9 Chapter 9: Analyzing Allusion and Intertextuality

Chapter 9: Analyzing Allusion and Intertextuality

                So far this textbook has insisted that works of fiction should be analyzed as textual units, as externally closed off systems of interrelated meaning-producing structures. And this is true up to a point. However, works of fiction by their very nature are also inescapably related to things existing outside of the texts themselves, to the bodies of cultural production and the historical events that preceded them – and they point to and engage with these external things, especially other texts, repeatedly. Various scholars, perhaps most notably Julia Kristeva, have theorized that cultural texts produce meaning not in isolation, but as nodes within a vast web or system of textuality by way of a phenomenon they dub intertextuality. In other words, texts produce meaning not just as the sum total of their formal meaning-producing structures, but also in their relation to or overlap with other texts. Psychologists use the term “intersubjectivity” to refer to the common, shared mental spaces produced by multiple interrelating thinking beings; “intertextuality” refers to a similar phenomenon that occurs where texts produce spaces of meaning in conjunction with each other.

The most blatant way that texts do this is by way of allusion, a device by which a work of fiction makes reference to another text through repeating language, a character or place name, a plot line, or some other feature of that text, thereby “importing” that text into itself in a manner similar to how a hyperlink works. The text making this allusion thus introduces and plays off of the ideas in the work being alluded to—it “piggybacks” off them if you will. For example, a narrative might include a character named Penelope in an allusion to Odysseus’s wife from Homer’s epic poem The Odyssey, thus evoking her defining characteristic of fidelity even under difficult circumstances. But the figure of Penelope has a “life” beyond The Odyssey and thus makes for a great example of the complexities of allusion and intertextuality. Penelope is also evoked in the penultimate chapter of James Joyce’s Ulysses and associated with the character of Molly Bloom, an earthy, life-affirming, musically inclined character, and Penelope is considerably reconfigured in Margret Atwood’s feminist retelling, The Penelopiad. So a literary figure, trope, or theme can be reworked over time and successive textual incarnations to where there is now a vast and contested terrain of ideas embodied by the figure of Penelope, and an allusion to her will open up with entire field of meanings, not just Homer’s figure of wifely fidelity and suitor-spurning.

Not all allusions are to works of literary genres like the novel and the epic poem. Historical allusions work in the same manner, but they refer to people or events from the historical record. Two of the most common forms of allusion are classical allusion, an allusion to figures from the myths, history, or literature of ancient Greece or Rome, and biblical allusion, an allusion to figures or stories from the bible.

We call a moment in a text an allusion when it seems very clear that another work, especially a well-known one, is being referenced. But there may be vague cases where we can detect resonances of an earlier text that aren’t sharp or blunt enough for us to be able to tell if an allusion is at play. For instance, just because we have a plot line in which a son feels angst over his mother marrying a close associate of his deceased father, is this necessarily an allusion to the play Hamlet? Well, the theory of intertextuality makes this a moot point: if all manner of texts intersect in ways that are at times vague and at times more explicit, we don’t have to have to strictly recourse to the notion of allusion and the idea of intended reference that it implies (remember from chapter 2 the intentional fallacy — how we can’t and shouldn’t read for intention?). Even if the author of this hypothetical example of a work with an angst-ridden son had never read or seen Hamlet, Shakespeare’s play has been so widely read, reworked, and commented upon that it has become diffuse within our culture, and so the author will have been impacted by Hamlet without ever having read it—for example, it could have been a major influence on two or three other works that this author had in fact read and been influenced by. So we don’t have to do the detective work of trying to prove definitively where or not a text is explicitly engaging with an earlier work—if the resonances are there, then we can begin to interpret the significance of the presence of the earlier text within the work at hand, of those spaces of intertextuality that are opened up.

There is a particular genre of fiction that is defined by its form of creative engagement with earlier canonical[1] literary works: creative retellings of these works, often from the perspective of minor characters (like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in Tom Stoppard’s play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead or characters from historically oppressed social groups (like women, in Atwood’s The Penelopiad mentioned above).  These works seek to either explore themes ignored or existing at the margins of the original work or to call into question the politics and assumptions of the original work and the society that gave birth to it—such as in offering the character Friday’s historically silenced indigenous perspective in J.M. Coetzee’s reworking of the Robinson Crusoe story in his novel Foe.

Analyzing for allusion and more subtle forms of intertextuality of course first requires identifying the other text being played off of. If it is a particular character or theme that is being evoked, we have to then ask how the meanings inherent in that character or theme extend, complicate, or qualify the themes being developed by the work of fiction under analysis (note that we can sometimes have ironic allusions to characters that serve to emphasize how unlike the character being alluded to a character in the work at hand is, like a character whose middle name is Hamlet but who is upbeat, totally self-assured, and not given to deep reflection). If we encounter a more general reference to or other form of engagement with an entire work, we then have to ask in what ways the themes being developed in the work under analysis reinforce or challenge themes in the other text being engaged with. Obviously the ideal would be for you to read or have read this other work, but in instances where that isn’t possible, some good internet research or queries to your instructor will help you to develop a sense of what meanings are being borrowed, reworked, or challenged from this other text.

Suggested Short Story Readings to Accompany This Chapter

                Any story that blatantly and extensively develops central themes by way of allusions to another text or texts will work well as an accompaniment to this chapter. Students will find analyzing allusion easier if they are familiar with the text being alluded to, but it of course can be difficult to find a text that a whole diverse class worth of students has read (except for perhaps The Great Gatsby and the Shakespeare plays taught in your region). But while the ideal is for students to have read and grasped the complexities of the text being alluded to, they can make due and get the general idea of allusion by Googling this information or by consulting available scholarly criticism in print or digital form. To teach about the analysis of allusion I often use the short story “The Semplica-Girl Diaries” by George Saunders, whose allusions to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin add layers of nuance and depth to its fictional meditations on the natures of social class and the relationship between developing word producers and Global Northern consumers within the system of capitalist globalization.