Progressive intertextual practice in modern and contemporary literature (routledge studies in contem
Progressive Intertextual Practice In Modern And Contemporary Literature (Routledge Studies in Contemporary Literature) 1st Edition Katherine Ebury
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Progressive Intertextual Practice in Modern and Contemporary Literature
This edited volume aims to reposition intertextuality in relation to recent trends in critical practice. Inspired by the work of Sara Ahmed in particular, our authors explore and reconfigure classic theories of authorship, influence and the text (including those by Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault and Harold Bloom), updating these conversations to include intersectionality specifically, broadly understood to include gendered, racial and other forms of social justice including disability, and the progressive impact of the transmission and transformation of texts. This diverse volume includes discussions of major canonical works such as James Joyce’s Ulysses alongside the recent contemporary literature by authors such as Siri Husvedt and Maggie O’Farrell, as well as theoretical interventions. This volume also engages with how intertextuality can facilitate interdisciplinary and ekphrastic thinking and representation, as the inspiration of music and the visual arts for texts and their transmission is addressed. The choice of intertexts become deliberately political, ethical and artistic signifiers for the authors discussed in this volume, and our contributors are thus enabled to address topics ranging from visual impairment to Shakespearean motherhood to the influence of Jazz culture on writing on the Northern Irish Troubles.
Katherine Ebury is Senior Lecturer in Modern Literature at the University of Sheffield.
Christin M. Mulligan is Adjunct Professor at Saint Joseph’s University.
Routledge Studies in Contemporary Literature
63 Posthumanity in the Anthropocene
Margaret Atwood’s Dystopias
Esther Muñoz‑González
64 The Poetics of Empowerment in David Mitchell’s Novels
Eva‑Maria Windberger
65 Nazi Germany and the Holocaust in Historical Crime Fiction ‘What’s One More Murder?’
Anthony Lake
66 Modern and Contemporary Yorkshire Poetry
Cultural Identities, Political Crises
Kyra Piperides
67 Temporalities in/of Crises in Anglophone Literatures
Edited by Sibylle Baumbach and Birgit Neumann
68 Stephen King and the Uncanny Imaginary
Erin Mercer
69 Postmodern Reading of Contemporary East African Fiction Modernist Dream and the Demise of Culture
Andrew Nyongesa
70 Progressive Intertextual Practice in Modern and Contemporary Literature
Edited by Katherine Ebury and Christin M. Mulligan
For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/Routledge‑ Studies‑in‑Contemporary‑Literature/book‑series/RSCL
Progressive Intertextual Practice in Modern and Contemporary Literature
Edited by Katherine Ebury and Christin M. Mulligan
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Library of Congress Cataloging‑in‑Publication Data
Names: Ebury, Katherine, 1986– editor. | Mulligan, Christin M., editor.
Title: Progressive intertextual practice in modern and contemporary literature / edited by Katherine Ebury and Christin Mulligan.
Description: New York, NY : Routledge, 2024. |
Series: Routledge studies in contemporary literature | Includes bibliographical references and index.|
Identifiers: LCCN 2023055505 | ISBN 9781032578248 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032578279 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003441199 (ebook)
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023055505
ISBN: 9781032578248 (hbk)
ISBN: 9781032578279 (pbk)
ISBN: 9781003441199 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003441199
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HANAWAY‑OAKLEY
4 Grotesque Mat(t)er: Materiality and Matrilineality in Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet (2020)
5 “Yardbird Suite”: Jazz, Double Consciousness, and the Reverberations of the Harlem Renaissance in Stewart Parker’s Pentecost (1987)
MATTHEW FOGARTY
6 Novel Art: The Contemporary Turn towards Ekphrasis
MONIKA GEHLAWAT
Contributors
Ruth Daly is Lecturer in Cultural Studies and Global Creative Industries at the University of Leeds. Working closely with feminist interventions in psychoanalytic theory, feminist literary criticism, and affect theory, her research examines ethical practices of reading in the humanities. More broadly, her research interests include critical and cultural theory, post colonial studies, decolonial theory, and visual culture. Her writing has appeared in Australian Feminist Studies, Images: Journal of Visual and Cultural Studies, symplokē, Leeds African Studies Bulletin, and New Irish Writing. Reading Otherwise: Decolonial Feminisms (with Maya Caspari) will be published by parallax in 2023.
Katherine Ebury is Senior Lecturer in Modern Literature at the University of Sheffield, UK. She is the author of Modernism and Cosmology: Ab surd Lights (2014) and of Modern Literature and the Death Penalty, 1890–1950 (2021) and the co‑editor of Joyce’s Nonfiction Writing: Outside His Jurisfiction (with James Fraser, 2018) and Ethical Cross roads in Literary Modernism (with Matt Fogarty and Bridget English, forthcoming with Clemson UP in 2023). She has written articles and chapters on topics including modernism, science and technology, repre sentations of law and justice, and animal studies.
Matthew Fogarty is the author of Subjectivity and Nationhood in Yeats, Joyce, and Beckett: Nietzschean Constellations (Liverpool UP, 2023). He has published articles in the Irish Gothic Journal, International Yeats Studies, Modern Drama, the James Joyce Quarterly, and the Jour‑ nal of Academic Writing. He is the co‑editor (with Katherine Ebury and Bridget English) of Ethical Crossroads in Literary Modernism (Clemson UP, 2023). His current book project, Identity Politics and the Jazz Aes thetic: Ethnicity, Gender, and Class in Modern Transatlantic Literature, explores how white writers from Britain and Ireland have used and abused the jazz aesthetic to address formative sociopolitical develop ments and complex ethical concerns.
Contributors
Monika Gehlawat is Associate Director of the School of Humanities and Professor of English at the University of Southern Mississippi where she teaches courses on contemporary and world literature, critical theory, and visual art. Her book In Defense of Dialogue (Routledge 2020) con siders Frank O’Hara, James Baldwin, Grace Paley, and Andy Warhol alongside Habermas’ theory of communicative action. She has pub lished essays in Post 45: Peer‑Reviewed, The James Baldwin Review, Contemporary Literature, Literary Imagination, and Word & Image. She also serves as Critic for the Center for Writers and Series Editor for Literary Conversations.
Cleo Hanaway‑Oakley is Lecturer in Liberal Arts and English at the Uni versity of Bristol. Her research focuses on embodiment and the senses in modernist literature and culture. She is the author of James Joyce and the Phenomenology of Film (OUP, 2017) and is currently co‑editing, with Keith Williams, The Edinburgh Companion to James Joyce and the Arts (forthcoming with EUP, in 2024). She served on the executive committee of the British Association for Modernist Studies (BAMS) and was the co‑editor of Modernist Cultures (2019–2023). She is a trustee of the International James Joyce Foundation, an associate research fel low at the Science Museum London, and a member of the management committee for the University of Bristol’s Centre for Health, Humanities and Science.
Philip Miles is Senior Lecturer in Sociology and English Literature at the University of Bedfordshire, UK. The author of Midlife Creativity and Identity: Life into Art (2019), his research emphasises how culture is experienced and understood by individuals and groups in society via narratives of personal value, emotion, variables of geography, and in trinsic sociality and how these criteria may be utilised and maintained in meaningful ways in contemporary life. He retains specific interests in the sociology of literature (including reception studies, life writing, and soci ological late modernism); the study of creativity (philosophy, processes, and spaces); ethnographic methods; and sociological and literary theory.
Christin M. Mulligan is Lecturer at St. Joseph’s University, Philadelphia. She is the author of Geofeminism in Irish and Diasporic Culture: Inti mate Cartographies (2019) and is working on a manuscript on romance and diaspora. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Gender Jus tice and the Law, Literature Interpretation Theory, Flann O’Brien and the Nonhuman, and Hypermedia Joyce Studies.
Orlagh Woods has recently completed her PhD in English Literature at May nooth University. Her dissertation explores representations of moth erhood across a range of 21st‑century adaptations of Shakespeare by
Contributors
prominent female authors including Anne Enright, Jeanette Winterson, and Preti Taneja. While her current work focuses specifically on liter ary adaptation, her wider research interests include stage performance and cinematic adaptation as well as women’s life writing. She has written chapters on topics including representations of voluntary non‑ motherhood in contemporary India and the Emma Rice controversy at the Globe in 2016.
