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meaning does not derive from the chain of events of the surrounding narrative, but from references to an intertext that remains the same for each successive version of the subtext . . . These ungrammaticalities are the most effective and conspicuous, not just because they disturb verisimilitude, but because in a time-oriented context they focus on an unchanging intertextuality, deriving their significance from their reference to an intertext that has no past, no future, no temporality, an image therefore of unchangeable truth . . ." (1990, p. xviii) This other frame of reference is the "intertext," the elusive, never-present text to which the text is connected through those ungrammaticalities which make sense only by reference to the absent intertext. The intertext is not another text, nor a marginal "text within the Text;" it remains as it were the perennial "unconscious" of the text; a path to it may be traced by clues such as ungrammaticalities in the text. |
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18. Riffaterre 1978, p. 12. |
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19. Riffaterre 1978, p. 13. |
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20. How this happens can be illustrated also and by attention to a Mimamsa discussion presupposed by Advaita. PMS I.1.24-5 is devoted to both an establishment of the proper subject matter of Mimamsadharmaand to a preliminary explanation of how dharma is to be known; one adhikarana addresses the problem of how dharma can be the object of language. The objection is that even if individual Vedic words are authoritative, Vedic sentencesgroupings of wordshave no definite, unchanging reference, and so lack authority: "Even if the relationship of word and meaning is original, words cannot be expressive of dharma; for that purpose is not known by means of words." (PMS I.1.24) The siddhanta takes the position that the cohesion of the words into authoritative units is original to the Veda itself, and these larger and smaller units of words cohere with corresponding, always-being-enacted rituals: "On the contrary, they are authoritative, since there is a handing down together of words, already formed prior to use, for the sake of action. This handing down together is the means to the knowledge of that purpose, dharma." (PMS I.1.25) On these sutras, see Clooney 1990 b, pp. 90, 115. |
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A long argument begins here, later formalized as the debate between the Bhatta and Prabhakara schools on the opposing positions of anvitabhidhanavada (the Prabhakara view that the meaning of a sentence is more than the meaning of its words) and abhihitanvayavada (the Bhatta view that the meaning of sentences is constructed out of the meanings of the individual words). At the core of the debate is the issue of how the Veda, in its individual sections related to individual sacrifices, imparts meaning. The purvapaksa is that meaning is accumulated out of component meanings, such that the meanings of sentences are composed of the meanings of the words which comprise that sentence. |
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