Grao en Lingua e Literatura Inglesa Traballo de Fin de Grao
The Leftovers: An Intermedial Dialogue
Autora: Irene Lens Fernández
Titora: Laura María Lojo Rodríguez
Xuño 2022
Traballo de Fin de Grao presentado na Facultade de Filoloxía da Universidade de Santiago de Compostela para a obtención do Grao en Lingua e Literatura Inglesa no curso académico
2021/2022.
Grao en Lingua e Literatura Inglesa Traballo de Fin de Grao
The Leftovers: An Intermedial Dialogue
Autora: Irene Lens Fernández
Titora: Laura María Lojo Rodríguez
Xuño 2022
Traballo de Fin de Grao presentado na Facultade de Filoloxía da Universidade de Santiago de Compostela para a obtención do Grao en Lingua e Literatura Inglesa no curso académico
2021/2022.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction ... 1
2. The Leftovers and its Dialogical Nature ... 3
2.1. A Confluence of Arts: ‘Intertextuality’ and ‘Intermediality’ ... 4
2.2. A Dystopian Representation on TV: The Rapture and ‘the Leftovers’ ... 6
3. The Dialogue between The Leftovers and the Literary Tradition ... 8
3.1. The Reinterpretation of Hawthorne’s Dystopian Atmosphere ... 9
3.2. The Implicit Impact of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and Dante’s Divine Comedy... 17
4. Conclusions ... 28
5. Works Cited ... 32
1. Introduction
This dissertation addresses the major theme of literary influences by mostly focusing on one major work, namely the HBO TV series entitled The Leftovers (2014-2017), and created by screenwriter and producer Damon Lindelof, together with novelist Tom Perrotta. This particular TV drama is pervaded with a large number of literary references and allusions that significantly contribute to its enrichment and development. The depiction of the complex dystopian society that articulates The Leftovers is imbued with a literary meaning that, if examined and comprehended, will enlarge the overall significance of the work, thereby helping the audience in achieving a higher understanding of its contents, alongside showcasing the substantial impact that the literary tradition has on cultural products such as this particular TV series. This dissertation is of particular interest nowadays, taking into consideration that contemporary TV dramas introduce and display an increasing and noticeable number of literary texts that can be analysed under the light of complex narratives in TV (Loriguillo-López 2019, 871). In fact, it should be noted that HBO is considered to be an emblematic example of a network that has contributed remarkably to the consolidation of narrative complexity in television (872), thereby promoting a higher involvement of the audience, who is compelled to abandon a passive state when visualising a TV series such as that with which this dissertation is concerned, primarily due to the use of experimental forms that differ significantly from conventional narratives.
Therefore, the primary aim of the present dissertation is to unearth the literary influences and potential implicit reminiscences that The Leftovers encloses, in order to unveil the dialogue established between an audiovisual contemporary cultural rendering and the literary tradition at large, while also clarifying obscure meanings that may elucidate the
contents and symbolical implications present in the story of the show. For this purpose, after a brief contextualisation of the TV series and its dialogical nature at the beginning of the next chapter, the study will discuss the concept of ‘intertextuality’ in § 2.1. (“A Confluence of Arts:
‘Intertextuality’ and ‘Intermediality’”). More specifically, the study will employ the notion of intertextuality understood, roughly speaking, as the established dialogue and interactions between different works of the literary tradition. Graham Allen’s Intertextuality (2000) will act as the basis for the contextualisation of this concept, it being a complete work that includes a variety of chapters ranging from the origins of the term to its evolution in the different areas in which it has been applied and reinterpreted. However, given the fact that the primary works belong to two different media (i.e., television and literature), the notion of ‘intermediality’, developed by Irina O. Rajewsky in her essay “Intermediality, Intertextuality, and Remediation:
A Literary Perspective on Intermediality” (2005), is also going to be addressed and discussed in this section. Thus, this study will focus on the intermedial references, that is, instantiations of influences that are established across different media, that can be apprehended in the aforementioned TV drama. Additionally, this dissertation will, when necessary, refer to notions related to the area of film studies, taking into consideration that a detailed analysis of a TV series, although focused on literature and on exploring its connection to the literary realm, demands a certain knowledge about the field in which it is circumscribed, it being, in this case, the field of cinema studies.
After providing a brief contextualisation and overall summary of the main aspects that conform The Leftovers in § 2.2., Chapter 3 is going to focus on the core of this analysis by delving into the selected writings for the study of intermedial references in The Leftovers. The selected instantiations are well-known works of the literary tradition, varying in genre and, thus, including a short story and two poems. The first work to be discussed will be Nathaniel Hawthorne’s dark short story entitled “Young Goodman Brown”, originally published in 1835.
The Leftovers is highly influenced by the Romantic writer in what regards the exploration of
the setting and the characterisation of his protagonists. The first section of Chapter 3 will, therefore, examine Hawthorne’s direct influence on the HBO drama, and how the showrunners have reinterpreted the characteristic disruptive atmosphere inherent to Hawthorne’s work.
Subsequently, § 3.2. will elaborate on more implicit references. In this section, the study will examine the impact that T. S. Eliot’s modernist poem The Waste Land (1922) and Dante’s Divine Comedy have had, not only on the contents and motifs of The Leftovers, but also on its
structure and organisation. The analysis of the connections of both poems to the TV drama will be developed simultaneously, due to the fact that, similarly to The Leftovers, T. S. Eliot’s poem is equally nurtured by Dante’s Divine Comedy, thus showcasing the workings of intertextuality.
2. The Leftovers and its Dialogical Nature
The Leftovers, a TV series created by Damon Lindelof and Tom Perrotta, released in 2014, and
based on Perrotta’s book of the same name, portrays the tribulations of a society that has experienced a traumatic and apocalyptic event: the 2% of the global population has vanished, abruptly and inexplicably. The drama, rather than focusing on that 2% of the population that has disappeared, explores the life and emotions of the people that have remained on earth, the leftovers, and how they confront loss and grief.
This particular TV series is very interesting from a literary perspective, since allusions to literary works permeate almost all episodes. There are explicit references to literary works, such as the recital of the second stanza of W. B. Yeats’s poem “Michael Robartes Bids his Beloved be at Peace” (S01E08), or “A Man Said to the Universe” by Stephen Crane (S01E09).
However, these explicit quotations and how they infuse The Leftovers with meaning is beyond the scope of this dissertation, which aims at studying the more implicit references that contribute to the creation of the TV series. Accordingly, this dissertation will delve into some
literary works that operate as potential intertexts, namely Nathaniel Hawthorne’s dark short stories, and T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, which, in turn, also showcases a great number of intertexts that can also be perceived in The Leftovers, such as allusions to Dante’s Divine Comedy.
