Chapter One—
Cinema and the Theory of Intertextuality

Cinema History as a Textual Element: Iconography and Iconology

In 1989, a special issue of the French journal Hors Cadre was published. Entitled Film Theory and the Crisis in Theory, the issue pointed to an epistemological crisis that had been the object of recent discussion among film critics. This general sense of crisis was expressed by Jacques Aumont:

The first thing we must do is state the fact: that today there is nothing like a dominant theory, indeed nothing that really appears to be theory at all. Nothing comparable to what semiology was between 1965 and 1970, to the Marx-Freud rapprochement of 1970, to the psychoanalysis of 1975, or even to the kind of analysis of film that provided a refuge to so many of us at the end of the seventies. If there is a scholarly discourse that is dominant today, then we would all have to say that it is the discourse of History: the problematic discourse par excellence, that has great difficulty even defining itself.^[1]

Of course Aumont's assertion is difficult to accept as it stands. Theory exists and continues to develop. In recent years the fields of narratology and pragmatics have expanded and feminist film theory and the study of new technologies have produced some interesting work. But none of this, it goes without saying, in any way undermines the general pathos of Aumont's position. "Large-scale" theorization is over, and the resulting vacuum has been filled with historical studies.

In the humanities this kind of scenario generally points to a crisis in method. When a large conceptual paradigm ends, there is a return to empirical investigation, albeit enriched by the experience of the theorizing that came before.

But the relation of theory to history cannot be reduced to the idea of them simply alternating within the social sciences, and still less to the opposition of theoretical to empirical knowledge. To a considerable degree the crisis of theory is the result of its own inability to integrate historical material within itself, thanks to a kind of "innate" resistance that history manifests toward all forms of systematic theorization. This is linked above all to the tendency of theory to create its own "specific" or immanent field in which history, with its huge volume of heterogeneous matter, cannot be contained. Theory traditionally aspires to be synchronic.

Within this scenario, history, the diachronic level of analysis, remains, as Aumont puts it, a "problematic discourse," one that "has difficulty even in defining itself." It is true that the most recent histories of film, particularly in the area of early cinema, have been moving toward a greater sense of scholarly precision and a harmonizing of theoretical approaches with the concrete results of research (this is particularly evident in the attempts to construct a history of systems of representation). An effective conceptualization of history, however, remains unreachable. Michèle Lagny, whose Histoire et cinéma is a fairly successful attempt at unifying the historical and theoretical approaches to cinema, is relevant here:

In fact there is a fundamental incompatibility of spirit between those approaches that are primarily seeking to account for the ways that writing functions as well as for the process by which meaning is produced, and the historical mode of questioning, which is less concerned with die text itself than with that whose trace the text happens to be. Semiotics, nonchronological and comparativist in its essence, does not have the same needs as history, which typically tries to organize particular events along a linear axis of time.^[2]

Lagny's observation is very much to die point here. It appears that theory—which studies the production of meaning—and history have no obvious points of contact, although the meaning of a work is linked both to the historical context of its creation and to the position of a given text within the evolution of art. The semantic fullness of any text is surely the result of its ability to establish a connection with the texts that came before it, and occasionally with those that came later.

Writing came about to preserve memory. The same can be said about other durable forms of textualization. For this reason writing, understood in the broadest sense of the word, heightens the relevance of the problem of strengthening tradition. In examining this question, lurii Lotman reaches a conclusion that is crucial for what it tells us about the history of culture: "For writing to become essential, historical conditions must be unstable, circumstances must be dynamic and unforeseeable, and a need must be felt for various kinds of semiotic translation, a need arising from frequent and prolonged contact with another ethnic milieu."^[3]

In other words, the need to consolidate memory is itself the result of an unstable and dynamic cultural moment, one that shows an increasing tendency toward innovation. Modern culture, even as it increases the possible modes of textualization, is involved simultaneously in a constant search for the new. Novelty and tradition enter into a dynamic fusion that is to a large extent responsible for the production of new meanings. In essence the production of meaning is resolved in this "struggle" of memory and the way it is overcome. History is drawn into a text's structure as a semantically productive element.

For a long time the problem of the presence of cultural history within a text was essentially reduced to the question of influence, that of a predecessor over his successor. Influence was considered the principal marker of the presence of tradition within a text. But the very notion of "influence" turned out to be thoroughly vague and posed more problems for scholars than it solved.

To begin with, the notion of influence assumed that the past continued to impinge on the present, while any "choice of influence" was made in the present. The influence of the older text on the present thus appeared as the result of a contemporary author's activity. Could such a means of translating tradition be called influence? Even if one were to adopt the psychoanalytic interpretation of influence as the internalization of a certain experience, it would be hard not to conclude that the originary trauma is to a large extent the retroactive construct of subsequent experience. The entire problematics of influence could not escape what Laplanche and Pontalis have called the "phantasm of origins."^[4]

The other dominant way of accounting for influence involved a depersonalization of the creative process. According to this perspective, the artist had only a limited say in choosing his material. The latter rather presented itself to him as a kind of lexicon of themes, motifs, construct, in other words a given "artistic language" that allowed for the construction of a new text. Such a position served to demystify the concept of influence. After all, one could hardly speak of the influence of language, if the latter was understood as the medium in which a text was formed and continued to exist. This depersonalization of tradition was carried out in the realm of the visual arts by the Vienna school of art history, culminating in the iconographic studies of Erwin Panofsky.

The field of cinema studies can also boast of a great number of quasiiconographic studies, above all in the area of specific genre films such as the Western, film noir, and so on. There have even been attempts at compiling an exhaustive "symbolarium" of world cinema.

Raymond Durgnat, for example, has produced a "little dictionary of the poetic motifs" that wander, authorless, from film to film. The following motifs find their way into Durgnat's dictionary: blindness, carnivals, prisons,

fairs, flowers, mechanized music, mirrors, paintings and posters, railway stations, shop windows, statues, record players, and the underworld. The main defect of Durgnat's thesaurus of symbols and similar lexicons lies in their attempt to affix some kind of univocal and unchanging meaning to a given motif. For example: "The fair is not freedom but an anarchy that generates chaos."^[5]

Somewhat less arbitrary are dictionaries of symbols with specific delimitations, where the iconographic forms are defined by a given cinematic opus or a highly codified genre. There have been several attempts, none very successful, to analyze the iconography of D. W. Griffith's melodramas.^[6] An iconographic approach to early cinema was advanced by Erwin Panofsky, who believed that a persistently iconographic stage was a necessary moment in the way cinema evolved its semantic strategies. Traditional iconography helps us to understand early cinema. It functions a little like the subtitles in silent movies, which, according to Panofsky, played a role analogous to that of medieval tituli:

Another, less obtrusive method of explanation was the introduction of a fixed iconography which from the outset informed the spectator about the basic facts and characters, much as the two ladies behind the emperor, when carrying a sword and a cross respectively, were uniquely determined as Fortitude and Faith. There arose, identifiable by standardized appearance, behavior and attributes, the well-remembered types of the Vamp and the Straight Girl (perhaps the most convincing modern equivalents of the medieval personifications of the Vices and Virtues), the Family Man, and the Villain, the latter marked by a black mustache and walking stick. Nocturnal scenes were printed on blue or green film. A checkered tablecloth meant, once and for all, a "poor but honest" milieu; a happy marriage, soon to be endangered by the shadows from the past, was symbolized by the young wife pouring coffee for her husband; the first kiss was invariably announced by the lady's gently playing with her partner's necktie and was invariably accompanied by her kicking out with her left foot.^[7]

The persistent motifs that Panofsky enumerates here carry a meaning that is immutable and upon which a film or indeed any artistic text can rely. Yet these motifs do not participate in the production of new meaning; rather, they passively transmit significations from the past into the present. Panofsky himself relegated these motifs to the realm of iconography, calling them "secondary" or "conventional." He provides us with an eloquent example when he points out that thirteen men seated in a particular way around a table signify the Last Supper—this is the conventional iconographic signification. Yet da Vinci's painting on this theme signifies something far greater—and this new signification, intrinsic to da Vinci's fresco, Panofsky calls its "inner meaning" or "content": "The discovery and interpretation of these 'symbolical' values (which are often unknown to the

artist himself and may even emphatically differ from what he consciously intended to express) is the object of what we may call 'iconology' as opposed to 'iconography.'"^[8]

Both the potential and the complexities of an iconological approach to meaning become clearer in the light of the example to follow. I have consciously taken it from the early history of cinema, during which the iconographic layer in films was consistently highlighted. I am thinking of a particular motif in D. W. Griffith's Intolerance (1916), the statues of elephants with their trunks raised adorning the main set in the film's Babylonian episode. It is generally believed that Griffith borrowed these elephants from the Italian film Cabiria (1914) directed by Pastrone. To be sure, the relationship between Griffith and Pastrone now appears a lot more complicated than a case of the latter influencing the former; yet after B. Hanson's research on the subject, the fact that some borrowing occurred seems beyond dispute.^[9] Significantly, this borrowing took place despite Pastrone's fierce resistance to any form of plagiarism: the Italian director had even taken the precaution of having false scenery built for Cabiria to prevent any plagiary. Although his deception was largely successful, the elephants were nonetheless stolen, even before Griffith got to them, to appear soon after Cabiria in the film Salammbô .^[10]

The desire to display elephants as a decorative motif in Cabiria and Salammbô need hardly surprise us if we recall that both films were set in Carthage, a city readily connected to elephants through Hannibal's legendary crossing of the Alps on elephant-back. Yet Griffith's decision to place elephants in Babylon seems somewhat baffling, since there is no traditional link between Babylon and elephants and since Griffith himself was generally quite opposed to such anachronisms. As Griffith's assistant Joseph Henabery remembers:

Griffith was very keen on those elephants. He wanted one on top of each of the eight pedestals in Belshazzar's palace. I searched through all my books. "I'm sorry," I said, "I can't find any excuse for elephants. I don't care what Doré or any other Biblical artist has drawn—I can find no reason for putting elephants up there. To begin with, elephants were not native to this country. They may have known about them but I can't find any references."

Finally this fellow Wales found someplace a comment about elephants on the walls of Babylon and Griffith, delighted, just grabbed it. He very much wanted elephants up there.^[11]

The question then arises: What kind of meaning could this motif have as part of the Babylonian scenery? A brief mention must be made here of the representation of elephants in the iconographic tradition.^[12] In general the elephant appears as a wise, pure, and God-fearing creature. It has been

endowed with the ability to blush, for which reason it becomes a symbol of chastity. The Physiologus, the basic sourcebook for most Christian bestiaries, speaks of the antagonism between the elephant and the dragon. While fleeing from the dragon, the she-elephant gives birth in water. The Physiologus compares the male and female elephant to Adam and Eve after they have tasted of the forbidden fruit, while the newly born elephant cub has been seen as Jesus Christ. The dragon, needless to say, is equated with the Devil. Leonardo da Vinci viewed the elephant as an embodiment of honor, prudence, justice, and religious piety, while Bernini deployed the elephant in his celebrated obelisk as a creature of the sun. The notion of the elephant as a solar animal goes back to the nineteenth century and is definitively established in J. Collin de Plancy's Dictionnaire Infernal.^[13]

Enough has been said for us to realize that the iconographic symbolism of the elephant is difficult to reconcile both with the general context of Babylon and with the specific content of Griffith's Babylonian episode, in which the ancient city is evoked according to its traditional image as the embodiment of sin. In this sense the iconographic tradition throws little light on the meaning of the motif; indeed, the motif now appears even more enigmatic.

