'Free to Fall': Transgressive Intertextuality in Carl Shuker's the Lazy Boys (Critical Essay‪)‬

An immersion in the mind and experience of a young man on a nightmarish descent towards complete moral disintegration, Carl Shuker's second novel, The Lazy Boys (2006), (1) is a savage critique of youth culture and masculine expression in New Zealand. Into this grim satire Shuker has blended an intertextual dimension that traverses boundaries of high and low art, the canonical and the contemporary., the fictive and the factual, the local and the global, thus creating a postmodern synthesis of diverse cultural signifiers. The novel's epigrams place Paradise Lost alongside lyrics by punk legends The Clash and alt-rockers The Pixies, an incongruous juxtaposition that dares us to contemplate the tenuous similarities between literary epic and pop song; after all, the gist of Milton's tale of transgression and revolt, informed by the political instability of the Restoration period, is not so dissimilar to the rebellious anti-establishment ethos of 1970s punk rock and its development into the fiercely independent alternative rock scene of the 1980s. This is, of course, a reductive comparison; by playfully reworking his cultural and literary heritage, however, Shuker creates a curious layer of intertextuality in The Lazy Boys that aims at more than just postmodern recycling. Instead, his deft manipulation of transgressive antecedents infuses the narrative with an aversive quality that amplifies the unsettling effects of engaging the taboo. Julia Kristeva coined the term 'intertextuality' in her essay "Word, Dialogue, and Novel' (1966), in which she was among the first to introduce the ideas of Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin to Western readers. (2) Interpreting Bakhtin, Kristeva presents the 'literary word' as 'an intersection of textual surfaces rather than a point (a fixed meaning)' (3) Hence, any given literary text, as a 'dialogue among several writings', is always an 'absorption and transformation of another'. (4) Kristeva's colleague Roland Barthes developed this notion in his essay 'The Death of the Author' (1968), in which he describes the text as a 'multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash', and a 'tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture'. (5) A text does not therefore contain a single message from an 'Author-God'; instead, its meaning is mediated through its participation in the discourses of other texts, a process in which the reader becomes an active participant.