, with a woman (probably notnamed Marguerite) in Switzerland, for which the only external evidence is a single refer-ence in a letter to his friend and fellow-poet Arthur Hugh Clough. The group of poemswas published in 1877 with the collective title ‘Switzerland’, but in successive publicationsthe poems in the group are altered or re-titled, and poems are added or removed. Anexample of a co-textual grouping without a formal title is the set known as the ‘Conversa-tion Poems’ of Coleridge, comprising eight poems, of which the best-known are probably‘The Eolian Harp’, ‘This Lime-Tree Bower my Prison’ (1797), and ‘Frost at Midnight’(1798).5 The poems in the group are linked by their ‘conversational’ discursiveness, allbeing introspective, meditative, self-analytical, self-doubting poems with a distinctive ‘talk-ing tone’, by an emphasis on notions of love and friendship, by a sense of personal failureand personal shortcomings, and by a tendency to project the focalised self onto idealisedparallel figures or ‘surrogates’.6 A reading of any one of the poems from the group in isola-tion would necessarily be incomplete and would fail to represent the full complexity of its‘textual condition’. Other major canonical co-textual clusters include Keats’s ‘Odes’, thepoems of Tennyson’s In Memoriam, Thomas Hardy’s elegiac group of poems of 1912–13,and Yeats’s four elegiac poems about Robert Gregory (‘An Irish Airman Foresees hisDeath’, ‘In Memory of Major Robert Gregory’, ‘Reprisals’, and ‘Shepherd and Goat-herd’). The major ‘textual reading’ technique with this kind of informal co-textual clusteris often the identification of a ‘reservoir’ of running motifs which provide the material forall of them, along with a comparative analysis of the different permutations and deploy-ment of elements from the ‘reservoir’ which occur in each of the component pieces.

A prose example of an informal co-textual grouping is the set of short stories aboutmature or elderly writers written by Henry James in the 1880s and 90s and collected inFrank Kermode’s Penguin volume in The Figure in the Carpet and Other Stories. This grouptoo is constituted as such partly by later editorial identification, for the stories have nocollective title, and were never published together in James’s lifetime between a single setof covers. But a range of recurrent motifs and situations can be identified, most notablythe way the older writer’s decline provokes the affectionate curiosity of a younger disci-ple or admirer (often himself a writer).7 Kermode writes in his preface that the pervasivequality of the stories in this co-textual grouping is ‘an element of game or even joke inthe working out of the given themes or situations’ (p. 7).

Intertextuality

Like co-textuality, intertextuality links texts together, but whereas the former is a rela-tionship of contiguity, in which texts stand alongside, and cast light upon, each other, thelatter is a relationship of interfusion, so that elements of the one text enter the other. Thus,intertextuality is succinctly defined by narratologist Gerard Genette as ‘The actual pres-ence of one text within another’, where the term ‘actual presence’ has almost a liturgicalor religious feel, as if a form of transubstantiation were taking place.8 A slightly stricterdefinition would hold that in intertextuality we have ‘the words of one text withinanother’. Intertextuality, therefore, occurs when one text quotes from, or alludes to, or

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evokes, another. At the opposite pole from those two ‘finite’ notions of intertextuality isJulia Kristeva’s definition of intertextuality as ‘the sum of knowledge, the potentially infinitenetwork of signifying practices that allows [any text] to have meaning’ (my italics).9 Adefinition so broad places the phenomenon almost beyond human ken – no conceivablereading technique could cope with an intertextuality thus defined.

