Just as a piece of writing is threaded with symbols and themes from the writer's subconscious - it being the real writer, I would argue, and us just fingers pounding a keyboard like the hypothetical monkey - so that same piece of writing adopts the symbols and themes of the reader's subconscious, and is kneaded into a slightly different, still recognisable shape. Nothing revolutionary here: the author never died; he just joined hands with the reader, the text itself, the larger context and so on. Like a nursery rhyme. (What this means for the higher power that Nietzsche pronounced dead, who knows. Maybe he was always just a pretty rhyme.)
Everything I read is forced into conversation with everything else, into saying things they perhaps didn't mean to or didn't know they were going to say.
The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides references a scene from Mrs Dalloway and by extension, for me, The Waves both by Virginia Woolf and, of course, the movie The Hours. From postmodernism to modernism, from a novel in which the collective narrator points to us as fellow voyeurs, to a novel in which we are invited to watch. All of this ends in Ms Woolf walking into a river with a pocketful of rocks and nods to Sylvia Plath with her head in an oven. Giving the finger to a world that we are all forced to watch consume itself. By defiantly consuming one's self. Although Mr Eugenides might argue that this act is really desertion, leaving one's fellow soldiers to advance on the front-line alone.
Then there's A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood, the structure of which mimics that of Mrs Dalloway, but with only brief moments of her sympathy, which is demoted to sentimentality, as if to protect one's self against the fire from the front-line. And briefer moments of shining transcendence, which are even more self-consciously sentimental and ultimately held underwater until they stop shining.
And where has this extended metaphor of war come from? From The Seizure of Power by Czeslaw Milosz, where political allegiance is a bit of flotsam being hurried along the world's oceans. From here to the desecrated naivety of Three Farmers on their Way to a Dance by Richard Powers (both of the characters and the author) and a leap to A Place of Greater Safety by Hilary Mantel, in which the French Revolution is a soup of naivety, childhood traumas and survival mechanisms.
I could swim my way into science fiction, psychology texts, African literary fiction and South American magic realism in a few strokes, but I suspect you're already swimming in another direction or colliding against one of those pieces of flotsam - or perhaps clinging to it together with Pi's tiger from Life of Pi by Martel Yann.
The world is just another text or a library (an underwater one if we want to continue the metaphor) - gosh and here we escape into the corridors of Jorges Louis Borge's infinite library and his lottery.
If you want to see my soul, here it is, laid bare. (Prometheus and his liver.) It's as good a map as you're ever going to get, although there is no key except that of your own subconscious. (And ricochet back to A Single Man and on to Michel de Certeau's 'Walking in the City' and Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, Marco Polo....)
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