The Text within the Text

Translators' note. The first few pages of this essay are not printed here. In this omitted portion Yury Lotman distinguishes between two major functions of texts. The first function is the adequate transmission of information, and the second is the generation of new meanings. The most desirable condition for the first function is the complete overlap of codes between senders and receivers of messages. Since this situation is virtually impossible, an intermediary is developed, which Lotman terms the “text-code.” The text-code, of which the Bible is the most obvious example, serves an interpretive and prescriptive role in the transmission of texts. The traditional linguistic, structural approach to analyzing texts, exemplified by Vladimir Propp's Morphology of the Folktale, often results in the construction of a text-code. The linguistic, structural approach presupposes a closed set or system whose elements can produce an infinite series of texts. In contrast, the second function of texts suggests an immanent, literary approach that attempts to situate texts within the confluence of their contexts, antecedents, and descendants. A text analyzed in its second function will be noted for the heterogeneity of its constituent elements, some of which form “texts within texts.” In the remainder of this essay, presented here in its entirety except for one elision, Lotman develops this approach, which he associates with the work of Mikhail Bakhtin.