Acknowledgements
This project was conceived during the early days of the COVID‑19 pandemic. We are first and foremost grateful to the contributors for their hard work and solidarity during these difficult times. We believe the won derful work of our contributors will make a clear intervention in both the academic and public understanding of intertextuality and its potential. We are also grateful to our editors at Routledge, Jennifer Abbott and Anita Bhatt, as well as to our anonymous peer reviews for their thoughtful feed back. Finally, we are deeply indebted to the support of family, friends, and colleagues during this process.
Introduction
Katherine Ebury and Christin M. Mulligan
Introduction
This edited volume aims to reposition intertextuality in relation to recent trends in critical practice. Inspired by the work of Sara Ahmed and Kim berlé Crenshaw in particular, our authors explore and reconfigure classic theories of authorship, influence and the text (including those by Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva, and Harold Bloom), updating these conversations to include intersectionality specifically, broadly under stood to include gendered, racial and other forms of social justice includ ing disability. Together, this approach considers the progressive impact of the transmission and transformation of texts. This volume includes chap ters on major canonical works such as James Joyce’s Ulysses alongside recent contemporary literature by authors such as Teju Cole and Mag gie O’Farrell, as well as chapters that offer broader theoretical interven tions. This volume also engages with how intertextuality can facilitate interdisciplinary and ekphrastic thinking and representation, including the inspiration of music and the visual arts for texts and their transmission. The choice of intertexts are deliberately political, ethical and artistic sig nifiers for the authors discussed in this volume, and our contributors are thus enabled to address topics ranging from visual impairment to Shake spearean motherhood to the influence of Jazz culture on writing on the Northern Irish Troubles. This collection of essays thus constitutes a cu‑ rated collection of new research in this area, with our authors sharing a commitment to examine how intertextuality can be innovative, radical and intersectional; we believe the diversity of the collection is a strength that shows how intertextuality can be more central to political and ethical con versations in literary studies across different subdisciplines. Instead of in herently rejecting “tradition”, the writers explored in our chapters choose what and how to reframe and repurpose from other works, as well as what should be jettisoned. We contend that a constellation of associations is de termined by both the author and the hope of a collective audience sharing
Katherine Ebury and Christin M. Mulligan
in the development of an actively progressive, interactive, intersectional or responsive open experience.
Our understanding that the intertextual can be progressive and intersec tional leads to a richer mode of reading. As such, Progressive Intertextual Practice in Modern and Contemporary Literature raises a number of issues from accessibility to gender representation to the very value of art itself and its ethical and political meaning to contemporary writers. In conceiv ing the volume, we were conscious that the concept of intertextuality has lost some of its radical roots, to be discussed in the critical history that follows. “Influence” and “allusion” have a pull towards tradition, and formalist scholars may still conceive of intertextuality as radical. But the concept of intertextuality, which transformed the field in the late 1960s and for some time after, is today sometimes treated as a synonym for the traditional formalist terms which it aimed to undermine and even replace. Intertextuality is often seen as a useful critical tool that is politically and ethically neutral. This introduction aims to reorient both the past critical history and the present use of intertextuality, preparing the way for chap ters that offer case studies of the future use of the term. We will, firstly, reconsider the critical history of intertextuality in the light of the theme of this volume; secondly, we will introduce key theory that informs our un derstanding of the progressive in our critical practice and, finally, address three interrelating themes that underlie the work of the authors in this volume (metaphors, inclusivity, and interdisciplinarity).
A Progressive History of Intertextuality
This volume reconceptualizes our current understanding of intertextu ality by exploring how modern and contemporary authors and readers can use and respond to this technique in progressive, radical and intersec tional ways. This section of the introduction attends to the progressive and radical origins of intertextuality, offering a critical history of the concept that foregrounds these aspects, focusing on the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, Roland Barthes and Julia Kristeva and their subsequent interpreters. Even though Kristeva’s coining of the term dates back to 1966 and it is now a widely used critical tool, the term intertextuality retains, Scarlett Baron suggests, “a sheen of novelty”, as well as a “definitional haziness” (5–6). While Baron has recently traced the origin of the term intertextuality back much further to Darwin’s work on inheritance, the focus of our volume on modern and contemporary literature means that this section will begin with the 1960s and the work of Bakhtin, Barthes and Kristeva. Although Baron believes the concept of intertextuality “requires a longer historical view”, Baron also concedes the relevance of the term is especially intense in our contemporary society:
It is in its emphasis on the fundamental interrelatedness of all textual phenomena that much of intertextuality’s appeal resides: the startling vista it adumbrates is one of boundless connectivity. Such an empha sis is well suited to the outlook and sensibilities of writers and readers located in a globalized, hypertextual, information‑rich world, and this alignment of life and theory, though it postdates the invention of inter textuality by forty years, has doubtless entrenched its position in critical vocabularies. (2)
For Graham Allen too, “Intertextuality seems such a useful term because it foregrounds notions of relationality, interconnectedness and interdepend ence in modern cultural life” (5). Allen also reflects that it is important for each account of intertextuality to reflect on its own ideological back ground: “Every true vision of intertextuality starts with the unmanageable and even unimaginable plural before defining itself (including its ideologi cal stance) in its own particular modes of compression, reduction and con densation” (232). For us, as the editors of the current volume, given we have a specific investment in intertextuality as a progressive concept in modern and contemporary literature, it makes sense to revisit the term’s history in the light of that specific context. Here we draw upon examples of how intertextuality was already working as a radical concept when it was coined, appraising how each theorist or critic deploys within or be yond specific political and ethical frameworks. Allen has been writing about intertextuality for over 20 years and he still suggests that it is impossible to offer “a fundamental definition of the term. Such a project would be doomed to failure” (2). Instead Allen feels it is more achievable to “return to the term’s history and to remind ourselves of how and why it has taken on its current meanings and applications” (2). We will therefore keep our definition brief and anchored in existing schol arship, as well as focused on the aspects of intertextuality that are specific to this volume. Intertextuality, in short, refers to the complex relation ships between one text and other texts which are now taken to be inherent to creativity. Intertextuality differs from older ideas about influence and genetic source hunting in several ways, but perhaps most importantly in not creating a temporal hierarchy of literary authority: earlier texts can be changed by newer ones and more recent texts are not merely belated. As Dennis Cutchins explains,
The word “influence” suggests a one‑way street along which William Shakespeare could influence Leonard Bernstein, Arthur Laurents, and Stephen Sondheim, but denies that these men could ever influence Shakespeare. [Bakhtin’s] notion of interdetermination, on the other hand, and the recognition that all texts, even those written four hundred
Katherine Ebury and Christin M. Mulligan
years ago, are constantly in dialogue with other texts, suggests that West Side Story can have an effect on the meaning of Romeo and Juliet, at least for the person who has experienced both texts. (75)
Gertrude Postl writes that “the term intertextuality now refers to a gen eral interconnectedness and mutual influence among texts, challenging the assumption of a text as unified, independent, self‑enclosed entity” (298). When the concept was first introduced in works by Kristeva in “Word, Dialogue and Novel” (1966) and “The Bounded Text” (1966–1967) and by Barthes in “The Death of the Author” (1967), these theorists explained, respectively, that intertextuality expressed a view of the literary text as “a mosaic of quotations” (66) and “a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centers of culture” (146). Metaphors for intertextuality such as the “mosaic” and the “tissue” proliferate: in the first subsection of this book, Ruth Daly and Philip Miles will work in detail with metaphors for intertextuality, using the idea of the web and the mezzanine, respectively. Hans Bertens explains Barthes’s view in its wider and more radical sense that intertextuality is an effect of language and culture, rather than a delib erate pastiche of materials by an author:
What Barthes has in mind here is not intertextuality in the sense of textual borrowings that derive their effect from our awareness of their sources, but an intertextuality that practically coincides with language itself: we cannot use language without being intertextual, without draw ing on linguistic resources that others have drawn on before us. (186)
