Opreanu, Lucia. Originality, influence, intertextuality in David Lodges Fiction: A Quest for Solutions to Problems of Literature.

Constana: Europolis, 2011. pp. 95-110

3. 1. Originality, influence, intertextuality

The complex network of connections established between texts has constituted an abiding concern of literary theorists since classical antiquity and the recognition that the creation of literature depends in significant part on the alignment of texts to prior texts and the anticipation of future texts has drawn significant critical and ideological attention to this reflexive dimension of discursive practice
whether by the attribution of literary influence, or the identification of literary sources and analogues, or the ascription of traditionality, or the allegation of plagiarism or copyright violation or, indeed, by any of a host of other ways of construing relationships between texts. (Bauman 1)

The concepts of originality, influence and tradition can be listed among those crucial elements that are invariably mentioned in critical discourses dealing with the complex relationships that link together works belonging to different periods. The notion of tradition is intended above all to give a certain temporal status to phenomena that are both successive and identical and to enable us to rethink the dispersion of history in the form of the same. (Foucault 1998: 421) Tradition thus involves a certain reduction of the difference that characterizes every new beginning and enables us to pursue without discontinuity the endless search for the origin, to isolate the new against a background of permanence, and to transfer its merit to originality, to genius, to the decisions proper to individuals. (Foucault 1998: 421) The related notion of influence is used above all in order to explain the frequent phenomena of resemblance or repetition by means of transmission, inheritance and communication, processes that enable us to perceive the whole of literature as a complex network in which each individual text is connected in one way or another with the ones that either precede or follow it. As far as the notion of originality is concerned, it has always been a key term in literary discussions, although opinions regarding its importance have varied quite a lot in the course of time. During the classical period it was universally accepted that a writer should seek the influence of canonical masters and learn everything he could from the artists that preceded him. This point of view prevailed during the medieval and Renaissance periods and continued into the eighteenth century. However, literary theory during and after the Romantic period regarded the adoption of the tone, style or attitude of another writer as a somewhat inferior practice. Indeed, Romantic theories of the imagination not only challenged the basic premise that art imitates life, but also the view concerning the importance of tradition. The value of a literary work was thought to reside in its novelty, in the innovation of new forms or modes or in the use of hitherto undiscovered or unexploited themes and subjects, that is in originality rather than in imitation. It is by no means surprising that one of the most eloquent analyses of these shifting points of view was provided precisely by one of the writers whose own work can be best described in terms of the complex relationship between the literature of the more or less distant past and the creation of new texts. In a brief but nevertheless comprehensive presentation, David Lodge traces the evolution of this concept over the centuries, from the relaxed attitude of earlier times, when writers felt no hesitation or uneasiness about borrowing stories and rhetorical devices from their predecessors (YHJ 202) to the modern emphasis on originality as an absolute value, resulting in the perception of literary influence as something potentially dangerous as well as inspiring something you must struggle against when it threatens your claim to originality. (YHJ 203) Apart from these historical guidelines, the article also contains simple but solid arguments supporting the inevitability of literary influence: It is of course impossible to write anything without being influenced. Nobody ever wrote a novel or a poem or an