In the more down-to-earth sense used here, there are various kinds of intertextuality:sometimes it takes the form of a deliberate and strategic ‘twinning’ by an author of onetext with another, in the form of ‘textual dyads’, whereby a later text is in dialogue withan earlier one in a sustained and systematic way, with the aim of providing a revisionarycritique, a supplement, an expansion, or an exposition of the ‘canonised’ text. Well-known examples of such dyads are Dryden’s All For Love with Shakespeare’s Antony andCleopatra, Jean Rhys’s The Wide Sargasso Sea with Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, EdwardBond’s Lear with Shakespeare’s King Lear, and David Dabydeen’s 1991 novel The Intendedwith Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. The form of ‘textual reading’ required is itself‘dyadic’, with each text being read through its dyadic intertext. By contrast, in the caseof the intertextual relationship between T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and Shakespeare’sThe Tempest, what we see is primarily the words of the earlier text in the later one, ratherthan elements of plot or character; for instance the line ‘Those are pearls that were hiseyes’ from The Tempest is twice quoted in The Waste Land (at 48, and 125): at 191-2, in‘Musing upon the king my brother’s wreck ⁄And on the king my father’s death beforehim’, two lines from the play are conflated, while at 257, ‘This music crept by me uponthe waters’, which is the next line from the play, is also quoted. The drowning motif cul-minates in the brief Part Four, ‘Death by Water’, with the figure of ‘Phlebas the Phoeni-cian, a fortnight dead’. But there is no real parallel between the two texts beyond thewords and images they have in common, since nobody drowns in The Tempest. The playrefers to drowning, but it is central to both its plotting and its thematisation that nodrowning actually occurs. By contrast, in the poem, Phlebas the Phoenecian really is deadand gone, and that too is central to the text in which the Shakespearean words andimages about drowning are transplanted. The poem, in other words, quotes the words ofthe play, not its situation or its plot.10

In all these examples, intertextuality is overtly indicated and exploited by the author ofthe later text, but some forms of intertextuality are covert, such as the presence of materialfrom Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals in some of the poems of William Wordsworth. Forinstance, on 27th May 1800 Dorothy opened the door of their cottage to a stranger ofimposing appearance, and she described the ensuing encounter in her journal:

On Tuesday, May 27th, a very tall woman, tall much beyond the measure of tall women, calledat the door. She had on a very long brown cloak, & a very white cap without Bonnet – herface was excessively brown, but it had plainly once been fair.11

There is no indication that this person was seen at all by William, but on 13th March1802 she read her account of the meeting to him, and the poem, ‘Beggars’, was finishedthe following day. It begins:

She had a tall man’s height or more;Her face from summer’s noontide heatNo bonnet shaded, but she woreA mantle, to her very feetDescending with a graceful flow,And on her head a cap as white as new-fallen snow.Her skin was of Egyptian brown:



Dorothy is written out of William’s account of the incident, and the encounter becomesa solitary one, transferred from the cottage door to the open countryside. William adds a‘graceful flow’ to what Dorothy describes as ‘a very long brown cloak’, feminising it intoa ‘mantle’, and making the cap, not just white, but ‘white as new-fallen snow’. Generally,he changes the woman into a rather more stereotypical ‘exotic’, an alien figure with skin‘of Egyptian brown’, whereas Dorothy says that ‘her face was excessively brown, but ithad plainly once been fair’, and tells us later in the passage that she was actually Scottish.Studying the covert intertextual pairing reveals a good deal about Wordsworth’s limita-tions, and perhaps makes us read all his encounters with solitary figures in the countrysidewith a degree of caution, so intertextuality in this instance throws light upon a wholeco-textual cluster of texts.

Multitextuality

We tend to think of each named literary work as a unique and stable entity, but manyexist in several different forms and versions, so that plurality or multiplicity is arguablythe textual norm. The problems which arise from the phenomenon of multitextuality canbe divided into two major types: in the first, the differences are mainly of wording, andthey are distributed piecemeal throughout the whole text, while in the second, the altera-tions concern substantive changes, such as differences in plot or structure, or the addingor taking away of whole sections of the text (of course, these two kinds of multitextualitycan also occur together). The verbal kind is seen in the case of the revisions to his novelsand stories made by Henry James for the New York Edition of his works in 1909, wherethe changes concern details of style and wording only. For instance, in the original 1879text of ‘Daisy Miller’, Daisy is lovely ‘in the flattering moonlight’ during the fatal visit tothe Coliseum, but in 1909 she is lovely ‘in the sinister silver radiance’, which hints at thetragic outcome of the visit.12 Cumulatively, the many verbal changes of this type (whichtake up seven pages of the appendix to Gooder’s excellent edition) palpably shift theinflection and articulation of the whole work, but in a manner difficult to define pre-cisely. It is easy (as here) to identify the effect of a single change, but the textual readermust also try to describe the collective effects of the alterations, by identifying patterns ofchange which reveal the shift in overall effect that James was seeking to make.