Critics such as Christos Hadjiyiannis, Gertrude Postl and Jakob Stougaard‑ Neilsen have recently seen these original writings by Kristeva and Barthes about intertextuality as a model of intertextual practice in their own right, as well as depending on a past avant‑garde practice of fragmenta tion, collage and montage, as well as methods from deconstruction and poststructuralist thought. For example, in assessing Kristeva’s inspiration from the modernist avant‑garde, Hadjiyiannis suggests, “Kristeva finds in the avant‑garde a practice and a process invested with possibilities for creative instability, radical rupture and change”, linking the style of the avant‑garde with its aims to upend bourgeois political and ethical stand ards (277). Postl connects Kristeva’s work and her “crossing of texts in writing”, with her wish to hear minor voices and to create a deeper rela tionship with history and context:
If one were to turn this use of the term “intertextuality” into a blue print for a style of writing, Kristeva’s own texts would qualify. […] Presenting herself not so much as author but as writer/reader (reader/
writer), she allows other texts to speak on their own terms, constructing dialogues or conversations rather than pursuing a streamlined argument from above that subordinates other voices. This practice of what might be called “intertextual writing” succeeds in unearthing in other texts that which has not been explicitly said, producing yet additional layers of meaning. By interconnecting other texts with her own, Kristeva cre ates a multiplicity of intersecting voices that reflect any given political and historical currents as well as the reading/writing experience of their “author”. (302–303)
We will shortly turn more directly to how Kristeva’s theory is able to “re flect any given political and historical currents”, but it is important to acknowledge that she practices what she preaches. Kristeva is not just asserting a theory of intertextuality but modeling how a self‑conscious practice of intertextuality can transform writing: especially of note is the in terconnection of “minor” forms to create something new and the emphasis on the often under‑ or un‑observed features of a perhaps more canonical work. To give just two examples from the many in this volume, Hanaway‑ Oakley emphasizes the experiences of the extremely minor character of the blind stripling in Ulysses in the context of understudied blindness manuals from the era and Woods’s writing about O’Farrell’s novel Hamnet focuses on the historically occluded experiences of Anne Hathaway and Shake speare’s children; the playwright himself only appears by elliptical allu sion, off‑stage for the majority of the novel’s events, as it were. The very invention of history in art and vice versa is the subject of both Woods and Gehlawat, and as Kristeva prescribes, it is possible because the novels they write about take an intertextual form. Similarly, Stougaard‑Neilsen writes that in the case of Barthes,
The montage‑like quality of ‘The Death of the Author’ is not merely a stylistic device fitting its publication format, but a performance of its own attempt to script its theory of unoriginal authorship and practice of a radical intertextuality in which multiple and disjointed discourses flicker as quotations without quotation marks. (282)
As we have touched on already, the origins of the term intertextuality are inherently progressive. Indeed, as Baron has argued, intertextuality’s “con tinental provenance and appertaining politics” is part of what makes it sometimes still controversial in Anglophone contexts today (5–6). Kristeva’s coining of the term intertextuality depended on her understanding of Bakhtin’s theories about the social construction of language through dia logue, as well as his emphasis on the power of heteroglossia to disrupt dominant ideologies. Bakhtin’s concept of dialogue meant that “no work
Katherine Ebury and Christin M. Mulligan
of art is able to stand alone in its meaning, [and this] is for Bakhtin the best, the most human part of any work of art. All texts, finally, depend upon us” (Cutchins, 85). Bakhtin’s work also had a strong sense of history and was well‑adapted to political readings, and as Allen summarizes, “At the heart of Bakhtin’s work is an argument that the dialogic, heteroglot as pects of language are essentially threatening to a unitary, authoritarian and hierarchical conception of society, art and life” (29), so that “Bakhtin’s vi sion concerns a process of constant struggle, a constant unfinished dialogue within specific social situations” (57). These progressive aspects in Bakhtin stand behind the concept of intertextuality as Kristeva claims in a retro spective essay: the term was aimed to be “a way of introducing history into structuralism” and thus increasing the political and ethical implications of her ideas (10). The examples Kristeva gives of where history might be in troduced via intertextuality are themselves progressive in terms of politics and ethics: among many more neutral possible examples, she refers to Mal larmé’s reading in anarchism informing his poem Coup de Dés and Proust’s reading of articles about the Dreyfus Affair as important sources for A la Recherche, concluding that “the post‑structuralist theme of intertextuality also gave birth to an idea that I have been trying to work on ever since […] namely that of the connection between ‘culture’ and ‘revolt’” (10–11). While there are pleasures and questions for the individual subject in her work, as in her thought “plurality, of self as well as of meaning, is seen as the source of liberation and joy”, Kristeva is also deeply invested in collec tive action (55). Her participation in the Tel Quel group also highlights the potentially radical nature of the concept of intertextuality as the work of the group “is understood in Marxist terms as an attack on the commodifi cation of thought and writing” and as “anti‑humanist and anti‑authorial” (32). Similarly, Barthes is explicit about the revolutionary potential of get ting rid of the author‑god and transferring power to the reader, much as a democratic state might emerge from an authoritarian government: he writes that “by refusing to assign a ‘secret’, an ultimate meaning, to the text […] liberates what may be called an anti‑theological activity, an activity that is truly revolutionary since to refuse to fix meaning is, in the end, to refuse God and his hypostases—reason, science, law” (147)
For Kristeva and Barthes, who were both members of Tel Quel, con cepts of intertextuality are used to challenge the bourgeois values that had grown up around the figure of the author. Allen quotes Barthes to show what Barthes admired about Kristeva were her challenges to orthodoxy in thought and speech and, more broadly, to authority:
Julia Kristeva changes the place of things: she always destroys the last prejudice, the one you thought you could be reassured by, could take pride in; what she displaces is the already‑said, the déjà‑dit,
i.e. the instance of the signified, i.e. stupidity; what she subverts is authority – the authority of the monologic science, of filiation. (30)
Bakhtin, Barthes and Kristeva all advocated for active, empowered read ers. The concept of intertextuality creates subjects who are not satisfied with received wisdom, whether in relation to texts, or other people, or a wider culture. Indeed, for Kristeva, “The notion of intertextuality replaces that of intersubjectivity” (66). In short, intertextual writers and readers are more likely to hear minority voices and to disrupt monoglossia––and thus to hold progressive political and ethical views.
While intertextuality would retain its radical expression in feminist and postcolonial criticism, to be discussed in more detail in the next section, soon after Kristeva’s coining of the term we also see a move towards a more neutral interest in intertextuality which treats it as a critical tool among other options, including Harold Bloom’s The Anxi ety of Influence (1973), as well as in early adaptation studies. While Bloom only directly uses the term intertextual once, in the Preface to his study (xxxii), and never refers to Kristeva, Allen notes that Bloom means something deeper in using the word “influence” than the con ventional understanding of the term before Kristeva and Barthes (132). Bloom in fact describes an intertextual vision of writing that partially undermines concepts of authorship and originality: he argues that po etry after Milton is driven by the desire both to imitate great poets and to conceal their debt to past poets through deliberate misreadings. Bloom’s divergence from influence and source hunting is clear in the temporality of his theory, in which the belated new poet can genuinely affect and shape the work of a previous precursor, and in its openness to an understanding of texts as circulating within culture so that an au thor can have an intertextual relationship with the literature that they have not even read (135). However, Allen suggests that Bloom’s theory “is actually a defence against the plurality celebrated by Barthes and Kristeva”, particularly with regard to popular culture (137). Indeed, Gilbert and Gubar responded directly to Bloom in relation to a “patri archal theory of literature” in developing their more radical feminist “writing back” (46–50). Subsequent approaches to intertextuality fol lowing Bloom are not inherently progressive and introduced a diver gence from its origins with the Tel Quel group, which explains some confusion in approaches to intertextuality that continues to exist today. For a sustained and serious engagement with Bloom’s legacy within the framework of the volume, see Miles in Chapter 1. The scholars we have been quoting from in this section have previously acknowledged these progressive aspects of the history of the concept of intertextuality, but no one has yet fully followed up on these insights to form a full perspective
Katherine Ebury and Christin M. Mulligan
on the politics and ethics of intertextuality in the way that the present volume attempts to do, both here in the introduction and in our chap ters. We continue assembling this account in the following section.
Progressive and Intersectional Theory and Criticism
This volume casts fresh light on the ethical and political dynamics that ma terialize in modern and contemporary literature through original readings of texts and contexts. In this section of the introduction, we explore some of the shared theoretical touchstones for the progressive politics found in these chapters in the work of Kimberlé Crenshaw and Sara Ahmed, as well as previous feminist and postcolonial thinkers, which inform the chapters in this volume and create powerful synergies and a strong sense of coher ence between chapters. We will first offer an account of how intertextual ity develops after Kristeva and Barthes in terms of its political and ethical ramifications before turning directly to Crenshaw and Ahmed.