essay without having read at least one and more probably hundreds of such works by others. (YHJ 202) Indeed, however fascinating the doctrine of absolute creative originality, it is hardly possible to accept a critical view which confuses the original with the aboriginal (Frye 97) and imagines that a creative poet sits down with nothing but a pencil and blank paper and eventually produces a new poem in a special act of creation ex nihilo. Every writer begins with some sort of tradition behind him, even if only that provided by his language, and every writer modifies to a certain extent that tradition, even when being imitative. All artists draw in many ways on the previous heritage of the form they use, the devices and artifices it has developed, the cultural energies it has acquired, the themes and experiences it has explored.(Bradbury, 1997: xvii) Moreover, absolute novelty and artistic value are not necessarily synonymous, and T.S. Eliot was probably the critic who best expressed the indissoluble relationship between individual talent and tradition, as well as one of the first to re-examine the importance of influence. In his famous essay Eliot condemned above all the tendency to insist when praising a poet upon the poets difference from his predecessors, upon those aspects of his work in which he least resembles anyone else and which apparently harbour that artists peculiar essence and individuality. His claim is that on approaching an artist without such prejudices critics and readers might find that the best as well as the most individual parts of his work are those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality more vigorously. (Eliot 28) Although readers generally endeavour to find qualities that can be isolated in order to be praised and enjoyed, it should be taken into account that no poet and in fact no artist of any kind has his complete meaning alone. His appreciation depends on the appreciation of his relationship with his predecessors, the dead poets and artists influencing his work. Consequently, no artist can be valued in isolation and has to be set, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. (Eliot 29) According to Eliot, one of the most important qualities required of a writer is the historical sense which makes the artist most acutely conscious not only of his place in time but also of his contemporaneity, and compels him to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. (Eliot 28) Indeed, the main difference between the present and the past resides in the fact that the conscious present is endowed with a remarkable awareness of the past which exceeds by far the pasts awareness of itself. It is this awareness that an artist must develop throughout his career, to such an extent that his progress can be eventually viewed as a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of his own personality in the attempt to conform to the great tradition of the past. Far from representing a matter of inheritance, tradition is something that can only be obtained by great labour and involves the artists willingness to acknowledge the priority of his predecessors works over his own private achievements. Eliots conception of poetry and of literature in general as a living whole of all the texts that have ever been written represented a major breakthrough in the study of literary inheritance and influenced to various extents all subsequent critical disquisitions. One of the most notable figures to adopt his views was Northrop Frye, whose discourse is centred on the same mistake deplored by Eliot four decades earlier, that is the tendency of readers to think of a poets real achievement as distinct from, even contrasted with, the achievement present in what he stole. (Frye 96) Employing the same words previously used by Eliot, Frye suggests that new texts simply manifest what was already latent in the order of words, that literature is not shaped externally but shapes itself and thus poetry can only be made out of other poems and novels out of other novels. Indeed, all art derives from other art, especially art of the same kind and books are made out of other books as much as they are made out of their authors personal experience. (WO 57) Even poems, usually regarded as the unique expression of the poets thoughts, (YHJ 205) are not simply made out of experience but out of previous poetry, that is, the tradition of disposing the possibilities of language to poetic ends, (WS 5) modified to a certain extent by the particular experience of the individual poet, but in no straightforward sense a direct expression of it. Moreover, as Frye further indicates in one of the crucial passages of his work, the real difference between the original and the imitative artist resides in the fact that the former is more

