Over the holiday break I've done some good reading (though not as much as I would like), including Inkheart, by Cornelia Funk (thank you, Claire!); Lost in Austen, a "create-your-own-Jane-Austen-adventure" by Emma Campbell Webster (thank you, Chloe!) and The Remarkable Case of Dorothy L. Sayers, by Catherine Kenney. Here's a quote from the latter: so far the best and most succinct definition I've ever heard of the intriguing concept known as "intertextuality":
"The dense fabric of allusion in Sayer's novels is similar to that found in much twentieth-century literature, including the more literary versions of the detective story, and is an aspect of what is now fashionably called 'intertextuality.' Perhaps in a time when things fall apart, when the function and future of literature is daily questioned and the alienation of human beings from one another is so severe, texts have to talk to each other to make connections. Perhaps, even worse, in these incoherent times only texts can speak to each other." - From The Remarkable Case of Dorothy Sayers, by Catherine Kenney (Kent State University Press, 1990, page 14)
Upon reading that last sentence I had a vision of the library basement at Duke Divinity School, darkened after hours, and all those thousands of unread books slumbering away with neglect--until one of them whispers, "psst!!"
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Nice comment on intertextuality. I think the Bible itself also bears out the thesis that this happens in times of crisis -- e.g., we get Second Isaiah playing with motifs and metaphors from the Exodus during the Babylonian Exile; Job, facing a personal crisis, parodes Psalm 8 in an early chapter of Job, transforming an assurance of God's presence into a threat of same; the early Christians, facing the "krisis" of the Resurrection, interpret Jesus' suffering and death and raising in terms of the Passover story.
I love the iamge of the books whispering clandestinely to each other. :-)
Interesting: crisis DOES seem to be a motif in intertextuality--perhaps even a precondition for it. Maybe that's why we've got the whole "ancient-future church" thing going on: we've begun to realize that if the contemporary church is to have any meaningful identity it must be in conversation with the past (and this is not the same as conservatism).
The idea of texts talking to one another puts a whole new spin on the concept of "book group," doesn't it? I can just picture a little circle of dusty doctoral dissertations gathering weekly on the third shelf of section P for some scotch...
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