2.1. A Confluence of Arts: ‘Intertextuality’ and ‘Intermediality’
For the purpose established above, and in order to better comprehend the discussion of the literary influences that The Leftovers encloses, this section of Chapter 2 will provide a short revision of previous studies and theoretical contributions to the (historical) development of the concepts of ‘intertextuality’ and ‘intermediality’.
The term ‘intertextuality’, first concocted by Julia Kristeva in the 1960s, has been overused, and different meanings have been assigned to it by academics. Thus, it is not a transparent concept, a problematic that can be seen, for instance, in the different (and even opposing) apprehensions and usages that structuralists and poststructuralists display of the term: “poststructuralist critics employ the term intertextuality to disrupt notions of meaning, whilst structuralist critics employ the same term to locate and even fix literary meaning” (Allen 2000, 4). Therefore, it is significantly important to define the term and clarify in which sense this dissertation will employ it. In an effort to clearly illustrate the concept, the academic and writer Graham Allen has provided an exhaustive definition and historical overview of
‘intertextuality’. Allen states that “[W]orks of literature, after all, are built from systems, codes and traditions established by previous works of literature. The systems, codes and traditions of other art forms and of culture in general are also crucial to the meaning of a work of literature”
(Allen 2000, 1). Thus, according to contemporary literary theorists, texts do not enclose any independent, autonomous meaning, but they rather work on the basis of intertextuality. Texts are interrelated, and their interpretations on the part of the readers emanate from the act of
disclosing the possible or potential connections woven between those texts and others. This idea, with which this dissertation agrees, inescapably perceives the figure of the reader as the one who produces meaning, an essentially post-structuralist idea also shared by the theorist Roland Barthes, as Allen showcases (4), and which subverts the long-held and deep-rooted traditional conception of the author as the sole agent of meaning construction. Similarly, Tom Perrotta’s and his co-workers’ contrivance of the TV series The Leftovers also questions the structuralist belief that a definite meaning can be reached, as Perrotta himself expresses: “[W]e were never really interested in fixed meanings or final answers. Multiplicity was always preferable to singularity.” (E-mail message to author, November 8, 2021).
It should also be noted that intertextuality is not “exclusively related to literary works”
(Allen 2000, 5), an idea that calls forth the term ‘intermediality’, which Irina O. Rajewsky elucidates and develops in her essay entitled “Intermediality, Intertextuality, and Remediation:
A Literary Perspective on Intermediality” (2005). The term ‘intermediality’, as Rajewsky suggests, is similar to ‘intertextuality’ in the sense that it is used in very different ways and, consequently, misunderstandings may arise (45). Hence, once again, it is crucial to define it, shortly and just according to the objectives of this dissertation, not being able to elaborately explain here the different postures and subcategories of the intermediality debate, due to lack of space and digression from this study. In a broad sense,
[I]ntermediality may serve foremost as a generic term for all those phenomena that (as indicated by the prefix inter) in some way take place between media. “Intermedial”
therefore designates those configurations which have to do with a crossing of borders between media, and which thereby can be differentiated from intramedial phenomena [i.e., within a single medium, thereby not entailing a crossing of borders] as well as
from transmedial phenomena (i.e., the appearance of a certain motif, aesthetic, or discourse across a variety of different media). (46)
However, this dissertation will employ the term ‘intermediality’ in a narrower sense, agreeing with the treatment that Rajewsky displays of the concept: “intermediality [conceived]
as a critical category for the concrete analysis of specific individual media products or configurations” (47). The study will even apply intermediality in a much narrower sense, since the aim is not exclusively to analyse how The Leftovers evokes structures or elements of another medium (in this case, literature) “through the use of its own media-specific means”
(53), but rather to explore the particular dialogue that the TV series establishes with specific instantiations of literature (and not with the literary medium at large).
The idea that all works of art can operate as intertexts in other works of art independently of their field (i.e., literature, cinema, music, architecture, painting, and so forth) is the basis of this dissertation. Allen notes that “[A]s a new and popular form of artistic production, cinema has, from its earliest days, relied on the established and ‘serious’ form of literature to provide it with cultural value” (2000, 180). In the same way, the world of the small screen can also resort to works of literature in order to imbue a particular instantiation of a TV series with a deeper meaning, The Leftovers being a great exemplification of this. By dissecting and analysing the different allusions and reinterpretations of works of the literary tradition, the audience may reach a higher degree of understanding of the story that the TV series aspires to convey. Therefore, intermedial references, understood as direct or indirect allusions and/or reinterpretations of literary texts on the part of a work that belongs to a different medium (in this case, a TV series), contribute to the general effect and constitution of meaning of the work.
2.2. A Dystopian Representation on TV: The Rapture and ‘the Leftovers’
The Leftovers revolves around the eschatological and evangelical idea of the Rapture, the
“belief that both living and dead believers will ascend into heaven to meet Jesus Christ at the Second Coming” (Stefon 2018), while the sinners are left behind (the leftovers, hence the title) to confront a 7-year period of torment. However, as Sonia Front signals in her study “Post- Apocalyptic Stress Disorder in The Leftovers” (2021), not every chosen individual who has presumably ascended during what they eventually baptise as the “Sudden Departure” is a Christian, nor are all of them good in nature (260). This inexplicable quality of the event affects and disturbs the characters severely, whose varied irrational responses and actions before the apocalyptic situation manifest the deep psychological wounds that it has caused. The life of the characters begins to be measured according to the event, thereby dividing the course of history into Before and After the Departure (258).
The characters of the HBO drama are compelled to develop different coping mechanisms to be able to endure the change in their lives and their society, since “the rapture left no corpse to bury, making mourning and healing an impossible process” (Joseph and Letort 2017, 2). One of the most radical responses is the creation of a cult that works under the name of the “Guilty Remnant”, which showcases the necessity of human beings to obtain new beliefs and religions to purvey the world with meaning, since the familiar biblical exegesis does not provide any of the answers they need (e.g., why has this occurred? To where have the selected people go? Why is there not a coherent pattern that explains why both good and evil people have disappeared?). Thus, the characters are not able to assimilate the event due to “the lack of information” and “its unrepresentability” (259), its quality as something uncanny and without closure. This impossibility to find answers to transcendental questions, which causes a feeling of stagnation and spiritual death so common in the post-modern era, is reflected in The Waste Land, as will be developed in § 3.2. Another relevant reaction is that of one of the protagonists, Kevin Garvey (Justin Theroux), whose mind, unable to become reconciled with the apocalyptic
experience, is immersed in a complex psychological process entailing the encounter with hallucinatory people and circumstances, strange nightmares that seem to be real, and so forth.
