"Intertextuality" is a term coined by Julia Kristeva but one that I use to cover a broader range of formats than those she explains in her seminal work, Dialogue and Novel: Problems De Structuration Du Texte (1967) (1) .
Although the term intertextuality dates from the 1960's, the phenomenon, in some form, is at least as old as the records of mankind. The Socratic dialogues provide one of the earliest forms of what Kristeva will eventually call intertextuality.
Kristeva establishes that the biographer, scenarist or playwright is "first a reader of texts in the broadest sense before he is a creator of text. Consequently the novel (or motion picture) is laced with references, quotations and influences of every kind." (2) This paper is a study of intertextual space occupied by three forms: biography, drama and screen play as they shape and transform each other and the legend of Salome. That tripartitioning determines the structure of this paper.
The first form I will investigate is biography and four options available to its practitioners. A biographer can invest several months in a subject before discarding them as not interesting enough. On the other hand, the writer can spend years pursuing a subject not realizing how the subject's life is a shared emotional experience. "A good biography is prompted not by the inherent qualities of its subject," argues Julian Symons in his introduction to his brother's book The Quest For Corvo , "but by the biographer's unconsciously realized opportunity for self-expression." (3) "The real elements of self-identification are much more subtle and subliminal than one originally thinks," agrees Richard Homes, biographer of Samuel Coleridge and Percy Shelly (4) .
A third path taken by the biographer is outlined by Leon Edel: "Biographers are invariably drawn to the writing of a biography out of some deep personal motive . . . a subject so utterly familiar to me that i might as well have been writing my own memoirs." (5)
A fourth option is taken in James Atlas' choice of Delmore Schwartz as a biographical subject. He was born in 1913, the same year as Atlas' father. Both Atlas' and Schwartz' parents had immigrated to this country around the turn of the century. "But these were incidental correspondences for Schwartz' life served as a cautionary tale," writes Atlas. "He drank, squandered his early promise and died alone in a crummy midtown Manhattan hotel. Writing his life served as a cautionary tale: This way lies madness. (Is there such a thing as counterindentification ?)" (4)
I will next look at the character, Salome, a Princess of Judea. The Gospels of St. Mark and St. Matthew, the most famous versions of John the Baptist's decapitation, do not provide her with a name or a character.
Matthew 14:
3 For Herod laid hold on John, and bound him, and put him in prison for Herodias' sake, his brother Philip's wife.
4 For John said unto him, It is not lawful for thee to have her.
6 But when Herod's birthday was kept, the daughter of Herodias danced before them, and pleased Herod.
7 Whereupon he promised with an oath to give her whatsoever she would ask.
8 And she, being before instructed of her mother, said, Give me here John the Baptist's head in a charger.
9 And the king was sorry: nevertheless for the oath's sake, and them which sat with him at meat, he commanded it to be given to her.
10 And he sent, and beheaded John in the prison.
11 And his head was brought in a charger, and given to the damsel: and she brought it to her mother.
In the Nineteenth Century, the story of the daughter of Herodias enjoyed a renaissance in French letters. Helen Grace Zagona writes:
The theme with its manifold possibilities of
development was the presence among those treating
it of the century's most notable representatives
of the principle of art for art's sake. (5)
Notes of sadism and perversity are added when Oscar Wilde writes his one- act play, Salome , (1893) (6) that ends in silence after the title character is crushed to death. The Francophone text, reads, according to critic Herb Greer "as though he thought in English as he wrote it. The English version . . . was marred in the making by Lord Alfred Douglas, whose command of French was less than perfect. Even after the translation was worked over by someone else, faults remained . . ." (7)
Peter Briskin writes, "Examining the cultural soil from which films grow does not impoverish them, as conservative critics often charge, but rather enriches them by restoring to their original nourishment." (8) By citing the presence of a Nineteenth Century literary text in a Twentieth Century cinematic text, we place ourselves on a continuum linking us to other generations and assisting our understanding in the Nineties. G. K. Chesterton puts it this way, "They invoke the little republics of antiquity with the complete confidence of one who invokes the gods. For some strange reason man must always plant his fruit trees in a graveyard . . . he can make the future luxuriant and gigantic, so long as he is thinking about the past." (9) Salome's drama is mediated on many levels in the motion picture, Sunset Boulevard , (1950), written by Charles Brackett, Billy Wilder and D. M. Marshman, Jr. In her autobiography, Gloria Swanson describes an offer to appear in a scenario when the tracings of the Princess of Judea are slight. She writes that Bill Wilder asks her to play
an ex-movie queen who attempts to dominate
a younger man, a writer, and return to
pictures. There was a murder in it.
