The Genre of Trolls - Doria

plicitly intertextual terms; therefore some theories of the subject, such as
Lotte Tarkka’s, will not be considered here (but see Asplund 2001: 73).
Julia Kristeva has extended her discussion of intertextuality into the domain
of the preverbal through her conception of the semiotic and the symbolic,
presented in her doctoral dissertation La révolution du langage poétique
(1985). The semiotic is composed of the drives preceding the acquisition of
language and subjectivity as they are inscribed into language, the symbolic.
After the acquisition of language, the semiotic and the symbolic are part of
the same whole, and both constitute subjectivity. Hence all signifying systems
contain elements of both, though art, and especially poetry, is more
open to the energy of the semiotic (Kristeva 1985: 22). The revolution in
poetic language referred to in the title of the thesis is the eruption of the
semiotic into the texts of poets like Mallarmé, and the linguistic and social
revolution caused by it. Kristeva distinguishes between phenotext, which is
symbolic, and genotext, the inscription of the semiotic into the symbolic
(Kristeva 1985: 83–86). Her prime concern is the movement back and forth
from one to the other in a text. The semiotic is associated with a nonverbal,
atemporal and non-spatial receptacle of drives called the chora, anterior
to the formation of subjectivity (Kristeva 1985: 22–30), while the break
into language and identity is named the thetic, involving a separation of
subject and object (Kristeva 1985: 41–43).
This aspect of Kristeva’s work has not received much attention within
the field of folkloristics, but it must be included here to do justice to the
notion of intertextuality. For a good introduction to this facet of her work,
see Smith (1998).
Roland Barthes approached the problem of subjectivity from a more prosaic
angle. In his analysis of Honoré de Balzac’s short story “Sarrasine”,
entitled S/Z (1976), Barthes identified five codes constituting the text and,
by extension, Balzac as a subject. Barthes attempted to demonstrate that
none of the features of the story had its origin in Balzac the Author-God’s
unique, individual mind, imbuing the text with august authorial intention,
but in the “tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture”
as he put it in “The Death of the Author” (Barthes 1977: 146). Balzac
is transformed from a humanist subject into an intertextualized one in the
process, even though Barthes denies the text itself the status of intertextual;
the classic text, the class to which “Sarrasine” belongs, is limited in its plurality
(Barthes 1976: 13), and is connotative rather than truly intertextual, or
Intertextuality in the History of Research 39