profoundly imitative (Frye 97) and true originality does not represent the search for absolute novelty but a symbolic return to the very origins of literature. Yet, however revealing Eliots or Fryes analyses of the significance of literary influence may be, the affiliative relations between past and present literary texts and their authors were probably most exhaustively explored in Harold Blooms widely read monograph, The Anxiety of Influence, the study which laid the ground-work of his revisionist poetics. It is interesting to note that though Bloom regarded his idea of tradition as opposed to the one in Tradition and Individual Talent, his influential and still controversial theory of antagonistic literary influence is arguably contiguous with Eliots (Reeves 117). In his exploration of the mechanisms of influence Bloom argues that every poet is engaged in an antagonistic struggle against his literary forebears. According to Bloom, there is a complex and fascinating tension between the strong poets in any tradition those with a powerful drive to preserve their own identity and the predecessor poets whose influence they have to cope with and somehow turn to their advantage. From the very first pages of his book, Blooms asserts his claim that literary history is indistinguishable from literary influence, as all strong artists make that history by misreading their predecessors, so as to clear imaginative space for themselves. (Bloom 1973: 5) In the same way in which the Freudian subject must come to terms with the Oedipal love-hate relationship of son to father, the poet must try to escape the gravitational pull exerted by his precursors. Formerly constructed as ideals the new writer should imitate, canonical masters now assume the role of threatening parents and the poet actually experiences the guilt-ridden hatred of the father that Freud detected at the root of family relations. His will to expression is pursued through cunning forms of displacement, or defensive tropes, (Norris 117) which at the same time disguise and elaborate the will to be self-begotten, to acknowledge no previous authority and influence. Yet, the strong poet has the courage to recognize his own belatedness in relationship to the tradition he inherits, as well as the strength to subvert it by troping his predecessors. During this process, primary sources are misread and reconfigured by the later poet by means of a complex system of revisionary ratios, comprising the psychic defences through which a poet can rebel against his forebears. Up to a certain point, Blooms revisionary theory and the practice of deconstruction seem to share an impressive number of features. Both start out from the idea that literary history, in so far as it exists in any genuine sense, has to deal with texts in their relationships one with the other, through a process of displacement and misreading. Both dismiss the subjectivist illusion of the poet as selfpossessed creator of meaning, an individual subject expressing the truths of his own authentic vision. (Norris 118) Indeed, both views suggest that in order to interpret a text the reader must first of all seek out the strategies and defensive tropes by means of which it confronts or evades preceding texts. Moreover, Bloom obviously shares Derridas view when he insists that textual origins are always pushed back beyond recall, in a series of hard-fought rhetorical encounters that make up the line of descent in poetic history. (Norris 119) The only important difference between the two perspectives resides in Blooms belief that the strong poet must strive to create a certain working-space for his own imagination and in his tendency to halt the deconstructive process at a point where it is still possible to judge a poets creativity in terms of his overriding will to expression. An intriguing aspect of Blooms approach concerns his decision to discuss these issues in terms of poetic creation alone, especially given the possibility of arguing that the specific nature of narration and the constant pressure to be original in form and content ensure that the modern novelist is in a way even more vulnerable to the anxiety of influence than the modern poet. (YHJ 205) In spite of its somehow limited scope, Blooms approach has proved at least as influential as Eliots study of tradition and individual talent and in fact literary criticism that followed the publication of his monograph tended to focus above all on influential textual linkages, on spotting thematic likenesses or disclosing verbal patterns between as well as within texts to such an extent that Western literary history has become quite inseparable from the mimetic view of influence. (Renza 187) Moreover, although his taxonomy was meant to be representative of the literary process in general, it was considered to be especially applicable to the production of postmodernist texts.

