AND LIKE A FOOL, all this time you’ve been using your eyes. It’s not your fault; you were trained that way. In fact, you’ve been trained that way for hundreds of years. Thousands, even. Ever since print became the privileged form of knowledge exchange, the eyes have it. Back when our old pals Snorgg and Ongk sat around the cave talking about the mastodon hunt, or even when a hundred or so guys who would become Homer were roaming around the Levant telling tales of Odysseus and Achilles to rooms of drunken warriors, building epics up out of fragments and borrowed narratives, stories came in at the ear. Even then, though, the end was nigh. In something like twenty-one thousand lines of poetry that comprise The Iliad, there is precisely one mention of writing. But you know what? One’s not none. If we accept that this poem achieved the form we know sometime in the eighth century BCE, then the writing, as it were, was on the wall for oral storytelling roughly twenty-eight hundred years ago: the print-oriented bastards are coming. Okay, so maybe it wouldn’t refer to Marshall McLuhan directly, but you get the point.
Besides, as Joyce has Stephen Dedalus remind us, we are trapped by the “ineluctable modality of the visual.” What that cluster of jawbreakers suggests, aside from the speaker having studied Latin too much, is that there’s no escaping visual data, that what the eyes take in dominates our consciousnesses. Hard to argue with him. He is, after all, Joyce.
But let’s say you’re reading a novel (insert punchline here). That novel reminds you of something else you’ve read, which something may or may not be fiction—news stories, ancient epics, recent movies, biographies of the famous or notorious, and, yes, even other novels. How do you get that reminder? Do you see the other text? Or, rather, do you hear something that sounds familiar?
Most of the time, to be sure, that hearing is a little vague, but it comes in clearer after a bit. Here’s a f’rinstance—two books, one of which you might have heard of and the other you should have. Like nearly everyone of my generation, I discovered E. L. Doctorow before John Dos Passos. Specifically, I discovered Ragtime (1975), a novel with three interrelated storylines and a historical mosaic. Two of the three plots involve persons without names: Father, Mother, Mother’s Younger Brother, Grandfather, and the Little Boy are the white, middle-class family in New Rochelle, New York; Tateh, Mameh, and Little Girl are the Jewish immigrants struggling to survive. Among the main characters, only the black couple, a ragtime pianist named Coalhouse Walker Jr. and his sweetheart, Sarah, have names. Their three narratives weave together to move toward an ending that is both tragic and uplifting, since Doctorow is shrewd enough to recognize that no story of America is all one thing. A place of freedom and opportunity, it is also a haven for racism and unequal treatment, a place where immigrants are simultaneously welcomed and reviled, a place where fortunes can be made and lost almost overnight. This tale of individual destinies is interwoven with a larger tapestry of America at the beginning of the twentieth century, from J. P. Morgan and Henry Ford, to the tragic love triangle of Evelyn Nesbitt, Harry K. Thaw, and the architect Stanford White, to Emma Goldman, to Harry Houdini, to Booker T. Washington. Nor are these historical figures merely wallpaper in front of which the “real” plot plays out. Rather, they interact with the fictional characters, forming friendships and love relationships, offering or needing assistance or obstruction, performing official functions and private blunders.
