Morphing Moonlight: Gender, masks and carnival mayhem- The ...

meaning is an entirely social and political outcome. Interpretation, or framing,
and the social and institutional forces that drive it are semiotically an inherent
part of the work. This resembles Kristeva’s unified or thetic text which she
sees as conservative and relying on existing codes and conventions and
tending to confirm rather than question them. This text tries to deny and
suppress its own inherent polyvocity (polysemy) and plurality and the
ambiguity that resides within all texts but which, in its desire for univocal
meaning, it tries to obliterate. This need to retain unity at all costs involves the
institution of limits, rules and procedures. For Bal, following Derrida’s idea of
the parergon 7 , dissemination is also limited from the inside. She postulates
that ‘the production of meaning takes place not as an ulterior supplement but
as something already inscribed, not in the work as a whole but in its semiotic
status’ ( Bal 2001: 74).
Bal’s discussion of intertextuality, polysemy of signs and semiosis seems
closely allied to the work of Julia Kristeva’s psycho-analytical semiotics. Both
theorists are at pains to place the text and the subject into a socio-historical
and political framework. ‘Freedom’ of interpretation based on intertextuality
and the polyvalency (polysemy) of the sign exists within this framework.
Combining Bal’s theory of reading visual narrative and Kristeva’s theory of
poetic language, I plan to explore, through a detailed exploration of narrative
7 The parergon is the frame and as Derrida writes it represents: ‘…neither work (ergon) nor outside the
work [hors d'oeuvre], neither inside nor outside the work, neither above nor below, it disconcerts any
opposition but does not remain indeterminate and it gives rise to the work’ (Derrida 1987: 9). In this
Derrida is trying to show that what is external to the work is as important as what is internal to it. The
parergon acts as a type of supplement to the work of art ensuring that an ambivalent and constant
interaction between outside and inside, inside and outside occurs through the threshold of the frame
(parergon).
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