In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine. –Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Reading that this summer, I realized that it must have been from Kundera that Jonathan Safran Foer lifted the title Everything is Illuminated. Bricoleuse that I am, I love discovering these correspondences–I am, like most people, an intertextuality-fiend. Roland Barthes wrote that every new text is “a tissue of past citations.” I feel that metaphor so much: text as textile.I’ve made a habit of collecting quotation-titles. Here’s what I’ve come up with so far:
*Both Joan Didion (Slouching Toward Bethlehem) and Chinua Achebe (Things Fall Apart) drew their book titles from Yeats’s The Second Coming.
*Tender is the Night (F. Scott Fitzgerald) is a quotation from Keats’s Ode to a Nightingale.
*All That Is Solid Melts into Air (Marshall Berman) comes from The Communist Manifesto.
*Lady MacBeth named my favorite contemporary novel with this line: “My hands are of your color, but I shame to wear a heart so white.”
*Faulkner also borrows from MacBeth (though I can’t claim any special relationship with his work–Faulkner is a literary lacuna of mine):
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
In accordance with my citation-fixation, my blog posts often have intertextual titles: “Unpacking My Library” is a nod to Walter Benjamin; “On Going Home,” an allusion to Didion; this post, “Illuminations,” refers both to Benjamin and Rimbaud. Even the title of this blog, Besotted Gleaner, is a dual reference to Susan Sontag’s “besotted aesthete” and good ol’ 19th century social realism:
My own use of intertextuality stems from a deep mistrust of my own thoughts–better to patch together the thoughts of other people than to come up with my own; my appreciation of it comes from intellectual vanity, that flush of pride you feel when you recognize an allusion. (I give myself a mental gold star every time…)
I so rarely get to luxuriate in knowingness.
4 Comments
October 20, 2007 at 6:46 pm
Stephen Ambrose also borrows from Shakespeare (Henry V, specifically), for the title of his book about soldiers in World War II,
“And St. Crispin’s Day shall ne’er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remembered:
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.”
Shakespeare is the source of so many familiar sayings, there are no doubt other titles that derive from his works.
I enjoyed this post very much, and I wonder how many more titles refer to other sources that we have not thought of, or may not know about yet…
October 20, 2007 at 9:33 pm
Oh, word. Good one, lady.
February 9, 2008 at 9:16 pm
Thought of a couple other cross-references:
John Steinbeck borrows the title “Of Mice and Men” from a poem by Robert Burns, in which he says “the best-laid schemes of mice and men go oft awry….”
Steinbeck also borrows the title “The Grapes of Wrath” from “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” by Julia Ward Howe.
There are no doubt many more….
March 8, 2008 at 9:30 pm
Okay, I am admittedly obsessed with this particular post. Thought of another one: The title of the play “A Raisin in the Sun” by Lorraine Hansberry comes from a poem by Langston Hughes, “A Dream Deferred.”
“What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?…..”
I keep looking for literary connections. Thanks for starting me on another tangent….I really needed another one….