Yet the Babylonian scenery in Griffith's film has one other figurative source that is at least as significant as Cabiria —namely, the painting Belshazzar's Feast (1820) by the English artist John Martin. Griffith, who knew this painting well, included a reproduction of it in the large album of visual material that he put together for the film.^[14] It is clear that Griffith's Babylonian scenery follows the broad conception of Martin's painting. Belshazzar's Feast, like Griffith's scenery, contains enormous columns; adorning them, however, we find not elephants but snakes. The snake is the primary animal symbol in Martin's painting; it winds around the columns on the left-hand side of the canvas, as well as around the idol standing to the back of the palace. The snake's presence in Martin's painting is doubly motivated. It is the symbol of sin, as well as being a creature from Babylonian mythology called Tiamat, the "dragon of darkness" destroyed by the solar and light-giving Babylonian divinity Marduk. Martin's painting does include some elephants as well, although they function as barely visible ornamental attributes. Martin's elephants stand at the base of Belshazzar's throne with their trunks raised, while snakes, coiled and about to strike, ride on their backs.

It is certainly curious that Griffith should have replaced the elephants with snakes, which were traditionally considered their foes. His choice appears even stranger in the light of the subsequent history of Martin's painting during the nineteenth century. In 1831 H. C. Selous, an epigonal artist of Martin's time, produced an engraving entitled The Destruction of Babel, an obvious imitation of Martin that contains four enormous sculpted elephants

Under Martin's influence, Victor Hugo wrote a poem called "Le Feu du ciel" that recounts the destruction of Babylon, Sodom, and Gomorrah. Here, too, we unexpectedly find "granite elephants carrying a gigantic cupola." The poem was illustrated in 1831 by the well-known engraver Louis Boulanger, whose work also clearly indicates the influence of Martin. To the left of Boulanger's print we find an enormous statue of an elephant standing on its hind legs; in the background there is a building in flames, with elephants serving as caryatids and adorning the heads of its columns. Several details in Boulanger's painting, then, closely anticipate Griffith's deployment of the same motif.^[15]

Griffith would thus appear to have fallen into a specific iconographic tradition that goes back as far as Belshazzar's Feast by Martin and is connected to Babylon rather than Carthage. We might well ask, then, what might have necessitated the insertion of elephants into Griffith's vision of Babylon and its demise.

It should be said that the elephant as a symbol betrays signs of ambivalence quite early in its history. We know that Behemoth, one of the demons from hell, could take on the guise of an elephant.^[16] A print by the well-known Franco-Dutch artist Bernard Picard, The God of Wisdom, Health and Well-Being According to the Sinhalese (from his series of 1723–1731 entitled Religious Ceremonies and Customs), depicts an elephant-headed idol with goat's feet, being worshiped in what closely resembles a Black Mass. Significantly, however, the object of veneration in this rather ambiguous print is still called a god of wisdom and well-being.

It was after the Portuguese discovery of the Elephanta Caves on an island near Bombay in India that the connotations of the elephant as a symbol became markedly more negative. At Elephanta a series of cave temples were uncovered containing innumerable statues of elephants, as well as enormous granite lingams, the striking traces of a phallic cult. This discovery strongly affected the European imagination: it established the link between the elephant as a sculptural motif and the ruination of the idolatrous and sinful city. It was at Elephanta that elephants were found serving as caryatids in close proximity to enclosures containing stone phalluses.^[17] By the end of the nineteenth century, we find Felicien Rops depicting an elephant with a phallus-like trunk in his engraving The Idol. The entire engraving functions as an allegory of vice. And in his poem "Le Voyage," Charles Baudelaire also speaks of "idols that have trunks" in the city of voluptuaries:

Nous avons salué des idoles à trompe;
Des trônes constellés de joyaux lumineux;
Des palais ouvragés dont la féerique pompe
Serait pour vos banquiers un rêve ruineux;

Des costumes qui sont pour les yeux une ivresse;
Des femmes dont les dents et les ongles sont teints,
Et des jongleurs savants que le serpent caresse.
(We have saluted idols that had trunks;
Thrones bedecked with bright jewels;
Finely wrought palaces whose fairy-tale pomp
Would be a ruinous dream for your bankers;
Costumes intoxicating to the eye;
Women with teeth and nails painted,
And wise jugglers caressed by a snake.)^[18]

Clearly, in Baudelaire the elephant shares a common semantic context with the snake.

This "new" iconography, marginal to the classical iconographic tradition, includes a further cinematic moment in its history, the film The Seven Mortal Sins by George Méliès (1900), which contains an allegorical episode called "The Castle of Pride." The allegory of pride is elaborated in terms of the classical iconography described by Panofsky. Pride is represented by a woman emerging from a peacock's feathers. A peacock has of course classically personified self-pride, but perhaps not only the latter. From Brunetto Latini's thirteenth-century bestiary Livre du trésor we learn that the peacock's sinful nature is expressed in the splendid bird's "serpentine head and devilish voice."^[19] In any case, we do not need to go back so far in history. The peacock continued to function as a symbol of sin in French culture at the end of the nineteenth century, for example, in Edmond Louys's painting Jeune fille au paon (1895) and in Pierre Aman-Jean's poem "La Femme aux paons" (1891), which describes a woman's sexual union with a peacock.^[20] The allegorical detail that concerns us here is the representation engraved on the wall of the castle of Pride of an elephant with its trunk raised.

The details we have reconstructed allow us to decode the symbolic meaning of the elephant in Griffith's Intolerance. It can be read as a sign of pride or vice, the sins that doom the city of Babylon. But this meaning does not derive purely from traditional iconography: it emerges at the point of intersection of a range of texts belonging to the romantic and symbolist traditions.

This analysis in its turn raises further questions to which there are no simple answers. We cannot say for sure that Griffith was consciously deploying the figure of the elephant in precisely the symbolic context I have outlined. The only solid proof we have is that Griffith knew Cabiria and was acquainted with Belshazzar's Feast. If we were to conclude that Griffith took

the elephants from Pastrone, then we could also assume that the statues in Intolerance have no symbolic value and merely reproduce a decorative motif that Griffith saw and liked. Yet this is precisely what we cannot say for sure: they could be a quote from Martin (in whose painting elephants also figure, although not centrally) rather than Pastrone. Nor can we say for sure that Griffith did not also know the engravings of H. C. Selous, Boulanger, or Felicien Roops, the poetry of Hugo and Baudelaire (although the latter is unlikely), or the film of Méliès. Our lack of certainty suggests that this list could be continued. Yet most important, we cannot also reject the possibility that Griffith did not in fact rely on any received tradition, and that he chose to insert the elephants into the set out of caprice, or through an entirely personal and unconscious impulse (e.g., as a phallic image).

The analytical tradition in which we are situated is such that it cannot free us from what the Russian phenomenologist Gustav Shpet once called "genealogical curiosity." When this curiosity sets in, said Shpet, "it creates a species of people who can perform incredible intellectual contortions in order not to understand what X says, without knowing who X' s parents were, the nature of X's religious upbringing, convictions, etc. The problem is that even after finding all of this out, they are still unable to understand anything, tormented as they are by the doubt that in this case trustworthy Mr. X might be lying and the lying Mr. Y might be telling the truth."^[21]

"Genealogical curiosity" is most often methodologically fruitless. In the final analysis we can never establish the authentic source, the motivations underlying the choice, or the precise symbolic meaning of the figure of the elephant in the Griffith decorations. Nonetheless, "genealogical curiosity" is not a trait specific to a singular "species of people" as Shpet describes them: it is a fundamental feature of culture in general. It is connected to the fact that a text always appears to us as emerging from some other text, the Platonic "Idea" of a text, as it were. We cannot conceive of discourse without some metaphysical origin. I quote Michel Foucault at length here, since he has best described this common representation of origins:

All-manifest discourse is secretly based on an "already-said," and . . . this "already-said" is not merely a phrase that has already been spoken, or a text that has already been written, but a "never-said," an incorporeal discourse, a voice as silent as a breath, a writing that is merely the hollow of its own mark. It is supposed therefore that everything that is formulated in discourse was already articulated in that semi-silence that precedes it, which continues to run obstinately beneath it, but which it covers and silences. The manifest discourse, therefore, is really no more than the repressive presence of what it

does not say; and this "not-said" is a hollow that undermines from within all that is said.^[22]

This felt need to correlate the text to some silent prior discourse is essentially linked to the fact that discourse, being linear, is perceived by us in time. It is difficult for us to conceive of the possibility that discourse has not been preceded by the flow of time, a "breath" or "voice," and hence something both temporal and unseen, since we cannot see time. The hollow created by the unseen "already-said" is then filled by the material of culture. Meaning is projected onto the text exactly as something "already-said" that functions as a double of manifest discourse. Naturally, all of this applies to the realm of reading, to the phenomenology of our perception of discourse. Iconology reconstructs on a rational basis a precursor discourse, fills it with the concrete material of culture, and renders the "breath of time" visible in the text.

The Anagram

A far more sophisticated model for linking a manifest discourse to a latent one was elaborated in Ferdinand de Saussure's theory of anagrams, which played a significant role in the creation of a theory of intertextuality. Saussure formulated his theory of the anagram before writing his Cours de linguistique générale, but his writings on the anagram gained intellectual currency only after 1964, when they were released along with his other unpublished writings. Saussure's claim was to have discovered in the ancient Indo-European poetic tradition (early Latin, Greek, and Old German) a "general principle for composing verse by 'anagram.' Many poetic texts in this multiple tradition, such as the hymns of the Rig Veda, appear to have been constructed in accordance with the acoustic (phonological) composition of the key word, generally the name (usually never mentioned) of a divinity. The remaining words of a text were chosen in such a way that the sounds (phonemes) of the key word were repeated with a certain regularity."^[23]

Saussure accumulated a huge amount of material concerning the place of the anagram in Indo-European poetics, which he was never to publish, for several reasons. First, he was embarrassed by the fact that none of the poets he had studied ever admitted to having consciously employed the anagram as a principle. Second, he was unable to establish definitively that the anagrammatic structures he had found were not the result of chance: "There is no way to resolve the question of chance [in anagrams], as the following illustration will indicate: The most one could say against it is that there is a chance of finding on average in any three lines the means—legitimately or not—to create any anagram whatsoever."^[24]

Saussure's doubts have not obscured the broader methodological significance of the anagram as a graphic model of how one text enters another,

of how an external element (such as a name) affects the meaning of a text's "internal" elements. Saussure himself, in discussing Die Niebelungen, had noted that any change in the character of the name being anagrammatized can alter the entire meaning of the text: "In the arrangement of the narrative, the symbol as material is not simply utilized; it undergoes a modification. For the arrangement is modifiable, and itself becomes an agent of modification. It is enough to vary the 'external' relations of the original material in order for its apparently 'intrinsic' characteristics to begin to differ. The identity of the symbol is lost in the diachronic life of the legend."^[25]

In this way a certain order of elements (which were traditionally attributed a key role in the generation of meaning) acquires a very different function. It anagrammatizes another text (the precursor text) and thereby produces meaning in the syntagmatic as well as the paradigmatic dimension, in synchrony as well as in diachrony. The order of elements uses anagrams to organize not so much a linear succession as a kind of vertical axis, an exit that leads to other texts, in other words—intertextuality. The anagram permits us to see how another outside text, a hidden quote, can both organize and modify the order of elements in a given text.

Saussure distinguished between several types of anagrams: the hypogram, the logogram, and the paragram. It is the paragram that is of particular significance to a theory of intertextuality: "We use the term paragrammatic network to describe the (nonlinear) tabular model for the elaboration" of a text's language. "The term network replaces the univocal (linear) principle by incorporating it within itself, and suggests that each ensemble (sequence) is the completion and beginning of a polyvalent relationship." The term paragram indicates that each element functions "like a dynamic mark, like a moving 'gram' that makes sense rather than simply expressing it."^[26]

The critic Julia Kristeva has devoted some attention to the notion of paragram, as well as to Saussure's general study of the anagram. It was Kristeva, too, who brought the term intertextuality into general circulation. Hers was the first attempt at theoretically appraising Saussure's writings on the subject:

The poetic signified refers back to other discursive signifieds, in such a way that several different discourses are legible within a poetic utterance. Around the poetic signified, then, a multiple textual space is created, whose elements can be inserted into a concrete poetic text. We shall call this space intertextual . . . .

