Mise en abyme in the aspect of intertextuality

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).