Intertextuality and Emergent Order
Everything in Literature is Connected and Nobody Planned That
I’m not the biggest fan of most literary theories, but I happen to like intertextuality. At least the loose or weak version that holds that, “all works of literature exist in a kind of continuous dialogue, whether or not authors are aware of that fact.” This principle can be taken too far, but it’s clear that every writer draws on, rejects, is influenced by, or in some fashion can be said to have learned from those writers who have gone before.
Most obviously, there is literary allusion, in which a writer explicitly or implicitly invokes another work. There is also the use of symbols and metaphors with ancient lineage and common meaning (even if the writer intentionally subverts the typical meaning). Relatedly, there is the fact that language evolves over time and is altered by those who use it. If you’ve ever used a word like “obscene” or “assassinate,” you have William Shakespeare to thank.
Similarly, story and patterns of storytelling evolve over time and are altered by those who tell them. It isn’t necessary to know who first told a story about a soldier searching for his homeland to tell a story about a homeward-bound soldier that in some way draws upon all such stories that have been told before.
Even genre and worldbuilding are intertextual. Every genre had an inventor. Even worldbuilding itself had an inventor – early novels didn’t necessarily have the well-developed worlds that later ones did, and certainly not the vast, sweeping worldbuilding of the multibook high fantasy or space opera series we know today. In the same way that modern rock and roll doesn’t look anything like the Beatles, yet all of it derives from (even in tiny ways) innovations that they made, all modern fantasy authors can in some small way credit J.R.R. Tolkien with defining the genre that they write. He wasn’t the first, but he made it what it is.
This isn’t an argument against originality. Nor is it an argument that “all stories are the same story.” Rather it is simply a description of the fact that the evolution of language and story and myth and worldbuilding and character-development and literary allusion and a thousand other factors all combine to create the rich environment in which we modern writers write. We should be grateful. It’s a more diverse, developed, interesting, complex, creative, and creativity-sparking environment than has ever existed before. Every addition to it, so long as it has readers, deepens and widens it. Barring apocalypse, we can never go back to a less complex backdrop for story creation.1
If the canonical philosophers are engaged in an ageless “Great Conversation,” and if the literary canon is engaged in an overlapping and similar “great conversation,” perhaps it can be said that the rest of us mere mortals are engaged in good conversation – or at least, a series of overlapping and separate good conversations within the same coffeehouse, with some occasional eavesdropping.
A similar thing is sometimes said about social media (or the Internet as a whole). It’s probably true, but perhaps we might say that that conversation is taking place in the seedier nightclub adjacent to the coffeehouse.
Intertextuality is an Emergent Phenomenon:
I may not be a fan of most literary theories, but I am a fan of something called “emergent order” (or spontaneous order). This is a term from economics, but it applies to many things throughout the natural and manmade world.
A phenomenon is emergent if it arose over time through a series of chaotic, complex, unplanned interactions between autonomous or distinct entities. Emergent order is bottom-up, not top-down. It comes out of chaos.
I’d argue that this is a good description of physics. At the quantum level, there is chaos – particles pop in and out of existence, probability and chance (rather than geometry) govern quantum interactions, and a cat can be both alive and dead at the same time.2
And yet, all around us, we see order. We see classical mechanics – Newton’s laws, predictable orbits, objects that accelerate towards the Earth at the same rate every time. Compared to the random mess of the subatomic realm, the things we can see and touch behave in surprisingly regular and intelligible ways.
To a point. Randomness still governs our world. But at least the Earth can’t be in two places at the same time.
Some people say that consciousness is an emergent phenomenon. There is, of course, an alternative hypothesis. Evolution certainly creates emergent phenomena. Every trait or characteristic of modern plants and animals and fungi emerged over time as a result of spontaneous interactions and random chance. Natural selection is essentially chaotic – a stray meteor can wipe out most species in an instant and alter the course of history. But over millennia, higher-order life develops from lower-order life.
Storms seem disorderly to us. But if anything, they represent a type of order that springs out of the fluctuations in temperature, pressure, air currents, and thousands of variables that in turn define the thousands of interactions between particles of air and water which combine to produce a swirling cyclone or the eye of a hurricane.
Many of the most beautiful things in the world came out of chaos. The inscrutable flow of a river which steadily carves away for millennia until we have a Grand Canyon. The swirling bits of gas and rock and matter that coalesce into suns and planets and planetary systems. The turmoil of wind that eats away at the stone until it creates the arches in the eponymous national park.3 And also the rich tapestry of intertwined stories and allusions that is the literary canon.
Literature is an Emergent Phenomenon:
Rather than take you through the history of the novel, starting with Robinson Crusoe or Don Quixote or Lazarillo de Tormes, I’ll assume you intuitively understand the notion that literature developed slowly over time, with each new writer or wave of overlapping writers contributing to it and changing it along the way. Oral storytelling and spoken word poetry gave rise to recorded myths and epic poems. The Greeks had writers of philosophy, history, and theater. The Romans had poets and playwrights and chroniclers. The English (or maybe the Spanish before them) had the novel.
But the novel got its start pretty late in the game. Even in the early nineteenth century, it was possible for a novelist like Jane Austen to have a solid grasp of almost all fiction from Shakespeare to her present day, and stay on top of contemporary innovations. Today, there has been so much written already, and there is so much being currently produced, that it would be impossible for a single individual to read more than a fraction of it, even if he or she spent eight hours a day for seventy years reading books.