In this perspective, it is clear that the poetic signified cannot be seen as dependent upon a single code. It is the point of intersection of several codes (at least two), situated in a relation of negation to one another.

The problem of how several alien discourses are made to intersect (and explode) within poetic language was raised by Ferdinand de Saussure in his work on anagrams.^[27]

What is essential here is the fact that the various poetic discourses manifested in the field of a paragram do not simply coexist, jostling together or impinging on each other; instead, they negate each other to create meaning, just as the paragram itself is a destruction of writing by other writing, the act of writing's self-destruction.^[28] Indeed, if we were to read a poem in which the name of God is inscribed in coded form, we would perceive either the text of the poem or the name of God. The name, once it enters the text of the poem, destroys (or at least strongly modifies) its writing.

Some of Kristeva's postulates, particularly concerning the multiplicity of codes and textual systems existing in a given text, as well as their conflictual and mutually destructive nature, have been taken up and applied to the field of cinema by Christian Metz—without, however, using the term paragram.^[29] This is hardly surprising, since by its very nature the paragram occurs in a verbal text, which allows for its division into acoustic segments. Since the primary means of expression in film is visual representation, which can be divided into articulate segments only through montage, paragrammatic constructions are hardly possible in cinema.

The most natural way of introducing anagrams into a film would therefore involve its linguistic elements. Here is one example. The title of Jean Vigo's film À propos de Nice (1929) strikes us still for its unusualness. The construct "à propos de" is rare in the titles of works of art; it seems to belong more to the genre of the scholarly article or essay. Vigo's choice of title can indeed be read as a variation on the title of Guy de Maupassant's short essay "À propos de rien" (1886), which deals precisely with Nice. Significantly, both Nice and rien are paragrams (i.e., incomplete anagrams) of each other. The paragram thus allows us to reconsider the significance of Nice in this film: it establishes the equation Nice = nothing, emptiness, pure negation. But that is not all. The anagrammatic relation between the titles of the two texts allows us to bring them both together and project each onto the other, producing some curious results.

Maupassant's essay begins with a description of the flower festival and carnival in Nice (both figure centrally in Vigo's film also). A pretty and diminutive blonde throws flowers from the stand at those participating in the procession. Tired, she freezes for a moment, and then becomes astounded at what she had not noticed before: " 'Dear God! How ugly these people are!' For the first time, she noticed, in the midst of this festival, amidst these flowers, this joy, this intoxication, that of all the animals, the human animal was the ugliest of all."^[30] Maupassant then gives a vivid account of all the human deformities that his heroine observes, before reaching his conclusion:

Certainly people are just as ugly every day and smell just as bad all the time, but our eyes, accustomed to seeing them, and our nose, accustomed

to smelling them, are able to distinguish their hideousness and their stench only when they are made aware of them by a sudden and violent contrast.

Human beings are terrible! In order to put together a gallery of grotesques capable of making even a corpse laugh it would suffice to take the first ten passers-by to come along, line them up, and photograph them, with their varying stature, their legs too long or too short, their bodies too fat or too thin, their faces red or pale, bearded or beardless, their demeanour smiling or serious.^[31]

Further on Maupassant enumerates the various other reasons for our human blindness, among which he includes all forms of social prejudice—religion, morality, habit, essentially every manifestation of standardized human behavior. At the end of the essay, Maupassant once more turns to his heroine: "She spoke no more! What was she thinking of?. . . No doubt, about nothing!"^[32] This final sentence gives the essay a circular quality, returning us to the title, "À propos de rien."

The Maupassant essay concerns the opposition between vision and consciousness. Vision is here seen as a mechanical and unconscious registering of reality (the photographing of chance passersby), while blindness is equated with consciousness in all its forms, including the verbal. It is in this context that Maupassant's final reference to the heroine, who is no longer thinking about anything and hence is seeing for the first time, acquires its full meaning. Maupassant's paradox resides in the fact that what the heroine has seen cannot be related by the writer ("She spoke no more!"), since language would destroy her vision. Consciousness must be (of) "nothing" (rien ) in order for us to see.

If we suppose that Vigo's film and Maupassant's essay are correlated through the paragram established by their titles, then Maupassant's text can be understood as an explication of, or running commentary on, the film, with its gallery of grotesque monsters and aging men and women. The film becomes a repository of the pure, wordless vision that arises out of the "nothing" of clichéd consciousness, which is equated with the city of Nice itself. As an embodiment of "nothing," Nice allows us to see people as they really are. For both Vigo and Maupassant, Nice becomes the ideal locus of vision (and the visionary).

An anagram based on titles can widen to embrace texts as a whole, correlating both texts in order to shed light on the semantic strategy underlying one of them (in this case Vigo's film). The Vigo-Maupassant nexus is also uniquely intertextual in that it involves a literary text that posits the absence of language as the condition of sight, and a cinematic text that effectively realizes this wordless vision. Yet the very absence of language in Vigo's film finds its motivation verbally, in Maupassant's text, which appears to free À propos de Nice from any need to have recourse to language.

Vigo's film thus negates Maupassant's essay but acquires its additional meaning precisely from this negated text.

My second example, which is more complex, deals with the film La Coquille et le Clergyman (1927) by Antonin Artaud and Germaine Dulac. The film was the only one of Artaud's screenplays to be actually shot; nevertheless, Artaud remained dissatisfied with Dulac's work, disavowed any part in it, and even tried to obstruct the film's screening at the premiere, which took place at the Studio des Ursulines. We still do not know the reason Artaud rejected the film, although critics and witnesses have offered a multitude of conjectures. Georges Sadoul, who participated in the scandal that took place at Les Ursulines, sums up Artaud's possible reasons: "He had expected to play the principal role in La Coquille et le Clergyman, and though in fact it was given to someone else, simply because he [Artaud] had been ill, he was convinced that there had been treachery afoot, and created a disturbance at the premiére with a rowdy Surrealist demonstration."^[33] Another eyewitness, Jacques Brunius, writes that Dulac "had damaged the film with Alex Allin's mediocre acting and by drowning it in an orgy of technical tricks, with only a scattered handful of powerful images surviving. "^[34]

These hypotheses concerning Artaud's motives for rejecting the film have gained wide acceptance. A range of scholars has tried to provide Artaud's actions with a biographical and psychological basis. Naomi Greene, for example, views the collision between Artaud and Allin as an expression of Artaud's fear of his double; Richard Abel sees Artaud's script itself as reflecting his relations with Gênica Athanasiou, as well as with his mother and father.^[35] Nonetheless, Artaud's rejection of the film can be understood in a wider sense, as an expression of Artaud's general desire to create a kind of "absolute text," which fundamentally cannot be realized in material form.

Artaud had seen in theater the possibility of overcoming language, transcending the actual play in favor of a new concrete language of signs, which he equated with Egyptian hieroglyphs: "I mean to say," he declared, "that I will not stage any play based on writing and language."^[36] Jacques Derrida has shown that for Artaud the word once uttered, particularly the word of the Other, is something stolen from the body.^[37] Hence Artaud's interest in language that is "directly communicative," in the "effacement of words by gestures."^[38] Hence the idea of a theater without rehearsals, a theater of pure immediacy, a theater without text—in other words, a Utopian, unrealizable spectacle. Linda Williams has suggested—and she is surely right—that the cinema represented for Artaud a means of realizing the Utopia of a language that did not have to "steal" its words from the body, a language that "seemed to appeal directly to the imagination without the separation between sound and sense so endemic to language."^[39] The

search for a language that does not sever meaning from sound points on the one hand to the cinema, in which signifier and signified are fused. On the other hand, it seems akin to the function of the anagram, which in its own way also abolishes the difference between meaning and sound. It will be my thesis that the screenplay Artaud wrote for La Coquille et le Clergyman, while oriented toward the cinema, also contains complex anagrams that cannot by nature be translated into visual forms of representation.

Beyond the cinema and the anagram, Artaud's screenplay also displays a third orientation. The text clearly contains a range of alchemical subtexts, which have already been the object of critical attention.^[40] In 1932, Artaud wrote the article "Alchemical Theatre," in which he attempted to elaborate an analogy between alchemy and theater. For Artaud both alchemy and the theater are marked by an inner ambiguity, for they both look for gold by simultaneously reworking matter and creating symbolic abstractions. Both are thus involved in a search to link matter to meaning, and in this they reproduce the basic dilemma of language. Artaud, moreover, believed that both alchemy and the theater arose from the collapse of some primordial unity, generating the conflict on which the theater thrives and the division of the world into the spirit and matter that necessitated alchemy. The task of both alchemy and the theater, said Artaud, was "to resolve or even annihilate all the conflicts produced by the antagonism between matter and spirit, idea and form, the concrete and the abstract, and to fuse all appearances into a unique expression resembling spiritualized gold."^[41]

Alchemy for Artaud was above all the sundering of a primordial unity into a certain duality, which could once more be overcome thanks to the re-creation of the prior oneness in "gold." This same capacity Artaud attributed to phonetic articulation (whose duality was one of the principal themes of his reflections). In 1934, he published one of his most enigmatic and philosophical works, Héliogobale ou I'Antichriste couronné, which reveals the primary source of his linguistic Utopias, L 'Histoire philosophique du genre humain by Fabre d'Olivet, a well-known occultist who wrote at the beginning of the nineteenth century. In Héliogobale, Artaud hails d'Olivet's great revelation that the One, the Ineffable, becomes manifest in sound. Sound by nature is dual, bipolar, based on the collision of two principles, the feminine and the masculine: "It is sound, acoustic vibration, that transmits taste, light, and the surge of the sublimest passions. If the origin of sounds is double, then everything is double. And this is where the madness begins—the anarchy that precipitates war, the massacre of partisans. And if there are two principles, one is male, the other female."^[42] The history of Héliogobale (a hermaphrodite) is the history of the genesis of the world, which falls apart into a male and a female principle.

Artaud's alchemy thus acquires a markedly acoustic character that is programmatically realized in the form of anagrams. Anagrams, in fusing several meanings into one sound, are capable of restoring a prior oneness. They become a metaphoric means of finding a "spiritual gold." One example is the tide of Artaud's well-known collection Ombilic des Limbes, which is based on a complex wordplay. The word limbes (limbo) is anagrammatically contained in the word ombilic (navel), whose three syllables also punningly divide into homme-bile-liq (uide) (man-bile-liquid). The word ombilic is also a paragram of alambic (alembic), an apparatus for alchemical distillation. Most important, the word also contains the utterance OM (or AUM), the primordial sound in the Hindu tradition, which Artaud believed had a mystical significance. OM is at once God, the word, the source of all things, and the vehicle of a trinitarian principle (insofar as its written symbol has three components in Sanskrit). In the Mandukya Upanishad we read that AUM is "a symbol for what was, what is / And what shall be. AUM represents also / What lies beyond past, present, and future." This unity of all being is projected with particular clarity onto the duality of speech and breath which the Chandogya Upanishad reads as simultaneously masculine and feminine: "Speech and breath, Sama and Rig, are / couples, and in the imperishable OM they / come together to fulfill each other's desire."^[43]

Also significant is the fact that the Hindu tradition links the utterance OM to what is also the film's central motif, the shell. In Hindu mythology the shell produced the first sound to resonate throughout the world, the mystical OM. The oyster shell is associated with the ear, and the pearl it contains is the word. In other myths the shell itself becomes sound (the primordial sound contained within it) and language. In the Upanishads the shell is an attribute of Vishnu, and it contains the primary elements of the world, its germ, that is also OM.^[44]

If OM is anagrammatically present in the word ombilic, then it is also worth enumerating some of the "hidden meanings" attributed to the same syllable by the Hermetic tradition. Each of its two constitutive letters has its own meaning. M is a hieroglyph meaning water, but it can also be a symbol for mother or woman. O (the French eau ) also means water. Thus OM contains hidden within itself a symbolic unity O = M (water = water). When arranged vertically, the same letters acquire another hieroglyphic value:

O—is the sun, the eye of God hovering over

M—water, the first element in the Genesis of the world.^[45]

It is worth noting that Artaud's screenplay repeatedly and from the very first line identifies the clergyman as homme, the man. Paradoxically, the word OM/homme has been viewed by the Hermetic tradition as a feminine and aqueous symbol. Man (OM ) functions as an alchemical androgyne.

