Textual boundaries

Perhaps we should not call it “intertextuality,” but something like intertextuality is necessary to textual meaning, even at the most basic levels. You cannot read a single sentence without bringing some knowledge of the language to bear on the text. The reader must have information from outside the text if he is going to understand anything. A text (or, better, a text’s author) can mean only as a piece of discourse in a world of discourses.

Move a notch from literal meaning, and the point becomes even more dramatically obvious. Understanding a simile like “the wicked are like chaff” requires not only competence in English but something more. A reader must not only know the literal meaning of “chaff,” but must also know that chaff is light, chaff is waste, chaff is easily blown by the wind, chaff is useless, chaff is . . . . None of this is directly given in the text – and yet it is essential to the text.

Another example: “He’s another Churchill” requires not only competence in English language, but some knowledge of modern English history. Again, information that the text does not provide is absolutely necessary for making sense of the text.

All this to say that textual boundaries, however physically fixed by margins, white spaces, and book covers, are hermeneutically porous.