"Who murders whom?" I asked.
"We honestly aren't sure yet," Billy Wilder
said. (10)
The fictional former silent-movie star, Norma Desmond, writes a lengthy movie script based on Salome's life and Oscar Wilde's drama. It is as though Salome has found Norma.
Worton and Still remind us that "while all authors rewrite the work of predecessors, many . . . writers, consciously imitate, quote and or plagiarize extensively. In various ways these writers are thereby inscribing themselves in tradition and making public a loving gratitude to ancestors--but their works are equally witnesses to an agonistic impulse to demarcate and proclaim their own creative space." (2)
I will now set up a dialectic between the two remaining texts, Wilde's one-act and theBracket-Wilder-Marshman scenario. (11)
Norma Desmond intends to return to the screen in the title role of Salome for she is a celebrity for whom the world has no role until she devises one to play. The viewers of the film and drama, unlike Norma, become aware of complicity in the women's respective relationships and their fondness for crisis. Salome's power makes an immediate, subliminal appeal to a biographer uncertain of her own position and torn between conflicting desires. Norma's identification with her subject, like Leon Edel's, is palpable as she uses the third person to apotheosize this woman of noble birth who shares her hedonistic energy, to Joe Gillis, whom she promptly casts as the alter ego of the oracular John the Baptist. Gillis becomes her collaborator, a second, more objective cinematic biographer of the Princess of Judea.
Norma
This is to be a very important picture.
I have written it myself. Took me years.
Gillis: (looking at the piles of script)
Looks like enough for six important
pictures. (Page 24)
Norma
Salome--the woman who was all women. You
know the story. She was a princess and she
was a slave, crawling before John the
Baptist, dancing the dance of the seven
veils. And then she has his head chopped
off. He's hers at last. His head is on a
golden tray. She kisses his cold, dead
lips . . . (Page 25)
Gillis
Maybe it's a little long and maybe there are
some repetitions . . . but you're not a professional
writer.
Norma
I wrote that with my heart. (Pages 27-28)
The playwright and the three scenarists foreshadow the bloody conclusions of their respective plots with parallel dialogue. The play's opening lines contain a privileged moment. The young Syrian, the captain of the guard for Herod, Salome's stepfather, praises the princess, while the page of Herodias uses forbidding terms to describe the moon in the second line.
The young Syrian: How beautiful is the princess
Salome tonight!
The page of Herodias: Look at the moon . . . she is
like a woman rising from a tomb. She is like a
dead woman. One might fancy she was looking for
dead things. (Page 293)
A similar privileged moment happens when Norma mistakes Joe Gillis for an undertaker looking for the corpse of her pet monkey. She probes Joe with two questions that resonate through subsequent scenes.
Norma:
You there! . . . .
Why are you so late? Why have you kept
me waiting so long? . . .
I've made up my mind we'll bury him in the
garden. Any city laws against that?
Gillis:
I wouldn't know.
Norma
I don't care any way. I want the coffin
to be white. And I want it specially lined
with satin. (Pages 19-21)
Brooke Astor feels "mirrors in a room, water in a landscape, eyes in a face--those are what give character." (12) This aspect of the facial atlas is just one of the many ways in which the scenario and drama play off and illuminate each other. The smitten Syrian makes an oblique reference to Salome while describing the moon:
She is like a little princess, whose eyes are of
amber. Through the clouds of muslin she is
smiling like a little princess. (Page 299)
Gillis
She sure could say a lot of things with those
pale eyes of hers. They'd been her trade mark.
They'd made her the number one vamp of another
era. I remember a rather florid description in
an old fan magazine which said: "Her eyes are
like two moonlit waterholes, where strange animals
come to drink." (Page 29)
Both women are worshipped by older figures, an incestuous uncle-stepfather and a former husband. Salome's first lines contain a question and its answer.
