Iowa State University Capstones, Theses and Retrospective Theses and Dissertations Dissertations 1997 Love, death and poetry: epidemic intertextualities in Chaucer's Book of the Duchess and Tony Kushner's Angels in America Kelly Anne Munger Iowa State University Follow this and additional works at: https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/rtd Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Munger, Kelly Anne, "Love, death and poetry: epidemic intertextualities in Chaucer's Book of the Duchess and Tony Kushner's Angels in America" (1997). Retrospective Theses and Dissertations. 16201. https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/rtd/16201 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Iowa State University Capstones, Theses and Dissertations at Iowa State University Digital Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Retrospective Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Iowa State University Digital Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Love, death and poetry: Epidemic intertextualities in Chaucer's Book of the Duchess and Tony Kushner's Angels in America by Kelly Anne Munger A thesis submitted to the graduate faculty in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF ARTS Major: English (Literature) Major Professor: Susan L. Carlson Iowa State University Ames, Iowa 1997 ii Graduate College Iowa State University This is to certify that the Master's thesis of Kell y Anne Munger has met the requirements of Iowa State University Signatures have been redacted for privacy For the Graduate College III In memoriam: Cary Gold (1960-1994) Donnie Jackson (1958-1992) Tracy Mure (1964-1990) iv TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER 2. EPIDEMIC INTERTEXTU ALITIES 9 CHAPTER 3. AN INTERTEXTUAL READING OF BOOK OF THE DUCHESS AND ANGELS IN AMERICA. 19 The Book of the Duchess 20 Angels in America 32 Reading Synchronically, Reading Simultaneously 58 CHAPTER 4. ANINTERTEXTUALPEDAGOGY 70 WORKS CITED 78 1 CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION ...any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another. (Kristeva 66) The concept of intertextuality has been, according to Leon Roudiez, a translator of Julia Kristeva's work, "much used and abused on both sides of the Atlantic" (15). The relationship between texts has traditionally been discussed in terms of either "influence" or "inspiration." In the former, a temporal relationship between prior texts and subsequent texts is assumed which perceives the earlier text as a source for the construction of the later text. For example, Chaucer's Book of the Duchess has been read as constructed of material from earlier sources: Boethius' The Consolation of Philosophy, the Roman de la Rose, Ovid's Metamorphoses, and Froissart's Dit dou Bleu Chevalier, among others (Cherniss 1969, Crane 1992, Hardman 1990, Findlayson 1990). In the latter, "inspiration," which is perhaps best represented by T. S. Eliot's metaphor of the poet as a "catalyst" (Eliot 469), the "individual talent" of the writer transforms the tradition. The problem with a strict reading of the 2 relationship between texts as one of either influence or inspiration is that the emphasis in such an understanding is placed on the centrality of the author, who is engaged and assumed to be familiar with the prior texts which are transformed and absorbed into the new text. There is a tension in such a binary model of intertextuality, as ThaIs Morgan explains in her essay, "The Space of Intertextuali ty," Given the incongruent presuppositions of these two models, it is not surprising that their point of unending dispute lies in that gray area which constitutes most of literature: those texts in which the author imitates or borrows features from an earlier text or set of texts, but in the process changes or transforms these features to suit the characteristics of his own previous work. (241) Morgan here tells us that there is nothing simple about either influence or inspiration, for neither sort of intertextual relation is static. It is not a matter of picking out the bits of prior texts from the mosaic which makes up the text under construction, but also a task of asking questions about the relationships between the texts: how do they change, from one place to another, and, more importantly, why? This conception of influence, inspiration, and intertextuality as existing in relationship to each other in more than one fashion is also described by Jay Clayton and Eric Rothstein: The shape of intertextuality in turn depends on the shape of 3 influence. One may see intertextuality either as the enlargement of a familiar idea or as an entirely new concept to replace the outmoded notion of influence. In the former case, intertextuality might be taken as a general term, working out from the broad definition of influence to encompass unconscious, socially prompted types of text formation (for example, by archetypes or popular culture); modes of conception (such as ideas "in the air"); styles (such as genres); and other prior constraints and opportunities for the writer. In the latter case, intertextuality might be used to oust and replace the kinds of issues that influence addresses, and in particular its central concern with the author and more or less conscious authorial intentions and skills. (3) Clayton and Rothstein are suggesting that, although one might limit the relationship between texts to that which can be attributed to the author (through either intention or sociohistorical construction), one might also expand the conception of intertextuality so that it reaches beyond the author as the center of textual relationships to include both reader and culture. This expanded understanding of the relationship between texts, which sees the author as but one part of "a complex of relation between the text, the reader, reading, writing, printing, publishing, and history" (Plottel xx), opens up interpretive possibilities by reordering the tradition to create a more resonant significance than anyone text carries in a more traditional, diachronic reading. It is not just the author's influence and inspiration which creates the intertextual web in which the text 4 exists, but also the influence and inspiration of the reader, and of the culture in which all (author, text, reader) coexist. Unlike some models of the literary tradition, which assume a linear progression from one text or period to the next, the sort of intertextual relations suggested by Morgan and Plottel, among others, assumes a web-like arrangement of intertextuality; we can no longer assume "precursors" or "prior texts," and can, therefore, no longer assume direct relations between texts. Rather, some texts will only be related to each other when read through other texts--a literary version of the contemporary parlor game, "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon," in which connections between actors must be threaded along a web of film trivia until a connection to the character actor, Kevin Bacon, is established. In such a relationship, whether between texts or between actors, connections are established along criteria other than the linear construction of the literary tradition or film history. What takes precedence is the relationship of the text to the web of other texts, and not to a diachronic timeline. In such a reading of cultural texts, Kevin Bacon can be linked to actors and actresses who died before he was born; in the such a reading of literary texts, the chronologically "later" text may be read as informing and influencing the "prior" text. This paper will examine the ways in which such a simultaneous, web-like intertextual reading of Chaucer's long poem, the Book of the Duchess, and Tony Kushner's Pulitzer Prize-winning two-part play, Angels in America, can open up interpretive possibilities for both texts by engaging in a process of reordering the tradition. In an adaptation of T. S. Eliot's conceptualization of a tradition 5 that opens itself to make room for the new talent, we have in these texts an example in which the addition of a "new" text to the tradition in fact makes room for the "old" text to be read anew. This reordering of the tradition creates, to borrow the words of the poet Galway Kinnell, a ''backward-spreading brightness" (59), a more resonant significance for both the "older" and "younger" text than either carries in a more traditional, chronological reading. The addition of Angels in America to the literary tradition makes it possible to move beyond traditional readings of Chaucer's text as an occasional poem to commemorate the death (or to dedicate the tomb) of Blanche of Lancaster, or as the first of his long poems and an attempt to integrate the French romance style of Roman de la Rose into the English vernacular. Instead, the presence of Angels in America in the tradition makes possible, as well as necessitates, a reading of the Book of the Duchess as an exploration of grief in the face of plague, and of the ways in which traditional understandings of consolation fail the survivors of such a plague. It is by reading the failure of philosophical or religious consolation in the contemporary plague--AIDS--which Angels ill America addresses that we are able to read the significance of the poet-dreamer's failure to console the Man in Black. Such a reading allows us to perceive both texts as engaged in a conversation--a relationship that is fluid and changing, rather than the static and linear relationship of traditional literary history. This new reading allows us to address both the contextualities (historical and contemporary) and the intertextualities of the texts: beyond similarities in content and form, the texts 6 speak to each other through other texts (Boethius' The Consolation of Philosophy and Come Back, Little Sheba are two examples).