This blurred line between reality and fantasy will be of special interest when subsequent chapters explore the relation that The Leftovers establishes with Nathaniel Hawthorne’s usual treatment of his ambience and characters’ behaviour. Finally, another character’s evolution that is crucial to mention is that of Nora Durst (Carrie Coon). Nora lost every member of her family in the Departure, thereby being the most extreme case of suffering and grief, a feeling of despair that will define her psychological process throughout the series, alongside her quest for safety and her family.
3. The Dialogue between The Leftovers and the Literary Tradition
As indicated in Chapter 2, The Leftovers is remarkably rich in literary references. The different literary allusions range from explicit recitals of specific passages of well-known poems, such as those by W.B. Yeats or Stephen Crane (cf. above § 2) to more indirect and implicit potential influences. The latter, as already noted before, will be the focus of this dissertation.
To begin with, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s influence on Perrotta’s work is significantly conspicuous. Perrotta himself expresses that “the ghost of Nathaniel Hawthorne [...] hovers over The Leftovers” (2015). In fact, the place where Kevin and Nora cross their path is Hawthorne School (2015), thus directly associating the two protagonists with a setting impregnated with the author’s dark and Romantic symbolism and ambiguity inherent to his work. The next section will thoroughly study Hawthorne’s influence on, primarily, both the construction of the characters’ psychology and the setting of the TV series, paying special attention to the conception of the woods as places that are presented as highly allegorical, or which impel the audience to scrutinise and disclose different layers of meaning. The meaning-
constructing impact of Hawthorne’s writing is so, that it strengthens the dystopian atmosphere that characterises The Leftovers.
In addition to Hawthorne’s writing, a central modernist work that may operate as a pertinent intertext in The Leftovers is T. S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land (1922). Although at a first superficial glance The Waste Land may be apparently unrelated to this particular TV series, a more profound understanding of both works may reveal the implicit reminiscences and potential connections that the twentieth-century poem establishes with the aforementioned TV drama. In § 3.2. this study will take into consideration that The Leftovers is one of the manifold cultural products that represent the Western civilisation as a wasteland, including the sterile relationships between its inhabitants. Furthermore, the section will discuss some parallelisms that can be recognised between both works, such as their narrative framework or structure, and the presence of several narrative voices or perspectives. Finally, in the same way that Dante’s Divine Comedy functions as an intertext within The Waste Land, some relevant allusions to the Italian poem can also be discerned in the TV series.
3.1. The Reinterpretation of Hawthorne’s Dystopian Atmosphere
Nathaniel Hawthorne is notably renowned for his complex symbolism, the psychological depth with which his characters are imbued, and the use of ambiguities from which multiple and diverse layers of meaning may erupt (Gibert 2001, 217). These general distinctive features of his work are shared by and displayed in The Leftovers. The TV series, being greatly inspired by Hawthorne’s writings, can only be effectively and ultimately comprehended once the allegorical layers of meaning are interpreted. Additionally, both Hawthorne’s works and The Leftovers unveil religious connotations, thereby exposing their numinous quality.
Regarding Hawthorne’s use of ambiguities and symbolism, it is imperative to allude to the author’s conception of his own writings. He consciously distinguished between romances
and novels. As indicated by Hawthorne himself in the preface to The House of the Seven Gables (1851),
When a writer calls his work a Romance, it need hardly be observed that he wishes to claim a certain latitude, both as to its fashion and material, which he would not have felt himself entitled to assume had he professed to be writing a Novel. The latter form of composition is presumed to aim at a very minute fidelity, not merely to the possible, but to the probable and ordinary course of man’s experience. The former—while, as a work of art, it must rigidly subject itself to laws, and while it sins unpardonably so far as it may swerve aside from the truth of the human heart—has fairly a right to present that truth under circumstances, to a great extent, of the writer’s own choosing or creation. (Hawthorne 1993, 6)
Thus, Hawthorne restricts the definition of the novel to the sense that nowadays is attributed to the realistic novel, which indeed places its focus on the ordinary aspects of life, ever being faithful in its representation of reality. Conversely, when writing a romance, the author enjoys more liberty, since he can freely forge his composition without limiting himself to the laws or conventions that are imposed on a novelist, such as being utterly concerned with the exact and detailed representation of real events. Therefore, through romances, Hawthorne could elaborate a mysterious and symbolic atmosphere where unexplainable supernatural forces are at work, something mightily present in The Leftovers, as will be later explored, and which contributes to the shaping of a chaotic, ominous, and dystopian depiction of reality.
Furthermore, both works aim to transmit “the irrational forces that affect the human mind but cannot be explained by empirical evidence” (Gibert 2001, 221), an idea that is intimately connected to the unexplainable workings of the unconscious mind. Accordingly, a “Romance, having a great deal more to do with the clouds overhead than with any portion of the actual
soil” (Hawthorne 1993, 7) in which the story is set, is concerned with the less tangible world that surrounds the characters, focusing on the more distant and unfathomable aspects of the human being, the human mind, and the human existence.
Similarly, the introductory −and highly autobiographical− chapter to The Scarlet Letter (1850), entitled “The Custom House”, develops this distinction between romances and novels.
As Hawthorne declares, a romancer strives for discovering a “neutral territory, somewhere between the real world and fairy-land, where the Actual and the Imaginary may meet, and each imbue itself with the nature of the other” (Hawthorne 1990, 30). Regarding the thin membrane that divides the real from the imaginary, the importance of the setting should be addressed.
Night, darkness and the presence of dreams or nightmares play an essential role in the construction of mysterious surroundings, rendering the line between reality and fantasy even more vague. In Hawthorne’s own words, “[m]oonlight, in a familiar room, [...] is a medium the most suitable for a romance-writer to get acquainted with his illusive guests [...] [W]hatever, in a word, has been used or played with, during the day, is now [at night] invested with a quality of strangeness and remoteness [...]” (30). According to this, night has the power to render the familiar unfamiliar.
In order to further study the influence that Hawthorne’s literary achievements have had on The Leftovers, and with the aim to illustrate with concrete examples the characteristics explained above, this study will select specific instantiations of Hawthorne’s writing to identify their repercussion on the HBO drama.
To begin with, Hawthorne’s short stories are particularly focused on the combination between realism and symbolism. A great exemplification of this is featured in “Young Goodman Brown” (1835), the central work that has been chosen for the detailed commentary on Hawthorne’s impact on The Leftovers. “Young Goodman Brown” apparently narrates the
literal journey of an Everyman who enters a forest at night, an experience that seems to change him utterly. However, Hawthorne’s continuous use of the allegorical method (by imbuing with symbolical meaning the names of the characters, or the objects that appear in the stories) suggests that this could be interpreted at a more profound level of analysis. In fact, “[i]t has been contended that, when Brown enters the forest, he is really entering his own evil mind”
(Gibert 2001, 223). This idea may be reinforced by the fact that Brown’s wife is “aptly named”
(222) Faith, and he decides to initiate his journey and depart from her, thus allegorically abandoning his religious faith to pursue “his present evil purpose” (225). Faith initially tries to convince her husband to stay at home with her, instead of venturing through the woods at night.