By contrast, changes of the substantive kind are seen in the alterations made by Tenny-son to the ending of his poem ‘The Lady of Shalott’, between the 1832 and 1842 versionsof the text. In the former, the dead lady floating downstream in her boat is seen only bythe ‘well-fed wits of Camelot’, who try to decipher the puzzling parchment at her breast,whereas in the latter, the parchment is omitted, and the boat is seen by ‘All the knights ofCamelot’, including Sir Lancelot who, in the final lines, ‘mused a little space; ⁄He said,‘‘She has a lovely face; ⁄God in his mercy lend her grace, ⁄The Lady of Shalott’’ ’.13 Thechange makes for a more decisive sense of recursive closure, for the views of the sud-denly-introduced ‘well-fed wits’ can hardly be of much interest to the reader, and the newending brings the protagonists together for the first time, generating a certain pathos.

In general, however, two opposed accounts of the broad phenomenon of multitextual-ity can be identified: the first takes an ‘evolutionary’ view of text production, seeing pub-lication as the ‘birth’ of the text, before which is an ‘avant-texte’ period corresponding toembryonic growth, and after which may come a period in which the text passes throughdifferent published versions and reaches its final and mature form. This model is hierar-chical, with each stage superseded, and relegated to ‘draft’ or interim status, by the onewhich follows, so that the composition and text production process as a whole is



teleological, leading to a definitive version which is eventually ‘canonised’. Textual‘emergence’, on this model, is studied by ‘genetic criticism’, the aim of which is toanalyse ‘texts in process’.14

The second view of multitextuality, by contrast, sees instability and provisionality as thefundamental condition of the literary text, so that we will usually have, not a hierarchy, buta corpus of notionally-equal ‘versions’, and rather than privileging textual end-products, asthe first model does, this one tends to privilege the ‘versions’ at the earlier end of the pro-cess. Indeed, it even favours the pre-publication ‘avant-texte’ period before the purity of tex-tual parthenogenesis becomes contaminated by the assistance and interference of editorialmidwives, and by that ‘friction with the market’ (Henry James’s phrase) which makesauthors tend to accommodate their genius to public tastes and morals. This second view,which sees every text as being in a state of permanent provisionality, is partly the product ofthe influence of poststructuralism, with its liking for the endless flicker of textual differance,whereby the work itself is seen as innately ‘plural’, polyvalent, and unstable. So the text isthe sum of all its versions, not so much actual words on actual pages, more a kind of notionalPlatonic fusion or suspended constellation, within which all versions exist co-equally.