Why does the Tetrach look at me all the
while with his mole's eyes under his
shaking eyelids? It is strange that the
husband of my mother looks at me like that.
I know not what it means. Of a truth
I know it too well. (Page 296)
Norma Desmond's butler, Max Von Meyerling, cautions Gillis about her health.
It's just that I'm very worried about Madame.
Gillis
Sure you are. And we're not helping her
any. Feeding her lies and more lies . . .
What happens when she finds out?
Max
She never will. That is my job. It has been
for a long time. You must understand I
discovered her when she was eighteen. I
made her a star. I cannot let her be destroyed . . .
Gillis
And she's turned you into a servant.
Max
It was I who asked to come back,
humiliating as it may seem. I could have
gone on with my career, only I found
everything unendurable after she
divorced me. You see, I was her first
husband. (Pages 97-98)
Both women are shrines where two available younger men sacrifice themselves. The young Syrian stabs himself and falls at the feet of Salome while she pleads for the kisses of Jokanaan, John the Baptist (Page 302). While, in an artful echo of Salome but using the frequencies of the Twentieth Century, Max reports
There was a Maharajah who came all the
way from Hyderbad to get one of her
stockings. Later, he strangled himself
with it. (Page 31)
Salome's first awareness of the precursor is the sound of his voice, as he cries out from the cistern, where he is imprisoned, damning her incestuous mother and announcing the coming of Jesus Christ.
This prophet . . . is he an old man?
First soldier: No, Princess, he is quite young. . . .
Salome: What a strange voice! I would speak with him. (Page 297)
Norma is unaware of the need for counteridentification recommended by James Atlas nor does she heed Friedrich Nietzshe's counsel against grappling with monsters lest she become a monster herself (13) for she ignores the climax of the princess' cautionary tale. Norma is under the jurisdiction of her alter ego's fatal passion.
Salome's and Norma's terrible fate is sealed from almost the first moment they see the young men. Salome is seized by a frenzied passion for Jokanaan incarnating a forbidden sexuality. Norma is equally prompt in her infatuation for a young Adonis who reminds her of the one in her past who took his own life.
Norma
Is it funny that I'm in love with you?
Gillis
What's that?
Norma
I'm in love with you. Don't you know that?
I've been in love with you all along. (Page 51)
Norma's return to the screen and her lust for the writer run parallel courses to the past for he is a synedoche for that which she cherishes about her youth.
The Princess of Judea enacts the main themes of Norma Desmond's life. So eager is the latter to find a potential prisoner she inverts the role of the chaste Jokanaan impressing the unlikely subject, Joe Gillis, an unemployed scenarist behind on his rent and car payments, into the role of John the Baptist. Gillis is an inverted image of Jokanaan cast upon the walls of Norma's feverish imagination for he represents the romance of a fresh start, the young man whocan still be molded and taught by the older woman. Joe quickly becomes a kept man. He describes his plight:
Gillis
It's lonely here, so she got herself a
companion. A very simple set up: an older
woman who is well-to-do. A younger man who is not
doing too well . . . Can you figure it out yourself?
. . . I've got a good thing here. A long-term
contract with no options. I like it that way.
Maybe it's not very admirable. (Pages 106-107)
Salome forces the Syrian to bring Jokanaan out of his prison. Once she sets eyes on him she borrows from yet another text, the lascivious language, intended for a female, of the Songs of Solomon, to describe him.
I am amorous of thy body, Jokanaan! Thy
body is white like the lilies of a field
that the mower hath never mowed . . . Suffer me
to touch thy body.
Jokanaan: Back! Daughter of Babylon! (Page 301)
The Precurser does not want to enter the mire of human sexuality, especially the territory between gender and power, any more than Gillis who begins to regret his Faustian bargain.
Norma Desmond uses men's clothing, not words, to woo. Her gifts list like a habidashery's inventory: eighteen suits, custom-made shoes, eighteen dozen shirts, a vicuna coat and a long gold key chain.
Norma
Joe, you look absolutely divine. Turn around!
Gillis (embarrassed)
Please.
Norma
Come on! (Gillis makes a slow 360-degree turn.)