Now Dos Passos, as I’ve discussed elsewhere, is the creator of the U.S.A. trilogy, comprising The 42nd Parallel (1930), 1919 (1932), and The Big Money (1936). In it, the central narrative is interwoven with sections of biography of the notable and notorious, Newsreels whose texts are literally ripped from the day’s headlines (chiefly from the Chicago Tribune), and Camera Eye snapshots of the America in which Dos Passos came to adult consciousness. Sound familiar? Then you’re smarter than me. I distinctly remember reading The 42nd Parallel for the first time with two responses: this doesn’t sound like anything I’ve read before, and I’m missing something. In fact, I read the whole trilogy without twigging to the connection. There was that persistent sense of an echo of something, but I couldn’t bring it clearly into mind while confronted with the tremendous originality of Dos Passos’s creation. It wasn’t until I reread the first novel some years later (having in the meantime taught Ragtime once or twice in book and movie form). Then, about halfway through, I thought to myself, I know what this sounds like. Dos Passos, Doctorow, similarities, check. My only question was why it took so long to arrive at that recognition. Your honor, the defense pleads mitigating circumstances. First, and there’s no way around it, Doctorow is a much better writer, particularly in managing a plotted story with characters, even if they are handicapped by the absence of names. U.S.A. is a cubist masterpiece. That’s not the same as a narrative gem. Dos Passos is not great with his dialogue, which is often stilted in a kind of working-class king’s English. Second, the flow is so much smoother in the later work than in the earlier. Dos Passos employs the herky-jerky qualities of those two signatures of the new medium of cinema, the montage and the newsreel; Doctorow the comparatively smooth flow of the nickelodeon-like flip books created by Tateh. And finally, the historical figures are woven much tighter into the main storyline in Ragtime than in U.S.A. In fact, part of the charm of each is the distance or nearness to the historical context, which may be a function of proximity. Dos Passos catches the look of the country at the moment of writing his novel but uses it as background to the stories of Mac and Janey and his other fictional characters. Doctorow, on the other hand, is writing many years after the fact, and all the famous figures are safely dead, so he can have Evelyn Nesbitt engage in a sexual relationship with Mother’s Younger Brother without fear of lawsuits. Hey, don’t laugh; these practical considerations are too onerous to ignore.
Here’s an analogous situation. You’re sitting in the theater watching Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End, and suddenly you’re in a spaghetti Western. Remember the scene? Things are looking distinctly bad for the pirates, who’ve just discovered they’re facing a fleet only slightly larger than the Spanish Armada (in fact, the word “armada” gets employed repeatedly), and Elizabeth Swann, no dummy, calls for “parlay.” Suddenly we cut to a shot of boots crossing sand, and while they’re definitely pirate boots, they’re not in a pirate movie anymore. Against all odds, this sand, on the edge of the ocean, is the most desiccated stuff you ever saw. Sand that’s bucking for promotion to dust. And boots in the dust equal showdown. Good guys squaring off with bad. Gary Cooper in High Noon, John Wayne at the end of Stagecoach. Okay, John Wayne in about anything. But most of all, men with no name. No one in film history showed more boots striding through more dust than Sergio Leone. And he’s the one we’re supposed to think about here. How do we know? The soundtrack ceases to be Hans Zimmer and becomes, for the duration of the walk, Ennio Morricone. It’s all weird instrumentation and over-the-top effects. I’m willing to swear, although I’m sure it’s not true, that I heard whistling in there. And as anyone born before 1960 can tell you, Morricone means Leone. Old school chums, they never went anywhere, creatively, without one another. And look what they did together. Once Upon a Time in the West. A Fistful of Dollars. And most of all, that other one.
And then it hits you. That’s what this is. The amoral Leone universe. Is the good guy good or not? Can Charles Bronson really be the hero and Henry Fonda the villain? Whose side is Clint on? The angels or the demons? Can we even tell? One thing’s for certain, though, for all that water, this is The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Everybody’s playing his own hand (or hers, since Elizabeth becomes a real player here), and nobody, with excellent reasons on all sides, trusts anyone. There are double-crosses on the double-crosses. It may all work out, but somebody’s gonna hafta die. All that from boots on the sand. And listening.
Okay, wise guy, how’d you get there?
The inner ear. I thought of calling it the third eye, but that image is too disturbing. Let’s just say that readers use a special sort of hearing when they process information, whether said information comes from print or film or whatever. If you simply read the text of the pirate movie, you see, what? Boots, sand, a bit of water. You have to bring your own data to the part. That Morricone soundtrack certainly helps, but only if you’ve heard some of his other work. Gore Verbinski, the director, assumes we have, but there are no guarantees. But even before the melody registers, we can sense where this scene is heading. By step two, the Leone echo is rolling; the musical cues merely reinforce something we’re already hearing. Verbinski’s reference is arch and fairly obvious, but it would be “audible” even if delivered with greater subtlety. And that subtlety is why we need to open ourselves to nuance. Looking too intently at a text can overwhelm our other senses, can make us miss the echo, the sympathetic chimes in a work.
