Article

Name: Mise en abyme in the aspect of intertextuality

Authors: L. E. Muravieva

Research University – Higher School of Economics

Abstract: Modern and postmodern narrative practices offer a wide range of devices providing the intertextual interaction within narrative. A special case of this interaction is the discursive literary practice which creates an effect of interior reduplication in narrative structure, well known as mise en abyme in Western literary criticism and heraldic construction (M. Yampolskiy) or textwithin- a-text (Yu. Lotman) in Russian philology. Mise en abyme is guided by the principle of self-reflexivity in the text: due to this device narrative can reproduce within itself the elements of the story (motives, events, diegetic levels, etc.) or the discourse (the process of its own creation or reception). Despite the fact that mise en abyme evokes a special interest in present-day rhetorical narratology, the figure is practically not studied in the aspect of intertextuality. It can be particularly explained by the fact that, firstly, “mise en abyme – theory” is focused on structural and/or metafictional aspects, secondly, that the interior reduplication is traditionally regarded as a special type of narrative structure. As a result, the links between reduplication and other texts are not taken into consideration. However, all through the XX century the mise en abyme as a principle of narrative and compositional organization of text not only transforms classical narrative model, but also refers to precedent texts by way of reinforcement the expressiveness. In the postmodern literature intertextual potential of mise en abyme draws to a head and begins to be used as a specific way of significance. Postmodern literary tradition gives a great number of examples of self-reflexivity in the texts provided both by the mise en abyme structure and by references to precedent texts (e.g. novels by D. Lessing, M. Cunningham, D. M. Thomas, J. R. Fowles, etc.). The article studies the phenomenon of intertextuality of the mise en abyme – figure and for this purpose it is introduced the notion of the intertextual reduplication. It is proposed to define the intertextual reduplication as a narrative structure, in which an embedding fragment refers both to the embedding narrative and to the other text. The article gives the typology of mises en abyme according to the intertextual criterion. Reduplications are divided into “in-textual” and “intertextual reduplications” which are subdivided in their turn into “self-reduplications” and “reduplications of other texts”. The semiotic mechanism of the last type is detailed in the analysis of “The Hours” by M. Cunningham (1999).

Keywords: mise en abyme, narrative, semiotics, intertextuality, types of signs

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