This is similar to the way in which it was easier for a doctor or a scientist in the nineteenth century to know all of what came before him – and maintain his knowledge of current developments while still practicing his craft – whereas today this is impossible. Which is why we have specialists and why most practitioners can’t also be researchers.
Literature has taken on a life of its own (especially if we include in the term “literature” all those popular writers of genre fiction who come in for so much condescension from the critics). That said, it’s unclear that any person or group ever really had much control over it.
This bubbling cauldron of uncertainty sometimes produces the kinds of black swans we would expect from such chaos – the astronomical book sales of J.K. Rowling,4 or the “Great Men and Women of Literature” who leave such an outsized impact upon the world of the written word that some philistines claim they can’t really have written the things they did, like Shakespeare or Austen.
Thomas Foster defines intertextuality as the “dialogue between old texts and new” that “is always going on at one level or another… the ongoing interaction between poems or stories,” which “deepens and enriches the reading experience, bringing multiple layers of meaning to the text.”
I think that’s a pretty good description. It’s the reason we can study literary symbols across the ages – very often, their meaning in one novel is the same as (or similar to) their meaning in others. He notes that because we grow up in a culture steeped with echoes of the various stories and tropes and symbols that have come before, we can even unintentionally react to or refute novels or poems we’ve never read. Ideas seep into the collective consciousness, and we encounter them in new and different forms that might even be unrecognizable.5
So, sometimes it’s unintentional. Other times, these deep connections between works are very intentional. Faulkner titled his novel The Sound and the Fury as an explicit reference to Shakespeare’s Macbeth. He was engaged in conversation with Shakespeare across the centuries, and he understood himself to be doing that.
Other times, dialogue between writers is literal. It happens in person. We can think of the various literary movements in which contemporaries met (say, in Paris in the 1920s)6 to discuss ideas. However, even literary movements aren’t really planned. They spring out of the interactions between individuals who travel in the same circles, or who read each other, or who are influenced by the same sets of ideas. Some literary movements are more self-conscious than others. But even here, the intentionality doesn’t make them any less emergent. No group has a monopoly on the written word, and even the most self-referential movements contain much that is contradictory or tangential.
As the various waves of romanticism, realism, naturalism, modernism, post-modernism, etc. swept through the literary canon, they shaped the canon and in turn were shaped by external feedback. There was no design. Instead, stories and forms and tropes and modes of storytelling bubbled up through the ages, arriving in the present day as they currently exist. Agreed-upon meanings (or disagreed-upon meanings) for various symbols, usages of words, ways of expressing thought, and turns of phrase all combine to form an ever-shifting tapestry that moves and alters before it can be fully defined and catalogued.
You can’t pin down anything that is still evolving (and perhaps more rapidly than ever). You can try. But the beauty of it is that there was never any control over it and there never can be. Literature is too diffuse. There are too many overlapping conversations for even an advanced supercomputer to try to direct them all.
If we can suppress the urge to try to control it (which is often futile), chaos is beautiful. There is a kind of transcendence in this series of overlapping conversations in the coffeehouse. Much of it may go on above our heads (or below the surface). But we can sit down, listen for a little, and it becomes intelligible to us – even if, by definition, we can never know the full context for it. The story in full, in totem, is beyond our ken. But we can join in, engage and withdraw, learn something – knowing we will never be able to learn everything.
We can become a small part of a tapestry that is greater than ourselves, greater than any individual, greater than any group, a tapestry that is without form or order or design or centralization. The tapestry didn’t spring into existence fully-formed. And it isn’t finished yet. Perhaps it never will be. It simply emerged over time as a byproduct of the interactions of billions of individuals over thousands of years, most of whom weren’t conscious of their contributions. Even in the arguments, even in the competition for recognition, there was mutual cooperation to produce something no person could produce alone.7 Out of chaos, came order. All literature is connected in some way.
Theoretically, a child raised by wolves would exist outside of this backdrop. For everyone else, intertextuality seeps in: through education, reading, conversation, bedtime stories, and simply engaging with the written and spoken word.
So to speak.
You will notice that wind and water and air keep coming up. These are all fluids. Having studied fluid dynamics as an aerospace engineering undergraduate, I can tell you that “chaos” is a very good description of the behavior of fluids. Outside of the simplest of systems (constrained pipe flow), we cannot mathematically represent the exact behavior of any fluid flow. We can develop very good approximations, but never exact answers. Our most advanced computational fluid dynamics software can give us estimates good enough for hypersonic flight or hydroelectric dams, but never precise answers. The woman who taught me this piece of knowledge designed that software. The related mathematics of partial differential equations contains equations that have never been solved and perhaps never will be, because there are too many unknown variables.
In Black Swan, Nassim Taleb actually uses Rowling’s success as an example of a positive black swan (and of the difficulty the human mind has in comprehending large numbers). There is no theoretical limit to the number of books a person can sell (other than the size of the global population), and Rowling proved that.
As I mentioned, there’s an absurd theory that takes this concept way too far, bordering on the conspiratorial or the fantastical (i.e., invoking spirits or various nonhuman agential forces). But I think it’s eminently true that we can learn things second- and third-hand, and that this allows us to understand what someone means when they say, “Get thee to a nunnery,” even if we’ve never read or seen Hamlet.
We can’t just say “the ‘20s” anymore, because we’re living in them.
This isn’t the only example where competition creates mutual cooperation in ways that coercion never can.