The shell, which is also the symbolic embodiment of OM, serves as man's double, the second principle that is the basis of the world's manifestation in sound. The film as a whole can be read as a mystical parable about the creation of the world from two single yet divided principles.

Since these anagrammatic forms are realized exclusively on the script's verbal level, we need to examine Artaud's own use of language more closely. The film's hero is identified by one of two words, homme and clergyman (the latter word also appears in the title). The English word clergyman, rather foreign to the French ear, refers only to Anglican pastors. One might suppose that Artaud's choice of even this rather obscure word might have been dictated by a phonetic anagram. When pronounced with a French accent, clergyman can be distinctly heard to contain the two words l'air (air) and hymen (hymen), which signifies both marriage and the virginal membrane (a clergyman can demonstrate his modesty by pulling his coattails over his thighs). Artaud's decision to designate the same character with two names might then be equivalent to introducing two elements—air and water—combined into one. Hymen would then refer not only to the feminine nature of the clergyman but also to the idea of an alchemical marriage.

Just as the script's plot involves the encoding of several alchemical processes, so the anagrammatic nature of Artaud's writing serves to encode an alchemical transformation of sounds—the metamorphosis of OM into OR (gold). Let us recall the last scene in the screenplay:

In order to clean the house they have to move the glass ball that is nothing other than a kind of vase filled with water. . . . Among [the young people] we rediscover the woman and the clergyman. They appear to be about to get married. But at this moment the corners of the screen begin to project the visions that had passed through the brain of the clergyman while he slept. The screen is cut into two by the apparition of an enormous ship. The ship disappears, but the clergyman, headless, his hand carrying a packet wrapped in paper, is seen climbing down a staircase which seems to recede into the sky. Entering the room where everyone is gathered, he unwraps the paper and reveals the glass ball. The attention of the public is taut to the point of breaking. Then he bends toward the ground and breaks the glass ball: from it there emerges a head, none other than his own.

The head grimaces hideously.

He holds it in his hand like a hat. The head rests on an oyster shell. As he raises the shell to his lips the head dissolves and is transformed into a kind of blackish liquid which he swallows with his eyes closed.^[46]

I will not delve too deeply into the clearly alchemical symbolism in this episode, which has already been investigated by Grazyne SzymczykKluszczynska. Suffice it to note the connection between the glass ball, the shell, and the alembic (the alchemical still); the motif of the alchemical

marriage; and the staircase receding into heaven—surely Jacob's ladder, a motif that enjoyed some currency in alchemical iconography (and often situated on a seashore).^[47] What concerns us lies somewhat to the side of these motifs. The entire final episode (including its somewhat obscure imagery) can be decoded as part of the alchemical production of gold, designated here by the French OR. OR is a mystical root meaning "light." In the Hermetic tradition it was often written in three letters, as AUR (the Latin aurum), and was hence linked to a trinitarian principle, like AUM. Mystics rediscovered OR in the name of the highest Zoroastrian divinity, Ahuramazda (Ormuzd), meaning "the active word." In the more recent European tradition of Kabbalistic thinking, OR finds another meaning. Fabre d'Olivet, in his La Langue hebraïque restituée, notes that the letter R was eroglyphically a head, while O signified water. Thus the combination O + R (the creation of gold from various elements, the overcoming of duality) is in one way or another connected to the process of drinking. Jean Richer has uncovered the play of these hieroglyphs in Arthur Rimbaud's poem "Larme," which ends with the following couplet: "Or! tel qu'un pêcheur d'or ou de coquillages / Dire que je n'ai pas eu souci de boire!" (Gold! Like a fossicker of gold or shells / I no longer cared to drink!)^[48] The symbolism of these lines concerns us only in their linking of gold, shells, and the act of drinking (it is possible, incidentally, that Rimbaud had in mind the liquid gold of alchemists). The point is that Artaud's bringing together of the head, the shell, and the act of drinking in one episode functions like a rebus, disguising the creation of gold like a hieroglyph made up of the letters OM (shell).

My hypothesis is readily confirmed by the phonetic patterns of the script's last paragraph, which Artaud, always sensitive to the mystical resonance of sounds, certainly would have taken seriously. Let us reread it in the French: "Il la tient dans sa main cOMme un chapeau. La tête repose sur une coquille d'huitre. COMme il approche la coquille de ses lévres la tête se fond et se transfORMe en une sORte de liquide noirátre qu'il absORbe en fermant les yeux." I have capitalized the syllables through which the "alchemical transmutation" of OM into OR takes place. The phonetic structure is here sustained with the utmost symmetry. First the syllable OM is repeated twice, then the syllable OR. In the center are the pivotal words se transforme, the moment of transition, in which OM and OR are fused into ORM.

The "blackish liquid" that appears in the last sentence can be further interpreted in the light of a mystical tract well known in France, L'Oeuf de Kneph: Histoire secrète du Zéro, published in Bucharest in 1864 by one Ange Pechmeja. The book contains an illustration of the universal egg, which conjoins all the letters of the alphabet. Here the letter O is interpreted as

the source of all vowels, and R as the source of all consonants (cf. the dual nature of sounds in d'Olivet and Artaud). The symbol for the letter O , moreover, is the white Jehovah, and for R, the black Jehovah (another double that Artaud would have appreciated). In this way the transmutation of the phonetic principle OM into OR might be described by invoking the symbolically black letter R.^[49]

There is, incidentally, a curious moment in L'Oeuf de Kneph, where the semantic—or rather the symbolic—range of the word or (gold) is established etymologically. Among the words listed here (the author even includes anagrams such as RO ), we find most of the motifs that appear in Artaud's film: ORtus ("birth" in Latin), qOURoun ("crown" in Arabic), ÖRaba ("carriage" in Breton), gORod ("city" in Slavic), gORa ("hill" in Polish), or the Greek amphORa.^[50] In this way, the acoustic element of a word can serve as the kernel from which a whole cluster of motifs can evolve on the basis of an anagrammatic connection.

Enough has been said to propose one last hypothesis concerning Artaud's dissatisfaction with Dulac's version of the film. Artaud's script simply could not be filmed, since its logic was to a considerable extent rooted in the phonetic and hieroglyphic layer of Artaud's writing. Clearly this layer could not be translated into the visual idiom of a film. Artaud's script was fated to remain an experimental hypothesis.

But the questions raised by La Coquille et le Clergyman go well beyond the factual details of Artaud's encounter with Dulac. The point, rather, is why Artaud, in writing his script, came to choose a paragrammatic model of meaning. It has already been pointed out that the anagram in its own way abolishes the dualism of meaning and sound and finds in this an affinity with the cinema, which is also based on a unique consonance of signifier and signified. Linda Williams has written, "For Artaud, precisely this absence of the cinematic signifier seemed to offer a possible protection against the robbery of his speech by the Other."^[51]

The anagrammatic nature of Artaud's writing is clearly oriented toward overcoming the phonetic level of language through the hieroglyphic. In this context OM can be equated with shell and contain the hieroglyph meaning water, while OR can become the hieroglyphic combination of head and water. The anagram is thus the most direct means of transforming the phonetic into the visual: it carries within itself the mechanism of screen adaptation, if by the latter we mean the translation of language into visual terms. Yet this alchemical "transmutation" of the "acoustic" into the "pictorial" also resists any actual attempt at cinematic visualization. Screen adaptation is in fact already inscribed, anagrammatically, in the written text, which finally excludes the actual translation from text to screen.

What Is a Quote?

The hieroglyph in cinema is a problem that deserves separate attention, and I shall be returning to it in part 2, which deals with intertextuality in the films of D. W. Griffith. Artaud himself spoke unequivocally in favor of replacing phonetic speech in the theater with hieroglyphics. In the first manifesto of the Theatre of Cruelty he wrote:

For the remainder, it is necessary to find new means of recording this [phonetic] language, either in ways that resemble musical notation or through some kind of coded language.

Now as far as ordinary objects are concerned, or even the human body, when both are elevated to the status of signs, it is evident that hieroglyphic characters could serve as an inspiration, not only for the purpose of recording these signs in a way that is legible and which permits their reproduction at will, but also for the construction onstage of symbols that are precise and easily read.^[52]

Jacques Derrida has shown convincingly that the concept of the hieroglyph in Artaud is closely related to a fundamental change in the idea of representation. The representation of the word has been replaced, says Derrida, by "the unfolding of a volume, a multidimensional milieu, an experience which produces its own space." Derrida signals this displacement as the "closure of classical representation" or as "the reconstitution of a closed space of original representation" ("original" here refers to the preverbal and gestural). Derrida further defines postclassical representation as "the autopresentation of pure visibility and pure sensibility."^[53]

Now the closure of classical representation into volume, space, pure visuality, and sensuousness gives the hieroglyph a corporeal quality. The hieroglyph as body acquires an autonomy that undermines its status as sign. The sign ceases to be a transparent medium translating meaning from signifier to signified. This process takes place wherever writing, particularly in its pictorial form, acquires the traits of an object. For Ezra Pound, who considered Chinese hieroglyphics a model for poetic imagery, the image was "a form of super-position, that is to say it is one idea set on top of another."^[54] This conception of the image was to become the basis of Poundian "vorticism," which he contrasted to "impressionism," whose greatest expression, for Pound, was the cinema. Sergei Eisenstein was to formulate an idea quite analogous to Pound's, although somewhat later. He dismissed the natural (impressionistic) notion of mimesis underlying premontage cinema in favor of montage, which he saw as a unique way of realizing the very same idea of the hieroglyph-pictogram. Eisenstein had this to say about the constitutive elements of the hieroglyph, which he saw as identical to the elements of montage in cinema: "Each, separately, corresponds to an object, to a fact, but their combination corresponds to a con-

cept. From separate hieroglyphs has been fused—the ideogram. By the combination of two 'depictables' [izobrazimykh ] is achieved the representation of something that is graphically undepictable."^[55]

If we ponder the essence of this "piling" of one thing onto another, which constitutes the basis of the hieroglyph for Pound, Eisenstein, and Artaud, we easily rediscover both a variation on the anagrammatic principle of combination and the clearly expressed intent to destroy the semiotic transparency of the constitutive elements of the hieroglyph.

When Eisenstein says that in hieroglyphics "the picture for water and the picture of an eye signifies 'to weep,' " then he is also suggesting that in order to achieve the concept "to cry" we have to destroy the simpler, more obvious iconic meaning of the images of water and the eye.^[56] The escalation, already noted, of pure spatial and corporeal elements in the hieroglyph thus works in tandem with the destruction of a prior iconic value, of what we might call the mimetic level of discourse. For Pound and Eisenstein, the destruction of the meaning of the individual elements of the hieroglyph is readily compensated for by the creation of a general meaning, established on the ruins, as it were, of mimesis. Yet such a conclusion is by no means obvious. The superimposition of "water" and "eye" might constitute the concept "to cry," but it might just as easily not do so. The meaning of a hieroglyph is always far less self-evident than meaning produced mimetically, and in the vast majority of cases is in fact not realized in perception. The breakthrough toward a new meaning thus might end up destroying meaning entirely, leading finally to an escalation of nothing more than pure "corporeality," the self-presentation of the sensuous.

