Illuminations

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.