Delving Deeper: Interconnectedness of Texts

     Thomas C. Foster’s claim, “writing and telling belong to the one big story,” raises significant question about the ability of one writer to be original and individual.  Can one write something entirely unrelated to and independent of what they have read or experienced before?  Or are they chained to the past, the history of themselves and mankind?

     To delve deeper into the meaning and implications of Foster’s claim, one must first explore scenarios in which this assertion is true.  Take, as an example, Virgil’s Aeneid.  Since the epic poem’s publishing at least two thousand years ago, hundreds of references have been made to the piece in other forms of literature and film.  An obvious example is found in Ursula K. LeGuin’s Lavinia, a novel focused on the life of one of Virgil’s characters in the Aeneid.  Books with such blatant, obvious, and intentional intertextuality are common; however, does the statement still hold true when the intent is nonexistent, when the author is attempting to be entirely original?

     To explore this, let’s take a hypothetical man living in complete isolation his entire life.  For some reason, he writes a book.  Foster's nation that his book can "grow" out of other stories unbeknownst to him might seem far fetched, but is it?  If he writes about anything that has descended through generations, that has at one point or another felt the effects of other human beings, he is a part of this bigger story.  If he write about birds, trees, water, or the sky, he is fulfilling this requirement, as men before him have had control of the same birds, trees, water and sky that he writes about now.  With this said, even if the man somehow manages to write about something entirely unrelated, but his piece is read by a human later on, he has become a part of a much bigger story.

     With this truth in mind, a reader is able to experience reading in an entirely new and enriching light.  This knowledge affords the reader the ability to process much more than the plot and apply much more than solely their definitional knowledge of words in the piece.  They are able to make a text even richer than the author might have ever intended, and learn more about books they closed months before.