Critics using contemporary theory to analyze the hieroglyphic model of writing (including Eisenstein's) as it applies to the cinema have concluded that the hieroglyph "shatters the sign" by increasing the text's heterogeneity.^[57] The shattering of the sign above all involves the destruction of linearity as the basic temporal model of discourse. Linearity is then displaced by a constellation of diverse components. Jacques Derrida describes the pictogram as follows:

The signifier is broken or constellated into a system: it refers at once, and at least, to a thing and to a sound. The thing is itself a collection of things or a chain of differences "in space"; the sound, which is also inscribed within a chain, may be a word; the inscription is the ideogrammatical or synthetic; it cannot be decomposed; but the sound may also be an atomic element itself entering into the composition.^[58]

For Derrida even a sound, linear by nature, acquires the qualities of an "atom" inserted into a constellation. This constellation, founded on differences, acquires, simply by virtue of losing its linearity, the features of a "body," one that is no longer "mimetic," and hence quite unique: a "body-as-sign."

At first glance, the pictogram appears to restore the motivatedness (and hence the mimeticism) of the sign, its connection with the objects of the external world. In fact the opposite is the case: by superimposing its constitutive elements, it in fact undermines the mimetic nature of the text. Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier provides a clear diagnosis of what is at stake: "It is always a question of going back to Cratylus, motivating the sign and bringing it closer to the thing, thus of making the letter or word a figure for the real. One could then say that inversely the search for the hieroglyph in cinema seems to be based on the possibility of demotivating the image with respect to the object it represents—thus of dissociating figuration and signification."^[59]

Our discussion of the hieroglyph, flowing directly from the very nature of the paragram, has an immediate bearing on a theory of intertextuality. Intertextuality, too, superimposes text on text, meaning upon meaning, thereby essentially transforming writing into a hieroglyph. The essential question arising from this can be formulated as follows: Does intertextuality open up new signifying perspectives (meanings), or, rather, does it generate such a complex superimposition of meanings as to finally annihilate the possibility of a final meaning? Is the sign made finally into a hieroglyph, thereby "closing" the moment of classical representation and inaugurating the "autopresentation of the sensuous"?

To proceed further we need to ask the following questions: What is a quote? To what extent is a quote characterized by the qualities we have noted as typical of the anagram and the hieroglyph? To explore this question, let us take the exemplary case of a textual genre made up entirely of quotes. In late antiquity there existed a poetic genre whose texts were effectively a mosaic of quotes from classical authors. This genre was called a cento (literally, a patchwork quilt). Mikhail Gasparov and E. G. Ruzina, who have studied centos based on the poetry of Virgil, conclude that the genre is proof not so much of literary continuity as of "a profound historicocultural rupture between the material at hand and its reworking in the cento."^[60] The cento is thus founded on a break with tradition, presenting itself as an internally disorganic text, a patchwork.

In our century Walter Benjamin could be considered a true creator of centos. Benjamin had dreamed of writing a text that would be a "collection of quotes." Quotation for Benjamin replaced a more immediate relationship with the past. The transmission of the past to the present was replaced by the principle of quotability. The act of quoting, however, was by no means a conservative one, a preservation of the past. At stake was a desire to destroy the present, the temporal medium of classical representation that was spoken of earlier.^[61]

We know that Benjamin's interest in quotation evolved under the influence of Karl Krauss, who had himself elaborated a "method of quoting

without commentary." Krauss, said Benjamin, "has discovered in quotation the power not to preserve but to purify, to tear from the context, to destroy; the only power in which hope still resides that something might survive this age—because it was wrenched from it."^[62] Significantly, Krauss insisted on calling quotation a form of "written acting."^[63] This irruption of theater into writing reflects a rupture in the text's homogeneity, the introduction of a scene or painting, a heterogeneous and somewhat selfenclosed fragment that we know as the quote.

In the cinema this metaphoric transformation of the quote into something resembling a pictorial canvas or theatrical scene is in a sense confirmed by the specific features of film.^[64] Raymond Bellour has pointed out that a cinematic text cannot be quoted by the critic, insofar as the latter works with written words. The fact that a film cannot be quoted in a written text even impels Bellour to suggest that the very idea that a film is a text can be accepted only metaphorically. He concludes that the only way of quoting a film in writing is by reproducing photograms from it:

A written text cannot reproduce what only the camera can do—create the illusion of movement on which the film's sense of reality is based. This is why the reproduction of even a large number of photograms proves little beyond the critic's inability to capture a film's textuality. Nevertheless, these photograms are of immense importance. They really do function as the reader's equivalent of the freeze-frames which arrive at the editor's table and which have the contradictory role of exposing a film's textuality at the very moment that they seek to interrupt its unfolding.^[65]

Bellour's observation is valuable for the way it stresses the fragmentary, static nature of film quotes: in becoming photograms, they violate the "natural" logic of the film's development. But the fact that the photogram as quote is inorganic in its painterliness or theatricality is not the whole story. More important is the fact that the photogram "exposes a film's textuality"; that is, it allows us to touch the hidden processes by which a film creates its own meanings. Paradoxically, then, the meaning or textuality of a film flashes into view precisely where the film's natural life is interrupted.

Roland Barthes once analyzed this phenomenon quite convincingly, showing how the so-called third meaning (troisième sens: vague, inarticulate meaning; meaning still in the process of becoming) is best read out of the photogram, which isolates and immobilizes the shot:

Which is why to a certain extent (the extent of our theoretical fumblings) the filmic, very paradoxically, cannot be grasped in the film "in situation," "in movement," "in its natural state," but only in that major artefact, the photogram. For a long time, I have been intrigued by the phenomenon of being drawn, even fascinated by frames taken from a film (outside a cinema, in the pages of Cahiers du Cinema ) and of then losing everything in those photos

(not just what I got from them but even the memory of the image) when once inside the viewing room—a change which can even result in a complete reversal of values.^[66]

If we are to follow Bellour in seeing the photogram as the model of film quotation, then we are impelled to the conclusion that meaning is manifested only in quotes. Meaning emerges in textual "anomalies," such as the photogram.

The quote stops the linear unfolding of the text. As Laurent Jenny observes:

What is proper to intertextuality is the introduction of a new mode of reading that explodes me linearity of the text. Each intertextual reference is the site of an alternative: either one keeps reading, seeing the reference as nothing more than one fragment among others, an integral part of the text's syntagmatics; or one returns to the original text, resorting to a kind of intellectual anamnesis whereby the intertextual reference appears as a "displaced" paradigmatic element issuing from a syntagmatic axis that has been forgotten.^[67]

This alternative, however, is not always possible to realize. The anomalies that emerge in a text, blocking its development, impel us toward an intertextual reading. This is because every "normative" narrative text possesses a certain internal logic. This logic motivates the presence of the various fragments of which the text is made. If a fragment cannot find a weighty enough motivation for its existence from the logic of the text, it becomes an anomaly, forcing the reader to seek its motivation in some other logic or explanatory cause outside the text. The search is then conducted in the realm of intertextuality. Jenny's alternative is available only when the anomalous fragment can be convincingly integrated into the text in one of two ways—through the text's internal logic or by referring to another text. Michael Riffaterre formulates this dilemma in the following way: "Semantic anomalies in linearity force [the reader] to seek a solution in nonlinearity."^[68] Unable to find a motivation contextually, the reader looks outside the text.

Riffaterre also suggests posing the dilemma in terms of an opposition between mimesis and semiosis. One could say that the textual anomaly (a fragment that the reader or viewer is unable to integrate into the text in a convincing manner) violates the calm of mimesis, the transparent and porous character of the sign. But precisely where mimesis is violated, we begin to see vigorous traces of semiosis. In other words, we witness the birth of meaning, which is normally transparent wherever mimesis remains untroubled, dissolving into the effortless movement from signifier to signified. This is because the quote violates the link between sign and objective reality (the mimetic link), orienting the sign toward another text rather than a thing. Riffaterre observes: "This passage from mimesis to semiosis

arises either from the superimposition of one code onto another, or from the superimposition of one code onto a structure that is different from what is properly its own."^[69] Where the reader expends the effort required to draw on other texts and other codes, the quote acquires its motivation, thereby not only imbuing the text with additional meanings but also restoring the mimesis it had violated. Intertextuality can thus be seen to enrich meaning and to salvage the very linearity of narrative that it had compromised.

In light of the foregoing, I would venture the following definition: The quote is a fragment of the text that violates its linear development and derives the motivation that integrates it into the text from outside the text itself. From this point of view, what is traditionally considered a quote may end up not being one, while what is not traditionally seen as a quote may well be one. Let me clarify this point with a few examples. Jean-Luc Godard is well known as one of the most intertextually oriented of film directors. Several of his films are practically collages of quotes. Godard revealed his passion for quotation in his very first film, Breathless (A bout de souffle). Godard himself was to explain:

My first films were purely the work of a film buff. One could even make use of what one had seen before in the cinema for the sake of making explicit references. . . . Some of the shots I took were connected to others that I had seen before, in Preminger, Cukor, etc. . . . You have to put the blame on my taste for quoting, a taste I have always kept. But why blame me for it? In life people quote the things they like. We have the right to quote whatever we like. So I show people who are always quoting; the only thing is that I arrange it so that whatever they quote also happens be to something that I like.^[70]

Breathless is riddled with all sorts of quotes, which Godard was more than happy to point out. The source of the widest layer of quotes in the film was the American film noir. Godard himself was to acknowledge that during the shooting he believed he was making a film in the same genre.^[71] In one episode the film's heroine, Patricia, tries to hang a poster, a reproduction of a Renoir painting, in the hero's room. She tries hanging it on one wall and then another, and then finally rolls it into a tube and looks through it at Michel. Then Patricia and Michel kiss, and Patricia goes into the bathroom, where she affixes the poster to the wall. There is nothing in this episode that might seem to violate the linear unfolding of the story line. Yet Godard was the first to admit that the episode contained a hidden quote. When Patricia looks through the tube of the rolled-up poster, the film is quoting a scene from Samuel Fuller's Forty Guns, in which one of the heroes looks at his enemy through the sights of the rifle.^[72] Fuller's film throws further light on the relationship between Patricia and Michel, a

relationship in which Michel appears as the victim or target. The episode anticipates the hero's tragic death after he is betrayed by Patricia.

At the same time, this episode is so organically embedded into the film's narrative, so transparent a part of the film's mimetic structure, that we need Godard's own commentary to recognize the Fuller reference in the heroine's spontaneous behavior. Without Godard's help this quote would remain indiscernible—it would simply melt into the linear flow of the plot. A quote that Godard intended and believed obvious thus remains opaque to the viewer. This is a telling example of a buried quote, one that dissolves in mimesis. Indeed, I would dare to suggest that, prior to Godard's commentary, this episode, paradoxically enough, was not a quote.

Let me turn now to another example, taken from Carl Theodor Dreyer's Vampyr (1932). The film begins with its hero, David Gray, on the bank of a river, where he finds a strange hotel. The film's second shot shows us this hotel's unusual signpost, a winged angel, holding a bough in one hand and a wreath in the other. Gray books into the hotel and settles down to sleep. Later, just as the hero begins to dream, we once again see the hotel's signpost in close-up; immediately afterward, the owner of a nearby castle, whose inhabitants have all fallen victim to the vampire, enters the room where Gray lies sleeping. I shall not dwell in greater detail on the film's plot (I refer the reader to David Bordwell's very fine analysis of Vampyr, which he reads as a parable in which a death experience initiates the hero into a secret knowledge).^[73]

What interests us here is the signpost. Had it appeared in a shot along with a frontal view of the building, it might escape the viewer's attention. In fact it is always shown in an isolated close-up shot, never as part of the hotel facade. The obtrusive insertion of the signpost into the story seems particularly forced the second time it appears. We see Gray go to his room after inspecting the hotel, locking the door behind him. There follows a caption, which tells us that the moonlight shed an unnatural light on things, filling the hero with a terror that would haunt him even in his sleep. Then we once more have a shot of the signpost, followed by another of Gray asleep in his bed, lying on his back. The key to his door now turns, and the owner of the castle enters the room. Clearly there is something anomalous about this unexpected outdoor shot of the signpost appearing in the foregoing sequence. For this very reason, it is a quote.