Although she “kept [him] back awhile” (226), he eventually left her behind. Towards the end of the story, Goodman Brown exclaims “[m]y Faith is gone!”, explicitly relating it to the lack of “good on earth” (232) and the triumph of sin.
Regarding the setting, The Leftovers is equally nurtured by this particular conception of the woods as places that are haunted by evil, which may represent what the protagonist, Kevin, resembling Young Goodman Brown, is trying to repress; his own “evil mind”. In both works, therefore, there is a distinction between the town and the forest. In Hawthorne’s story, Faith remains in town, whilst Brown crosses the threshold to enter the forest, where he falls deeper and deeper into the dark as he progressively distances himself from his wife. Similarly, Kevin often enters the woods at night, thereby abandoning his civilised self, and there he experiences the most tragic situations. Perrotta himself illustrates this idea by saying that “[i]n a lot of Hawthorne’s stories, there’s the town and there’s the woods, and the town is civilised and everybody behaves well, and in the woods there’s all the satanic energy” (Perrotta 2015).
This “satanic energy” is perfectly illustrated in Hawthorne’s story by the presence of “the figure of a man” (Gibert 2001, 226) that holds a staff that “bore the likeness of a great black snake”
(226), thus being reminiscent of Satan, who appears in the form of a serpent to tempt Eve in
Genesis 3. Goodman Brown is similarly led (or rather tempted) by this mysterious man into
the heart of the forest to join what seems to be a congregation of sinners conducting a conversion ritual, as a result of which the people present there acknowledge their own sinful nature, as well as becoming conscious of that of their brethren. It should be noted that in this congregation the protagonist encounters the people of his town, who had, apparently, always been civilised and pious members of their Puritan society. In the woods, however, their uncivilised, sinful selves arise, an idea that is connected with Perrotta’s statement above about the civilised town and the satanic woods, only separated by a very thin membrane. Thus, Goodman Brown loses his innocence and finally sees the inherent wickedness of the human being, a topic that interested Hawthorne greatly. As a consequence of this, Brown loses his faith. In a literal sense, he sees how his wife Faith participates in the ritual, but from an allegorical point of view, it could be argued that he loses his religious faith. As regards The Leftovers, the satanic energy arises from a varied set of strange and atrocious occurrences. Like
Goodman Brown, Kevin is also initially led to the forest by a mysterious man called Dean (Michael Gaston). The staff that the devilish figure holds in Hawthorne’s story is substituted by a shotgun in the TV series, always carried by Dean to shoot the dogs that escaped towards the forest right after the Departure occurred. Kevin is first convinced by Dean to kill these dogs.
In subsequent episodes, the audience is confronted with more savage acts like, for instance, the murder of one of the members of the Guilty Remnants (S01E05), or the abduction, by the sleepwalking Kevin, of the leader of this group, Patti Levin (Ann Dowd), who eventually decides to commit suicide in the presence of both the bewildered Kevin and the enigmatic Dean (S01E08), and who, later on, will appear as a ghostly presence to Kevin. It should also be noted that the unconscious part of Kevin’s mind manifests itself in the woods via sleepwalking, or through nightmares at night. In relation to this, it is relevant to note that the representation of the protagonist’s dreams in a story increases the degree of depth of knowledge that the reader
or viewer possesses regarding the characters’ perception and psychological processes (Bordwell 1996, 58), and, by consequence, it also increments the degree of subjectivity (Loriguillo-López 2019, 880). Moreover, Kevin’s unconscious mind contrasts radically with Kevin’s behaviour in town during the day, being, at least superficially, a rational individual who is, in fact, the embodiment of order and justice, him being the chief of police of Mapleton, the town where most of the drama takes place.
Therefore, Kevin epitomises the figure of the split subject in literature, so common in Romantic authors, such as Nathaniel Hawthorne or Edgar Allan Poe (cf. “William Wilson” or
“The Fall of the House of Usher” for further illustrations). Hence, the human subject “is split between the conscious and the unconscious, reason and desire, the rational and the irrational, the social and the presocial, the communicable and the incommunicable” (Allen 2000, 47), a theory also postulated by Julia Kristeva. The idea that Kevin’s divided personality presents two extremes that manifest themselves in the town and the forest, respectively, emphasises the contraposition between both places and the notion of trespassing present in Hawthorne’s writings: “only a very thin membrane separates civilized society from something darker and more primitive” (E-mail message to author Tom Perrotta, November 8, 2021). It is worth mentioning that Kevin’s somnambulist state materialises his unconscious mind into real acts, thereby rendering the two parts of the split subject paradoxically inseparable, since one affects the other, participating in cause-effect relationships.
The ominous setting of both “Young Goodman Brown” and The Leftovers is pervaded and strengthened by dreams that foreshadow dreadful oncoming situations. Kevin’s recurrent strange nightmares occur in the woods, where he eventually will appear while he is under the effects of somnambulism. In a similar way, Brown’s wife showed “trouble in her face, as if a dream had warned her” (Gibert 2001, 225) about what was going to happen to his husband that
night in the forest. In addition to this, the reader can never know for certain if what happens to Brown in the forest is a dream or a real event, since the description of the events is constantly rendered as dubious and ambiguous. Similarly, Kevin is completely unable to distinguish dreams from reality, something that becomes clear when he questions Dean about his own state in S01E01: “[a]m I awake?” (Lindelof et al. 2014-2017, 01:06:20). This is directly connected to the unreliability of the protagonists, both Brown and Kevin, and Hawthorne’s use of ambiguities. ‘Internal focalisation’ is favoured in complex narratives that present unreliable narrators, instead of the adoption of a reliable Genettian ‘zero focalisation’ (Loriguillo-López 2019, 869). Hence,
[E]n las “puzzle films”, la emergencia de los narradores poco fiables merece atención por su ubicuidad en buena parte de los títulos adscritos a la televisión compleja. Es [...]
a través de una focalización interna profunda en estos protagonistas, aquejados de los más variados trastornos mentales, sobre los que la narración (altamente restrictiva) se apoya a la hora de divulgar información diegética. (Loriguillo-López 2019, 883-884).
