The article examines Hanya Yanagihara’s third novel, To Paradise, by exploring how it is reshaped into a hypertext to reveal historical pessimism. By drawing on the concept of transtextuality by Gérard Genette, it argues the novel does not merely allude to Henry James’s Washington Square and Michael Cunningham’s Specimen Days but rather radically transforms them into something new. To Paradise preserves the nineteenth-century marriage plot pattern in James’s novel but questions and changes the normative assumptions associated with it. The novel adopts the triptych structure from Specimen Days and presents similar patterns in various historical periods across three centuries. In fact, Specimen Days is already in an intertextual relationship with Walt Whitman through its title and many references to one of his poems in the novel. Therefore, Yanagihara extends this multi-layered intertextual relationship in her own novel. The characters’ names, recurring locations, relationship dynamics, and emotional states like love, dependency, and loss provide a continuity between the different sections of the novel, yet the author refuses the idea of historical progress. The possible alternative historical imaginings create the expectation of change, but they all serve to reveal the same pessimistic patterns and endings. In conclusion, the novel proves that creating a hypertext is not only a formal choice but also a tool to show the limitations of historical imagination. History can be fictionalized in various ways; it might not always repeat itself, yet the characters continue to find themselves in comparable impasses.
Cansu Özge ÖZMEN DURALİ (Sat,) studied this question.