writing--art--imitation

[truepenny]

cpolk has another ramification to the discussion of writing as art that's been propagating gently (and sometimes goofily) for the past several days.

Renaissance rhetoricians had a term, aemulatio, which means roughly "imitation with the purpose of surpassing." Much more than originality, that was the driving force behind art in their day--which may help if you've ever wondered why Shakespeare never came up with his own plots. The primacy of originality is another not entirely positive legacy of Romanticism and its popularization, since the simple fact of the matter is, as cpolk says, we learn by imitating. Doesn't really matter what we're learning, as far as I can tell; the process works the same way.

And originality in art, I would argue, is not something that generates itself. Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun, as a random f'rinstance, is a mélange of all kinds of different things. Part of the joy of reading those books is spotting where the different bits come from. I still remember the absolute thrill of delight I got (at the age of eighteen or nineteen) when I realized that the avern took its name from Avernus. You (or I, at least) can argue neither that The Book of the New Sun is unoriginal, nor that it could have been written without the existence and influence of all the other texts that inform it.

Creativity doesn't happen in a vacuum.

Comments

[supergee.livejournal.com]

I think a writer who came up with something totally original would not be understood and would most likely wind up in the bughouse. Originality is finding new ways to combine old things.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Originality is finding new ways to combine old things.

Yes.

That was what I was trying to say, and not quite managing. (What I get for posting with insufficient sleep.)

Thank you!

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

"Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos; the materials must, in the first place, be afforded; it can give form to dark, shapeless substances but cannot bring into being the substance itself... Invention consists in the capacity of seizing on the capabilities of a subject and in the power of moulding and fashioning ideas suggested to it."

-- Mary Shelley, from the introduction to Frankenstein

Joanna Russ

[dmsherwood53.livejournal.com]

If it matters Joanna thinks that mary was one of the most original writers -see TO WRITE LIKE A WOMAN- not a GOOD writer that's another thing

Re: Joanna Russ

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

Well, Frankenstein certainly feels to me like it was written by someone young, giddy, and possibly stoned a lot of the time.

Re: Joanna Russ

[dmsherwood53.livejournal.com]

All her other books are suposed to be much the same only not as good.
She did invent the last-man-alive-on-earth genre

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

This is what I call the Folk Process. (Not a term original to me; it's been in use in musical circles for more years than I care to research.)

Ideas come from synthesis, I think. At least, my ideas come from synthesis. It's stone soup.

And this emphasis on 'originality' in writing, I think, is somewhat crippling. When I was really an apprentice writer, I used to sit down and rewrite a page out of a book I liked into my own words, and see if I could do it, and what different aspects showed up when I tried, and so forth.

And I discovered a lot through that, including my own voice, I think.

John Gardner recommends picking a classic short story and retyping it, word for word. I've heard people dismiss both these exercises as silly, but--

It's the same thing as a student painter standing in Louvre copying the old masters. So why is it a good idea for painters but a bad idea for us?

"Mediocre artists borrow. Great artists steal."

[oursin.livejournal.com]

There's an extremely apropos article (http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,1118961,00.html) in today's Guardian Review, by Joseph O'Connor, about how he began to write, in adolescence, first by simply copying out 'Sierra Leone' by John McGahern, and then by stages changing elements in it, starting with the character names.

However, there is a difference (I think) between this sort of learning by imitation process and deliberately setting out to write or be 'The Next' whatever bestseller.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Oh yes. All the difference in the world.

Imitating because you don't know any better, or you aren't self-aware enough to recognize what you're doing--or because you've chosen it deliberately as an autodidactical strategy--is very different than saying in cold blood, I will write this kind of book because this kind of book sells.

One is about learning. The other is the opposite.

[larryhammer]

Given the high concept of what I'm writing now is "Baucis and Philomen" crossed with "The Reeve's Tale", I necessarily agree in full. Heck, half of what I've written the past three years has been half-consciously done as aemulatio. My long-term goal is to do to modern genre fantasy what Ariosto did to chivalric romance—which, naturally, has never before been attempted in verse or prose.