In the case of “Young Goodman Brown” and The Leftovers, the readers or viewers have a restricted access to the stories, since the diegetic events are transmitted through the protagonists’ (Brown and Kevin’s respectively) own limited (and highly unreliable) vision of the reality in which they are circumscribed. On the one hand, “Young Goodman Brown” is filled with moments when the protagonist doubts as to whether he actually sees some events or he simply imagines them. For example, when he describes the writhed staff of the figure who accompanies him in his journey into the forest, he depicts the staff as a living serpent that seems to be moving. However, he immediately questions this sight by stating that it “must have been an ocular deception, assisted by the uncertain light” (Gibert 2001, 226). Another example of Brown’s unreliability is his imagining voices of the town’s people in the forest, when,
immediately after, “he doubted whether he had heard aught but the murmur of the old forest”
(232). In fact, the question of whether what Brown has experienced and witnessed was a dream, a vision or a real event is explicitly raised at the end of the story when the narrator inquiries:
“[h]ad Goodman Brown fallen asleep in the forest, and only dreamed a wild dream of a witch- meeting?” (237). This question is never answered in the story, thereby finishing with an ambiguous open ending that allows for two possible resolutions: either the reader believes in the reality of the events or he does not. On the other hand, Kevin’s actions are sometimes enacted in real life, sometimes in nightmares, constantly confusing the spectator as to what regards the veracity of the incidents. This is very interesting from the perspective of the character-spectator relationship, since by being incapable to separate the Actual from the Imaginary (in Hawthorne’s own terms), the latter is liable to access Kevin’s confused ill mind after the Departure, and therefore s/he may be able to sympathise with him. Complex contemporary narratives indeed showcase a change from an impeccable hero to a more complex individual who is, more often than not, quite impaired (Loriguillo-López 2019, 886), another reason that propels the audience to connect with him, since it makes him more vulnerable, human and, therefore relatable.
To close this section and to further elaborate on the relationship established between the viewer and the characters, it is worth noting that the strategies employed to create a surreal atmosphere (such as the representation of strange nightmares, the use of symbolism, and so forth) may be a way of portraying the impossibility to understand what happened, namely the Sudden Departure. Since the characters themselves cannot find answers to the event, the TV series resorts to surreal scenes, strange situations on the verge of the uncanny and the supernatural, in order to make the audience feel the anxiety and terror that the characters suffer from. The impossibility of reconciling oneself to a reality so inexplicably changed will also be
discussed in the next section, since The Waste Land also illustrates a fragmented society in need of finding closure.
3.2. The Implicit Impact of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and Dante’s Divine Comedy
T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) is in itself very significant from the perspective of intertextuality, since it resorts to several well-known works of the literary tradition, aiming to portray the barbaric legacy of World War I and the subsequent sterile and stagnant state in which the Western civilisation was immersed in the early twentieth century. T. S. Eliot himself expresses the relevance of tradition in his essay entitled “Tradition and the Individual Talent”, clearly elaborating on the concept of intertextuality (cf. above § 2.1.). The author expands on this notion by stating that “[n]o poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists.
You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead”
(1982, 37). He further develops the idea of intertextuality as interwoven connections between literary works that, consequently, operate in a dynamic network, thus conceiving “poetry as a living whole of all the poetry that has ever been written” (39). Hence,
The necessity that he [i.e., the poet] shall conform, that he shall cohere, is not onesided;
what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions,
values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new. (37)
Paramount examples of intertextual references in The Waste Land are, for instance, the subversion of the “General Prologue” to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (“April is the cruellest month”, Eliot 1998, l. 1), the constant allusions to Dante’s Divine Comedy, the Arthurian legend of the Grail Quest, or Shakespeare’s The Tempest, to name but a few.
Furthermore, The Waste Land is substantially relevant to this study, since it may function as another potential intertext in The Leftovers, although this poem’s influence and references are more implicitly suggested than those of Hawthorne that have been explained in the previous section.
At a first, and quite superficial, level of analysis, the most conspicuous correlation that can be established between The Leftovers and The Waste Land is that posited by the titles of both works. The title of T. S. Eliot’s poem refers to the desolate physical and moral panorama caused by the Great War. The monstrous quality of the political upheaval that characterised twentieth-century society, the “heap of broken images” (Eliot 1998, l. 22) that configured Western civilisation, are implied in the title and further depicted in the poem. The ones that have been left behind in the TV series, the remnants, also inhabit a devastated society defined by its decay and desolation. These people are characterised, precisely, as ‘Wastelanders’, as members of a society that has completely lost its spiritual foundation.
In terms of content, both The Waste Land and The Leftovers resort to the exploration of the same themes. Both works hover over the ideas of physical and moral destruction, loss of faith, broken and sterile relationships among characters or their avoidance of making questions as an attempt to find a potential resolution, due to the entrenched and severe pain that the characters feel when being reminded of the drastic negative change that their societies
have undergone. In this sense, the physical desert that can be seen in the imagery present in T. S. Eliot’s poem, by the recurrent motif of water, or rather, the absence of this element and the constant yearning for it (e.g., “Here is no water but only rock / Rock and no water and the sandy road”, ll. 331-332; and “If there were only water amongst the rock”, l. 338) may represent moral sterility. The reiterative use of phrases that express the longing for finding water illustrate that which this society requires. Traditionally, water has been conceived as a symbol of regeneration, and in Christian tradition is a key element found in baptism, a ritual that immediately links an individual with God, thus, with faith. However, in The Waste Land, there is no water, “[b]ut dry sterile thunder without rain” (l. 342). The Leftovers delves into this particular use of the motif of water, thus becoming the predominant and controlling motif throughout Season Two. As early as in the first episode of this season, the absence of water is made evident. The episode opens with what seems to be the recreation of the Sudden Departure, the only difference being that, this time, the Departure occurred at a much more previous time in history. Therefore, the very first scene of the episode shows a pregnant cavewoman with the members of her group, all of them nearby a lake. After an earthquake, everybody disappears or seems to die under the rocks. Thus, the cave collapses and, here as well, the rocks imply death; a stagnant, inert state, without the possibility of regeneration, only resulting in loss. This is the very same lake in which three girls will disappear in the present temporal line of the TV series, also after an earthquake, leaving their families grieving.
What is very relevant in relation to The Waste Land’s representation of water is that, at the very end of this episode, simultaneous to the disappearance of the three girls (who are reminiscent of the departed nymphs of the poem, e.g., l. 175), the water of the lake also disappears, thereby only leaving “mountains of rock without water” (l. 334). In summary, at the beginning of Season Two, the presence of rock and the absence of water is equated with loss (loss of one’s beloved ones in the case of the TV series). Therefore, “[t]he image of the
naked and inanimate rock symbolically objectifies death in relation to the absence of water, a symbol of rebirth and life” (Deyab 2022, 30), so that physical desolation represents, in both works, moral desolation, a moral or spiritual waste land.
