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If paratexts fashion and/or act as “airlocks” to texts, what does the text itself look like? The strange merging of synergistic text with “actual” text and the resulting confusion in vocabulary of textuality demand a reappraisal of what a text is and how it works. Roland Barthes famously insisted that the text is always on the move and hence impossible to grasp or to study as a set object. Barthes drew a distinction in this respect between the text and the work. The work, he explains, “can be held in the hand,” whereas “the text is held in language, only exists in the movement of a discourse,” and is “experienced only in an activity of production.”¹¹ One can hold a roll of film or a tape of a television program, but that is the work alone—the text is only experienced in the act of consumption. However, Barthes defines this act of consumption as one of production because no text can be experienced free of the individual reader. In effect, all of us bring to bear an entire reading and life history to any act of textual consumption, so that each one of us will find different resonances in the same text. To offer an exaggerated example, when watching a war film, a person with a family member at war will likely experience a different text than will a second viewer in the middle of a fraternity’s action film marathon. Thus, while the work consists of letters on a page or images on a screen, the text comes alive in the interaction between these letters or images and the reader. The text, as Barthes notes, “decants” the work and “gathers it up as play, activity, production, practice,” thereby asking of its reader “a practical collaboration.”¹² The magic and majesty of art rely upon the individual spark that occurs between work and reader as the reader participates in the birth of the text.

Texts make sense because of our past textual experiences, literacy, and knowledge. At a basic level, for instance, if we are new to a language, we can only decode small parts of anything that we read or hear. But fluency extends beyond mere vocabulary and grammar, to visual, imagistic, and artistic literacy and experience. As such, intertextuality—the inescapable links between texts—creates added meaning. Stories that begin with “Once Upon a Time” immediately signal their fairytale roots for those of us who have heard such stories before. Should we hear a character in a television show demand “a room of my own,” if we have read Virginia Woolf’s famous feminist treatise “A Room of Her Own,” the demand may have added resonance. Or, should we be watching a film in which a hand-held camera is following a character by peering through foliage, a history of watching horror films will likely suggest that the character is being stalked, and that the camera’s “eyes” are those of the predator. Language, images, and texts never come to us in a vacuum; instead, as Valentin Volosinov notes, “The utterance is a social phenomenon,” for each shard of textuality or meaning comes to us in a given context. “Any utterance—the finished, written utterance not excepted—makes response to something and is calculated to be responded to in turn. It is but one link in a continuous chain of speech performances. Each monument carries on the work of its predecessors, polemicizing with them, expecting active, responsive understanding, and anticipating such understanding in return.”¹³ This means not only that texts talk back to and revise other texts, either implicitly or explicitly calling for us to connect their meanings to previous texts, but also that we will always make sense of texts partly through the frames offered by other texts.

Much intertextuality is random, entailing links that an artist could never have predicted. Indeed, much communication is chaotic: change channels from a news item about a rise in local crime to a channel that is advertising home security systems, and the former text may handily intensify the effect of the latter. Or turn from the cannibal-serial-killer film Silence of the Lambs (1991) to a hamburger ad and one may be repulsed. But much intertextuality is intentional too. Michael Riffaterre in particular writes of intertextuality as a means by which writers “guarantee” that readers will come to the same meaning. He argues that all texts rely upon other texts for their meaning and value, so that “the most important component of a literary work of art, and indeed the key to the interpretation of its significance, should be found outside that work, beyond its margins, in the intertext,” the recovery of which “is an imperative and inevitable process.”¹⁴ Riffaterre’s faith in intertextuality as conditioning and guaranteeing the “proper interpretation”¹⁵ is unrealistic, holding out for a world of perfectly informed readers. Similarly, his inability to recognize the disruptive force of invasive or corruptive intertextuality underplays the multiple roles that intertextuality plays in the reading process, as I will discuss shortly. Nevertheless, he is correct to point out the degree to which intertextuality can act both as a constraint upon reading and as a guide for interpretation. Character names, in particular, often offer intertextual “guides” on how to read a text, as do ways of filming, mise-en-scène, generic codes, and the like. Surfing through television channels, then, many of us need only a few seconds, if that, to determine a text’s genre, as many subtle and overt clues—film stock, mode of acting, use of color, rhythm of dialogue, and so on—immediately make sense to us based on our past viewing.

As Michael Iampolski spells out, to understand and to recognize “is to place what you see alongside what you know, alongside what has already been.”¹⁶ Thus our reading of any text is illuminated by potentially thousands of texts that have “already been,” each intertext serving as a different energy source, and the shape and nature of the resulting text for any given individual will depend upon from where the energy comes. If, then, “any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations,”¹⁷ Iampolski (echoing Barthes) notes, “only the viewer or reader can unite the text, using his [sic] cultural memory to make it one.”¹⁸ The text is the consequence of the meeting of work and reader, but each work and each reader will bring multiple intertexts that energize and animate the text.

