Intertextuality in Jenny Erpenbeck’s The End of Days: Focusing on References to Majakowski’s Secret of Youth

Abstract

Kristeva's famous definition of intertextuality that “each text is built up as a mosaic of quotations” goes through post-structuralist discourse and expands to ‘universal intertext’. However, the intertextuality can be differentiated and graded according to the degree of intensity of the intertextual reference. Jenny Erpenbeck’s novel The End of Days in which quoted passages from various texts such as literature, the Bible, the Talmud, earthquake records, and song lyrics are inserted throughout has a high level of intertextuality, and this paper analyzes the intertextuality between this novel and Majakowski’s Secret of Youth. The intertextuality between these two works functions in a way of synecdoche. Erpenbeck actively utilizes preceding text in her novel by bringing the discourse structure of the poem into the novel to compose the character's remarks or by translating the poem into prose. The passages in which Majakowski’s phrase is quoted show the process of forming a multi-layered semantic structure through intensive repetition.