As highlighted in the above section, the origins of intertextuality are pro gressive, especially in their implications for intersubjectivity. Birgit Schippers writes in Julia Kristeva and Feminist Thought in relation to the intersection of Kristeva’s work with contemporary feminist thought that “Dialogism proves central to the Kristevan concept of intertextuality: it indicates the ex istence of another in language and in meaning, paving the way for Kristeva’s theory of an ethics of alterity” (24). While Schippers addresses Kristeva’s ambivalence about first‑wave and second‑wave feminism and holds her to account for the way she appears to keep feminism at a distance, her chap ter on Kristeva’s ethics does touch both on Kristeva’s “attempt to develop a maternal herethics” and “on the ethical dimension of immigration and multiculturalism” (87–88). These aspects are relevant for our new discus sion of intersectionality and the politics of citation in relation to a version of intertextuality that is alive to its progressive potential in relation to gender and race. Despite initial anxieties from feminist and postcolonial scholars and writers about the challenge to the author posed by the work of the Tel Quel group, Stougaard‑Neilsen finds intertextuality a “radical” practice in terms of both style and implications, so that subsequent thinkers in these areas were able to use the concept of intertextuality in order to “continu[e] and modif[y] this deconstruction of the subject and the literary canon in its ‘universalized’ state as significantly Western, white, and male” (282).
The dialogic and heteroglossic power of intertextuality is often put into practice by feminist and postcolonial authors as a means of “writing back” against a previously dominant discourse. A novel like Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), published in the same year as Kristeva’s work on intertextuality, is a key case study for Mita Banerjee’s recent reading of authorship in postcolonial and indigenous contexts. By reimaging Bertha
Mason as Antoinette Cosway, Rhys’s novel is a work of both second‑wave feminist and early postcolonial “writing back”, challenging the attitudes to gender and marriage on display in the original precursor text, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), as well as its imperial attitude to the Carib bean and colonial subjects. This work also points to different directions in scholarship and in literary writing in the late twentieth century, including in novels such as Rhys’s and in theory such as Sandra M. Gilbert’s and Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic (1979) which forms a branch of feminist thought on “writing back”. Similarly, postcolonial critics such as Edward Said in Orientalism (1978) and postcolonial authors such as Salman Rushdie used the technique in Midnight’s Children (1981) were able to “write back” in order to critique the politics of Empire and move on from it. Indeed, the phrase “writing back” was originally coined by Rushdie in 1982 as a pun on Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, so this concept itself has an intertextual history. As Banerjee argues,
the practice of ‘writing back’ may also have profound repercussions for notions of authorship as such. […] There is a sense in which the literary practice of writing back may lead to a doubling of authorship. Each newly emerging postcolonial text that rewrites a canonical novel from the perspective of a colonial subject […] bears an intertextual relation ship to the original work. […] At the same time, it has been argued that for a genuinely postcolonial writing to emerge, the act of ‘writing back’ can only be a first step; unless other forms of engagement follow, the postcolonial author will continue to be mesmerized by her colonial past. (316–317)
Banerjee highlights a need to move on from simpler forms of “writing back”, which might include more complex intertextual models: she dis cusses the indigenous Australian author Kim Scott’s novel Benang (1999) as an example of this. Today “writing back” often depends upon inter textuality, rather than influence, as even where there is a stable precursor text feminist and postcolonial authors and critics are often resisting, and perhaps pastiching, a much wider field of past literature and a whole previ ous mode of thought.
Turning now to the specific progressive ideas which animate our authors, it is important to address Crenshaw and Ahmed. Coined and developed in two landmark essays by Kimberlé Crenshaw from 1989 and 1991, the broad concept of intersectionality was recently redefined by Crenshaw as “a metaphor for understanding the ways that multiple forms of inequality or disadvantage sometimes compound themselves and create obstacles that often are not understood among conventional ways of thinking” (n.pag.).
As Devon W. Carbado, Crenshaw herself, Vickie M. Mays and Barbara
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Tomlinson reflected in 2013 in a retrospective special issue, “Rooted in Black feminism and Critical Race Theory, intersectionality is a method and a disposition, a heuristic and analytic tool” (303), while the concept is “animated by the imperative of social change” (312). Crenshaw defines her theory as “a two‑pronged intervention”, by which she seeks both to “dismantle the instantiations of marginalization that operated within in stitutionalized discourses that legitimized existing power relations” and to criticize how “discourses of resistance could themselves function as sites that produced and legitimized marginalization” (304). Carbado and Crenshaw et al. go on to acknowledge how the concept of intersectional ity has since been expanded to address “a range of issues, social identities, power dynamics, legal and political systems, and discursive structures”, with the conversation “characterized by adaptation, redirection, and con testation” (304). As our work shows with continuous conscientious and conscious adaptation, redirection and contestation, we continue in the spirit of the authors’ insistence that “intersectional analysis or formation is always a work‑in‑progress”, believing that “we should endeavor, on an ongoing basis to move intersectionality to unexplored places” (304–305). It is also important to be alert to the dangers of intersectionality’s radi calism being watered down over time: as we saw with intertextuality, it was aimed to be a radical tool but became more mainstream and politi cally neutral over time. Similarly, as Anna Carastathis argues, we need to overcome some aspects of the “main‑streaming” of intersectional ity which forgets its roots in progressive and radical social movements: “Intersectionality‑as‑challenge urges us to grapple with and overcome our entrenched perceptual‑cognitive habits of essentialism, categorial purity, and segregation” (4). As editors, we were originally inspired by a broad and open account of intersectionality, which also shares some of the em phasis on plurality and social change noted in the above account of the role of intertextuality in the work of the Tel Quel group, to import it into our critical practice for working with intertextuality as a progressive concept, as indicated in Hanaway‑Oakley’s work on disability and Fogarty’s work on race and the Troubles. The authors featured in this volume found this provocation inspiring and responded to our call for essays: here an inter sectional approach is taken to topics beyond race and gender—although race and gender are strongly addressed and the roots of the concept in black feminism is always acknowledged—including disability in particular which appears as theme in several essays. We hope thereby to square the circle of using the term intersectionality respectfully, with knowledge of its origins, but also flexibly in the spirit of keeping the term moving and trans forming in a way that Crenshaw has previously supported. In short, inter textuality and intersectionality have in common a progressive drive and a concern with interrelation and enmeshing, where the individual subject
or text is seen to be part of a much wider field of culture while remaining historically and politically conversant. Thus, this volume demonstrates how effective intersectional histori cal and political conversations become inherently intertextual. For Sara Ahmed “intersectionality is a starting point, the point from which we must proceed if we are to offer an account of how power works” (5). We were similarly inspired by the recent work of Ahmed for our definition of the progressive in relation to intertextuality. In her early monograph, Differ‑ ences That Matter: Feminist Theory and Postmodernism (1998), Ahmed discussed the implications of Barthes’s concept of “the death of the au thor” and found her perspective on the concept was still shaped by an un derstanding that this theory looked different in feminist and postcolonial contexts. As Ahmed expresses her solution to this issue,
While I agree with the critique of the theological principle [of the au thor] within the text, I would also suggest that what is required is a historicization and contextualisation of the author as an embodied sub ject. By opening out the process of writing to the contexts of authorship, such a feminist approach would not de‑limit or resolve the text, but complicate it. (123)
As she subsequently clarifies, “sexual [or racial] difference is both struc tural, delimiting or binding what is possible within a textual relation, and open to being displaced and transformed in the process of being read dif ferently” (128), concluding in relation to postcolonial writing that “the relation between self and writing is an attempt to recognise how race and gender are mutually implicated as differences that matter within the dis cursive formations of authorship” (136). Though she does not directly mention intertextuality, Ahmed’s nuancing of Barthes here may be tak ing her closer to Kristeva’s thought, given that Kristeva’s understanding of intertextuality includes attention to intersubjectivity. While the author for Barthes is dead or irrelevant, Kristeva’s author is much richer and more full of political potential: “a subject in process” and “a subject on trial”, “a carnival, a polyphony, forever contradictory and rebellious” (2010, 10). Additionally, we see here how Ahmed is keen to find a progressive, intersectional response to the concept of “the death of the author” and to intertextuality more broadly, as we are in this volume. While one of Ahmed’s key concepts, “the politics of citation”, might at first seem opposed to Kristeva’s concept of intertextuality and the ideas it initially suggests of a free play of voices, in fact scholars of Kristeva such as Mary Orr have noted “Kristeva’s scrupulousness (unlike Barthes or Der rida for example) in citing and referencing ideas gleaned from elsewhere”, even in the essays that define and explore intertextuality, in particular in
