Intertextuality in LOST
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Georg Jeschke, B.A. Intertextuality in LOST Masterarbeit Zur Erlangung des Akademischen Grades Master of Arts Anglistik und Amerikanistik Alpen-Adria Universität Klagenfurt Fakultät für Kulturwissenschaften Begutachter: Univ.-Prof. Dr. Jörg Helbig Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik Jänner 2012 Ehrenwörtliche Erklärung Ich erkläre ehrenwörtlich, dass ich die vorliegende wissenschaftliche Arbeit selbstständig angefertigt und die mit ihr unmittelbar verbundenen Tätigkeiten selbst erbracht habe. Ich erkläre weiters, dass ich keine anderen als die angegebenen Hilfsmittel benutzt habe. Alle aus gedruckten, ungedruckten oder dem Internet im Wortlaut oder im wesentlichen Inhalt übernommenen Formulierungen und Konzepte sind gemäß den Regeln für wissenschaftliche Arbeiten zitiert und durch Fußnoten bzw. durch andere genaue Quellenangaben gekennzeichnet. Die während des Arbeitsvorganges gewährte Unterstützung einschließlich signifikanter Betreuungshinweise ist vollständig angegeben. Die wissenschaftliche Arbeit ist noch keiner anderen Prüfungsbehörde vorgelegt worden. Diese Arbeit wurde in gedruckter und elektronischer Form abgegeben. Ich bestätige, dass der Inhalt der digitalen Version vollständig mit dem der gedruckten Version übereinstimmt. Ich bin mir bewusst, dass eine falsche Erklärung rechtliche Folgen haben wird. (Unterschrift) (Ort, Datum) ii CONTENTS Introduction 1 1. Intertextuality 4 1.1. Different theories of Intertextuality 4 1.2. Intertextual Communication, the Death of the Author and Hypertexts 8 1.3. Postmodernism and Intertextuality 10 1.4. Diverted Reading 12 2. Defining Allusions 15 2.1. The Scope of Allusions 15 2.2. Reading Allusions 15 2.3. Duration of Significance 17 2.4. Allusion as metaphor and metonymy 17 2.5. Explicitness 18 2.6. Integration of allusions in LOST 19 3. Functions of Allusions in LOST 22 3.1. Supporting Themes 22 3.2. Characterization 23 3.3. Anticipatory Function 25 3.4. Tradition 28 3.5. Reality Effect 29 3.6. Multiple Functions: The Brothers Karamazov 30 4. Cross-medial Allusions: Music in LOST 32 4.1. Criteria for Music in Film 32 4.1.1. Diegetic vs. Non-diegetic film music 32 4.1.2. Visual and Verbal References to Music 34 4.2. Pop-songs as Intertextual Allusions 35 4.2.1. Film music’s tasks 36 iii 4.2.2. Lyrics as Intertexts 36 4.2.3. Patsy Cline Leitmotif 39 4.3. Functions of Music 40 5. The Paratext 42 5.1. Features of Paratexts 42 5.2. Paratextuality as a Category of Intertextuality 43 5.3. An Analysis of Intertextual Titles in LOST 44 5.4. Bonus Material 50 6. What’s in a Name? 52 6.1. Intertextual Names 52 6.2. Jack and Christian Shephard 52 6.3. Philosophers 54 6.4. Literary Characters 57 6.5. Conclusion 58 7. Genre 60 7.1. Thematic and Modal Components of Genre 60 7.2. Architextuality 60 7.3. Modes of Representation in LOST 61 7.4. Themes and Sub-Genres 62 7.4.1. Island Narratives 63 7.4.2. Time Travel Narratives 68 8. Case Study – Intertextuality and Self-reflexivity in “Exposé” 72 8.1. Summary 72 8.2. Self-Reflexivity 76 8.3. Intertextuality 78 Conclusion 81 iv Introduction With interest in mythology and spirituality on the decline, 21 st century society offers little comfort to humans unable to cope with the difficulties of modern life. This often leads to an attempt to create alternatives: escapism, asceticism or back-to-the-roots movements. For certain individuals, art offers the possibility to immerge oneself into another reality. Like all great myths in the history of time, the US-American TV-series LOST (2004-2010) also offers a fantastic narrative that is intended to help make life more meaningful and connect people. It does not shy away from the big questions and mysteries of existence: the origin of the human race, the afterlife and the existence of God. LOST creates its own mythology and symbolism, and the setting of a desert island serves as an ideal location for an alternative lifestyle to become possible. However, the narrative of LOST does not invite viewers into its alternative reality to idly rest there. On the surface, its labyrinth structure is filled with dead ends, unanswered questions and paths that lead nowhere. The viewers have to dig deeper and look for clues in the form of literary and cultural allusions to make sense of what they see on screen – that is, if they do not want to get lost. In LOST, a plane flying from Sydney to Los Angeles crashes onto an island in the Pacific Ocean. Miraculously, most passengers survive, but their hope for rescue is soon crushed when they learn that their plane was hundreds of miles off course and that the pilot had lost all communication with the main land. Cut off from society and civilization, the first challenge for the passengers is how to survive in this forsaken place and how to form