Postmodernist theoretical discourses invariably contain various references to the already familiar notions of tradition and influence, as well as to phenomena such as allusion, appropriation, bricolage, collage, echo, parody, pastiche, plagiarism, (direct or indirect) quotation, recuperation, structural parallelism and above all the one concept that encompasses them all, intertextuality, to such an extent that no accurate description of postmodernism can exist in the absence of a list comprising all these highly suggestive terms (Ray 144). The term initially coined in 1966 by Julia Kristeva to denote the interdependence of literary texts, the interdependence of any one literary text with all those that have gone before it, (Cuddon 454) has found its way even into academic quarters where poststructuralism is usually sniggered at rather than admired and now belongs together with such postmodern truisms as Jacques Derridas There is nothing outside the text and Roland Barthes death of the author among the heavy artillery of literary theory where it is easily the most catholic of concepts () but also the most entangled in controversial definitions and contradictory usages (Schulze-Engler 3). One such controversy concerns the possibility of seeing intertextuality either as an enlargement of the familiar idea of influence an opinion obviously shared by David Lodge, as it emerges from his reference to the inescapable kind of influence that modern criticism calls intertextuality (WO 58) or as an entirely new concept to replace the outmoded notion of influence (Clayton and Rothstein 3). The most neutral solution to the difficult task of deciding whether the birth of intertextuality as a critical term insists upon the death of influence as its conceptual precursor (Stanford Friedman 146) is a generalization along the lines that influence has to do with agency whereas intertextuality has to do with the much more impersonal field of crossing texts (Clayton and Rothstein 4). Starting from the theory of dialogism formulated by Mikhail Bakhtin and adding the principle that all language is made up of prior uses of language, Kristeva challenged traditional notions of literary influence, asserting that intertextuality denotes a transposition of one or several sign systems into another or others. Her main contention was that a literary text, far from being an isolated phenomenon, is made up of a mosaic of quotations, consists of a network of texts, replete with echoes of earlier texts (Fleming and Payne 12) and as such represents the absorption and transformation of previous discourses. For post-structuralist theorists such as Kristeva and Roland Barthes, all language is inevitably intertextual in more than one way, not only because individuals do not originate or invent language but also because without pre-existing forms, themes, conventions and codes there could be no such thing as literature at all. Far from simply being a literary phenomenon, intertextuality pervades every aspect of human life, from everyday conversations full of fragments of other voices and other texts to numnerous popular television programmes and advertising (L. Pearce 94-95). According to Barthes, a text is a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash () a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture. (Barthes 1977: 146) This theory was further developed in the deconstructionist rejection of the idea of a TEXT as a single, autonomous entity created by a single author (Quinn 167) and the assertion that if a text seems to refer beyond itself, that reference can finally be only to another text. Just as signs only refer to other signs, texts can only refer to other texts, generating the intersecting and indefinitely expandable web called intertextuality. (Sarup 52) Irrespective of the various controversies and divergent explanations, there is no denying the importance of a term that has been used with great frequency in literary criticism in order to describe the numerous ways in which texts interact with other texts, and in particular to focus on the interdependence between texts rather than on their discreteness and uniqueness (Montgomery et al 162). In the course of time this concept has occupied an increasingly prominent place in discussions of literature in acknowledgement of the fact that all discourses can be in one way or another described in terms of intertextuality, with numerous theorists regarding it as the very condition of literature (and by generalisation of art itself), since all texts are assemblages of prior texts, are practically woven from the tissues of other texts (AF 98-99) whether their authors are aware of this or not:
Intertextuality is born with the recognition that a given text uncannily refuses to obey the principle of an organic form by assuming the shape of a unified whole, however fissured by irony, tension,

and paradox. From this beginning, intertextuality extends through the recognition of dialogic voices of other texts echoing within every text. Once the defining circumference of the text previously thought of as work collapses, the world and the text interpenetrate each other in a vision of allencompassing textuality. (Fleming and Payne 12)