The bough in the angel's hand gives us an early clue to the signpost's meaning. It reminds us naturally of Aeneas's golden bough in Virgil's epic. Aeneas, we recall, required the golden bough in order to cross the River Styx into the underworld and return alive. The reference to Virgil immediately gives Gray's experiences in the film a special significance: his adventure is equated metaphorically with Aeneas's descent into the underworld. The film also makes other references to the Aeneid. For example, a conversation

is seen to take place between the doctor (the vampire's servant) and Gray about the apparent sound of barking and a baby screaming (neither is audible in the sound track). These are precisely the first two sounds Aeneas hears in the underworld: "Huge Cerberus, monstrously couched in a cave confronting them, made the whole region echo with his three-coated barking. . . . Aeneas, passing its entrance, the watch-dog neutralised, strode rapidly from the bank of that river of no return. At once were voices heard, a sound of mewling and wailing, ghosts of infants sobbing there at the threshold."^[74]

The anomaly of the signpost's unexpected appearance in the montage sequence is thus resolved once we recognize the reference to the Aeneid. The connection is convincing enough for us to integrate the signpost into the film's context—yet difficulties remain. The angel that holds the bough and the wreath obviously has nothing to do with Virgil. Nor is it entirely clear why the angel's image should function as a signpost to a hotel that in fact plays a minor role in the film. The hotel is merely the place where Gray goes to sleep and where, in what is part dream and part reality, he is visited by the owner of the castle, who gives him a book about vampires. After this moment Gray leaves the hotel, never to return. From the point of view of narrative economy, then, Gray might have more usefully stumbled onto the castle rather than the hotel and asked to stay there.

An intertextual reading allows us to resolve this problem also. I would suggest that the signpost is itself a "quote" from Baudelaire's sonnet "La Mort des pauvres," in which the image of the hotel of death appears:

C'est l'auberge fameuse inscrite sur le livre
Où l'on pourra manger, et dormir, et s'asseoir;

C'est un Ange qui tient dans ses doigts magnétiques
Le sommeil et le don des rêves extatiques . . .

(It is the famous hotel written in the book,
Where one can eat, sleep and sit down;
It is the Angel who carries in his magnetic hands
Sleep and the gift of ecstatic dreams^[75]

The book mentioned in the first quoted verse might explain the mystical book that appears in the hotel. Baudelaire describes death both as a hotel and as an angel bearing the "gift of dreams." The appearance of the angel on the hotel signpost just as the hero drifts into sleep thus finds its motivation. (There actually may be yet another literary subtext here, Balzac's "L'Auberge rouge," which, like Vampyr, is also marked by images of death and blood.)

Michael Riffaterre has shown that the Baudelaire sonnet is intertextually linked to a 1922 poem by Jean Cocteau, "L'Endroit et l'envers." The

poem also elaborates the image of death as a hotel and contains the image of the mystical book, central to Dreyer's film:

Nous lisons un côté de la page du livre;
L'autre nous est caché. Nous ne pouvons plus suivre,
Savoir ce qui se passe après.

(We read one side of the book's page
The other side is hidden from us. We can no longer keep reading
To know what happens afterward.)

The most intriguing moment in the poem is an extraordinarily dense passage in which Cocteau discusses the signpost on the hotel of death:

Car votre auberge, ô mort, ne porte aucune enseigne.
J'y voudrais voir, de loin, un beau cygne qui saigne
Et chante, cependant que lui tordez le cou.

Ainsi je connaîtrais ce dont je ne me doute:
L'endroit où le sommeil interrompra ma route,
Et s'il me faut marcher beaucoup.

(For your hotel, o death, does not carry any signpost  [enseigne].
And I should like to see, from far off, a beautiful swan bleeding  [qui saigne]
And singing, while you wring his neck.
Thus would I learn what I still do not know:
The place where sleep will interrupt my path,
And whether I still have a lot more walking to do.)^[76]

The signpost, like the book, here foretells the future. Michael Riffaterre has shown that it is not the swan itself that prophesies but its punning connotations, as well as other paragrams hidden in the text. Signpost (enseigne ) is a paragram of the verb "to bleed" (saigner ), and swan (cygne) is a homonym of the word sign (signe ) > A "bleeding sign" is thus what teaches us (enseigne ) the future.^[77]

If the prophetic function of the signpost on the "hotel of death" is marked by a bloody sign, then we can better understand its link to vampirism, as well as to books about vampires that act as portents of encounters with death. Unlike the Godard quote, the signpost in Vampyr is inserted in such a way as to stand out as anomalous in any sequence of shots. It is never shown as part of the hotel facade: it is thus cut off from the diegetic level and exists in isolation from the space of the narrative. Neither can the angel on the signpost be understood in its relation to the general plot without referring to evidence from outside the film. Indeed, the Aeneid is by no means necessarily the end of the story. This apparently "illogical" moment can be recuperated only to the extent that we can recover

all the layers of intertextuality in which it lies embedded. An anomalous moment can reenter the text organically only if it is recognized as a quote.

What I have said so far might give rise to objections. It could be argued that we have no hard evidence that Dreyer knew Baudelaire, Cocteau, and so forth. I would respond that this question has no relevance to our inquiry. Even if Dreyer had something else in mind, Baudelaire and Cocteau allow us to inscribe the signpost into the film, creating an intertextual link that exists irrespective of the director's intentions.

"Construction En AbÎme" and the Principle of the "Third Text"

The signpost motif is of interest from another point of view as well. We have seen that the integration of an anomalous textual moment into its context cannot always rely on just one outside source (such as the Aeneid ). It may require two, three, or even more texts, making it a case of hyperquotation. This case is far from being rare; indeed, it may well be characteristic of intertextuality as a phenomenon. A quote becomes a hyperquote whenever one source is insufficient for its integration into the fabric of a text.

The case of hyperquotation raises several further questions. The hyperquote does not just open a text up to other texts, thereby simply broadening its horizon of meaning. It places a number of texts and significations one on top of the other. The hyperquote essentially becomes a kind of semantic funnel, drawing in all the competing meanings and texts, even if the latter contradict each other and are not readily reconciled into one unitary and dominant meaning. True, the Aeneid and the poems by Baudelaire and Cocteau allowed us to integrate the signpost in Vampyr into the remainder of the film, but only at the cost of invoking a range of diverse intertexts. In the final analysis, the integration of a quote in a film is won only at a cost: a hyperquote can bring order to a text only by erecting a new Tower of Babel, a babble of meanings.

The dilemma of the hyperquote can be resolved in one of two ways. On the one hand, intertextuality can be seen as an arbitrary accumulation of associations, quotes, and voices, in the spirit of Godard's claim that people quote "whatever they like": "In my notes, where I put down everything that I might need for my film, I might even put down a phrase from Dostoevskii if I like it. Why make a fuss? If you want to say something, there's only one solution: to say it."^[78] Godard's notes, a vast repository of everything that struck his fancy along the way, are one model of intertextuality. Roland Barthes came to similar conclusions, which he formulated in the following way: "I savor the sway of formulas, the reversal of origins, the ease which brings the anterior text out of the subsequent one."^[79] Barthes values the

very randomness of this accumulation of meanings for the way it reflects the unpredictable and mobile character of life.

Nonetheless, the majority of scholars have taken a different position. In Laurent Jenny's words, "Intertextuality does not imply a confused and mysterious accumulation of influences, but the work of transformation and assimilation of several texts performed by a centering text which retains its position of leadership in meaning. . . . I propose to use the term 'intertextuality' only when one is able to recover elements in a text that were structured prior to the text itself."^[80] Jenny is here echoed by Riffaterre, who also rejects Barthes's position: "All intertextual comparisons are imposed and controlled not by lexical coincidences but by a structural identity, the text and its intertext being variants of the same structure."^[81]

Truly, only if we can detect a structural isomorphism existing between texts or parts of texts is it possible for us to unify meaning within the centering framework of a "leading text." Essentially, what is at stake is the repetition of the same in both text and intertext, although this repetition is naturally subject to a semantic reworking.

Structural isomorphism is particularly evident in paragrams, where two messages are superimposed and thereby inserted into a single textual structure. It is no coincidence that Julia Kristeva sees paragrams as performing a "centering within the framework of a unitary meaning."^[82] Yet she herself has reduced the possibility of intertextual relations to a three-fold schema: (1) complete negation (complete inversion of meaning); (2) symmetrical negation (the logic of meaning is retained, while crucial nuances are removed); and (3) partial negation (the negation of part of a text).^[83] Clearly, all these patterns become possible only if isomorphic structures are at work, in a dynamic of reciprocal influence. How else could one conceive of "symmetrical" or "partial" negation?

The necessity of a structuring principle within intertextual relations also forces us to confront the question of the "text within the text," which the French have called la construction en abîme (literally, construction in the form of an abyss). The term has been borrowed from the culture of heraldic insignias, where it referred originally to a coat of arms that contained a copy of itself reproduced in a smaller size. It was André Gide who first made this heraldic term current as a constructive principle, whose use he illustrated in pointing to paintings that contain a mirror, the rat-catching scene in Hamlet, or the puppet-theater in Wilhelm Meister. He was referring, in the case of the plays, to the characters theatrically enacting the situation in which they actually found themselves.^[84]

Construction en abîme is marked by a heightened level of structural likeness between the framing text and the text it incorporates. Lucien Dällenbach has noted the similarity between construction en abîme and a phenomenon Claude Lévi-Strauss named the "small-scale model [le modèle reduit ]."^[85]

What Lévi-Strauss had in mind was the reproduction of an existing object on a smaller scale, as, for example, in a painting. This change in proportion has semantic consequences: it gives the copy the qualities of a handmade object and grants the maker the experience of mastering an object, compensating "for the renunciation of its sensory dimensions by allowing for the acquisition of its intelligible dimensions."^[86] At stake is the translation of an object into some other qualitative condition: I would call the "small-scale model" a case of transition from objecthood to representation.

In his analysis of that classic case of construction en abîme, the Velázquez painting Las meninas, with its complex specular construction of space, Michel Foucault came to a similar conclusion: "And representation . . . can offer itself as representation in its pure form."^[87] A text that functions on the basis of a duplication juxtaposes fragments that have been encoded in different ways but carry similar messages, thereby making their encodedness, that is, the fact of representation, all the more palpable. Iurii Lotman has defined this phenomenon as follows: "Duplication is the simplest way of making the code a part of a text's acknowledged structure."^[88]

Ultimately, construction en abîme creates little more than an illusory play of references, constantly emphasizing one and the same thing—the play of codes, the palpability of representation, structural isomorphism, and, behind all of this, the flickering gleam of shifting meanings. To be sure, no reflection is fully accurate, always involving a variation, a transformation that is stressed by the repetition itself. The concrete production of meaning, however, is often the result of a play of reflections and is quickly submerged in this play. We appear to witness the very birth of meaning, and this is an illusion that always somehow accompanies the phenomenon of "pure representation." Existing analyses of cinematic versions of construction en abîme confirm my conclusions: the work of Viacheslav Ivanov or Christian Metz on the subject is entirely devoted to the study of systems of mirroring.^[89]

A typical case of construction en abîme involving quotes (Dällenbach calls this an instance of autotextuality or self-quotation rather than intertextuality) arises when a film displays painterly or graphic forms of representation. These can be seen as a kind of "small-scale model." Sharply differentiated from the texture of the film thanks to the way they are encoded, they seem to flaunt the fact that they are representations.

Let us look at some examples of how this form of quotation generates meaning. In the episode from Godard's Breathless discussed earlier, we are actually shown several paintings: apart from the Renoir poster there are two reproductions from Picasso. One, showing an idyllic young couple, appears at the moment Patricia says, offscreen, "I would like for us to be Romeo and Juliet." The second Picasso appears a little later: it shows a youth with the mask of an old man's face in his hands. As we see it, Michel

says, again offscreen, "It's just like telling the truth when you're playing poker. People think that you're bluffing, and you win."