On this view, the ‘true’ text may be a ‘synoptic’ blend of many fragments, manuscripts,author-corrected page-proofs, and successive editions which has no identifiable existenceas a material entity in the world of writers, readers, and publishers, and has never been themeans of bringing fame, status, and wealth, to any author (perhaps other than the edito-rial-theorist who proposed it). Such is the case with James Joyce’s Ulysses, for Hans WalterGabler’s controversial ‘corrected’ edition of 1984 seems to embody the principles of thesecond view, for this ‘synoptic’ text of the work is not based upon any single, continuous‘copy text’, in the classical manner of editorial practice, but upon a synoptic reconstructionfrom a variety of sources. The Ulysses which was first published in 1922 was typeset andprinted in France and contained many errors, the most troublesome ones being thosewhich at first don’t seem to be errors at all. For instance, in the ‘Proteus’ episode near thebeginning, Stephen mentions the telegram he received in Paris which summoned himback to Dublin; he says he has kept it to show as a curiosity: it reads ‘Mother dying comehome father’. But like the curious incident of the dog in the night, the only curious thingabout this ‘curiosity’ is that there is nothing curious about it. In Joyce’s manuscript, it read‘Nother dying come home father’, but the French typesetters assumed that ‘Nother’ musthave been an authorial error and they ‘corrected’ it to ‘Mother’. Gabler ‘de-corrects’ the1922 text, even though the pre-publication typescript made from the manuscript also reads‘Mother’. In the 1980s, the major publishers of Ulysses went over to Gabler’s text, but thefurore about his editorial procedures was so immense, that from the 1990s onwards theyalso re-issued the old allegedly corrupt texts.15 The Ulysses which Gabler corrected is thecentral text of modernism – it is the text which did make Joyce famous, and the one onwhich a vast body of critical work already existed. Arguably, Gabler’s ‘corrected’ textremoves the novel from the ownership of its readers, its critics, and even from Joyce him-self. But the matter is so complex that almost everything there is to be learned about thepractice and principles of textual editing can be learned from the Ulysses case.16

Contextuality

Poetry’s main form of renewal has long been to take a great leap backwards every fewgenerations – the Romantics, for instance, by re-discovering the balladeers and the Eliza-bethans, the Modernists by aligning themselves with the Metaphysicals. The field of liter-ary studies, by contrast, renews itself by taking great leaps side-ways – into philosophy, of



linguistics, or, most recently, history. As a result, contextuality has become a powerfulforce, usually understood as meaning social and historical context. But context is neverready-made, never just waiting to be imported into our field of vision. Rather, everycontext has to be constructed by the critic, every context is a construct. Textual readingwithin this sub-category assumes that context is literary and cultural as well as historicaland social, and it emphasises, not context broadly conceived, but context as ‘triggered’ byspecific words and phrases within the text. This kind can be called ‘deep context’, beingthe opposite of the broad social-historical kind, where the same context will fit manydifferent works of literature. Deep context fits one text alone, because it is, in the end,scarcely distinguishable from content.

As an example, consider Lavinia Greenlaw’s poem ‘Mephisto’ (quoted in full below).The relevant context is a literary one, and it is ‘triggered’ by the title, ‘Mephisto’ beinganother version of the name Mephistopheles, the Satanic figure of Marlowe’s Dr Faustus,and Goethe’s Faust, the latter written in the German city of Leipzig. It contains a famousscene of student drunkenness set at an inn called ‘Auerbach’s Keller’, now a ‘must’ for tour-ists visiting the city. The speaker, as I read the poem, visited it while on a reading tour, andthe following morning she is ‘up in the air again’ – that is, both literally, for she is flying offto her next stop on the tour, and, metaphorically, for she is in a state of confusion or uncer-tainty. The flying recalls how Faust in the play flies over the icy wastes with Mephistophe-les, one of the perks of his ‘Faustian pact’ with the devil, before the passing of time bringshim to his inevitable end. As she looks down from the aircraft at the ice-bound river, nowbeginning to thaw after 3 months of winter, the speaker seems to be asking herself what res-idue is left by the experience of an unsatisfactory personal relationship or experience, pre-sumably with a ‘Mephisto’ character who, like Mephistopheles, fails, in the end to deliver:

Mephisto17

After a night in the cellarGoethe returned to with FaustI am up in the air again,cumulo-cirrus, thin ice, a voicethat is crushing and reasonable:Your little life...

We fly over a river,part frozen, part cracking upat the end of a beautiful winter:a three-month blinding heaventhat will leave its smallprintand otherwise nothing on earth.