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her use of Bakhtin (26). Kristeva wishes to give voice to other authors and other texts and to treat them as interlocutors: this is part of her progres sive perspective on the concept, even as eventually “prior text materials lose special status by permutation with others in the intertextual exchange because all intertexts are of equal importance in the intertextual process” (28). Orr discusses quotation and citation more directly later, writing that “Despite very different emphases, intertextuality, influence, and imitation all include [quotation] within their aegis and agree on its identification” (130). Due citation, as well as effective placement and reflective response, is part of the “mosaic” effect that Kristeva was seeking in coining the con cept, as well as in her aim to introduce “history into structuralism” by identifying markers that flesh out a historical context. While Kristeva’s work is more scrupulous with citation than the concept of intertextuality might sound at first, Ahmed’s concept of citation is more flexible and less academic than it sounds and often works like a mental library or memory bank which inspires praxis. For example, Ahmed writes,
Citation is feminist memory. Citation is how we acknowledge our debt to those who came before; those who helped us find our way […] A companion text is a text whose company enabled you to proceed on a path less trodden. Such texts might spark a moment of revelation in the midst of an overwhelming proximity; they might share a feeling or give you resources to make sense of something beyond your grasp; companion texts can prompt you to hesitate or to question the direction in which you are going, or they might give you a sense that in going the way you are going, you are not alone. (2017, 15–16)
Ahmed then lists key companion texts for the Living a Feminist Life pro ject, including Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss, Rita Mae Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle and Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye; these texts are allowed to shape both Ahmed’s writing and her ethical and political investments in her broader life (16–17). Ahmed’s ver sion of intertextuality shares some similarities with Jess Mason’s concept of a “mental archive”, a library existing in readers’ memories which they compare other books against, as well as her interest in collective reading practices such as book groups (72). Mason’s monograph offers a cognitive stylistics approach to intertextuality, both in written texts and in spoken discourse. Ahmed also describes transformative feminist activist commu nities in which books are shared and become “spaces of encounter” and “an archive whose fragility gives us responsibility” (2017, 17). This ver sion of intertextuality as a space of encounter is inspiring for the volume as a whole. Although Crenshaw’s and Ahmed’s work inspired the genesis of this collection for us as editors, we are considerate of how each chapter
defines progressive intertextuality for the particular author and case study and how they see its development through modern and contemporary lit eratures by pursuing their own theoretical or historical interest. The pro gressive nature of this volume, both ethically and politically, for us, means that we would rather allow our authors room to discern for themselves rather than drawing strict boundaries, which, to our minds, go against the nature of how they describe the development of the intertextual, and its progressive impact, in their works. So far, we have introduced a progres sive account of intertextuality and offered some strands that have shaped our understanding of the progressive, in what remains of the introduction we introduce the volume’s structure and the work of our authors. The essays are gathered under the rubrics of “metaphors”, “inclusivity” and “interdisciplinarity”, yet even as individual contributions emphasize each of these focal points, they each advance the book’s organizing argument by demonstrating the progressive power of intertextuality in the modern and contemporary literature.
Metaphors for Progressive Intertextuality
In an earlier section of the introduction we explored past concepts linked with intertextuality from theory and criticism on the topic including as mosaic (in Kristeva), as dialogue (in Bakhtin) and as tissue and weave (in Barthes). This opening section of this volume develops by adding meta phors to a conversation about intertextuality which aims to revivify the concept and to see it in a progressive light: the first metaphor from one of our authors is that of the ‘mezzanine’ as an intertextual space within the mind of the artist (Miles), while the second metaphor is of intertextual ity as a web (Daly), which is related to Barthes’s ideas but distinct from it in its ethical and political commitments. The web metaphor, develop ing Barthes’s idea of the weave, was, as Allen points out, first used by Nancy K. Miller in 1988 in Subject to Change: Reading Feminist Writing (152–153). This feminist criticism of the concept of intertextuality as ap plied to women was an early form of a progressive approach to intertextu ality as Miller aimed to reverse the effacing of women in Barthes’s theory by pointing out how these metaphors of weave and tissue have historically depended on women’s work. Miller also recuperated the mythological fig ure of Arachne as a metaphor for women’s status outside the dominant discourse of signification.
The first chapter in this section, and in the volume as a whole, is Philip Miles’s “Authorship, the ‘mezzanine’, and late‑modern anxiety: the ‘metaphysics’ of the creative writing process” where he introduces a new metaphor for intertextuality, that of “the mezzanine”, which allows him to explore progressive and intersectional aspects of creativity. Miles’s
Katherine Ebury and Christin M. Mulligan
chapter draws on past original ethnographic research which focussed on the routines of creativity amongst musicians, artists and literary authors with additional focus on locations of creative practice. Miles’s intellectual focus here will relate to a process that he conceptualized as “the mezza nine”, a psychological, liminal/transient “state” experienced by either an author or a reader when encountering the development, or consumption, of text. In this chapter, the utilization of the concept will apply to authorial intention (and lack of reader control on associative interpretation) in the works of contemporary authors to observe how the mezzanine is governed by incongruous thought and an unconscious sense of destiny—thus, the creating individual cannot be sure where the “action” of creativity is fated, or even if the action itself will emerge, let alone conceive of preordained forces of influence as shaping the flow of words that could not have “ever existed before”.
The other chapter in this section is Ruth Daly’s theoretical intervention, “De‑disciplining criticism: refiguring reading as a mode of response‑ability”, which examines how thinking intertextuality in terms of progressive and intersectional practice may provide conceptual resources for the formula tion of reading practices that allow de‑ phallicizing, de‑disciplining and de‑colonizing the study of texts as living bodies. This inquiry focuses on readings which acknowledge lived histories and experiences that are mate rially inscribed in texts rather than readings focused on the classification of ideas, theories, tendencies or debates. Reframing intertextuality as a mode of intersectional engagement, Daly argues, foregrounds profoundly ethi cal, if not political, dimensions of reading, which are at risk of becoming further entangled within traditional disciplining structures in which read ing is at risk of collapsing into a master/object relation. Such dimensions— lived relations of negotiation through shared systems of support, love and hospitality as exemplified by the various texts Daly brings into conversa tion using écriture féminine—lead to an unstitching of notions of a single story, challenging traditional epistemologies.
Progressive Intertextuality and Inclusivity
The chapters in the middle section of this volume have in common an emphasis on intertextuality in relation to the progressive value of various kinds of inclusivity: the chapters offer new perspectives on how marginal identities including the blind man and the witch might be better repre sented through the use of intertextual techniques. Earlier in the introduc tion we explored how Kristeva claimed, “The notion of intertextuality replaces that of intersubjectivity” and we added to this an understanding of how this principle could lead readers and writers to disrupt monoglossia and to understand difference (66). These chapters are a key expression of
that potential within this volume. In her response to Barthes in Differences That Matter, Ahmed is particularly concerned about the effacing of the body and identity within the concept of “the death of the author”, which would be especially problematic in relation to gender, race and sexuality but also in relation to illness and disability: “The loss of a specific body, a specific figure which is writing and written into the body of writing, suggests that, within the context of Barthes’s piece, writing is written by no‑body, no‑body who is identified as subject of body” (1998, 122–123)
Ahmed later writes that “intersectionality is messy and embodied” (2017, 119). The authors feature a concern with progressive intertextual ity in relation to mind and body and use disability studies and medical humanities approaches in considering how modern and contemporary de pictions of mind and body are caught up in intertextuality but they are not afraid to sometimes critique these methods or to supplement them with other techniques and approaches. Each author is particularly alive to the power of returning to past scholarship, by biographers of James Joyce and by William Shakespeare or by literary theorists, and offering a significant revision, often led by a consciousness of the progressive power of intertex tuality, which can help us view texts and subjects more sensitively and can potentially help us to be more inclusive in our daily life.
