Intertext, subreddits, and Actual Reality

 So the first thing I thought of when reading Jame's Porter's discussion on text interdependencies was Subreddits. No one really knows where the original Reddits came from— probably they go all the way to the cave-painting Reddits of emergent man, and today all that we have are the bickering cat-memes that are obviously a distillation of all those millennias' progress. But as I continued to read I realized Reddit wasn't nearly analogy enough. Hang with me here.

It seems to me that even when Porter links Eliot’s discussion on tradition and ritual as contained in intertext, in the end he stays very much on the surface of what intertext really is. What’s really going on here seems less about a reference to or citation of other individual ‘texts’ (in the broadest sense of that word) so much as describing the fundamental intermixability and crossreferencing texts give their most basic roots: the actual, personal realities behind letters and words. "No text escapes intertext", writes Porter, and goes on to quote Vincent Leitch: “The text is not an anonymous or unified object, but a set of relations with other texts.” This is true, but the connection to other bodies of texts doesn’t really cover the half of it.

So what really is this 'intertext' that Porter describes? It seems to me that it's the references between the words themselves to a middleground of shared reality rather than a shared ‘text’; put another way, the intertext is the middleground, but it’s not referencing itself. It’s referencing our individual experiences.

But let's zoom out and try to define these things deeper. For starters, consider what we each experience. There are doubtlessly differences in each of our respective awarenesses, things we witness and feel from within our personal sensory fishbowls that no one other than ourselves will ever be able to truly know: that deep, intimate feeling with the sky that you get when you summit a mountain and watch a sunrise over a hazed valley; that curled-up coziness when you're wrapped up in blankets next to a snowy window; that rush of giddy bliss when you're almost-drunk and surrounded by others and laughing so hard you can't breathe. All of these descriptions, obviously, are just representations, metaphors— the ‘texts’, if you will. But what they’re trying to reference are not other texts but the actual feelings, the actual flavor of the particular moments of genuine human experience that are yours. What is truly your reality, no one else will ever know it. But we, humankind, following Reddit all the way back to handprints on cave walls, have a desperate urge to try and share these realities regardless, to express these stories of experience in a way that allows, in some determined, desperate fraction, other people to almost-know what our realities feel like alongside us too. We are alone, but we want to believe that we're not; we want to feel connected.

So as a species we create a meeting ground, a pallet of means of expression—music, art, words, the ‘texts’. For the aid of visualization let's call it the 'middlestuff'. It's the stuff outside of your True Reality and outside of my True Reality, but secure in a place that has a vague reference back not to itself/other texts (because what is The Text porter describes if not unnatural black and white words, or pixels, or smears on a canvas?) but instead links back to the True Reality fishbowls of both you and me and all the other humans who have ever left a mark trying to get what’s in them out. The result of all these cross-references to True Realities is that it allows these lifeless ‘texts’ to give us a meeting ground for a tricky, protean kind of mutual understanding. When I say 'tree' and you hear 'tree', we are not thinking of even remotely the same thing, I assure you: oaks, sequoias, acacias, bristlecones—the choices abound. Even if spend a thousand words describing my experience of a tree, by the time it makes it through this 'intertext' to you, it's still not the same as my raw experience. This intertext, this alphabet, this assemblage of metaphor, this thing Vygotsky calls the 'web of meaning', constrains writing, as Porter says. It separates it from reality and turns it into something less. But by constraining it it allows us to universify it, to make it something that is but a pale shadow of raw reality, but a pale shadow that can be felt by somebody else.

One final stab to put this into perspective: think of crazy artists. Ever had a conservative uncle glance at a canvas of Pollock and mumble that he 'doesn't get it'? Ever try to stagger through Joyce's Ulysses at its most nightmarish? This is, perhaps, 'intertext' on the fringe. This is people with raw experience who have to bend the constraints of intertext to the very limits of comprehensibility—and, perhaps to some or even most of us, just beyond it—in order to reach into and represent their experience in a way that they believe is closer to that reality, is what they feel as less constrained.