Such a process risks sounding wholly individual, as indeed all interpretation is open to personal nuances, quirks, and redirections. Within the field of textual studies, Stanley Fish is most notorious for espousing his belief in personalized texts, as his reader response theory allows for readers in theory to imprint any meaning upon a text that they desire. However, Fish argues that in practice, reading and interpretation are limited by context and by “interpretive communities.” “I want to argue for, not against, the normal, the ordinary, the literal, the straightforward [interpretation], and so on,” he notes, “but I want to argue for them as the products of contextual or interpretive circumstances and not as the property of an acontextual language,” so that “the category ‘in the text,’ like ‘the ordinary’ [interpretation], is always full [. . .], but what fills it is not always the same.”¹⁹ To Fish, context determines interpretation, so that, for instance, he recalls the radically different interpretations that two of his classes—one an early English religious poetry class, the other a literary theory class—made of the same string of names on the blackboard. Fish sees interpretation as constrained; the constraints, though, “do not inhere in language but in situations, and because they inhere in situations, the constraints we are always under are not always the same ones.”²⁰ In effect, he crowns context as king, and precisely because context of interpretation will often be shared by others, readings will tend not to be random and wholly individualistic. Rather, Fish proposes the “interpretive community” as the prime filter for reading, a group of similarly minded (or contextualized) individuals whose strategies for interpretation “exist prior to the act of reading and therefore determine the shape of what is read rather than, as is usually assumed, the other way around.”²¹ When a text seemingly has one meaning, to Fish this only means that one interpretive community is dominant, effectively controlling the context of reception, setting the terms by which any reader will approach the text.

Fish’s siren rhetoric is wonderfully seductive, but he is guilty of overstatement. In particular, one is left wondering how interpretive communities form, or how one moves from one to another, if not through language, and if not, therefore, through textuality. His reading schematic is also considerably more acceptable when contemplating a single text; when a singular interpretive community is met with a second text, producing a different meaning, the schematic proves unsuccessful in attributing all meaning to the act of reading alone. Surely texts contribute to their meaning in some way. Nevertheless, having slipped out of Fish’s trap, we could still take away a better appreciation of the utter importance of context, and of how interpretive communities with set reading strategies exert considerable pressure upon the reading process. For all the problems with Fish’s theorization of textuality, therefore, his work still insists that we regard readers as often ready for texts before they encounter them and, not only as individuals but as groups, as predisposed to find or create certain interpretations.

Moreover, if we reintegrate Fish’s interest in context and interpretive communities with a belief in texts as having something to say in and of themselves, we can examine the role that texts and paratexts play in constructing the contexts and interpretive communities that will be activated when interpreting other texts. As such, intertextuality can be directed. Here, Laurent Jenny offers that if, following Ferdinand de Saussure’s linguistics, langue is the system and rules of a language and parole is the given utterance, through intertextuality other texts can create a “super-parole” as the meanings and context-setting apparatus of other texts encircle the text at hand.²² Jenny writes of arguably the most obvious instance of such directed intertextuality: parody. As I have examined elsewhere, parody works as a form of “critical intertextuality” that aims precisely to bump a text or genre’s meaning-making process off its self-declared trajectory.²³ Works such as The Simpsons or South Park (1997–) thus gouge at all manner of traditional family sitcom rules, so that subsequent viewings of Full House (1987–95) or other similar happy-happy sitcoms renders them all the more obviously artificial and saccharine. The Daily Show with Jon Stewart (1999–) and The Colbert Report (2005–) teach a form of news literacy that sets itself up on the perimeter of news discourse, so that subsequent exposure to the news may be recontextualized. In Jenny’s words, the author of such parody works in order “to encircle [the parodic target], to enclose [it] within another discourse, thus rendered more powerful. He [sic] speaks in order to obliterate, to cancel. Or else, patiently, he gainsays in order to go beyond.”²⁴ More than simply speaking to individual viewers, successful parody has also proven remarkably adept at networking and encouraging interpretive communities to build around it.²⁵

Parody is certainly the most overt and flashy instance of directed intertextuality, yet it is a small subset of a much larger universe of texts and paratexts that refer to other texts and, in so doing, set up reading filters and create interpretive communities. For an example of a particularly successful para-/inter-textual network, Tony Bennett and Janet Woollacott offer the case of James Bond, a figure who exists across films, books, merchandise, and ads. Each of these sites of Bond, they note, work as “textual meteorites, highly condensed and materialised chunks of meaning.”²⁶ These meteorites orbit any interaction we might have with another Bond text, so that we approach the text with a sense of who and what Bond is; via the pre-existing para-/inter-textual network of Bond, we will always arrive at any new Bond text with a sense of what to expect, and with the interpretation process already well under way. Bennett and Woollacott see no need to reduce text to context, as does Fish, but they do argue that when texts such as any new Bond film are made sense of by first moving through the dense collection of intertexts and paratexts, we must therefore “rethink the concept of context such that, ultimately, neither text nor context are conceivable as entities separable from one another.”²⁷ In other words, as much as we may still use terms such as “text,” “intertext,” and “paratext” for analytical purposes, in fact intertext and paratext are always constitutive parts of the text itself.