What if I told you Jasper Jones.. isn't just Jasper Jones?!

 Yeah, that's right. This might sound crazy, but when you pick up Jasper Jones, even though you probably read it and think you're just reading about Jasper and Charlie, and the racism and mystery in 1960s Corrigan that Craig Silvie writes... Nope! What your mate Craig's really doing? Secretly feeding you other books without you even noticing! Not full books, of course, that'd take him far more than 400 pages, but little tastes. A hint of My Fair Lady, a spot of Nancy Drew - heck, they might even kill a mockingbird in there somewhere!

But, what do I mean by this? And why would Silvie do it? Is it normal? Are we always being fed subconscious messages from other books whenever we read?

Well, yeah. It's a literary term called intertextuality

All you need to know is that when an author writes a text, they weave in references, styles, or characters from other texts to add extra meaning to their own work. Sometimes they say it directly, sometimes they sneak it in for you to notice (or not!).

Think about it like this. If you read a book about a girl strolling through a sunny woodland path, that sounds pretty whimsical and cheerful. But what happens when I add in the red cape she's wearing, the basket of goodies she's carrying? Now you're expecting a wolf. Instead of reading it like a whimsical story, you're going to wonder what's lurking off the path, waiting for something to go wrong.

That reference subtly added a new meaning that you wouldn't even realise was there if I hadn't told you! 

Bam. That's intertextuality for you. And it's nothing new, they've been doing it for thousands of years - there's even intertextuality in the New Testament!

Welcome to Corrigan

Back to Jasper Jones: the story follows 13-year old Charlie as he's reluctantly dragged into an adventure with Jasper Jones, the town outcast, after Jasper discovers the body of a murdered girl. As they try to uncover who killed her, they navigate small-town racism, secrets, and the typical coming-of-age chaos!

But what genre is this book? Horror? Mystery? Or is it just one of those Literature texts they always make you read because it's an Australian text about identity... 

Turns out, it's all of those. Some gothic moodiness, a Nancy Drew-esque murder mystery, and some good old-fashioned bildungsroman (coming of age).

Gothic, but make it Aussie 🦘

Murder, in a dark forest, at night? Gothic 101. As Charlie goes off through the forest with Jasper, he "begins to recognise the landscape less and less", the trees "shroud[ing] us", looking "eerie and ethereal". Doesn't this just conjure up images of moonlit glens, mysterious unexplainable events, maybe even a tinge of the paranormal? Classic gothic! Especially as Charlie and Jasper are "confined" to their narrow path, "further from the water". Is it important that they're being taken away from water? Why is water important? Silvie constantly uses this Gothic style to unsettle the readers.

But here's a little twist - it's not just gothic, it's Australian gothic!

Intertextual references to our Aussie landscape are just pouring in - those spooky trees shrouding them? Not just any trees,  those would be "paperbacks and floodgums". Aussie trees you can find just about anywhere. That narrow path they're stuck on? they It's a  "kangaroo track". We know kangaroo tracks, as Aussies. We've seen the trees, and the tracks. We're pretty much in those woods with Charlie. We feel Charlie's fear even more - it's real to us, more than just a book. They might not reference a book, a known title, but they reference our known world.

To anyone else? Australia's already pretty spooky, so unfamiliar references they don't understand just crank up the creepy!

Enter the Deep South

But we're not dealing with just Australia, and Charlie's bookshelf gives him away. He's reading books by Southern Gothic authors - Mark Twain, Truman Capote, Flannery O'Conner. And Corrigan is your typical rural, seemingly idyllic Southern Gothic town hiding deep injustices and a dark underbelly.

But that's not all - on Charlie's journey out to the forest, we come across another shocking plot twist - who is Mad Jack Lionel? This reclusive outsider living on the outskirts of Corrigan is feared by the townspeople, after rumours that he killed a woman years ago.

Mysterious. Reclusive. Murderer?

Sound familiar? This is essentially Boo Radley from To Kill a Mockingbird 2.0! Charlie's self-proclaimed favourite book! 

Here we have an intertextual direct reference, plus an archetypal character of Southern Gothic, giving us some more info - Boo Radley wasn't what he seemed… is Mad Jack Lionel what he seems? Instead of just a mad outsider, intertextuality tells us a whole new side of things. Is there more than meets the eye?

CSI: Corrigan 🔎

The mystery definitely doesn't stop there. As the action ramps up we get hit with some direct intertextuality - Charlie and his best mate Jeffrey discuss what to do about this mystery, Jeffrey tells Charlie "this isn't Nancy Drew". Well, if we weren't thinking about crime and mystery before we definitely are now!

Considering Nancy Drew, what are we on the lookout for now? Corrupt authorities, trying to prevent justice - just like the corrupt Corrigan town. A female protagonist solving the crime - does that mean the girl in Jasper Jones is signifiant? What do we think of Eliza now with this in mind? How mysterious.

And to some older readers, the plot centring around "Who killed Laura Wishart?" might sound eerily familiar... to Twin Peaks, and "Who killed Laura Palmer?" Twin Peaks featured a similar murder - Laura Palmer - and highly relevant incestual abuse, resulting in the discovery that Palmer's father was the guilty party. That just brings the theme of parental abuse, of Laura Wishart's father, and incest, into Jasper Jones, hinting at the upcoming mature themes before they fully come about.

And finally, Charlie actually grows up!!

You can't say Jasper Jones isn't a coming-of-age story. Just like To Kill a Mockingbird… Charlie learns, suffers, matures, in the same way as the character Scout. In the novel, Atticus Finch is a lawyer representing an African-American man unjustly accused of rape. In Jasper Jones, Charlie sees himself as a sort of Atticus helping out poor Jasper unjustly blamed for the murder of the book. However us readers can see, with help from our intertextual knowledge, that he resembles Atticus' naïve son, Scout, quite a bit more…

What to do with this 2-in-1 experience?

You've basically just read the story of 3 separate books (and many more if you have a closer look!) and it all fit into the one book, of Jasper Jones. It layers like an onion - references ranging from way back centuries, to texts as modern as Superman if you dare find the reference..

Today, Aussies know Jasper Jones. It was a pioneering book, writing about racism in a time before Australian society was actively conscious of the indigenous experience. It turned into a text that inspired other works, with ideas adapted and taken by modern authors to write new stories about coming of age. 

We don't know what's next. But Craig Silvie draws back to texts from generations before, to write his own text set 30 years before, all to contextualise the early 2000s world he lived in.

What's stopping you from doing the same? Intertextually reading into Jasper Jones, and applying that to contextualise your own world? It's not 2009 anymore, the world is different! But if Silvie found little nuggets in 1606, in 1960, even one from the 1st century BC, that helped him contextualise and expose his world, I'm sure Jasper Jones, and any other texts YOU engage with, have the power to do the same.

The words are still there. Pick them up, read them backwards, upside down, and inside out. Tell your own story.

(word count = 1317 words)