This reading of the poem can be described as a ‘documented close reading’, rather thanan ‘unseen close reading’, for, as context, it places the text in contact with its relevantdocumentary and cultural materials, and reads across them all. The context my readingconstructs for the poem is ‘deep context’, in the sense that the poem itself generates ortriggers it, and it cannot be used to contextualise any other literary work. Textual readingis, above all, and in all five of its aspects, always text-specific in this way.

Textuality

The essence of textual reading in the area of textuality itself is to alternate between think-ing about aspects of the whole work (‘distant reading’) and thinking about details of it



(‘close reading’). When readings disengage the part from the whole they become strainedand myopic, as when students and critics home in on phrases scissored out from a novel,ignoring the containing context of setting, structure, plot and technique. ‘Distant’ readingrequires us to stand far enough away from the text to take in aspects of the whole shapeof it, while ‘close reading’ is, and always has been, the nuanced scrutiny of textual detail.Textual reading, in addition, requires a constant situating of the close-up view within thedistant perspective. Consider as an example Henry James’s short story ‘The Turn of theScrew’: a ‘distant’ reading might focus on the overall structure and plot, looking for pat-terns (as we so often do in effective reading). For instance, we note that there are eight‘appearances’ in all of the haunting figures of Quint and Jessel, and that they fall into twogroups of four; the first group is dominated by Quint (who makes three out of the firstfour appearances), and the second by Jessel (who likewise makes three out of the lastfour). Within each group of four appearances, three are in the daytime and one is atnight. The two night-time appearances occur together in the middle of the wholesequence of eight, as the last of the Quint group and the first of the Jessel group, andboth of these take place in the same location (that is, on the staircase at Bly). Also, eachfigure has one location at which they appear twice (Quint at the window and Jessel bythe Lake), and each also has one unique location at which no other appearance takesplace (Quint on the tower and Jessel in the children’s room). The Quint figure seems to‘target’ the boy (Miles), and Jessel the girl (Flora). Most of the apparitions take place attwilight (such as Quint’s first) or just before dawn (such as Quint’s appearance on thestair). The seventh and eighth appearances cross a distinct boundary, with the governessforcibly holding another person in an attempt to get her (Mrs Grose) and then him(Miles) to admit that they too see the intruder. This ‘distant’ reading, then, is centred onnotions of structural patterning, is clearly indebted to influential structuralist approachesto narrative from the 1970s, and offers an invitation to the reader to consider the severalpossible ways of interpreting the patterns which have been identified.

The complementary stage of ‘close’ reading closes in on linguistic nuance and finesse,and we see that an air of indefiniteness and ambiguity is woven into the very texture ofthe language. Thus, the Governess is often ‘aware of’ things before she sees them, orinstead of doing so; both people and phenomena are often referred to using pronounsalone, rather than proper names, so that a collaborating ‘interpretive assent’, rather thanthe mere witnessing of what happens, is often required of the reader – we are not toldwhat happens, so much as invited to draw an inference about what happens. Likewise,direct speech is often left floating and ‘untagged’ (that is, no phrase equivalent to ‘saidMiles’ is attached to the utterance), so at the most tense and crucial moments (such asduring the final scene) it is not always entirely clear which remarks are made by whichspeaker. Also, euphemism is frequent (‘They were both infamous’, Mrs Grose says ofQuint and Jessel), assent or agreement is read into silence, and sentences begun by onespeaker in an exchange are sometimes completed by the other. There is also a frequentmotif of reversal, as when, encountering Quint looking in through the window, theGoverness rushes out of the room and onto the terrace and then herself looks in at thewindow and has ‘the full image of the repetition of what had already occurred’ (143) asMrs Grose in turn enters the dining room and is frightened by the white-faced figure ofthe governess peering in.18 When the two subsequently discuss Jessel’s first appearance bythe lake, the governess emphasises how Jessel looked at Flora ‘with such awful eyes!’ andadds ‘She [that is, presumably, Mrs Grose] stared at mine as if they might really haveresembled them’ (158). Such moments, of course, ambiguate the issue of who is hauntingwhom. At the level of textuality, the alternation between (and interaction between)



‘distant’ and ‘close’ elements of reading, in their many different forms, is the essentialdynamic of textual reading.