This sudden and tragic loss of one’s beloved ones inevitably results in two of the other main themes that have being mentioned before: loss of faith and sterile social relationships.
Loss of faith is portrayed in The Waste Land, for instance, by the reliance on superstition (cf.
the role of Madame Sosostris, the “famous clairvoyante”, l. 43), instead of religion. This idea is repeated throughout the poem, as showcased, for instance, by line 384 in the fifth and last section of the poem entitled “What the Thunder Said”: “And voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells”. This line is greatly charged with symbolical and religious connotations, since “in the language of the Old Testament the empty wells and cisterns would signify the drying up of faith and the worship of false gods” (Southam 1968, 106-107).
Likewise, in The Leftovers, a character named Holy Wayne (Paterson D. Joseph) is the embodiment of superstition, an example of a false deity. He deceives people into thinking that a hug from him would cure them, and relieve them of the burden and grief that the Sudden Departure has caused. Holy Wayne stands in contraposition to actual faith in a God that, for the Wastelanders, is no longer besides them. The loss of faith is also made apparent by Reverend Matt Jamison’s (Christopher Eccleston) statement in S01E05: “killing these people [i.e., the members of the Guilty Remnant] is pointless. They don’t care because they’re already dead [...] what I want is to bring them back to life” (Lindelof et al. 2014-2017, 37:06-37:20) through their reconciliation with God and the restoration of their faith. Nevertheless, the members of the Guilty Remnant remain faithless, spiritually dead (cf. “death had undone so many”, Eliot 1998, l. 63), something that can be apprehended by their action of buying Matt’s church and reducing it to one of their inert white dwellings. As suggested in § 2.2., the new harsh reality finds no answers and no comfort in traditional religion.
In order to delve deeper into the topic of spiritual death, it is of crucial importance to highlight Dante’s influence on T. S. Eliot as an author in general and, especially, in what regards The Waste Land in particular. T. S. Eliot himself expresses that he regards Dante’s poetry “as the most persistent and deepest influence upon [his] own verse” (Eliot 1965, 125).
A very clear example of direct influence of the Divine Comedy upon The Waste Land is reflected in line 56 (“I see crowds of people, walking round in a ring”), which is reminiscent of the “rings” or circles of Hell of Dante’s Inferno. T. S. Eliot further explains the diverse types of influences that the Italian poet had over his poetry:
I have ranged over some varieties of ‘influence’ [...]. Certainly I have borrowed lines from him [i.e., from Dante], in the attempt to reproduce, or rather to arouse in the reader’s mind the memory, of some Dantesque scene, and thus establish a relationship between the medieval inferno and modern life. Readers of my Waste Land will perhaps remember that the vision of my city clerks trooping over London Bridge from the railway station to their offices evoked the reflection ‘I had not thought death had undone so many’ [cf. above Matt’s statement about the Guilty Remnants being already dead]; and that in another place I deliberately modified a line of Dante by altering it–
‘sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled.’ And I gave the references in my notes, in order to make the reader who recognized the allusion, know that I meant him to recognize it, and know that he would have missed the point if he did not recognize it.
(128)
Therefore, Dante, and especially the Divine Comedy, had a great impact on T. S.
Eliot’s poetry. By portraying scenes of modern life with tinctures of, for instance, Dante’s medieval inferno, T. S. Eliot manages to represent his contemporary society by comparison, though the use of which the author emphasises the terrible state that consumed Western
civilisation. The modern era is, thus, equated to an infernal place, an idea that also applies to The Leftovers. In the TV series, Dante’s notion of Purgatory, although reinterpreted, also
features prominently: the Purgatory appears as a hotel, both being transitory places, places that people inhabit only temporarily. The protagonist, Kevin, enters the Purgatory, that is, a hotel, where a man named Virgil guides his actions, thus being reminiscent of the character of the same name that appears in the Divine Comedy as, precisely, Dante’s guide through the Purgatory and the Inferno. Once again, it should be noted that the audience does not know if Kevin is simply imagining the place and the events that occur there, or if he is actually experiencing them (cf. the unreliability of the protagonists in § 3.1.).
Furthermore, even the organisation of both Dante’s Divine Comedy and The Leftovers presents salient and powerful similarities. The Divine Comedy is divided into three parts:
Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso, and, likewise, the TV series also presents a tripartite structure. Each season of The Leftovers is, thus, reminiscent of each of the places that appear in Dante’s poem. For instance, the first season exhibits infernal undertones that can be apprehended through the wicked actions that occur in the woods (e.g., the murder of one of the members of the Guilty Remnants, Patti’s abduction by Kevin, the presence of hellish dogs, and so forth), and which, in turn, are related to Hawthorne’s conception of the woods as places haunted by evil (cf. above § 3.1.). In fact, this first season finishes with a fire that burns the dwelling that the Guilty Remnants inhabit. Afterwards, in the second season, Kevin enters the hotel (which, as mentioned before, represents Purgatory) for the first time, and there he is guided by Virgil. In Purgatory, Kevin undergoes several trials with the aim of cleansing himself. He eventually succeeds in eliminating the tormentous ghostly apparitions of Patti in his life and nightmares by understanding and forgiving her. Simultaneously, he seems to forgive himself, which implies a purification of the soul and the removal of the burden of guilt. Taking all of the above into account, the third and last season of The Leftovers would
be equated with Dante’s Paradiso. Indeed, the third season, in contrast to the previous ones, and especially in the last episode, offers a more positive ambience, where Nora and Kevin are finally able to reunite and trust each other. Moreover, in the last episode, there is a scene that finally celebrates love through a wedding, not as something to fear, but as something beautiful to strive for. In this wedding, a ritual is conducted: the people present at the event unburden themselves of their sins by placing necklaces made of beads on a goat, thus completing the process of purification that Kevin had already initiated in his purgatory, a process that is essential in order to have the opportunity to enter Heaven.
Another topic that permeates both The Waste Land and The Leftovers is the recurrent depiction of sterile relationships. In the case of Eliot’s poem, sterile relationships are best hinted at in, for instance, “A Game of Chess”, the second section of the poem. In this section, the reader encounters a married couple whose relationship manifests sterility, lack of feelings, and absence of preoccupation for one another. This is perceived by their communication, which fails deeply (e.g., the woman questions her husband but he does not reply or he responds shortly, unwillingly, and absent-mindedly, ll. 111-116). Therefore, “husband and wife [...] are isolated and alienated from each other despite their apparent unitedness by marriage” (Bellour 2013, 2). Moreover, by connecting the scene of this marriage with the recurrent motif of water and its symbolical representation of regeneration, it could be argued that “[t]he couple’s attempt to avoid rain [as showed in line 136: “And if it rains, a closed car at four”] is symbolic of their avoidance of salvation and fertility” (3). This topic of sterility is similarly suggested at the beginning of the third section of the poem, “The Fire Sermon”, which presents yet another intertextual reference. Line 176 (“Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song”) is an exact reproduction of that which constitutes the refrain to “Prothalamion”
(1596) by Edmund Spenser, which is “a lyrical celebration of the ideals and joys of marriage written in honour of the double marriage of the daughters of the Earl of Worcester in 1596”
(Southam 1968, 96). This pastoral and joyous representation of marriage stands in clear contraposition to the sterile unions that permeate The Waste Land. The contrast between sterility and fertility is further illustrated by the natural imagery of both compositions.