Perfect. Wonderful shoulders. And I love that
line. (She indicates the V from his shoulders to
his hips.)
Gillis
All padding. Don't let it fool you. (Pages 48-49)
Viewers cannot admire the weak-willed, opportunistic Gillis as Norma does. He is a fantasy figure who functions as some aspect of Norma herself. Her longings for youth, stardom and scandalous sensuality impel her to betrayal, murder and insanity. Joe learns how apt his phrase, "No options," is to describe his subordinate relationship as he tries to escape the insanity around him and says
Goodbye, Norma
Norma
No one leaves a star, that makes one a star
(Gillis picks up the typewriter and leaves.)
. . . You're not leaving me!
(She shoots twice in rapid succession. Gillis
drops the typewriter. The shots have swung him
around. He is now facing Norma. She shoots him.
This shot hits him in the belly. He doubles up,
instinctively backs away from her, plummets into
the lit pool.) (Page 112)
Norma switches from third to first person when referring to her subject after slaying her John the Baptist. Her transformation into Salome is complete as she descends the stairs as gracefully as the curve of a breaking wave into the madness waiting at the bottom.
Norma
Where am I?
Max
This is the staircase of the palace.
Norma
Oh, yes, yes. They're below, waiting for me
to dance the dance of the seven veils. I'm
ready.
Just as Huckleberry Finn addresses the readers of Mark Twain's novel,
"You don't know me without you have read
a book called The Adventures of Tom Sawyer " (14)
so Norma Desmond might say to viewers, "you do not know me without having seen a play by Oscar Wilde called Salome ."
The scenarists' characters achieve their own freestanding identity outside of the world of reference to previous literature about Salome. But audiences who are unfamiliar with the styles, genres and plays that Charles Brackett, Billy Wilder and D. M. Marshman, Jr. know, miss the awareness that the trio are writing an edifice of words construed not from life, but out of the language of earlier fiction.
Although the spectators of the motion picture might be unaware of the play, it is not unusual for a theme to be recognized as such only by trained comparatists, the audience is still perversely fascinated by the intertextual web as the protagonists act out the reverse of our American representative anecdote of upward mobility and happy endings, the downfall of celebrities. Glen O. Gabbard and Krin Gabbard postulate
By hot wiring Salome's story into the present, Charles Brackett, Billy Wilder and D. M. Marshman, Jr., force us to plumb Sunset Boulevard for its intertextual web and make all the modern connections.
1 Julia Kristeva, Dialogue and Novel: Problemes De La Structuration Du Texte (1967)
2. Michael Worton and Judith Still, Intertextuality: Theories and Practices , Manchester University Press: Manchester and New York (1990)
3. Julian Symons, Introduction to A. J. A. Symons' The Quest for Corvo , Michigan State University Press, East Lansing, Michigan (1955), page 1.
4. James Atlas, "Choosing a Life," New York Times , Book Section 7, pages 1-22
5. Helen Grace Zagona, The Legend of Salome and the Principle of Art for Art's Sake , Libraire E. Droz, 8 Rue Verdaine, Geneve (1960), page 12.
6. Oscar Wilde, "Salome," Five Major Plays , Airmont Publishing Company (1970), page 291
7. Herb Greer "Sichuan and Salome" The World and I , September 1990, page 167.
8. Peter Biskin, "Politics of Power in `On the Waterfront'" Film Quarterly , Fall 1975
9. G. K. Chesterton, "What's Wrong With the World" (Sherwood Sugden and Company) cited in "Noted With Pleasure" New York Times Book Review , June 21, 1992, page 31
10. Gloria Swanson, Swanson on Swanson , Random House (1980), pages 479-480.
11. Charles Brackett, Billy Wilder, D. M. Marshman, Jr. Sunset Boulevard , Paramount Pictures Manuscript, page 11454
12. Architectural Digest , March 1982
13. Randall Short, "Where Does She Get Her Ideas?" Book Section, Chicago Sunday Tribune , 7/28/91, page 20
14. Bernard De Voto (ed) Samuel Clemens, "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" The Portable Mark Twain , Viking press, NY, 1946, page 193
15. G. Gabbard and K. Gabbard from Psycho to Dressed to Kill , Film/Psychology Review , Vol. 4, 1980, page 165