Although a relatively recent critical term and as such usually employed in discussions of contemporary texts, intertextuality refers to the inevitable indebtedness conditioning the existence of texts belonging to all ages and describes a phenomenon that has been in existence for centuries and is as such entwined in the roots of the English novel, while at the other end of the chronological spectrum novelists have tended to exploit rather than resist it, freely recycling old myths and earlier works of literature to shape or add resonance to, their presentation of contemporary life. (AF 99) Postmodern intertextuality can be interpreted as the formal manifestation of both a desire to close the gap between past and present and a desire to rewrite the past in a new context, as postmodern writing directly confronts the past of literature, using and abusing intertextual echoes, inscribing their powerful allusions and then subverting that power through irony. (Hutcheon 1996: 487) One of the most important features of contemporary literature actually resides in the tendency of most postmodernist texts to be specifically parodic in their intertextual relation with literary traditions and conventions. Parody is indeed a particularly interesting kind of intertextuality, usually achieved by imitating the expression or style of a well-known text, author or genre and substituting an inappropriate content, thus invariably questioning the conventional notion of originality associated with rarity, uniqueness and value. It is however quite interesting to note that although apparently a humorous putting down of the powerful and their texts, parody may actually pay them homage. In this sense, parody could be said to represent a perfect postmodern form, as it paradoxically both incorporates and challenges that which it parodies and also forces a reconsideration of the idea of origin and originality that is compatible with other postmodern interrogations of liberal humanist assumptions. (Hutcheon 1997: 277) Postmodernism itself emerges as a rather contradictory phenomenon that uses and abuses, installs and then subverts (Hutcheon 1993: 243) the very concepts it challenges, not only in literature but also in painting, sculpture, film, music, philosophy, aesthetic theory, psychoanalysis, linguistics. One of its main characteristics consists in an ironic playfulness which refers to previous styles and famous works (Boyne and Rattansi 10) and it could actually be argued that postmodernism has always been in search of tradition while pretending to innovation. (Huyssen 1993: 228) Although it unsettles and deconstructs traditional notions about language, identity and writing itself, it intertextually refers to the literary tradition, no matter how ironically, and as a consequence it still indirectly affirms traditional texts and perspectives. (Bertens 144) Postmodernism is in this sense quite schizophrenic about the past, (Jencks 1993: 293) being at the same time determined to retain and preserve aspects of the literary tradition and to go forward, excited about revival yet wanting to escape the dead formulae of the past, simultaneously promoting rules and breaking them. The contradictory nature of this parodic approach to tradition moreover represents one of the main proofs in favour of the idea that the postmodernist novel can be best described as the site of fundamental paradoxes and tensions. (Scott 2) However sensible these discourses concerning the importance of parody in postmodernist literature might seem, Fredric Jameson argues that parody belongs to the past and as such it presently finds itself without a vocation. According to Jameson, pastiche, a notion to be sharply distinguished from the more readily received idea of parody, is the truly characteristic mechanism of contemporary literature. Pastiche is, just like parody, the imitation of a peculiar or unique, idiosyncratic style, the wearing of a linguistic mask, speech in a dead language, (Jameson 320-1) but it is a neutral practice of such mimicry, lacking parodys ulterior motives, its satiric impulse and the faith in the survival of a certain linguistic normality. Jameson goes on to develop the already familiar claim that contemporary producers of culture have nowhere to turn but to the past and are forced to resort to the imitation of dead styles, to speech through all the masks and voices stored up in the imaginary museum of a now global culture. (Jameson 321) Postmodernism can be thus interpreted as a logical culmination of the

premises of Romantic-modernist traditions, favouring a style which emphasizes diversity, displays a penchant for pastiche and adopts an inclusivist philosophy advocating an eclectic use of elements from the past exemplifying the apparently limitless assimilative capacity of contemporary society (Smart 168). Deriving from the Italian pasticcio, this term indicates a patchwork of words, sentences or complete passages from various authors or one author (Cuddon 685) frequently amounting to a medley or hotch-potch of pieces put together from various sources (M Pearce 137). Pastiching an individual author somehow resembles the creation of an anagram, not of letters, but of components of style and pastiche itself can be thus defined as a kind of permutation, a shuffling of generic and grammatical ties. (Lewis 125) Pastiche is moreover closely connected with the contemporary mania for impersonation, both of them being clearly related to the abandonment of the divine pretensions of authorship (Barry 83) and the unavoidable frustration that everything has been done before. Postmodernist writers seem to have given up longing for an unmistakable signature, preferring instead to pluck existing styles from the reservoir of literary history, and match them with little tact and this clearly explains why numerous postmodern novels borrow the clothes of different forms (Lewis 126) such as the detective tale, the western and the science fiction story. Whether the impulse behind this cross-dressing is spasmodic or parodic, whether pastiche or parody represents the defining trait of postmodern literature, there is no denying the fact that it can only be understood in terms of its complex and contradictory relationship with the past. Postmodernism must be indeed perceived in terms of two complementary perspectives, of continuity and discontinuity, of the abstract Apollonian view, discerning only historical conjunctions, as well as of the sensuous Dionysian feeling, touching only the disjunctive moment. (Hassan 149) Invoking two distinct divinities at once, postmodernism definitely engages a double view, including sameness and difference, unity and rupture, filiation and revolt, continuity and discontinuity, diachrony and synchrony, thus operating in a field of tension between tradition and innovation, conservation and renewal (Huyssen 1994: 371) in which the second terms are no longer automatically privileged over the first. Yet, if novelty is no longer necessarily perceived as a quality and innovation comes to be regarded as an unattainable goal, the question arises whether one can still talk of artistic originality or this notion belongs by now to a quite distant past. As far as the problem of originality is concerned, one of the most important aspects of the contemporary approach to literature and in fact to any form of artistic creation resides in the tendency to replace the image of the inventor with that of the bricoleur. This highly suggestive image clearly indicates that far from being the originator of unique images and ideas, the contemporary artist is interested only in putting together the various elements he has selected from the works of others. Instead of originating his own texts, the writer prefers to adopt an apparently passive position and simply mixes already extant discourses. (McHale 200) His artistic output can consequently be best described as a compilation comprising a wide selection of materials and his own contribution to this product resides not in his ability to create some novel form of expression but rather in his capacity to appropriate fragments of previous works and combine them in a creation of his own. However paradoxical it might initially sound, it could be argued that the originality of contemporary literature in its broad outlines resides in the refusal of originality at least in the narrow sense of complete novelty or primacy to its forebears:
Thus the best way to consider originality is to look not for first instances of a phenomenon, but rather to see duplication, parallelism, symmetry, parody, repetition, echoes of it the way, for example, literature has made itself into a topos of writing. What the modern or contemporary imagination thinks of it is less the confining of something to a book, and more the release of something from a book in writing. () The writer thinks less of writing originally, and more of rewriting. The image for writing changes from original inscription to parallel script. (Said 135)

