According to Bakhtin, carnival humour links degradation with affirmation. It does this by employing an oral humour, one that emphasizes defecation, procreation, and the sequences of birth and death. What the Crow Said and The Studhorse Man link us intertextually to Bakhtinian carnival, since Kroetsch's humour, in its degradatory use of anus and penis, hence defecation and procreation, is essentially carnivalesque. Furthermore, according to Barthes, intertext points the way to the sociality of language just as Bakhtin shows us the sociality of the oral humour of the carnival. Thus, since unravelling an intertext is at least partly an attempt to find the cultural and authorial origins of that text, and since Kroetsch's use of, and interest in, Bakhtinian humour demand of us an intertextual reading of the two novels, the humour of What the Crow Said and The Studhorse Man leads us on a search, through intertext, for the origins of text itself.
