“No Story Comes from Nowhere”, or, the Dentist from <i>Finding Nemo</i>: Ambivalent Originality in Four Contemporary Works

Abstract

This paper offers a perspective on a range of contemporary developments and articulations of the phenomenon of intertextuality in fiction and film. Using as backdrop a brief discussion of different intertextual motifs in Salman Rushdie‟s Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990), Paul Auster‟s Travels in the Scriptorium (2006) and Pixar‟s animated short film Boundin’ (2004), it moves on to discuss the highly intertextual relation between the works of Swiss writer Robert Walser and the contemporary American experimentalist Alison Bundy. The paper thus problematizes and qualifies the line of demarcation supposedly existing between texts or works of art and aims to expand and exemplify the scope of reference, citation and paraphrase inherent in the overall concept of intertextuality. This paper springs from a baffled encounter with four postmodern works which all revolve around the theme of ambivalent originality. The four works portray origin and the original as regurgitation and as a result or an end point. And they describe the site of origin as both primary and secondary, and as disturbingly identical to what appears to repeat it. This undermining of the stability and integrity of the point of origin is presented as a thoroughly relational event. Origin is seen to lose its originality in the interaction with its surroundings, echoing Graham Allen speaking of the „relationality, interconnectedness and interdependence in modern cultural life‟ (5). In this paper I discuss four different expressions of this „interconnectedness‟—expressions which each in their own way portray or testify to patterns of intertextuality. For the nodding, copying, alluding and parroting discussed below are all more or less explicit manifestations of the poststructuralist tenet of the inevitable intertextual dimension of language and text. Several of the key voices of critical thought of the last forty years—all of them representatives of J. Hillis Miller‟s so-called „uncanny‟ or „Dionysian‟ critics—have addressed this aspect of the deceptively margined and coherent unity of the entity of the Book. As J. Hillis Miller puts it, „[a] literary text is not a thing in itself, „organically