Intertextuality--or one author's recreation of another writer's work, as in James Joyce's rewriting of Homer, or J.M. Coetzee "sequel" Foe to Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe--seemed to me to be too immaterial a concept to be useful to studying composition histories. That is until I came across T. Sturge Moore's idea that revision—whether it is revising one's own work or that of someone else's—is simply what writers do. He felt that the poet has a duty to revise the work of another poet, for “[p]oetry dies when no new elements accrue to it; and so does each poem when, far from attracting correction and amendment, it no longer meets and weds with fresh thought and sentiment in those who read it”. Practicing what he preached, he set himself loose, in the privacy of the margins of his books, to “correct” John Gawsworth, W. B. Yeats and other poets, and to “author” a prologue for Oscar Wilde’s A Florentine Tragedy, which was published in 1908.
To this type of revision, Dacre Stoker, great-grand-nephew of Bram Stoker, has added another twist. It was announced this week (though incidentally not for the first time) that his sequel to Dracula, titled Dracula: The Un-Dead, was bought simultaneously by Dutton US, HarperCollins UK and Penguin Canada, and with film rights being acquired by AEI. The twist is not in that the novel/film, co-written by screenwriter Ian Holt, is yet another re-imaging of the famous vampire story, but that Stoker went back to the archive and used Bram Stoker’s notes and discarded drafts to write his own version, which is said to be set in London in 1912 and features Quincey Harker, the original hero’s son, as the main character. Add another interesting titbit: Stoker turned to the project because he felt that so many film adaptations had not remained faithful to his great-grand uncle’s original: “I found it exceedingly sad that all of the trash Hollywood had put out monumentally sullied Bram's and my family's literary legacy" (my emphasis).
The word “sullied” may be a favourite word of literary heirs. I don’t expect that Stephen Joyce will any time soon produce a sequel to Finnegans Wake using the notes that Joyce continued compiling after he had published his last book.
Be that as it may, intertextual processes have become a crucial part of manuscript studies.
2 comments:
A similar controversy surrounds Michael Johnston's "Brideshead Regained: Continuing the Memoirs of Charles Ryder", published by Akanos in 2003, and currently disputed by the Waugh estate. In this case I can't help but feel some sympathy for the Waugh family. Unlike say Coetzee's "Foe", or Jean Rhys' "Wide Sargasso Sea", this novel's title actively cashes in on the earlier book's success, despite being a fairly terrible piece of writing.
The likes of Michael Johnston and T Sturge Moore certainly have the ego to challenge their literary predecessors, but do they have the style?
You cited Joyce's rewriting of Homer - which is a pretty loose rewrite at best. Does the text below sound familiar: "She laid herself flat-out on the bed so close to her husband that she could feel his warmth but not touching, and closed her eyes. Slumberous flakes of snow, silver and dark, fell over her body, Garett's body, and all the sleeping and sleepless bodies of the Hotel Boulderado. It truly was snowing everywhere. Snowflakes from stars and moons everywhere falling like comets or dust or nothing. Falling on us all. Falling upon the beautiful and the ugly, the real and the counterfeit, the living and the dead." It's Anne Pigone's extreme "rewrite" of Joyce's "The Dead". In her "The Ugly" she paraphrases every single line of Joyce's story. Now that is what I call intertextuality!
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