Both these instances involve a duplication of meaning bordering on tautology. To show a painting of a young couple while someone is speaking of Romeo and Juliet, or the youth with the mask while someone is speaking of deception, adds nothing of substance to what is being said by the actors. And yet by virtue of being juxtaposed alongside quotations from Picasso, these passing comments do seem to gain a certain visibility and weight, acquiring something of the representational character of Picasso's works. In the given instance, meaning is not so much revealed as introduced into a context marked by heightened representativity, where it becomes all the more palpable and unitary for having been repeated. The quotes here function much like a teacher's comments in red ink.

Perhaps to avoid the relative didacticism of mere duplication, the construction en abîme gravitates toward triplication, or reproduction in even greater numbers. In Dreyer's Gertrud (1964), the heroine is tormented by a persistent dream. She dreams that she is naked and being pursued by a pack of dogs. In the same film we see a large Gobelin tapestry showing the naked Diana being torn apart by Acteon's dogs. The dream is thus duplicated by the tapestry. The same motif is also clearly projected onto Gertrude's life. The dream's meaning, as Pascal Bonitzer puts it, is "as transparent as it is lapidary: the dogs are the men to whose desires, as crude simulacra of the love she seeks, she abandons herself and by whom she is torn apart."^[90] The very obviousness of the situation hardly seems to call for duplication, or what Dällenbach calls autotextuality. In fact we are dealing not with a doubling but with a tripling of the same collision in different signifying systems: the words of the heroine and the tapestry. The multiplication of representation becomes analogous to the nagging persistence of dreams. Repetition here imitates the repetition compulsion generated by a trauma that has been repressed into the unconscious. These repetitions do not just reproduce a certain meaning: they point to the presence of a certain repressed semantic kernel whose significance is consistently expressed as other, different, mysterious. Repetition thus simultaneously asserts and denies that meaning is univocal.

Variations in repetition can thus lead simultaneously to a centering and a decentering of meaning. This can happen in more than one way. Let us look at one more example, from The Most Dangerous Game (1932), by Ernest B. Shoedsack and Irving Pichel. This somber Gothic film relates the adventures of two young people, Rainsford and Eva, who are shipwrecked off the shore of an island belonging to the sinister maniac Count Zaroff. The count agrees to release his two unwilling guests if they survive a hunt against them that he himself will lead. Working for the count is a terrifying bearded servant named Ivan. The film begins with a depiction of the door

to Zaroff's castle. A close-up shot shows us the strange knocker to the castle door in the shape of a centaur pierced by an arrow with a young woman, no longer able to resist, in his hands. Then from off-camera we see Rainsford's arm appear, lift the knocker, and knock thrice on the door. The centaur holding the woman in his arms appears again on the Gobelin tapestry that adorns the castle's staircase. This time we clearly notice the similarity between the centaur's face and the servant Ivan's sinister visage. Belaboring the point further, the directors at one point deliberately place Ivan against the tapestry, making him stand immobile until the similarity becomes unavoidable. Not only does the representation of the centaur holding the woman appear twice in the film (on the knocker and on the tapestry); it also establishes a link with one of the film's characters.

The construction en abîme once again becomes triple in character, although it is the tapestry that develops the plot in greatest detail: in the overgrowth we also see the young man who shoots the centaur with an arrow—Rainsford, of course, who will soon emerge victorious in the struggle to save Eva and himself. The triple character of these autotextual relations creates a more complex space of references and reciprocal mirroring, and with it the illusion of semantic depth, here particularly effective thanks to the specific variations in the distribution of motifs.

In a powerful psychoanalytic reading of the film, T. Kuntzel writes: "What is articulated in the very body of the centaur are man and beast, and this mixture, in all its varied forms (savage/civilized, nature/culture, game/hunter), constitutes the film's problematic, the field of its operations."^[91] In this context an autotextual repetition acts to center the film, emphasizing its principal theme without adding anything new. Yet the very image of the centaur, and the mythic layer related to it, allows us to widen the range of the film's references considerably. The figure of the predatory centaur belongs to classical Greek mythology. Centaurs abducted the wives of the Lapithae, the centaur Eurytion tried to abduct the bride of Pirithous, and Nestor attacked Hercules' wife Deianira. Dante placed the centaurs Nessus, Chiron, and Pholus in hell, where they were compelled to pursue sinners in an endless hunt:

Dintorno al fosso vanno a mille a mille
saettando qual anima si svelle
del sangue piú che sua colpa sortille.

(And many thousands wheel around the moat,
their arrows aimed at any soul that thrusts
above the blood more than its guilt allots.)^[92]

The Dante quote alone is enough to give the film an added metaphoric meaning that allows us to reconsider the shipwreck, the menacing swamps on the island, and the very meaning of the hunt.

Yet this is not all. More significant is the fact that this multiplication of representations strips the characters of reality, dissolving them into reflections and symbols. Marc Vernet, in his analysis of the motif of the mystery portrait in film, has concluded that the pictorial duplication of the hero "derives its substance from the real," or, as Lévi-Strauss might have put it, gives it an "intelligible" form. Reality becomes the bearer of a meaning that cannot always itself be formulated. Pascal Bonitzer has rightly observed: "The shot of a painting always provokes a doubling of vision and gives a sense of mystery to the image, a mystery that can be understood in religious terms, or like a detective mystery that has to be solved."^[93] Indeed, what is at stake here is the creation of mystery as such, the affirmation that meaning, as it emerges, is an enigma. Hence the necessity to create doubles and accumulate more and more references. Nor is it a coincidence that the film The Most Dangerous Game effectively combines a criminal case with some kind of religious mystery (if we take into account the reference to Dante).

We discover another kind of construction en abîme in D. W. Griffith's A Drunkard's Reformation (1909), a film we shall have occasion to return to in chapter 2. The film was conceived against the backdrop of a campaign launched toward the end of 1908 by New York's Mayor George McClellan for the moral regeneration of the cinema industry.^[94] It was a true didactic film, intended to show the horrors of alcoholism. In the first scene, we see the head of the family returning home drunk and terrorizing his wife and eight-year-old daughter. He is invited by his daughter to the theater, where he effectively sees the first scene in the film reenacted onstage: a degenerate alcoholic organizes a drunken orgy and then terrorizes his wife and daughter. What he has seen onstage awakens the father's conscience: he goes back home, gives up his drinking habit, and is seen in the film's final episode in an idyllic family reunion by the hearth.

The construction en abîme deployed in the film—the duplication of the plot onstage—was noted at the time of the film's making in a publicity statement released by Biograph studios: "The whole construction of the picture is most novel, showing, as it does, a play within a play."^[95] The specular nature of the "text-within-text" construction is particularly emphasized by the alternating character of the montage, which shifts from the stage to the audience, where the father, in his daughter's embrace, reacts vigorously to the play, pointing his finger at the stage and then at himself, as if to underline the fact that the play and his life are one and the same. This duplication of the plot in a theatrical performance is a classical trope; the repetition gives the film a didactic flavor, whereby the plot is viewed in the mirror of theatrical representation.

The publicity release put out by Biograph contains one highly significant detail. The play-within-the-play seen in the film is said to be an adap-

tation of Zola's L'Assommoir. Of course the general theme of alcoholism is common to the play and Zola's novel. Yet it is hard to believe that the film's viewers would have necessarily identified L'Assommoir as the text behind the play. The film does not acknowledge the novel in its credits, and the plot of the play has little in common with the novel, which has less to do with the decline of the male drunkard (in Zola's novel he is called Coupeau) than with the fall of a woman, Gervaise, herself a heavy drinker as well as a streetwalker who cheats on Coupeau with another man. There is none of this in A Drunkard's Reformation, and the analogue to Gervaise in the play, like the heroine of the film itself, is a pure, innocent, and all-suffering woman fallen victim to a husband in decline.

We might even dismiss the reference to Zola in Biograph's publicity as a simple error were it not for the fact that the whole structure of A Drunkard's Reformation reproduces an entirely analogous construction en abîme in another Zola novel, La Curée. In this novel there is a description of a performance of Phèdre, attended by the story's heroine, Renée, and Maxime, her stepson by her husband's prior marriage, for whom she is consumed by an incestuous passion. The relationship between Renée and Maxime is mirrored by those enacted onstage between Phaedra and Hyppolitus. Moreover this performance, like Griffith's play-within-the-play, imposes an absolute identification between its own protagonists and the heroes of the novel who constitute its audience, leaving Renée deeply shaken. As Théramène is about to begin his monologue onstage, Renée hysterically equates Racine's play with her own life's drama:

The monologue continued interminably. She was in the greenhouse, under the ardent foliage, and she dreamed that her husband was walking in and catching her in the arms of her son. She suffered horribly, losing consciousness, when the last death rattle of Phaedra, repentant and dying in the throes of poison, made her open her eyes once more. The curtain was falling. Would she have the strength to take poison one day? How petty and shameful her drama was, when compared to the ancient epic!^[96]

Griffith's film, we recall, reproduces not only the general structure of the construction en abîme but also the specific nature of the protagonists' reaction to what they see. In La Curée this device is used twice, although with variations. The novel also describes the performance of a series of tableaux vivants based on the amorous exploits of Narcissus and the nymph Echo. This time, however, the actors are Renée and Maxime themselves, who effectively enact their own relationship before a public. The system of mirrors is here reversed. For Zola it was essential that the theatrical performance depict a situation of falsehood, since it was his conviction that the theater, at least in its classical form, was a place of falsehood, in opposition to the naturalist novel: "Here one always has to lie," he observed.^[97] Yet

theatrical representation is not only the repository of falsehood in Zola's novel: it can also expose falsehood and hence assert the truth. A difference in the way the text is coded is thus projected onto the novel's own drama of deception. As will become clearer from my argument in chapter 2, the director Griffith also came to view the theater as a place of falsehood, deceit, and vice. These views, however, would become explicit somewhat later: at this point they appear in a muted way, through the intertextual links we have reconstructed between A Drunkard's Reformation and Zola's La Curée.

With the preceding example, we have seen how the construction en abîme functions. On the one hand, it duplicates the text and thereby emphasizes its message as unambiguously didactic. Meaning is unified and thereby "narrowed." Yet the introduction of a third text (in this case the Zola reference and the parallel construction en abîme in La Curée, which may have given Griffith the idea of inserting a "text-within-a-text" in his own film) acts to undermine the one-dimensionality of the text's didactic content. Meaning is opened up, made more enigmatic, ambiguous, even to the point of being reversed. There is, at the same time, a dissolution of unitary meaning in a form that acquires increasing complexity.

The third text, by layering form on form, helps to overcome the univocal nature of content. For this reason, the third text works in a manner that is diametrically opposed to the second text. Such threefold (and even more complex) constructions en abîme thus simultaneously widen and narrow the range of meaning, creating different potential perspectives in reading. The accumulation of textual doubles impedes the freezing of meaning in specific representational systems, such as theater and painting, even as these very systems are absorbed into the fabric of the film.