There is no denying the fact that the use of received forms in new contexts has been an essential aspect of all forms of artistic manifestation from the very beginning of the history of art, yet it would be wrong to conclude that artistic creation can only be discussed in terms of appropriation. The mistake of

much literary theory which works with notions like intertextuality has been to stress the dependence of any given text on the already existing resources of other texts while failing to adequately characterize the aesthetic transformations brought about by the new formal configuration of those resources. Contemporary literary theory has increasingly insisted in its analyses on the inherent dependence of texts upon preceding texts, neglecting the fact that it is the reconfiguration of existing linguistic elements to release new semantic potential, or to destroy existing meanings (Bowie 26) that makes literature a vital fact, not the fact that all literary achievements are parasitic upon other texts. The condition of possibility of literature is consequently connected to the fact that no literary theory, however sophisticated, can really account for the perpertual transformation of meaning brought about by the recontextualisation of existing structures in new texts. The new context actually uses the old material as part of its novelty and the new literary work of art, while clearly reverberating with echoes of other texts, is nevertheless unique and, far from simply betraying the dream of a new institution, represents a new institution unto itself. (Attridge 74) Citational intertextuality (including not only direct quotation and allusion, but also literary conventions, imitation, parody and unconscious sources) thus emerges as a valuable resource of postmodernist literature, which relies heavily on references to earlier styles and conventions, engages in extensive allusions that its knowing audience will recognize, and insistently calls attention to itself as being made up of other texts and characterizes in this respect a cultural sense that everything has already been said, and that the ironic consciousness of this condition is a kind of mastery over it. (Quinn 167) Literature can actually be regarded as an eternal story of the power of the human imagination, of the power of every new writer of significance to shift to a certain extent the literary tradition, adding something of his or her own, extending, sometimes totally upturning, what has gone before. (Bradbury 1997: viii) It is in fact quite interesting to note that the very initiator of the disturbing notion of the literature of exhaustion has repeatedly expressed his faith in the power of individual imagination, focusing on the used-upness of certain forms but clearly asserting that this is by no means necessarily a cause for despair (Barth 1977: 70). The Literature of Replenishment, intended as a companion and corrective to The Literature of Exhaustion, actually dismisses the assumption that everything has been written already, that there is nothing left for contemporary writers but to parody and travesty their great predecessors in an exhausted medium. Barth clearly states that the real aim of his much-misread essay was to demonstrate that the forms and modes of art live in human history () in other words, that artistic conventions are liable to be retired, subverted, transcended, transformed, or even deployed against themselves to generate new and lively work. (Barth 1996: 285) Moreover, after suggesting that the ideal postmodernist author neither merely repudiates nor merely imitates either his twentieth-century modernist parents or his nineteenth-century premodernist grandparents, but actually acknowledges both tradition and innovation, he goes on to assert his belief that literature can never be exhausted, if only because no single literary text can ever be exhausted its meaning residing as it does in its transactions with individual readers over time, space and language. (Barth 1996: 285) It could thus be argued that contemporary writers do indeed have more than one choice in their attempt to create something original and one of these choices actually involves the acceptance of intertextuality and influence. The fact that in contemporary fiction telling has become compulsory belated, inextricably bound up with retelling, (Connor 166) in all its familiar idioms (reworking, translation, adaptation, displacement, imitation, forgery, plagiarism, parody, pastiche) does not necessarily have as its natural consequence the disappearance of creative originality since any combinative operation is unique and grounds the text in a difference which cannot be repeated except as difference (Barthes 1989: 60). Attitudes to tradition and influence have constantly varied throughout the ages, yet writers have never ceased to borrow elements from the work of their precursors and, in the words of Ackroyds Chatterton, use them in forming new and happy combinations, a better proof of genius than searching after thoughts and ideas which had never occurred before. (58) A distinction has in fact been established between creators who bring entirely new matter into being and inventors who permute pre-existing material into novel combinations

