Originality and Intertextuality

What is originality? How can something be classified as original? It has been said before that nothing can be discovered as new or as original as manhood has already invented everything. So, day by day, man is reinventing himself in every aspect: twisting, changing, growing, cutting into pieces, reassembling one thing into another. Everything is a bettered version of the former one, or a reaction to an opponent, but the roots are all the same. This does not only happen in fields such as Technology, Medicine, Psychology and Arts, but also in Literature.

The Literature field is always evolving in a continuum of ideas: old ideas that are far explored, old ideas interpreted from a different perspective, ideas that emerge from old ideas, ideas that develop from former ideas. These ideas are expressed in texts and those texts are source for future texts. Texts are read, interpreted, meant; and every reader interprets and responds to the text differently. In the case of “The Call”, it is a response to other texts and a transformation of texts as well. There is a text about a love story that ended bitterly, a text about technology and how people communicate by different household gadgets, a text about the amazement experienced by people when using those gadgets which allow them to see, to do, to feel new experiences. Such is the amazement expressed in text as “The Telephone”, by Robert Frost. The text mingles with other texts, such is the case of the love story that ended breaking somebody´s heart mixed with the text that talks about an old love that has found a partner leaving the former lover feeling empty and unable to do something about how he feels. These different love poems could be illustrated with “2” by Emily Dickinson, “When you are old”, by W.B.Yeats and “I Loved You Once”, by Alexander Pushkin. Another text among them talks about ghosts, like “Ghosts from the Past” by T.J. Daniels: ghosts that haunt us, ghosts that live with us, ghosts from our pasts. The beginning of the text responds to the benefits of communication, the advancements of technology that enables people to do things beyond their knowledge.
Beneath the whole text, there is the love story, the heart-breakening story of an old love, the story about the one love, once so strong that now that it is gone, leaves the streets empty and hands missing other hands to touch and caress. Also, there seem to be two poems transformed by “The Call” so subtly that they become one. The amazement of light and communication is unified to the love story brilliantly, so they make one extraordinary text.


Emily Dickinson

2
You left me, sweet, two legacies,—
A legacy of love
A Heavenly Father would content,
Had He the offer of;

You left me boundaries of pain
Capacious as the sea,
Between eternity and time,
Your consciousness and me.
W. B. Yeats

When You Are Old
When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

Alexander Pushkin

I Loved You Once
I loved you once, nor can this heart be quiet;
For it would seem that love still lingers there;
But do not you be further troubled by it;
I would in no wise hurt you, oh, my dear.

I loved you without hope, a mute offender;
What jealous pangs, what shy despairs I knew!
A love as deep as this, as true, as tender,
God grant another may yet offer you.
"GHOSTS FROM THE PAST"
The words & visions are there
inside me.
I must write them down
or not get any rest.
The pain that was suffered
so many years past
comes fleetingly to the surface
if only for a moment.
But once seen
recognized
and understood...
the ghosts of the past retreat
back to the
Long Ago.
Copyright © 1998 T. J. Daniels
Robert Frost - The Telephone
'When I was just as far as I could walk
From here today,
There was an hour
All still
When leaning with my head again a flower
I heard you talk.
Don't say I didn't, for I heard you say--
You spoke from that flower on the window sill-
Do you remember what it was you said?'

'First tell me what it was you thought you heard.'

'Having found the flower and driven a bee away,
I leaned on my head
And holding by the stalk,
I listened and I thought I caught the word--
What was it? Did you call me by my name?
Or did you say--
Someone said "Come" -- I heard it as I bowed.'

'I may have thought as much, but not aloud.'

"Well, so I came.'