The first essay in this section, Cleo Hanaway‑Oakley’s “The Blind as Seen through Blind Eyes: An Intertextual Approach to Visual Impairment in James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922)” uses a disability studies approach in order to consider the progressive value of intertextuality. By reading James Joyce’s depiction of the “blind stripling” in Ulysses alongside fin de siècle Parisian blindness memoirs and manuals, this chapter will bring the phenomenol ogy of the body—via authors’ lived experiences of visual impairment— into productive dialogue with Joyce’s text, to offer a multi‑focal approach to non‑normative eyesight. Hanaway‑Oakley proposes that the origin of the “blind stripling”—who is encountered by Bloom in the “Lestrygoni ans” episode of Ulysses—lies, partly at least, in Joyce’s interest in blindness memoirs and manuals. By reading Joyce’s text alongside texts written by people with visual impairments for people with visual impairments includ ing Les Aveugles par un Aveugle (The Blind as Seen through Blind Eyes) by Maurice de la Sizeranne (1889) and The Blind Man’s World: Advice to People Who Have Recently Lost Their Sight (1903 in French; translated into English in 1904), Hanaway‑Oakley is able to offer a new perspective that builds upon, and goes beyond, insights provided by genetic, disability studies and biography‑focused approaches.
The next essay in this section, Orlagh Woods’s “‘This creature, this woman, this elf, this sorceress, this forest sprite’: Negotiating Authorship and Reconfiguring Motherhood in Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet (2020)” draws on fields of motherhood studies and adaptation studies in search
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of a progressive intertextuality. Woods argues that the recent feminist mobilizations of the grotesque can provide a productive framework through which to read a recent novelization of Shakespeare that foregrounds moth erhood. The process of adapting a dramatic text into the novel form creates space to explore the hidden voices of marginalized or subtextual charac ters that can contribute to the diversification of Shakespeare. O’Farrell’s Hamnet (2020) builds upon scholarly speculations that the death of Shake speare’s young son in 1596 inspired the play. Significantly, O’Farrell de thrones Shakespeare in the narrative and instead breathes new life into the maligned figure of Anne Hathaway. While disparaging Shakespeare biog raphers have condemned Anne Hathaway’s illiteracy, O’Farrell reinscribes her character Agnes, who stands for Anne, with an exhaustive knowledge of pharmacology that affords her an alternative, matrilineal intellectual lin eage that is often denied by historical and biographical accounts.
Progressive Intertextuality and Interdisciplinarity
This part of the introduction considers intertextuality in the context of interdisciplinary and ekphrastic thinking and representation, preparing for the final section of the volume which considers this specifically. Intertex tuality as it emerged in the Tel Quel milieu was immediately interdiscipli nary: as Postl reflects, “Tel Quel’s appeal for Kristeva – apart from personal affiliations – was its focus on the intersection of literature, politics and phi losophy which she expanded with the areas of linguistics and semiotics” (297), while Orr has previously claimed that Kristeva’s work was substan tially more interdisciplinary than the research of her peers at Tel Quel (23). Allen’s work has been essential in exploring the relevance of intertextual ity for other art forms, inspiring us to include this section in the volume: for Allen, intertextuality “is a term by no means exclusively related to literary works, or even simply to written communication” and “has been adapted by critics of non‑literary art forms such as painting, music and architecture” (5). Allen concludes that “intertextuality can often radically challenge established accounts of non‑literary art forms” (171). Allen uses postmodernism as a lens for interpreting an implicitly progressive role for intertextuality and interdisciplinarity as he is particularly interested in pas tiche and parody in postmodernism and whether there can be resistance to cultural norms through these intertextual techniques (176).
Another relevant term for this section is the concept of “intermedial ity” and its relation to intertextuality: while some scholars are happy to use intertextuality more or less interchangeably with intermediality, other critics may wish to use intermediality only when there is a clear jump in medium (220). For Irina O. Rajewsky, intermediality is further divided between three subcategories: medial transposition (film adaptations or
Another random document with no related content on Scribd:
THE next day Percival was moved to a house in Portland Place, in which my aunt, Lady Mar, resided. Every comfort was provided to make the little journey as easy as possible to one who could not even be carried downstairs without enduring a good deal of pain.
I took upon myself the care of arrangements for the removal of the very little property which my poor friend possessed. A few books, and clothes; a desk; materials for painting; a palette; and some dozen unframed pictures— comprised almost all that Percival owned in the world. He lay on his couch, watching my movements, as I wrapped up his pictures one by one.
"This one does not tell its own story," I observed.
"It illustrates the Legend of a sketch, which I made a short time ago; but I did not think it worth writing down," said my friend.
"I hope that at some leisure time you will repeat it: Lady Mar has a weakness for Legends. But here comes your landlady to bid you a tearful farewell: and Polly too; belikes in hope of a present, which she does not deserve."
Whether merited or not, the present was given; and a kindly good-bye was said to each of the women. Mrs. Bond declared that she had never had such a nice-spoken gentleman for a lodger—never! That she had done all for him that a mother could have done for a son; and that it was hard to have him go away and leave her. Polly was not so eloquent; but I forgave her the broken pane, and her little tempers, when I saw tears of genuine sorrow running down the poor girl's cheeks. Both mistress and servant felt that they would never look again on the pale, patient face of the lodger.
Percival was soon installed in his new, and comparatively luxurious, abode; but its comforts could only alleviate, not remove pain. He sometimes enjoyed conversation with my aunt, who is a very intelligent woman; yet at other times relaxed into greater languor, and did not care to touch his pencil.
Both Lady Mar and I more than once asked Percival to repeat to us his legend of the sketch, but he always evaded doing so.
"The story was too childish; too slight a thing for repetition to any one but a child," he said, a faint colour tinging his cheek. Percival was evidently shy in the presence of a lady.
My aunt, however, is one possessing tact to draw out those under her influence, and make them unconsciously follow her lead. She saw that Percival's spirits were drooping; and that, perhaps from fearing her critical eye, even his inclination to paint was passing away. Lady Mar noticed that her guest could hardly affect cheerfulness, though he manfully struggled to do so.
"My eyes are tired, and the daylight is fading," said my aunt one afternoon, laying down a book with which she had been vainly trying to amuse my poor friend. "The piano cannot be touched till after the visit of the tuner. We will not ring for candles yet; it is so pleasant to chat by twilight."
"Suppose we tell each other stories or legends," I suggested.
"If you begin, I'll try to follow suit," said my aunt; "and I'm sure that Percival—" (for the first time she dropped the "Mr.") "will not refuse his little contribution to the general amusement."
Percival was silent, but I saw that one point was gained: the invalid would try to forget languor and suffering in the attempt to give a few minutes' passing amusement to his friends, if others broke the ice.
I had a short Legend ready, and not being troubled with shyness, began the story which follows. I fear that it is not quite original: certainly its lesson has been often taught; but not perhaps in just the same form as in my little narration.
Legend of a Self-made Grave.
It is said that in olden times, a man very covetous of gain, was tempted to make a compact with a spirit, who was not a spirit of light. In Oriental language, such a mythical being is called a "jin." Some service secretly rendered by the miser to the jin was to be rewarded by the gift of untold wealth.
The jin carried the man to a lonely spot near a dark, weedovergrown morass, a place seldom visited by men, save some poor basket-makers, who went to gather reeds and rushes. The place was said to be haunted by snakes and other vermin. The miser, according to the jin's directions, had brought with him a heavy spade for digging, and a large sack to contain his gold.
"In this spot," quoth the jin, striking the earth with his foot, "thou shall find inexhaustible treasure. Only one limit is affixed to thy gains. When thou dost cease to dig, thou shalt cease to find." As he thus spake, the jin vanished from sight.
The man took his spade, plied it vigorously, and with wondrous success. First, silver coins; then, heavy gold ones —plentifully rewarded his toil. The miser never raised his eyes from the earth except ever and anon to glance timidly around, while his hand still used the spade, to see if any unwelcome intruder were watching him at his work. But no one interrupted him. The man's work was begun at dawn; he continued to dig at noon when the sun's fiercest rays blazed over his head, drawing up foul exhalations from the marsh. The digger dared not seek for shelter, lest his golden harvest should suddenly come to an end. His muscles ached; his mouth was parched with thirst: but the goldseeker, though shining heaps lay around him, would not pause even to go for a draught of water.
