When Is Writing Already Quotation? A Developmental Perspective on a Postmodern Question

Introduction

Postmodern literary-critical thinking introduced into many disciplines in the 1950s and 1960s the quite peculiar, yet intellectually engaging, idea that what is written is always already-quoted. This idea is a logical derivation from the concurrent idea that writing is "prior to history"¹ ; thus, what was written and what is written were simply always there, and someone wrote it long before the reader held the written document in hand. The semiotician Roland Barthes claimed that "Every text, being itself the intertext of another text, belongs to the intertextual, which must not be confused with a text's origins: to search for the 'sources of' and 'influence upon' a work is to satisfy the myth of filiation. The quotations from which a text is constructed are anonymous, irrecoverable, and yet already read: they are quotations without quotation marks."² In a similar vein, the cognitive psychologist David Olson argues that writing may be conceived not as transcription of speech, nor as a completely different mode of expression from speech, but rather as a type of reflexive language that points to itself as language.³ Writing is thus "quotation" that calls for "a distinctive mode of interpretation."⁴ The purpose of this article is to offer some reasons why conceiving of what is written as always already-quoted is likely not accurate as an ontological claim, but it may hold in particular circumstances and at a particular moment in human development. The phrase "already-quoted" will refer to this postmodern notion that entire texts, and components thereof, routinely call attention to their own opacity. Sometimes this opacity is achieved through the writer's use of actual quotation marks, but sometimes the opacity is only in the reader's experience of detecting a phrase or other unit in the text that summons up rather directly a perspective or another text in a way that blocks the transparent referential power that the words might otherwise have.

Quotation and the Questioning of Authority

First, a bit of history. Pierre de la Ramée (also known as Peter Ramus) was a French philosopher and logician whose 1543 tract Dialecticae Partitiones in Latin was the first philosophical work to appear in French (in 1555 under the title Dialectique), and, more pertinently for this discussion of quotation, was one of the first writers to use proto-quotation marks in his writings.⁵ The earlier Latin text "is printed entirely in roman type, except the preface, which is entirely in italics. But in his French Dialectique all citations of foreign texts are distinguished by typography: italics are used for poetry, inverted commas enclose prose."⁶ His motivation, according to Compagnon,⁷ was the desire to bypass the kind of univocal authority suggested by a text in which voices cannot be distinguished from one another, and to point out the status of quoted passages as "reasoned examples or illustrations."⁸ If this was in fact de la Ramée's motivation, one wonders if he would have preferred that his entire text be put in yet a different typographical face in order to suggest that his own words in the text are not authoritative, but, contrary to Barthes's belief, not anonymous, utterly recoverable, and admittedly perspectival in nature.

This detour through publishing history highlights an important difficulty in viewing what is written as always already-quoted: someone has to choose the quotations and arrange them (and, in de la Ramée's case, have the courage to counter the academy and point them out as citations). Is this act of choosing quotations also a quotation of a former chooser of quotations? In de la Ramée's case, obviously not, since he was the first to use different typefaces for different authoritative voices. This is one of the reasons why we cannot conceive of an entire written text as always already derivative. And if not derivative, then, by definition, not quoted. Assembling quotations and gluing them together with argumentation or poetry, as the case may be, is a creative act. This is so even if the words...