The Law of Universal Connectedness: Every novel grows out of other novels. So, you ask, does this mean everything’s derivative? On one level, yes. Writers can’t avoid being influenced by works they’ve read, stories they’ve heard, movies they’ve seen. If you see that influence as derivative, then it is. Yet that’s not the whole story. There is also the influence on us. We may hear things that weren’t available to the novelist at the time or writing, or that she wasn’t aware of—even that hadn’t yet existed. The echoes we hear need not run in only one direction. Words change meaning over time. The same’s true of novels: they change meaning over time. The words stay the same, naturally, but their meanings can change, although that’s not the major force. The world changes around the novels. We change. Are we the same today as Americans in Twain’s lifetime or as subjects of the queen in Dickens’s? Hardly. Society has gone through great upheavals in the last century or so; Comet Halley has come and gone in its seventy-six-year cycle since its visitation at the time of Twain’s death. Both countries have experienced multiple wars, recessions and depressions, alterations in the racial and ethnic landscape, and internationalism undreamt of in the nineteenth century. How can their work possibly remain static?
More importantly, other writers have engaged them in conversation. W. H. Auden said in his elegy for William Butler Yeats that, in dying, the great man “became his admirers.” That phrase can have a lot of different meanings, among them, it reflected well on people that they did admire such a poet. One meaning, though, must be that, to the extent Yeats would live on, he would do it through those admirers. True enough, I’m sure, but not one of them was him, and each of them would contain a Yeats colored by the possessor. My Yeats is very personal and, I’m equally sure, very distinct from Auden’s. One important distinction: I’m not a poet. When Auden makes use of Yeats’s verse in his own, as he does in the elegy (where, among others, “Under Ben Bulben,” Yeats’s own poem about his death and burial, is engaged in conversation), it forces readers to reconsider not merely the man being memorialized but the poetry as well. So, too, with novels. As I write this, a book called Finn has recently been published. In an audacious move for a first (or any) novelist, Jon Clinch purports to tell the story of Pap Finn, Huck’s violent, drunken, and doomed father. In doing so he brings in numerous details of the original, and we recall many more. Clinch could have told a story of any violent sod living along the Mississippi in antebellum Missouri, but he decided to tell this one, so there must have been some reason. Just as Twain sought to tell a tale of what he saw as the real America, setting it in opposition to earlier novels and stories by James Fenimore Cooper and Washington Irving, among others, that greatly romanticized frontier or rural life. There are things Twain couldn’t have said about life in his time, things he might not have noticed, even things that have become true that maybe once weren’t. Clinch can say them. In the process, he alters how we think about the book Hemingway claims fathered all of American writing.
Or take Jane Austen. Please. Sorry, couldn’t resist that one—must have been the Twain influence. Surely Pride and Prejudice stands as one of the seminal works of English letters. That does not, however, make it untouchable. Perhaps no novel has been more touched. As I mentioned earlier, Elizabeth-and-Darcy spin-offs seem to be a major growth industry. Most of those books, mercifully, will sink with little stain left on the culture, but one or two will likely hang around. More importantly, how many romance novels are informed by Austen’s great book? And to what extent do they color our understanding of the original? Then there’s Bridget Jones’s Diary, Helen Fielding’s melding of Pride and Prejudice with Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. What’s that you say? Fielding is no Austen? And neither is Anita Loos? Perhaps. But they’re pretty darned funny; you’ll have to give them that. Moreover, Fielding’s rather obvious borrowings from Austen and Loos remind us that all three are writing the same novel, a book called Modern Romance. All three proved highly successful in their own time, were scorned as each age’s version of chick-lit, and made witty, satiric observations on contemporary mating rituals. Her book forces us to reconsider the earlier ones through its reworking of themes and situations in the context of a different age. Do we subscribe to the gender roles and centrality of marriage that inform Austen’s novel? How does Bridget’s active role in courtship shed light on Elizabeth’s societally enforced passivity? Given the change toward career women, how do we feel about the 1925 gold-digger model as represented by the wonderfully named Lorelei Lee, a character who seems to exist in perpetual anticipation of Marilyn Monroe to arrive on the scene and play her? Fielding reminds us that our views of women have changed, and that our readings of her famous forebears may, therefore, also have changed.