Whereas The Waste Land shows a brown barren land “with the last fingers of leaf / Clutch[ing]
and sink[ing] into the wet bank” (Eliot 1998, ll. 173-174), Spenser’s poem portrays an idyllic scene “paynted all with variable flowers” (Baldwin 2009, 235, l. 13) and “adorned with dainty gemmes” (l. 14). Moreover, the nymphs, the “daughters of the Flood” (l. 21), that float on crystal waters in Spenser’s composition, are “departed” (Eliot 1998, l. 175) in The Waste Land (cf. above the three departed girls in the lake in The Leftovers). Thus, Eliot seems to subvert Spenser’s “Prothalamion”, a nuptial composition entailing fertility, in order to emphasise the desolate and arid state of Western civilisation in the modern era. Besides, marriage seems to be only a means to assure one’s procreation, as the line “What you get married for if you don’t want children?” (Eliot 1998, l. 164) of Section II expresses. Marriage is, therefore, not the symbol of love, but just a mere transaction. Bellour provides an insightful comment on The Waste Land’s sterile relationships, which connects content and structure, since the broken
marriages are reflected in the fragmentary organisation of the poem: “[l]ove is a way of transcending and overcoming brokenness, of retying and rebinding fragments into a whole.
But in The Waste Land, love fails; it connotes fragmentation rather than unity. Marriage becomes an alienating institution” (2013, 5).
Similarly, The Leftovers is concerned with broken families and sterile relationships, which are the only relationships that are left in the post-Departure world. The characters are extremely afraid of building potential love relationships, since they fear the repetition of the event. Thus, attaching oneself to people is equated with the possibility of eventual pain and grief due to loss. This is best exemplified by Nora Durst, who, after losing her whole family, finds herself emotionally unprepared to develop a relationship with Kevin. Nora’s response
is “a survival mechanism. Because on October 14 [the date of the Sudden Departure]
attachment and love became extinct. In an instant, it became cosmically, abundantly clear that you can lose anyone at any time. Our cave collapsed [cf. the cavewoman scene above]”
(Lindelof et al. 2014-2017, S02E08, 31:10-31:37). It is important to note that Nora, taking into account that she lost all the members of her family, was the most affected by the Sudden Departure, and, significantly enough, Durst means ‘thirst’ in German. In connection with the motif of the water explained above, her name may imply that “she’s permanently suffering from a thirst that can’t be quenched” (E-mail message to author Tom Perrotta, November 8, 2021), thus being in need of water, of regeneration. A further example to illustrate the topic of sterile relationships in The Leftovers is the Kevin’s desolate marriage.
His wife, Laurie Garvey (Amy Brenneman), abandons Kevin and her children to join the Guilty Remnants. The cult vows silence after the Departure, and Laurie’s joining the group and refusing to talk to her family parallels the husband’s gaps of silence in “A Game of Chess”. Besides, this emotional stagnant state is reinforced by yet another couple in The Leftovers, since the emotional paralysis from which characters of both works suffer is
literally reflected in the mental and physical paralysis of Reverend Matt Jamison’s wife, Mary Jamison (Janel Moloney), which is the consequence of a car accident that occurred during the Departure.
Since they underwent the Sudden Departure, the ‘leftovers’ have battled to find answers to what have happened in their emotional waste land. The lack of closure, the impossibility to find answers, as noted in § 2.2., results in a spiritual death (cf. above Matt Jamison’s “they are already dead”). Stories like The Leftovers, owing to their inexplicability, represent “a new type of threat prevalent in the twenty-first century” (Front 2021, 252). In other words, the event of The Leftovers is “something much more uncanny: the spectre of an
‘immaterial’ war where the attack is invisible [...] On the level of visible material reality, nothing happens, no big explosions; yet the known universe starts to collapse, life
disintegrates” (Žižek 2002, 37). Therefore, there are no tangible reasons to explain the Departure, nor to pacify the characters’ grief. In the same way, the last lines of The Waste Land present an overwhelming and open-ended question, which is asked by the Fisher King:
“Shall I at least set my lands in order?” (Eliot 1998, l. 425). In this sense, the character of the Fisher King might be compared to Reverend Matt Jamison, who tries to restore faith and moral fertility in people’s lives. Although the last word of the poem (i.e., “Shantih”, l. 433) entails peace and the coming of rain (e.g., “Then a damp gust / Bringing rain”, ll. 393-394) may symbolise a possible renewal that would eradicate the consuming sterility of his realm, the question of the Fisher King remains with no definite answer, as The Leftovers finds no closure.
It is of great relevance to note that the contents seen so far are reflected in the structure of both works, and, in the same way, The Leftovers is also nurtured by the structure and fragmentary quality of The Waste Land. The fragmentary and chaotic state of the world after WWI in the case of the poem, and the post-Departure society in the case of the TV series, is mirrored by the lack of unity and the disjointed structure according to which both works are organised. The Waste Land portrays Western civilisation as a “heap of broken images” (l. 22), and the poem is, in itself, a heap broken images; a succession of fragments with no apparent unity between them. This is emphasised by the diversity of characters or polyphony of voices (e.g., Madame Sosostris, Tiresias, the Fisher King, the married couple, etc), the fragmented sentences with the incorporation of other languages, quotations of fragments from other poems of the literary tradition, and so forth. The Leftovers exploits this view of the fragmentary representation of society in order to represent and highlight the alteration that the characters’ lives have suffered after the Departure. This is achieved through new modes of representation that are commonplace in complex narratives and contemporary commercial TV series (Loriguillo-López 2019, 869), and which differ greatly from the Institutional Mode
of Representation (IMR), dominant in classical cinema. The IMR is characterised by the elimination of potential ambiguities, whilst promoting straightforward cause-effect relationships that work towards a clear resolution, and which the audience may easily follow (870). On the contrary, TV series such as The Leftovers are pervaded by constant and sudden shifts from scene to scene, alongside temporal shifts (870) which are not necessarily explicitly signalled, so that the spectator must be intensely focused in order to find and connect the missing pieces of the whole puzzle, the gaps of information in the story. For instance, in this particular TV drama, there are constant temporal shifts from the past to the present and even to parallel experiences outside the actual diegetic time, which may be part of Kevin’s hallucinations. This mode of representation enables the showrunners to convey the difficulty of finding unity in a fragmented society, and posits the impossibility of communicating the turbulent events otherwise. Thus, “[a]s trauma demolishes a culture’s meaning-making strategies and representation modes, many critics deem it to be beyond representation” (Front 2021, 269), hence the use of techniques such as antilinearity, fragmentation, disjunction, subjectivity, and splitting of the narrative voice (269). Due to the use of experimental forms and the great change that entailed the transition from classic modes of representation towards innovative and complex narrative modes, the audience must also change from a passive state to a more conscious involvement when visualising contemporary commercial TV series (Loriguillo-López 2019, 871).