It should be added, in conclusion, that the five kinds of textuality on which the prac-tice of ‘textual reading’ is centred might conceivably have been augmented to six by theinclusion of ‘hypertextuality’, which often figures in current debates. But I have notincluded it here as a distinct variant of textuality, mainly because it can be taken as a syn-onym for ‘intertextuality’, understood in Kristevan terms as an open-ended web of inter-connections between all literary texts. That is the, so to speak, ‘metaphorical’ sense of‘hypertextuality’: in its ‘literal’ sense, it is the electronic or ‘digital’ form of intertextuality,whereby a piece of on-screen text, when ‘swiped’ or clicked on, becomes the ‘gateway’to further textual layers. Genette uses the term in its ‘metaphorical’ sense, but he under-stands it in a more restricted way – for him ‘hypertextuality’ designates highly specificrelationships between a given text and earlier texts, as set out in his book Palimpsests.Similarly, and typically, his notion of intertextuality (as described in his key work Narra-tive Discourse, and later summarised very helpfully by Allen) is more specific than that ofother theorists. Indeed, Genette’s precision of concept, definition, explication, and exem-plification is the textual ideal which I have tried to follow in the present piece.19

Short Biography

Peter Barry studied at King’s College London and London University’s Institute of UnitedStates Studies, and has taught English at primary schools, secondary schools, further educa-tion colleges, higher education institutions, polytechnics, and universities. His two longeststints in-post have been fifteen years each at LSU College Southampton and at AberystwythUniversity, where he is now Professor of English. For 20 years he was co-editor andpoetry-editor of English (the journal of the English Association), and he is an active memberof the Aberystwyth Poetry Workshop. Over the past few years he has published poems inPoetry Wales, New Welsh Review, and Stand. His major research interests are in contempo-rary poetry, the short story, and literary theory. His best-known book is Beginning Theory(3rd edition, 2009) which is also published in a South Asian edition and has been translatedinto Korean, Ukrainian, Hebrew, and Chinese. It is the founding text of Manchester Uni-versity Press’s highly successful ‘Beginnings’ series of books. His most recent book, Literaturein Contexts (MUP, 2007), explores the issue of context in literary studies through a numberof intensive literary ‘case studies’. He is currently working on two new books, ContinuingTheory and Enjoying Poetry. During the past 2 years he has given plenary lectures inGermany, Romania, the United States, and the UK.

Notes

* Correspondence: English Department, Aberystwyth University, Hugh Owen Building, Penglais, AberystwythSY23 3DY, Wales, UK. Email: [email protected]

1 For discussion of the recent shift in the balance of power between theory and text, see Cunningham, Eagleton,Kastan and Payne.2 Of course, all forms of reading are ‘theoretical’, even when the theory is not explicitly formulated, and until the‘theory era’ (roughly, the period from the early 1970s to the late 1990s) it was unusual to spell out the theoreticalbasis of reading practices. These matters are explored in the first and last chapters of Barry, 2009 (‘Theory before‘‘theory’’ ’ and ‘Theory after ‘‘theory’’ ’).3 Clearly, designating various kinds of reading ‘co-textual’, ‘contextual’, ‘intertextual’, and so on, has the side-effectof identifying something (else) as ‘the text’. This would trouble a poststructuralist, but is in accord with the greatertextual-specificity of the structuralist approaches which are currently re-emerging in textual studies.



