Gathered, not made: A brief history of appropriative writing

Combining his search for total objectivity with passionate bibliophilia, Walter Benjamin one time dreamed of authoring an essay which would consist entirely of quotations from his sources. I'm not certain what my motivations were, on the other hand last year I wrote a metrical composition roughly a third of which consisted of direct quotations from a 1979 guide to artists' videos. For the true copys of other recent poems I've lifted from like sources as the table of satisfieds of a 1950s literary journal, a review of an unenlightened 1960s film, a clumsy article upon the pop music scene in Switzerland, and the intermittently legible myth on an old Mexican retablo. In a certain quantity of cases I simply transcribed the passage I wanted, while in others I also had to translate it. What amazes me about these acts of literary larceny is in what manner satisfying I find the proces level though the words are not mine, I derive from them the same kind of pleasure and pride I win from lines I have written in a more conventional manner. wherefore I wonder, should it be creatively satisfying to simply transpose lines another has written into a body I intend to sign with my have a title to name?

It is to answer that question that I decided to dig a little into the history of appropriative literatu.re. I wasn't interested in like manner much in the twentiethcentury tradition of collage poetry-exemplified by dint of The Waste Land and The Cantos-as in a more farthest approach in which, rather than weave obvious quotations into his or her words, the writer becomes a kind of scribe, transferring small or large passages, usually without attribution or other signals that these words were written through someone else.

The epitome of this kind of writer is, of course, Borges's splendid invention Pierre Menard, that fictional early-twentieth-century French bard who sets out to rewrite Cervantes's Don Quixote word for word. (In the 1980 Borges's true copy was often cited in relation to so-called appropriation artists similar as Sherrie Levine and Richard Prince.) The idea of erasing the lines between authors was individual which Borges returns to again in his short essay "The Flowers of Coleridge." There, he raises the notion previously espoused by dint of Shelley, Emerson, and Valery that all literary works are the creations of a single eternal author (a point he tries to demonstrate by the agency of tracing a recurring idea end Coleridge, H. G. Wells, and Henry James). Arguing for the essentially impersonal nature of literature, Borges reminds us that George Moore and James Joyce "incorporated in their works the pages and decision of others" and that Oscar Wilde "used to give plats away for others to develop" More newly a whole school of critical theory has evolveed ideas remarkably similar to those Borges espoused. Roland Barthes, for instance, defined the literary body as "a multi-dimensional space in which are married and call in questioned several writings, none of which is original."

The following list doesn't include any Wildederived stories, alas, on the other hand there are plenty of instances of writers utilizing "the pages and determinations of others." I don't sham that this is an exhaustive list-I'm no literary scholar and didn't proceed far beyond what I could find upon my own shelves. However, I think it does indicate the extent and vitality of thicket and overt textual pilfering. If nothing other it has given me a better idea of on what account it seems so natural, and for a like reason creatively satisfying, to avail myself of the words of others.

(In emulation of Borges's bibliography of Pierre Menard's "visible" works, I've assigned each ingress a letter.)

a) Isidore Ducasse's (a.k.a., le Comte de Lautreamont) Le Chants de Maldoror (1868) more [i]or[/i] less eighty years after this proto-surrealist masterpiece was published, scholars discovered that lengthy passages in it were direct quotations from an 1853 encyclopedia of natural history. Although Ducasse left no explanation of his borrowings in Maldoror, he did inscribe a defense of plagiarism in his sardonic manifesto Poesies. "Plagiarism is necessary," he wrote because "it stays shut to the wording of an author, it uses his expressions, erasing a false idea and replacing it with a correct one" Ducasse's famous remark that "poetry should be made by the agency of all" encapsulates his challenge to conventional authorship.

b) Blaise Cendrars's Kodak (1924) a work of poems ostensibly inspired by means of Cendrars's travels in North and southerly America. Decades later, Cendrars revealed that the purportedly "documentary" piece of poetrys in the book were actually slightly revised quotations from a novel called Le mysterieux Docteur Cornelius by dint of Gustave Lerouge. According to Cendrars, he wanted to demonstrate that Lerouge a popular novelist little appreciated by the agency of the literary establishment of his day, was in fact a writer of considerable poetic ability. While no individual caught on to Cendrars's borrowings, the Kodak company realityed to his unauthorized use of its trademarked name in the title. In after editions the book carried the title Documentaires.

c) Hugh MacDiarmid's Cornish Heroic sonnets for Valda Trevlyn (1937-38), a collection of metrical compositions MacDiarmid abandoned only after writing more [i]or[/i] less seven hundred pages. In his introduction to MacDiarmid's chooseed Poems (1993), Eliot Weinberger describes by what mode the Scottish poet composed abundant of the book by transcribing "long passages from dark travel and science books, reviews in the Times Literary addition Herman Melville's letters, the writings of Martin Buber, Thomas Mann's Tonio Kroger" As Weinberger explains it, MacDiarmid had "discovered that the way on the outside of the traditional prosody and rhyme he had hitherto engrossed almost exclusively was to break plain down into long jagged lines."