The word for the day, class, is intertextuality. It comes to us compliments of Mikhail Bakhtin, the great Russian formalist critic, by way of the structuralist thinker Julia Kristeva, who coined the term, and has to do with how texts speak back and forth to each other. Bakhtin, in fact, gave us the term “dialogism,” speaking of the “dialogic potential of the novel,” by which he means the capacity of novels to carry on an ongoing conversation. The two terms overlap a good deal, differing perhaps in the marginally greater sense of conscious decision making implied by “dialogism.” For our purposes, the important notion here is of a conversation among texts across time.
Isn’t that discussion a little one-sided? Don’t the older texts do all the talking?
You’d think so, wouldn’t you? But no, it actually doesn’t work that way. The model that instantly comes to mind is something like a lecture hall, with the grizzled old-timer telling the assembled upstarts about how good it was in the days of yore. If that’s the model, then the seats are full of hecklers. A more apt image, though, is more along the lines of a graduate seminar. One discussant has some priority, in this case temporal, having arrived at the gathering somewhat earlier than the rest, but everyone is bringing questions, insights, critiques, and information to the seminar table. So it is with novels. Take the case of Bridget Jones’s Diary: yes, it draws upon those earlier novels about women, love, and independence, but in doing so, it also provides commentary upon and, in a sense, revision of those works. Fielding forces us to revise our thoughts about Austen and Loos. Bridget’s greater social mobility and self-doubt cause a reconsideration of both the limitations and the accompanying self-confidence that the social order affords Lorelei Lee. To be sure, she’s less a free agent in terms of where she can go and what she can do, but those restrictions make her surer of the ground beneath her feet. Bridget’s anxieties are in some ways a product of the greater freedom of the contemporary woman. The outcomes Bridget seeks also differ from either Lorelei’s or Elizabeth Bennet’s. A man, yes. But a man is not the end of the story in the 1990s. Men sometimes prove faithless (as we’re reminded by Daniel Cleaver), human life tenuous, and in any case a woman needs a career as well as domestic bliss. Oh, we find ourselves thinking, that’s something Austen didn’t know. All three writers examine women’s roles within the restrictions of their respective societies, and since the societies are quite different from each other, so, too, are the issues and stories that result.
So, dialogism. The idea here is that texts have an ongoing conversation, that echoes, citations, parodies, and reiterations will alter both the newer and older novels—even when the writer has never read the historically prior text. You’ll notice an emphasis on “texts,” which is the term favored by late twentieth-century (and even later) criticism of the schools lumped together as “poststructuralist theory.” This gets away from “works” and the inevitable implication that if there is a work, then someone must have done said work, what we could call the teleological argument for the existence of the author. The notion of texts and “scriptors,” as Roland Barthes calls them, as against some sort of quasi-divine “author,” goes back to his essay “The Death of the Author” (1967), in which he argues for a greater importance for the reader in the construction of meaning. Elevating the reader for him necessarily demotes the writer, particularly the writer as a sort of tin-pot despot of meaning, a minor god who packs everything in that readers should be so lucky as to unpack at the other end. Rather, Barthes is suggesting that there are things going on in texts of which even the authors may be unaware but which readers may discern. Can a writer know everything that may have influenced her choices? Probably not. Readers may actually be better situated to notice such details. So Barthes impishly kills off the notion of the Writer as the site of meaning and the font of signification, shifting it to the Text and, ultimately, to the Reader. Don’t you feel honored?
Does it matter, really, whether we focus on texts or authors? At most levels, probably not. At the level of Barthes and his followers (and detractors), very much. Barthes’s program in the essay is to establish the reader, and the act of reading, as the site of meaning. I’m not against that, although I find the writer-reader opposition a false dichotomy for a host of reasons. Here’s the one that matters here: writers are readers, too. Texts don’t simply spring into life out of thin air; they’re the product of a succession of writers encountering earlier works, among other things they encounter. They read and reread and invent from their reading of what others have read and reread and invented. Is that confusing enough for everyone?