As the sun sloped towards the west, strong fever came on the digger; but though already possessed of prodigious wealth, still he went on digging. At last, as night closed in, shivering and trembling, the miser felt that he must give over work: deep and long was the hole he had made by his diligent toil; large the golden harvest he had won. Yet was he loth to stay his hand, for the man remembered the words of the jin: "When thou dost cease to dig thou shalt cease to find."
"Just one spadeful more!" cried the miser. And stooping low, with his tool in his hand, over the hole made by his incessant labour, the poor wretch's senses failed him; he swooned, and fell into a self-made grave! The loose earth fell in from the sides and covered the wealthy fool!
The basket-makers who chanced to come in the morning gathered up the heaps of silver and gold which were found near the spot, beneath which lay the corpse of him who had purchased them with his life.
CHAPTER VII.
The Three "Bihistis."
"I AM afraid that your miser has many prototypes in real life," observed Percival, when I paused. "Many a man has sold his life for gold."
"And his soul also," said Lady Mar. "How few realize the depth of truth contained in the lines:"
"'The greatest evil we can fear Is—to possess our portion here!'"
After a little more conversation on the subject, Lady Mar was called upon for her story, which she thus began:
"I suppose that I need hardly preface my little tale by telling you what bihistis are—Oriental water-carriers, bending beneath the weight of their mushaks (skins filled with water): these have been made so familiar by pictures, even to those who have never been, like myself, in India."
"I knew nothing about mushaks in my boyhood," observed Percival; "so our Lord's words about old and new bottles were to me an insoluble puzzle; until some one in a Bibleclass mentioned that Eastern bottles were skins, of which old, worn ones would be liable to burst if filled with new, fermenting wine."
"What does the word bihisti mean?" I enquired. "Probably it is some combination of 'carry' and 'water.'"
"No, the title is a curious one," replied Lady Mar, "and conveys a poetical idea."
"Bihisti means 'one of Paradise,' and is probably given to the humble supplier of one of our first blessings, from water being regarded in the East as emphatically 'the gift of God.' 'Bihisti' is a beautiful name bestowed on an honest, hardworking class, who bear a heavy burden, in order to relieve the thirst of others in a dry and weary land."
"These bihistis are often seen in India filling their mushaks at a well, or pouring water from them at railway stations when the train stops for a few minutes. Bihistis enter even the guarded zenanas to perform their needful task of filling earthen jars; though the appearance of the poor watercarrier sometimes causes a stampede amongst the ladies."
"I was startled once, when showing my album to several bibis,* by their suddenly springing to their feet and running away, leaving me alone to encounter the danger, whatever it might be. Was it a mad dog or a tiger that had entered
the zenana? No; only a quiet, sober-looking bihisti, with his eyes on the ground, and his burden on his back, and his hand on the mouth of his mushak, to guide its contents into the jars placed ready to receive them."
* Ladies.
"And now for my story."
"Outside a serai (native inn) sat in the moonlight four men, smoking their hookahs, and having one of those long talks which natives of the East delight in, and sometimes prolong far into the night. One of the most striking figures in the group was that of a venerable Sikh, whose hair and beard, never touched by razor, were now of silvery whiteness. The other men were of various nationalities, but used Urdu as a tongue common to all."
"The first speaker, a Persian, was giving a flowery account of his own country, which none of the others had ever seen. Such horses, such fruits, such cities, he described—that to hear him, one might think that Persia, of all the lands of earth, was the most beautiful and most blest."
"And our men are unmatched for size and strength," pursued the speaker, using a good deal of gesticulation. "I am one of a family of ten sons; and not one of my brothers but is taller and stronger than I am. What would you say to our bihisti? He is some eight feet in height, and carries a mushak made of the hide of an ox, which, when full, five of your ordinary men could not lift!"
"Wah! Wah!" exclaimed the listeners.
The sage old Sikh rather incredulously shook his head, and muttered, "I should like to see such a bihisti."
Then spake a fine tall Afghan. "I could tell you of a bihisti," he said, "compared to whom your bihisti is but an emmet. I know one who can carry a mushak big as a mountain, and white as the snows on the Himalayas. This water-carrier can travel thousands of miles without stopping or feeling weary, sometimes whistling, and sometimes howling as he goes."
"Wah! Wah!" cried those around him.
But the Persian rather angrily said, "I will never believe such a pack of lies!"
"Oh, brother," said the old Sikh smiling, "there is more truth in the Afghan's tale than in thine. Look yonder," he continued, as a white cloud passed over the face of the moon, "and listen to the rushing blast which is shaking the leaves of yon palms. The wind is the mighty bihisti whom the great Creator employs to bear swiftly the huge white mushaks which convey His gift of rain. The words of the Pathan are not the words of folly."
"Thou art wise, O father!" said the youngest man in the group, who had hitherto spoken but little. "Now listen whilst I tell of a third bihisti; not tall like the first, nor strong like the second, but bearing a more wonderful mushak than either. This mushak is small, not longer than my hand; it is very old too, and it is carried by a very feeble man."
"Useless! Good for nothing!" exclaimed the Persian.
"Listen before you say so. In this mushak is water of such wonderful virtue, that if but a few drops fall on good soil, a spring of surpassing sweetness bursts forth, sometimes spreading and spreading: till first a brook; then a wide
stream; then a glorious river—appears. The most learned cannot calculate, nor ages on ages limit, the effects of a few living drops from that blessed mushak!"
The Persian and Afghan uttered exclamations of surprise; but a thoughtful inquiring look was on the face of the aged Sikh.
"Where can that mushak be seen?" he enquired.
"Here," replied the Bengali; and he drew a Bible from his vest. "This book contains the Word of God; and its contents, when received with faith, are spirit and life."
"It is the Christian's Scriptures," said the old Sikh, raising his hand to his brow in token of respect.
"Let me pour forth some drops of the living water," said the native evangelist; "as the moonlight is so bright that I can, by it, read a little from the pages which I know and love so well."
No one made any objection: the Persian listened with curiosity, and the Afghan with some attention; but it was on the old Sikh that the holy words fell like the rain from Heaven. This was not the first time that he had drunk from the precious mushak of inspired Truth, and its water became to him as a stream of life which should never fail him till time should be lost in eternity.
CHAPTER VIII.
The Legend of the Shekel.
"IT is your turn now, Percival," said my aunt.
"Give us the Legend of the Shekel," I rejoined. "It is getting too dark to examine your picture: but I remember it well. It represents a man, apparently a poor one, clad in a common Jewish dress. He is gazing, with wonder and delight, at some silver coin, which he holds in his brown wrinkled palm. I have been trying in vain to recall any incident in Scripture which would correspond with the picture."
"Surely," said my aunt, "Percival must have represented St. Peter with the money found in the mouth of the fish."
"I thought of that at first," I observed. "But the man in the picture, thin and weak in appearance, does not at all suit our idea of a hardy fisherman: he looks more like a wornout mechanic. Percival, you must tell us what meaning you intended to convey."
Percival. The shekel is meant for that brought by the fish; but the man in the picture is certainly not the Apostle.
Lady Mar. For whom then is this figure intended?
Percival as his reply repeated the following legend. I wrote it down afterwards from memory, as it was not to be found amongst the papers left by my friend.
The Legend of the Shekel.
When St. Peter, in obedience to the Master's command, had cast a hook into the sea, and drawn forth a fish in whose mouth he found a shekel, with which to pay the Temple tribute, his soul was filled with wonder. How had that piece of silver come into the mouth of the quivering, struggling creature, whose habitation had been the deep waters?
That silvery fish had, in some most mysterious manner, obeyed the behest of its Creator; and St. Peter resolved to restore the wounded creature to its native element.
"I will not take the life of the dumb fish that has ministered to the Master's need," thought Peter, as he cast it back into the water. For a moment, the shining scales glittered in the sunlight, then disappeared under the waves.
The shekel was duly paid into the Temple treasury as the tribute-money contributed by the Lord and His apostle.
In that treasury, under the care of the avaricious and worldly priests, the money remained for awhile. They saw in it nothing remarkable; it was merely, to them, a bright, newly-coined piece of silver, resembling, in everything but its freshness, the thousands of shekels that passed through their hands.