In summary, the fragmented organisation of both the poem and the TV series succeeds in portraying a devastated society, abounding in broken families and shattered lives. In relation to this, the characterisation of the Guilty Remnants is significantly interesting. The members of this cult have vowed silence after the rapture-like event. Their refusal to talk might be a symbol of the impossibility to communicate what has occurred, to verbalise trauma (Front 2021, 262). Since they feel that language is “is inadequate to describe the post-
departure world” (E-mail message to author Tom Perrotta, November 8, 2021), they resort to silence, leaving gaps of information that may lead to potential ambiguities and different interpretations about what the group actually believes in.
4. Conclusions
As this dissertation has explored, The Leftovers encloses a large number of varied literary references. The examination of the most relevant literary works that have substantially influenced the creation of this particular TV drama has proved the existence of different layers of meaning that greatly contribute to the overall significance of the work. Thus, the utilisation of well-known and central works of the literary tradition, such as Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story entitled “Young Goodman Brown” or T. S. Eliot’s modernist poem The Waste Land, has imbued The Leftovers with a literary meaning that emphasises the decayed state of the dystopian society that has immensely suffered from the so-called Sudden Departure. By unearthing the literary allusions present in Lindelof and Perrotta’s work, and by unveiling the connections between them, the audience may reach a higher comprehension of its contents and meaning-construction strategies, while also illustrating how the literary tradition impacts digital cultural products, such as this particular HBO series, thus consolidating the dialogical nature that characterises contemporary complex TV.
Texts, therefore, operate on the basis of intertextuality, thereby being interrelated. The meaning of a literary work arises from the reader’s disclosure and different interpretations of the potential connections that can be apprehended between that particular literary work and others, an idea that questions structuralism. Additionally, the revision of the concept of intermediality has highlighted the fact that intertextuality does not exclusively function within the literary medium but also across works that belong to different media, hence the label
‘intermedial references’.
The most pervasive reference to literature present in The Leftovers, although not explicitly mentioned in the TV series, is that of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s characteristic ambience.
His short story “Young Goodman Brown” is a great exemplification of his allegorical and mysterious representation of events. The Leftovers has been influenced by the particular conception of the woods as places haunted by supernatural evil forces that permeates “Young Goodman Brown”. Thus, the TV series has been nurtured by Hawthorne’s combination of the real and the imaginary in order to reinforce the chaotic, inexplicable and dystopian quality of the events that articulate The Leftovers, more specifically the Sudden Departure. Besides, the psychological construction and unreliability of Hawthorne’s protagonist is also shared by the main character of the HBO drama. Since the depiction of the events in both works is always rendered as dubious and ambiguous (favoured by the use of an internal focalisation), the reader or spectator can never fully know whether the protagonist’s experiences are real, or if they are just being subject to hallucinations.
Another central work that has emphasised the chaotic nature of the events narrated in The Leftovers is The Waste Land, a poem that has influenced the TV series not only as regards
the use of motifs, themes or imagery, but also in terms of its fragmentary structure. This study has showcased the difficulty of representing a society that is precisely characterised by the unrepresentability of the event that has caused its fragmentation. Therefore, in order to adequately convey the state of desolation and impossibility of finding closure that pervades the world of the ‘leftovers’, the showrunners have resorted to new modes of representation that question the IMR, and which mirror the fragmentation that structures T. S. Eliot’s poem, which in turn represents the horrid state and spiritual death of Western civilisation at the beginning of the twentieth century. Furthermore, this study has also illustrated that, in the same way that Dante’s Divine Comedy operates as a significant intertext within The Waste Land, it also
features prominently in The Leftovers, once again not only influencing the TV drama in terms of content, but also in terms of its organisation, since they exhibit an identical tripartite division.
It should be noted that the study of intermediality conducted by the present dissertation is not exhaustive whatsoever. Regarding the concept of intermediality, it is important to take into consideration other subcategories in addition to the one that has been discussed here (i.e., intermedial references). Therefore, further potential research may delve into other individual narrow categories of intertextuality, such as media combination or medial transposition (Rajewsky 2005, 51), the latter being of particular interest, taking into account that, as mention in § 2, The Leftovers is based on a novel. Since this study was concerned with the impact that specific instantiations of the literary tradition have had on the TV series, the analysis of the adaptation of Tom Perrotta’s book to the screen was beyond its scope. Nevertheless, it may be of interest to study the transformation of the novel into the digital medium and thus explore this “‘genetic conception’ of intermediality”, whereby “the ‘original’ text [...] is the ‘source’
of the newly formed media product, whose formation is based on a media-specific and obligatory intermedial transformation process” (Rajewsky 2005, 51). By exploring this area of intermediality, future research may examine the changes that have enabled the novel to become a digital product, signalling the differences and similarities between the two works in order to see whether the media transformation has entailed relevant alterations as what regards the overall significance of the original work. Hence, “additional layers of meaning which are produced specifically by this referencing or ‘putting into a relation’ of film and text” (53) may arise. Simultaneous to this intermedial comparative study, exploring Perrotta’s novel would reveal whether the book also includes the intertexts that this dissertation has analysed or whether they have been introduced or altered during that process of medial transposition, thereby only existing or only acting as meaning-construction strategies in the TV series,
rendering the digital product into “a new entity, anchored in the novel but gaining its own independent identity” (Front 2021, 255).
In conclusion, intermedial studies help to unearth a more profound level of meaning of the works to which they are applied. Moreover, they are of special interest nowadays, since complex TV shows are progressively displaying more intermedial references and literary allusions. The Leftovers in particular has strategically employed and connected specific texts of the literary tradition to better convey the dystopian atmosphere of an extremely wounded society. In Tom Perrotta’s own words: “our ideas of dystopia are created by the stories and poems that came before us” (E-mail message to author, November 8, 2021).
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