4 See Dunn and Morris.5 The group was first identified as such in 1928 by American literary scholar George McLean Harper in the open-ing essay, ‘Coleridge’s Conversation Poems’, of his book Spirit of Delight.6 See Barry, 2007, chapter three, ‘Mutual Contextuality: Coleridge’s Conversation Poems’.7 Some of the recurrent motifs are identified in Barry, 1991, where this co-textual group of stories is examined interms of permutations of six character roles and sixteen plot elements.8 Genette, 1997, 1–2, and quoted in Allen 101.9 Prince 46.10 Here, I taking literally my own distinction between the ‘actual presence’ of one text in another text, and ‘thewords’ of one text in another text. A broader claim for an intertextual relationship between The Waste Land andThe Tempest could easily be made (by asserting, for instance, that both are quest narratives or salvation stories), butat this level of thematic generalisation, the ‘intertextual domain’ of Eliot’s poem becomes vast, Kristevan, and (ulti-mately) beyond investigation.11 Woof 9–10.12 Gooder 286–93.13 Psomiades 44.14 The term ‘genetic criticism’ is used in Matthews 38, and see also Fordham. For an account of its provenance, as‘critique genetique, in France in the 1970s, see Deppman, Chapter 1.15 An example of a current edition of Ulysses which re-instates the ‘uncorrected’ text is Johnson, 2008, the intro-duction of which includes an admirably clear and up-to-date account of the dramatic textual history of this novel.16 I am grateful for the help of my Joycean colleague Dr Luke Thurston in connection with this discussion ofUlysses.17 This is the complete poem, from Greenlaw’s Minsk 32.18 Page numbers are to Lustig’s edition of ‘The Turn of the Screw’.19 Hypertextuality probably merits an article of its own, but in the meantime, see Landow for an authoritativeaccount of the relationship between its ‘metaphorical’ and ‘literal’ senses.

Works Cited

Allen, Graham. Intertextuality. London and New York: Routledge, 2000.Barry, Peter. Literature in Contexts. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007.——. Beginning Theory, 3rd ed. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009.——. ‘Embarrassments and Predicaments: Patterns of Interaction in James’s Writer Tales’. Orbis Litterarum 46 ⁄ 1,

spring (1991): 87–104.Cunningham, Valentine. Reading After Theory. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001.Deppman, Jed, Daniel Ferrer, and Michael Groden, eds. Genetic Criticism. Texts and Avant-Textes. Philadelphia:

University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004.Dunn, Maggie and Ann Morris. The Composite Novel: The Short Story Cycle in Transition. New York: Twayne,

1995.Eagleton, Terry. After Theory. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003.Fordham, Finn. I do I undo I redo: The Textual Genesis of Modernist Selves. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.Gabler, Hans Walter, Ed. Ulysses: A Critical and Synoptic Edition. New York and London: Garland, 1984.Genette, Gerard. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983.——. Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997.Gooder, Jean, Ed. Henry James: Daisy Miller and Other Stories. Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 1985.Greenlaw, Lavinia. Minsk. London: Faber and Faber, 2004.Johnson, Jeri, Ed. Ulysses: The 1922 Text. Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2008.Kastan, David Scott. Shakespeare After Theory. London and New York: Routledge, 1999.Kermode, Frank. The Figure in the Carpet and Other Stories. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986.Landow, George P. Hypertext 3.0: New Media and Critical Theory in an Era of Globalization. Baltimore: The Johns

Hopkins University Press, 2006.Matthews, Sean. ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums: a Text in Process’ in Word Play: The Magazine of the English Subject

Centre. Issue 3, April (2010): 36–8.McLean Harper, George. ‘Coleridge’s Conversation Poems.’ Spirit of Delight. Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries

Press, 1969, 3–27.Payne, Michael and John Shad, eds. Life After Theory. London: Continuum, 2003.Prince, Gerald. Dictionary of Narratology, Revised Edition. Lincoln & London: University of Nebraska Press, 1987.Psomiades, Kathy Alexis. ‘ ‘‘The Lady of Shalott’’ and the Critical Fortunes of Victorian Poetry.’ The Cambridge

Companion to Victorian Poetry, Ed. Joseph Bristow. Cambridge: University Press, 2000, 25–45.Woof, Pamela, Ed. Dorothy Wordsworth: The Grasmere and Alfoxden Journals, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.



re-thinking textuality in literary studies today

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