At last, for some needful work done in the Temple, the shekel was paid out to a poor artisan, who thought at first that it had been hardly earned by the labour of several days.
Michael, however, took the shekel without a murmur from the hand of a pampered priest, who seemed almost to grudge the workman his well-earned hire. Michael turned from the door of the Temple, which had become a den of thieves; made his way amongst bleating flocks; passed the gate of the money-changers; and would have turned his shekel into smaller coin, had not conscience hindered the pious Jew from doing any worldly business in precincts so holy.
"I will change my shekel elsewhere," said Michael to himself; "though I am a little loth to part with one which looks so unsullied by the touch of man."
Looking down at the money in his hand, Michael was amazed to behold on it in letters distinct as if fresh from a dye, but extremely minute, the first verse of the book of Psalms.
With wonder and delight Michael gazed on the marvellous coin; and as he gazed his wonder increased. The words melted away before his eyes; but no blank remained on the
miraculous silver. The second verse of the Psalm had succeeded the first; and this, in a few seconds, was followed by the third: and so on to the end of the Psalm. The shining shekel, won from the sea, was like a roll of the Holy Scriptures—Psalm after Psalm, in regular progression, appearing on the small bright disc.
"Oh, marvellous! Most marvellous and blessed shekel!" exclaimed the enraptured Michael. "Possessed of thee, I am the owner of inestimable wealth! I would not part with thee for a thousand pieces of gold."
Michael saw a learned Scribe advancing towards him; and, eager to know more of the nature of a thing of such miraculous virtue, the artisan ran towards the interpreter of the law, and eagerly showed him the piece of silver.
"What is this wonderful coin?" exclaimed Michael.
The Levite examined it, and a look of contempt came on his face. "Fool, have you never seen a shekel before?" he enquired.
"Never such a one as this!" cried Michael.
"It is like any other shekel," said the Levite scornfully, and he tossed it down in the dust.
It was only the eye of Faith that saw any special value, in that which a miracle had produced.
"Did my eyes deceive me when I read verse after verse of God's Word from that coin?" said Michael to himself, as he raised from the earth his shekel, quite undimmed by the dust. "No, for another Psalm is commenced. Blessed shekel! I desire to keep thee to my dying day, and then have thee buried with me in my grave."
Michael kept to his resolution for some length of time. Each day, when there came any pause in his work, he drank in comfort and instruction from the words visible to him alone on his wonderful piece of silver. They were the first thing which he studied when rising at dawn; and when the sun set, he read till the light faded away. Then, kindling his small earthen lamp, Michael still pursued his blessed study: never did the minute characters engraved on the silver shine more brightly than then.
And yet Michael did break his resolution; did part with his treasure! And this was how it happened.
Partly from prophetic verses seen on his coin, but still more from hearing the Divine Preacher Himself, Michael had become a devout believer in the holy Jesus of Nazareth. One memorable day, Michael met two of the Lord's followers, and heard them conversing together in troubled tones.
"The Master commanded us to provide things needful for the feast," said one; "and we have nothing wherewith to buy them. Judas hath the bag; and we wot not whither he has gone. The day is wearing on, and there is nothing ready for the Master."
"Surely God Himself will provide," said the other disciple.
Michael was a poor man, and knew not how to prepare the usual feast for himself; for he had shrunk from spending his precious shekel. But here the need was the Lord's; and should he not give to the Master of the very best that he had? How could his precious coin be better bestowed? So in lowly faith and love, the poor artisan gave his all to supply the table of the dear Master. Michael little knew that he was paying for the bread and wine which, at the Last Supper,
should be distributed as emblems of His own sacred body and blood by the Lamb about to be slain.
Michael was no loser by his free-will offering of love. All the words which had before been engraven on the shekel were now clearly written in his own heart, as if by the pen of an angel. A thousandfold blessed was the man who had given what he most prized to the Lord.
And even of the fish that had unwittingly helped the Master, the legend says that it had been reserved to be used again in His service. When the disciples were gathered together after the Resurrection of Christ, and their Lord appeared amongst them, the broiled fish which formed part of the repast was that which had borne in its mouth to Peter the wonderful shekel.
"I have been thinking," said I, as Percival concluded, "what kind of moral one could draw from your legend, which one could imagine some monk in the dark ages composing in his cell."
"To me it seems to convey the lesson that a blessing may be gained, even by a surrender of some spiritual privileges for the service of the Lord," said Lady Mar.
"The quiet, peaceful Sabbath evening given up for the Sabbath class in some heated, crowded room; the congenial society of God's people surrendered for that of rude, ignorant unbelievers, either at home or abroad—such sacrifices are well-pleasing in His sight. Few earnest followers of Him who left Heaven and its angels to toil amongst wicked men but know something of what it is to surrender the precious shekel, and gain a thousandfold in exchange."
CHAPTER IX.
The Night after the Crucifixion.
THERE was no third person present when Percival and I talked over the subject of the picture on which he had bestowed his most loving pains.
It was the only one, as he told me, in which he had ventured to introduce more than two figures. His mind had so pondered over his subject that to him, at least, the scene appeared to be real.
Percival had, as it were, sat on the ground with the mourners for a crucified Master; realized their sense of desolation; with them, bowed his head and wept. What must have been the darkness when the Sun of Righteousness had set! What the appalling stillness, when the sacred body of the murdered Hope of Israel lay cold in the rock-hewn tomb!
The scene depicted was a room on the ground-floor of some Jerusalem home. Scarcely any furniture is seen save a few mats on the earthen floor, and clay lamps burning dimly in niches on the wall.
There is also a low bedstead, on which, in a half-reclining position, appears the principal female figure, with another woman crouching on the ground, in silent unutterable woe, at her feet. A third, standing with clasped hands and upturned gaze, is seen near, but her wan face bears an expression of trustful confidence which has in it something of the sublime. She is not crushed, but exalted by trial.
Seyton. Here we doubtless see the three Maries. The central form is that of the Lord's desolate mother; but she seems rather to be absorbed in deep thought, than overwhelmed by the bitter grief of bereavement.
Percival. I pictured in my mind the three Maries, as types of Memory, Love, and Faith. The mother, in her silent sorrow, is meditating over wondrous recollections of the past; which, like the wall-lamps, cast some light on what would otherwise appear as one chaos of gloom. "Is it possible that He whose coming was foretold to me by a glorious angel; at whose birth seraphs sang and the shepherds were glad—is it possible that He has really passed from earth like a dream! Was it for nothing that holy Elisabeth and Anna prophesied, and the aged Simeon rejoiced? The sword has indeed pierced my soul; aye, drank as it were my very life's blood: but was not this also foretold! Doth God give the bitter, and withhold the sweet? Must not prophecies be fulfilled?"
Seyton. It has struck me that the circumstance of Mary of Nazareth's not being mentioned amongst the women who visited the sepulchre—may have arisen from her stronger
faith. She, the Lord's mother, did not, as far as we know, seek the living amongst the dead: at least, her so doing is not recorded by any one of the four Evangelists.
Percival. The things which Mary so long pondered in her heart may, like buried seeds, have sprung to light in the hour of her bitterest anguish. The Lord's mother was a thoughtful woman; and she knew that the Babe whom she had folded in her arms and pressed to her bosom was indeed the Son of God.
Seyton. But there is nothing of hope expressed in the attitude of Mary Magdalene in your picture.
Percival. No; she has loved, and she has lost, her Lord; lost Him, as she thinks, for ever, as regards this mortal life. Mary has kissed the dead feet; has pressed to her lips the wounded hand; and her tears have dropped on the thornencircled brow. Even the sight of angels will convey to her no comfort; her grief-dimmed eyes will not recognize the risen Christ Himself, till she hears His own beloved voice pronounce her familiar name.
Seyton. The third Mary presents a contrast to the Magdalene: the sister of Lazarus, with the tears streaming down her cheeks, looks as if on her pale lips could almost dawn a triumphant smile.
Percival. Have you never thought what was probably the subject of the Lord's discourse to Mary of Bethany when, absorbed in listening, she sat at His feet? Is it not likely that Christ was disclosing to her, as He did to less believing disciples, the approaching sacrifice on Calvary, and the glory which was to follow?
Seyton. If such were the subject of Christ's discourse, how Martha's impetuous interruption must have jarred both on
