This is a screen capture from my first Korean short novel I wrote many years ago. Somehow my macbook didn’t show this text correctly. Some are legible, but some aren’t. There is mixed line-height, somehow it looks neatly connected. This visual capture and partial understanding shows the moment of “layered text”.
Kristeva explains texts in terms of two axes: a horizontal axis connecting the author and reader of a text, and a vertical axis, which connects the text to other texts (Kristeva 1980, 69). Uniting these two axes are shared codes: every text and every reading depends on prior codes. Kristeva declared that ‘every text is from the outset under the jurisdiction of other discourses which impose a universe on it’ (cited in Culler 1981, 105). She argued that rather than confining our attention to the structure of a text we should study its ‘structuration’ (how the structure came into being). This involved siting it ‘within the totality of previous or synchronic texts’ of which it was a ‘transformation’ (Le texte du roman, cited by Coward & Ellis 1977, 52).
Can the text be another graphic to understand the ‘context’ of the layer? Can the writer’s life and writer’s outcome as a writing separated one to another? I need to find more threads of liminality to represent the layered text in the concept.