ABSTRACT
At the beginning of al-Kharrat’s first novel, MikhaUil says in one of his imaginary dialogues with Rama: ‘What can one say about death, truth, or love? Everything has been said’ (Kharrat 1979: 8/5).1 Apart from explaining soon afterwards his character’s belief that mere talking about something is a betrayal, al-Kharrat makes us think about one of the main issues raised by Western modernist writers and early postmodernist theorists alike: the consciousness that everything has already been said, everything has already been written (cf. Barth 1967: 69 ff.). The implications of this assumption are many: some even talk about the death of the author2 and the death of the novel. Here, we are mainly concerned with the idea that a novelist is bound to rework and interact (more or less consciously) with the texts preceding his or hers: this process can be summarized in the term intertextuality. According to Bertrand Westphal, the concept of intertextuality seems to have been already present in an embryonic form as early as the 1930s in Bakhtin’s work, but it is thanks to the French critic Julia Kristeva that the concept has become more widely known (Westphal 2001: 325). The term is open to wide interpretation and different Western scholars attach different meanings to it. For example, for Linda Hutcheon intertextuality in postmodernist terms is parody, pastiche, ironic quotation (Hutcheon 1989: 93-117); for Umberto Eco it is the assumption that every text (hence, every novel) is interconnected with other texts and this phenomenon reveals the cultural affiliation of the text;3 Genette prefers transtextuality to refer to all forms of textual relations (while intertextuality is for him limited to an overt presence of one text in another in the form of quotation, plagiarism, allusion; Genette 1982: 1-7); Italo Calvino underlines how a writer needs other texts to write about his own experiences.4 Calvino is a significant example since he gives a clear novelistic expression to this critical assumption in his novel If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller (1979). In this novel the fictitious character of a writer, Silas Flannery, tries to overcome his writer’s block by writing down the beginning of Crime and Punishment.