The theory of the sign elaborated by Charles Sanders Peirce sheds some light on the work of the "third text." Peirce, we know, asserted that a third element, the interpretant, needs to be added to the traditional dichotomy of sign and object. The third element, for Peirce, was essential to the emergence of meaning as such. This element inserts a difference into the tautology, a difference that allows for the creation of meaning: "Three things east, west and up are required to define the difference between right and left."^[98] In Peirce, the interpretant is a secondary sign created by the representamen in the human mind. It is precisely this secondary sign, when it is joined to the relation between the representamen and the object, that allows for the manipulation of signs, and hence meaning, via the arrangement of signs into chains. Peirce referred the interpretant to the sphere of "pure rhetoric," whose task was to "ascertain the laws by which in every scientific intelligence one sign gives birth to another, and especially one thought brings forth another."^[99]

Paul de Man, departing from Peirce's triadic model, has pointed out that rhetoric considers the "third element" responsible for the creation of

figural meaning, which, when superimposed onto the literal meaning, enters into complex relations with it. This creates a situation in which "it is impossible to decide by grammatical or other linguistic devices which of the two meanings (that can be entirely compatible) prevails. Rhetoric radically suspends logic and opens up vertiginous possibilities of referential aberration."^[100]

This triadic principle has been applied to the problem of intertextuality by Michael Riffaterre, who has suggested that the third text be given the Peircean name of interpretant (in the following quote, T = text, T' = intertext, and I = interpretant): "Intertextuality does not function, and consequently a text is not a text, unless the reading passes from T to T' through I, and the interpretation of the text in the light of the intertext is a function of the interpretant."^[101]

The interpretant is important to us for several reasons. First, it allows us to overcome the notion of the link between text and intertext as the link between the source and its text-successor; the related notions of "borrowing" and "influence" can also be abandoned. Second, it allows us to account far more convincingly for the work that goes into the creation of meaning, with all its displacements and transformations. Third, the interpretant, as the third text in an intertextual triangle, is responsible for the appearance of what Mikhail Bakhtin called "semantic hybrids," which practically all artistic works are to some extent.^[102] Finally, the interpretant allows us to understand how parody works, since the third text usually turns out to be the "distorting mirror" that parodically critiques the structure of the intertext within a text. The interpretant is responsible for the parodic status of a text to the extent that I and T(pr) are unable to affect each other without conflict or contradiction. The residual traces of these contradictions in a text can be seen as parody.

To conclude this chapter, I should like to look at one more film that shows how structural isomorphism between intertextually connected texts can create meaning as an enigma or mystery, and how the interpretant is involved in the creation of this enigma. I am thinking of Orson Welles's Citizen Kane (1941). Let us recall the basic plot: the film begins with the hero, Charles Foster Kane, dying in his castle, Xanadu. His last word before dying is "Rosebud." As Kane dies, a glass ball containing a miniaturized winter landscape drops free of his hand and breaks. The newspaper and newsreel magnate Rawlston orders the journalist Thompson to investigate the meaning of Kane's last word, which he believes to be the key to the dead man's life and personality. The film is a kind of mosaic—and puzzle—made up of the visualized stories about Kane that Thompson hears during the course of his investigation but that finally do not help him get any closer to the secret of Rosebud. The viewer, however, is given the answer. As the film ends, the workers who are burning the accumulated

rubbish from Xanadu throw the sled Kane had as a child into the incinerator. A picture of a rosebud, with a caption provided, adorns the sled.

The film repeatedly insists on the link between the word Rosebud and the glass ball, a children's toy that has apparently hypnotized Kane. The ball is a kind of mirror that duplicates the world and draws the viewer into a construction en abîme. The ball-as-mirror refers us to a visionary space, like the crystal balls used in spiritist seánces or the Salvator Mundi genre of painting, in which a glass ball is meant to provide a vision of the world.^[103] The film itself, however, does make one more explicit reference, to a literary text linked to the motif of vision. Kane's Xanadu naturally recalls Coleridge's poetic fragment "Kubla Khan: Or, a Vision in a Dream," whose first verses are quoted in the film. Kane's very name seems to recall "Khan," and the film is filled with motifs taken from the Coleridge poem. The River Alph (cf. alphabet) becomes the stream of newspapers owned by the press magnate Kane; the singing Abyssinian maid is parodied in the figure of Kane's second wife, a singer by the name of Susan Alexander who performs an "oriental opera" in the film; the construction of the palace out of song and music is reflected in the building of the opera house for Susan; and the paradisial garden surrounding Xanadu is echoed by Kane's gigantic zoo, "the largest private zoo since Noah."

Yet these individual motifs are overshadowed by a more important fact. Coleridge had maintained that the vision of Kubla Khan had appeared to him in a dream induced by opium. Waking, the author had begun to write down his vision, only to be interrupted by a visitor: "And on his return to his room, [he] found, to his no small surprise and mortification, that though he still retained some vague and dim recollection of the general purport of the vision, yet, with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had passed away like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone has been cast, but, alas! without the after restoration of the latter!"^[104] "Kubla Khan" thus appears as an enigma, a mysterious visionary fragment with a conclusion that has been lost forever.

In this sense it is typologically similar in form to Citizen Kane, which is also constructed around an enigmatic vision. In fact Citizen Kane points to yet another work of literature, in a way that is evident if less persistent. Several times during the course of the film, the hypothesis is advanced that Rosebud refers to a woman's name. Rosebud is in fact the name of the heroine of the Dickens novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Since the significance of the name remains a mystery to the very end of the film, the viewer is compelled to seek some basis for including Dickens among the various subtexts of Citizen Kane.

The Dickens novel bears a significant resemblance to both "Kubla Khan" and Citizen Kane. The Mystery of Edwin Drood, like Coleridge's poem, was never completed by its author, and the keys to its investigative mystery

have been lost. The novel also betrays several immediate parallels to the film. Like Citizen Kane, the novel involves an attempt to decipher the hero's last words: there is a scene in which futile attempts are made to unravel the words uttered by an opium smoker during his trance. These opium-induced hallucinations of the hero, Jasper, like Coleridge's visions in his poem, take up a considerable portion of the novel. The novel begins with Jasper taking up the hermeneutic challenge of deciphering an "opium-text": "When any distinct word has been flung into the air, it has had no sense or sequence. Wherefore 'unintelligible!' is again the comment of the watcher."^[105] The enigma of the novel as a whole is mirrored in this passage.

Significantly, the story of the "Abyssinian maid," Susan, is also echoed by Dickens's novel. Kane makes a dogged effort to make a singer out of her. One of these lessons ends with Susan getting hysterical and refusing to sing. Dickens also has Jasper mercilessly hounding Rosebud to sing: "As Jasper watched the pretty lips, and over and again hinted the one note, as though it were a low whisper from himself, the voice became less steady, until all at once a singer broke into a burst of tears, and shrieked out, with her hands over her eyes: 'I can't bear this! I am frightened! Take me away!'"^[106] Clearly, this scene closely parallels the analogous episode in the film.

Interestingly, the entire subplot involving the talentless Susan's compulsory singing lessons also has another literary source—George du Maurier's novel Trilby, in which the hypnotist Svengali lulls the tone-deaf Trilby into a trance and induces her to sing wondrously. One of the novel's crucial scenes involves the wounded Svengali in a theater box, inducing Trilby to sing under hypnosis. When Svengali suddenly loses consciousness, Trilby comes out of her trance and is unable to continue singing. What follows is a complete disaster: "Indeed she had tried to sing 'Ben Bolt,' but had sung it in her old way—as she used to sing it in the quartier latin—the most lamentably grotesque performance ever heard out of a human throat!"^[107]

Kane is also a kind of parodic Svengali—he is convinced that if he succeeds in hypnotizing Susan, then he could also hypnotize others. There is a moment in the film when Kane is in the opera box, casting demonic glances at the unhappy Susan, who emits some grotesque notes: this scene alone allows us to view Trilby as another subtext to Citizen Kane, all the more so since the du Maurier novel also evolves as an enigma that is solved only after Svengali's death. Trilby, then, readily serves as an interpretant, transposing the serious Welles/Coleridge parallel onto a parodic register. Interestingly, Trilby had already been used by Joyce in Ulysses for a similar parodic reversal: in chapter 15, Bloom appears as a fake hypnotist—"Bloom (In Svengali's fur overcoat, with folded arms and Napoleon's forelock frowns in ventriloquial exorcism with piercing eagle glance towards the door").^[108]

In fact any of the texts mentioned here can function as an interpretant, since all of them serve to distort the relations between Citizen Kane and the texts that form its intertextual environment. This distortion is complemented on each occasion by the marked introduction of some element of mystery, a missing key or fragment. Each intertext consistently reproduces the basic enigma of the film as a whole. N. Carroll has observed that "throughout the film, the heterogeneity of Kane's collections continues as an objective correlative ofKane's personhood."^[109] Kane does collect everything, from the sleds he had as a child to Greek and Egyptian statuary. The sheer motleyness of his collection reflects the irreducibility of his personality to any unifying center. As Borges once said, Kane is a "chaos of appearances," a "labyrinth with no center" and hence offering no way out.^[110] Intertexts also enter the composition of Citizen Kane as things from Kane's private collection. Without providing any real resolutions, they intensify the sense of mystery and deepen the film's meaning: this is the real significance of their distorting function as interpretants.

It is also important to note that the labyrinthine nature of intertextuality imbues the structure of the film itself with a paradoxical quality. Kane, that is, a protagonist who exists within the film's diegesis, is responsible for the creation of his own enigma. Yet this enigma quickly leads us to a range of texts that are to varying degrees formally identical to the film itself (and its discourse). All these texts appear to "describe" the fragmentary and unfinished nature of Citizen Kane itself. In other words, Kane as a protagonist of the film is aware not only of his own biography but also of the form that his own biography will take posthumously. Kane knows something of Welles's own discourse. It is for this reason that a character in the film poses a quandary that cannot be resolved from within his own life story. This quandary must be solved by someone who is aware of the posthumous treatment of his biography, someone like the viewer of the film rather than the investigative reporter Thompson. At the end of the film, Thompson nevertheless has the perspicacity to observe that it would not be possible to unlock the "meaning" of Kane just by deciphering the word Rosebud. This statement is immediately followed by a shot of the sled, which solves the puzzle for the viewer.

This solution, revealed only to the viewer, is doubtless partly fictitious. This becomes all the more evident when we consider the tautological, metadescriptive nature of the choice of all three intertexts: all three are "quoted" because they also involve puzzles. The real status of Kane cannot be established if only for the reason that Kane functions here as a character and as an author who knows something about the formal properties of the text that describes him. The discourse about him becomes his own discourse.

Kane's mystery, then, has no solution. The enigmatic literary subtexts serve another purpose. They destroy the clarity of the narrative mode and create a structure that allows for a slippage from the diegetic level (the level of narrative) to the discursive level (the level of the formal organization of the story). (Curiously, Borges was to deploy the poem "Kubla Khan" in an analogous way in his essay "Coleridge's Dream.")^[111] The link between these two levels of the text is established by the literary subtext, or rather by the puzzle involved in intertextual relations that is first posed by the author using Kane's persona and then confirmed by the hermeneutical contest between the viewer and the film's characters (Thompson, Rawlston). In this struggle for meaning, it would appear as if the viewer wins: after all, it is the viewer who sees the sled in the final scene. Nonetheless, the real victory belongs to the characters in the film, since they are the ones who know that there is in fact no real solution.

We have seen that the structure of intertextual relations is largely responsible for the labyrinthine movement of meanings in Citizen Kane, meanings that are never distilled into the text's one final meaning. As these meanings sabotage each other, a bottomless semantic funnel is created, which is typical of all constructions en abîme. The final meaning is displaced in the process of searching for it. The intertext constitutes meaning as the work involved in seeking it. The very dynamic of slippage from the diegetic to the discursive level, as seen in Citizen Kane, plays an important role in this work. When David Gray in Vampyr hears the cry of a baby that is not a part of the sound track, he is in fact hearing a cry that resounds not in Vampyr but out of Virgil's epic. While still situated within his own story, Gray—like Kane—unexpectedly penetrates the intertext in which the film that tells his story has been inserted. In this sense Gray hears (and knows) something that only the director Dreyer could have had access to. The character takes the place of the author.

This shift cannot be simply understood or assimilated: it necessarily creates a puzzle that resists solution. Intertextuality, then, while resolving certain contradictions within the text, at the same time creates others that are in fact irresolvable. The intertext functions as the resolution of some (resolvable) contradictions even as it creates others that are irresolvable. Understanding is thus accompanied by the appearance of a mystery. From this perspective meaning itself can be seen as an act of understanding that is shrouded in mystery.