rules and regulations to govern their everyday life. What is more, they realize by and by that the island is not an ordinary place and that there are other people inhabiting it. Survival and the struggle to return, magic and supernatural phenomena, and the threat posed by other societies, are the central themes of the TV-series. These themes (and many more sub-themes, such as time travel, mythology and romance) are supported by various allusions to cultural artifacts, such as references to paintings, film, television, music and literature. References to the latter field of art feature especially prominently in LOST. In Literary LOST – Viewing Television through the Lens of Literature (2011) Sarah Clarke Stuart identifies 91 works of literature that are alluded to in the TV series (149-51). Adding the references to other cultural domains, the number of overt allusions easily exceeds 300. On the DVD edition of the second season of LOST, the viewer can find a special feature called LOST Connections. It is based on Hungarian writer Frigyes Karinthy’s model of 1 the “Six Degrees of Separation” which implies that any two human beings A and B on this planet can somehow be connected to each other by no more than five other people. Following this principle, the users of this special feature can navigate their way through an intricate web of wires connecting the characters of LOST, starting with the show’s protagonist Jack Shephard. Moreover, LOST Connections is an interactive feature, with the user being free to decide which connecting wire to activate in order to establish one character’s link to another. Thus, this special feature functions as a metaphor for intertextuality in two ways. Firstly, it shows that any character in isolation has no significance whatsoever. It is only through exploring a character’s connections to others that he or she becomes meaningful. When substituting text for character we arrive at the core argument of the theory of intertextuality. No cultural text, be it a film, a novel or any other work of art, exists independently from other texts, nor can meaning be derived from it when it is read in isolation. Secondly, the user is a sort of navigator through the labyrinth of character relations in LOST Connections. Some might activate links others may not, and some might not even find a certain link between one character and another. Hence, the special feature itself is not meaningful unless a user explores it. The same can be said for the reading process of texts. It is not, as formerly believed, the author as the original and authoritative creator who fixes the meaning of a text, but the readers who, dissimilar in interest and cultural knowledge, produce various different readings of one and the same text. As in LOST Connections , they may take different paths and establish links to other texts. This is called the hypertext - the ultimate version of an intertextual artifact. The questions that are to be answered in this thesis are how and why LOST foregrounds its dependency on pre-texts texts. Chapter 1 presents the origins and different theories of intertextuality as they have developed since the coinage of the term by Julia Kristeva. The main aim is an attempt to reconcile these different theories in order to show that each of them has its validity and usefulness in the analysis to come. Moreover, this chapter demonstrates the immense influence intertextuality has had on the Romantic notions of the author-reader relationship and the reading process. Once the reconciliation between the different theories of intertextuality is completed, it can be made clear how such a concept - often regarded as an innate characteristic of language in general - can be closely tied to one artistic and cultural period, namely postmodernism. Last but not least, chapter 1 shows how intertextuality is quintessentially reader-dependent. The following three chapters will focus on allusions as the main instance of intertextuality within a text. Chapter 2 aims to define what allusions are and if, by a broad 2 definition, this concept might have the potential of serving as an umbrella term for all other intertextual devices. It moreover answers the questions of how allusions work and how they can be incorporated into a TV-series such as LOST. Chapter 3 describes the main functions of allusions with various examples from the TV-series, without failing to stress the fact that a text or author can never fix the function of an allusion, but that it is rather the readers who determine the purpose of an allusion for themselves. Chapter 4 analyzes music in LOST and aims to establish whether these cross-medial allusions also have such diverse functions as, for example, literary references. The next two chapters present two specific types of allusions as can be found in TV- series, films and written texts.