“Intertextuality” wasn’t discussed around many Thanksgiving dinner tables. Nor did shoppers use the term as they jockeyed for parking spaces on Black Friday. But the word is nonetheless salient.
Oxford Languages defines intertextuality as “the relationship between texts, especially literary ones.” It was first coined by critic Julia Kristeva in 1966, although the concept has been in existence since the first time a creator referenced another work.
One example of intertextuality is “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus,” a painting from roughly 1560, perhaps by an imitator of Pieter Bruegel the Elder. (The provenance is complicated.) It depicts a busy pastoral scene — plowman in the foreground, shepherd gazing up at the sky, mountains and cities and sea in the background.
Tucked away in the bottom right corner, almost as an afterthought, is Icarus, his waxen wings melted by the sun, sinking to his death in the waters near a masted boat.
One could enjoy the painting without knowing the myth of Icarus and Daedelus and their failed attempt to fly. It is, after all, an arresting piece. (Daedelus is unseen, but critics conjecture that the gazing shepherd looks up at him as he plummets earthward to join his son.)
The painting means more, however, when the viewer appreciates the allusion, the intertextuality between myth and art.
In 1938, W.H. Auden ratcheted up this intertextuality by making the painting the subject of his poem, “Musee des Beaux-Arts.” By describing the nonchalance of the plowman toward Icarus, Auden underscores how one person’s tragedy can mean little to somebody else: “how everything turns away / Quite leisurely from the disaster.” For the plowman, the sun is shining and seeds must be sown. For the boat’s passengers and crew, a journey awaits. Nobody has time for the drowning of a stranger.
A similar observation could be made about the daily news, where even the most horrific reports elicit little more than a shaking of the head and a clucking of the tongue. Robert Frost’s “Out, Out—,” about the accidental death of a rural boy, ends with a similarly stark observation: the survivors, “since they / Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.” It is a moment that we, much like the ancient plowman or shepherd, can relate to. Not callousness exactly, but rather a recognition of both our inability to reverse the outcome and the pressing nature of our own concerns.
I am ruminating on intertextuality in part because it is central to an essay I assigned to my students this week. Yet I’ve also come to realize that my preoccupation is a clumsy way of groping toward some understanding of tragedies like the one in Waukesha, Wisconsin.
The quick dissemination of news has transformed all of us, to some extent, into either indifferent plowmen or passively observant shepherds. We are witnesses to tragedy who lack the agency to do much, if anything, to help. The staunchest security procedures are not guaranteed to stop somebody from driving through a parade and killing the participants, and no amount of empathy can restore the fallen to their families and friends.
The solution is not to cancel parades or institute draconian procedures before all public events. The takeaway may be simply that tragedies are part and parcel of life.
When they occur as a chapter in our own stories — with our own people and in our own communities — we mourn more keenly and help more directly. But when they occur outside our sphere of influence, to other people in other places, our responses are, of necessity, more proscribed. We recognize, of course, our shared humanity. We can donate to causes that will help. Those with a belief in the power of prayer can certainly direct their efforts there. Yet few of us can drop our plows or reassign our shepherding duties to intervene in other ways.
Perhaps this real-world intertextuality — the confluence of outside tragedy with our own lives — is a reminder to cherish what we have today and to recognize its fragility and preciousness. After all, we aren’t always the plowman or shepherd.
At some point, we are Icarus, our wings aflame, the harsh sun burning hot above us, the bottomless sea below.
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