Here’s what I mean about reading and rereading. Who’s the single greatest influence in American popular music during the last half century? You might get some argument here, but most people in the business are likely to tell you it’s Bob Dylan. And who are his influences? Woody Guthrie, for sure. Hank Williams, Elvis Presley, Lead Belly, Buddy Holly. And in turn, he has influenced all kinds of people—The Band, Bruce Springsteen, Neil Young, Don McLean (whose “American Pie” anthem identifies “the Jester” Dylan as supplanting “the King,” Elvis). In any event, this is a pretty specific tradition of the singer-songwriter, with a twang. So naturally, in 2007, an album of Dylan covers came out from . . . Bryan Ferry. You know, English guy. Roxy Music, proto-New Wave with synthesizers and excellent grooming. That sounds like Dylan, doesn’t it? On first glance, this might seem one of those weird high-concept disks where Billy Idol sings Irving Berlin or AC/DC goes Gershwin. Yet this project is not, as one might suspect, the product of some marketing genius at the studio. Ferry means it. He’s a Dylan fan who in interviews shows knowledge and great respect for this tradition that isn’t quite his. The CD is interesting for the way it brings two different styles, two different approaches really, together. It likely won’t convert any nonfans of either Ferry or Dylan, but what it will do is make listeners reconsider the two changes. The questions that arise are not simply of the what-did-we-miss-about-Brian-Ferry sort. The most important ones have to do with what we missed about Dylan. For instance, what did he learn from Tin Pan Alley? Were George and Irving and Yip as important as Hank and Woody and Elvis? Is there a secret crooner under the nasal, atonal song-talker? But the questions spread out in all directions. Is the stage of the Grand Ole Opry all that far away from Broadway? Does the Great American Songbook also contain “Your Cheatin’ Heart” and “Lay Lady Lay”? And finally, where do all those threads in the web of song extend to, out there in space and time?
What we ultimately learn from the Ferry-Dylan pairing is that listening, like reading, is expansive. Ordinary fans of a genre or performer hear only one thing at work; often, they listen to only one sort of music. The apotheosis of this tendency would be the outrage when Dylan went electric. In retrospect, that shift seems inevitable if we look at Dylan’s influences and predilections, but at the time, many hard-core folkies were appalled. Musicians, on the other hand, listen to all sorts of music. Okay, I don’t know that Angus Young does love George Gershwin, but I wouldn’t be shocked if he did. They both write great hooks. The point is, musicians can appreciate music even when it comes from very different traditions from their own.
Writers are like that, too. They often have interests and tastes that are much more catholic than the average reader. Robert B. Parker names his detective “Spenser” with a medial “s” after a poet very few mystery readers will have read. That doesn’t make Looking for Rachel Wallace a modern reworking of The Faerie Queene (although he does allude to it in that novel), but it tells us just a little about the range of potential influences on Parker’s writing. Moreover, writers are touched by many works they have never read, bits and pieces of which come to them through other works and that they have. And they are touched by, and they are touched by, and so on. This is the real “worldwide web,” a network that has been going on forever, a conversation the living have with the dead and the not-yet-born.
How is this possible? I’ll have more to say on this later on, but we have need of a concept right about here: there is only One Story. It’s always been there, is still there, is always the same, is always changing. Every story, poem, play, movie, television commercial, and political speech—the whole shootin’ match—that has ever been told, written, remembered (no matter how vaguely) is part of that story. What that means is that literature, in its broadest sense, is all part of one system. You can be influenced by and can know a good bit about novels you’ve never read, stories you’ve never heard. Why? Because things you have read mention and make use of them. And sometimes the writers of those works haven’t read the original tales. But they’ve been touched by them. Literature, in other words, is a system, a worldwide shared experience across millennia. There are connections everywhere because everything is connected.
Which is where the ears come in. You don’t so much see these connections as hear them. Our language about noticing these sorts of connections is auditory. We speak of an echo of Homer in Virgil, or of Austen in Helen Fielding. Can you see echoes? Or hints, allegations, rumors, or soupçons (but then, I’m not sure you can hear that last one, either). What I’m advocating here is an inner-auditory process of reading, that you keep your inner ear attuned to the text for what it’s saying, for the sounds that lie just behind the main melody. “There’s just a hint of Raymond Chandler in this new mystery writer.” “He’s heavily influenced by Thomas Hardy with a soupçon of P. G. Wodehouse.” Now, that, I’d like to see.