"A man has a recurring dream about a treasure in a distant land" ❤️

Literary Hall of Fame

24th August in Literary History

#onhisbirthdaytoday #onherbirthdaytoday

24th August has got its own literary hall of fame.

Three famous authors – each a doyen in their own right – were born on this day.

Jorge Luis Borges, Jean Rhys, and A.S. Byatt!

Although all three writers differ in their setting, style, and subject matter –

Borges known for his philosophical fiction

Rhys for her psychological drama and

Byatt for her intellectual romances

at the same time - all three writers treat literature not as ‘an autonomous entity with a separate reality’ but as a vibrant, interconnected world!

Yes! Borges, Rhys and Byatt are known for their extensive use of intertextuality and metafiction.

So what pray is Intertextuality?

Graham Allen, in his insightful book titled, Intertextuality, gives us very interesting gleanings on the subject.

Texts, whether they be literary or non-literary, are viewed by modern theorists as lacking in any kind of independent meaning. They are what theorists now call intertextual. The act of reading, theorists claim, plunges us into a network of textual relations.

To interpret a text, to discover its meaning, or meanings, is to trace those relations. Reading thus becomes a process of moving between texts.

Meaning becomes something which exists between a text and all the other texts to which it refers and relates, moving out from the independent text into a network of textual relations. The text becomes the intertext.

Intertextuality, like modern literary and cultural theory itself, can be said to have its origins in twentieth-century linguistics, particularly in the seminal work of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure.

The work of the Russian literary theorist M. M. Bakhtin is crucial here. In fact, Bakhtin’s theories foreground host of different theories of intertextuality.

Julia Kristeva’s attempt to combine Saussurean and Bakhtinian theories of language and literature produced the first articulation of intertextual theory, in the late 1960s.

In short, then, Intertextuality challenges traditional notions of textual autonomy and originality, emphasizing the interconnectedness of all texts.

It suggests that the meaning of a text is not inherent within itself but is produced through its relationships with other texts and discourses.

They all write with a deep awareness of existing literature, often referencing, re-imagining, or directly engaging with other works of fiction and non-fiction to create new narratives. This literary style, characteristic of postmodernism, blurs the lines between original creation and commentary.

As such, each of these three authors is known for building their work upon existing texts.

A.S. Byatt’s most famous novel, Possession, is an academic romance that references Victorian poetry and literature!

Jean Rhys, known famously for her popular novel Wide Sargasso Sea, wrote it as a direct response to Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre - the backstory of the ‘madwoman in the attic.’

Jorge Luis Borges could be called a master of intertextuality. His short stories, like for example, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” are often fictions about fictional works or literary concepts.

He creates elaborate literary puzzles that require a knowledge of history, philosophy, and other texts to fully appreciate them. Hence, his works could be called ‘a continuous dialogue with the literary past!’

More on Borges, Byatt and Rhys from Gales Encyclopedia –

On A. S. Byatt

A best-selling novelist, short-story writer, distinguished critic, and winner of many prestigious awards and prizes, A. S. Byatt is one of the most ambitious writers of her generation.

Her short stories are of crucial interest in connection with her overall work and with regard to postmodernist developments of the genre.

Because of her imaginative wisdom and understanding of contemporary culture, Byatt’s short stories significantly enrich the postmodern literary scene.

In 1981 she was promoted to a senior lectureship, and in 1983, when she was elected fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, she retired from academic life to write full-time. Byatt’s career as a novelist reached a turning point in 1990, when the publication of Possession: A Romance brought her international fame.

In merging realism and naturalism with fantasy, Byatt has been influenced by an eclectic group of esteemed writers, from George Eliot to Robert Browning. In her midcentury-England novels, she takes inspiration from such writers as D. H. Lawrence.

She references everything from Romantic and Victorian literature to research books on zoology as also informing her intertextual work. But ‘‘The novelist I love most,’’ she asserts, ‘‘is Marcel Proust.’’

A central characteristic of Byatt’s handling of stories is the manner in which they are made to refer to their own status as texts and the ways in which different narrative expectations and multiple types of text—letters, diaries, journals, fairy tales—are merged.

On Borges

Jorge Luis Borges was born on August 24, 1899, in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He received his earliest education at home, where he learned English and read widely in his father’s library of English books.

When Borges was nine years of age, he began his public schooling in Palermo, and in the same year, published his first literary undertaking - a translation into Spanish of Oscar Wilde’s ‘‘The Happy Prince.’’

Borges has been called perhaps the best known of the Latin American ‘‘boom’’ authors and “postmodernist Master” of the mid twentieth century.

World Recognition In 1961 Borges shared with Samuel Beckett the ten-thousand-dollar International Publishers Prize, and world recognition at last began to come his way.

‘‘The Library of Babel,’’ (1941), is a short story by Jorge Luis Borges. In this fantastical story, a library contains every possible variation of a single 410-page book. In the same vein, Borges writes elsewhere about a map so large that it covers precisely, in 1:1 detail, everything it attempts to represent, so that it lays like a gigantic carpet over the land.

What’s more? 😊

Paulo Coelho himself has acknowledged that, he had based his The Alchemist on this Borges’s Tale of Two Dreamers.

And the plot of both The Alchemist and Tale of Two Dreamers were influenced by an ancient, widely-told folktale which goes like this –

A man has a recurring dream about a treasure in a distant land, travels there, and is told by someone in that land that he, too, had a dream - of a treasure buried in the first man’s own home.

And guess what? Paulo Coelho is also celebrating his birthday today. 😊