(Macfarlane 1) with the resulting perception of the work of art as addition to what exists according to one paradigm and an edition of it according to the other. As far as contemporary artists are concerned, they can either deplore an imaginary exhaustion of creative possibilities and of literature itself or reject this pessimistic view and use the partially assembled combinations which have previously proved serviceable in similar contexts (H. G. Widdowson 55-56) provided by the literature of the past for their own creative purposes, in the production of their own works of replenishment. Indeed, one of the most interesting characteristics of postmodern literature consists in the presence of writers that are not only capable of overcoming the apparently unavoidable anxieties of influence and indebtedness but actually confront them in their own literary works, often choosing them as their main themes. The success of writers such as John Fowles, Peter Ackroyd, A.S. Byatt or Julian Barnes, far from residing in some utopian novelty of form or content, consists in their willingness to acknowledge the literature of the past, in their ability to use previous literary works as materials for their own texts and above all in their acceptance of the fact that the attempt to create something entirely new is an essentially elusive goal. David Lodge is perhaps one of the most representative exponents of this category of writers, above all because he does not simply exploit the literature of the past but also uses his novels as vehicles for his own theoretical ideas, employing intertextuality both as a literary device and as a dominant theme. Notwithstanding Lodges reluctance to consider himself a postmodern writer, his novels are from many points of view typical examples of the aesthetic pluralism he sought to defend in his theoretical writing. This idea is in fact supported by his own reconsideration of the validity of his earlier metaphor of the crossroads and especially of the rather limited model associated with it, which did not allow for the mixing of genres and styles within a single text, let alone do justice to the unprecedented contemporary abundance of techniques and scenarios (Bradford 3) and subsequent decision to replace it with the less dramatic but more accurate concept of the crossover effect, frequently achieved precisely by means of foregrounded intertextuality, the overt citation or simulation of older texts in a modern text. (PW 9) The world created in most of Lodges novels is above all an intertextual world made up of the voices, styles and ideas of his favourite predecessors and many of the characters inhabiting it are usually tormented by the fear of influence and by the desire to achieve originality, that is by the very anxieties dominating the contemporary literary scene. The true complexity of his novels can be best understood in relationship with his own double identity, split between writing fiction and literary scholarship (YHJ 11) and Lodge himself explains the increasingly intertextual nature of his novels as a direct consequence of his decision to combine writing novels with a career as a university professor. (AF 102) It is important to note that although Lodge himself associates the use of a complex tissue of references with a later stage in his dual career and most critics choose to analyse this particular aspect in reference to a limited set of novels, intertextuality plays an important part in all of his novels. Even if Lodges early texts are not all as demonstrably parodical as his later works, they may be said nonetheless to have laid some of the ground-work for the more comic use of parody in future projects (Rose 1993: 256) and it is quite interesting to trace the way intertextuality shapes texts belonging to different periods and discover the peculiarities of each.