---L.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Naturally. :)

As ambitions go, though, I like that one.

[larryhammer]

Gracias. Tho' I should have put quotes around the phrase.

---L.

[heresluck]

Hmmm. I think the interest in originality predates Romanticism by a good deal, actually. It's a big part of how the novel (!) got started as a genre, and became (and remained) popular. Of course there's much about the novel as a genre, let alone any individual novel, that's not new or original, but certain elements of novels (e.g. plots) were (and are) expected to be more original than not. That interest in originality more or less for its own sake was pretty well established some decades before 1800.

FOr what it's worth, I do think that "originality" is becoming less and less useful as a defining characteristic of the novel -- a phenomenon that I'm still thinking about, but which has become increasingly true within the last, say, 30 years.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Clearly this is what I get for avoiding eighteenth-century literature like the proverbial plague.

Except for Tristram Shandy. Which rules.

[dmsherwood53.livejournal.com]

Lot of inesting things happened in Art in that period. Its proberly a pitty I''m pig ignorant of it

[sollersuk.livejournal.com]

I don't think it does by very much (though I have to be careful here - I say "quite late" and mean "post 7th century" and my daughter the theologian says "quite far back" and means "16th century"). Cervantes is fairly apologetic about originality in the late 16th/early 17th centuries, which from my POV is awfully close to Romanticism. 16th century and earlier, one avoided any suggestion of originality literally like the plague, and this was the normal view point right back to Plato, who wanted to get rid of anyone who was creative in the literary line. Taking a theme and producing variations on it was the name of the game.

[heresluck]

Fair enough. I study the history of the novel, so the late 16th and late 18th centuries are not at all close from my POV. I was thinking about the early 18th c., when the novel as we know it began to take shape, in contrast to the late 18th c., when Romanticism gets underway (if one accepts the standard 1785-1830 dates for the phenomenon, which I don't entirely, but that's another post).

So the interest in originality predates Romanticism by anywhere from several decades to nearly a century, depending on what one considers key texts, not to mention what one considers originality. Correspondingly, there's an early-novel interest in individual psychology (notably in Richardson's work) that predates the Romantics. That said, I do think the Romantics can be collectively credited with *institutionalizing* Individualism and The Imagination in a way that the early novelists didn't -- which is part of what Truepenny was getting at in this and other posts, if I'm not misconstruing.

art imitates art

[kriz1818.livejournal.com]

We communicate by imitating. Everything we're writing here is the same 26 letters (and change) arranged in different ways. Everything we say in writing depends on a common vocabulary - of words and ideas. It can be obvious, like "Oedipal" or "(whatever)gate" or relatively subtle, like a vain and beautiful person spending a lot of time looking in the mirror. Or like the cues that tell us whether what we're reading is set in Northumberland, New England, or New Orleans - or a fantasized facsimile thereof. Reams of modern fantasy depends on the reader being acquainted with some basic concepts of epic fantasy as propagated by Tolkien. People can't communicate well when they don't have a sufficiency of common background ideas.

So fiction, even the so-called non-genre stuff, necessarily works by establishing a connection with that common background, and then playing with it. Adding stuff in, taking stuff out, turning it inside out. "Originality" isn't coming up with something totally new, but coming up with a new way to do the old stuff.

(Am I doing that with my writing? God knows. Let's hammer out the getting-it-done part and worry about originality later ...)

Cheers!

Re: art imitates art

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

And one reason genre-fiction often gets sneered at is that its necessary commonalities are specialized and therefore obvious. If one prizes originality, then, yes, a secondary-world fantasy which relies on a number of fairly mannered conventions is not going to look like a work of merit.

The conventions of "mainstream" fiction--and, more importantly, the conventions of reading "mainstream" fiction--obfuscate their own mannerisms by asserting congruity with "real life."

But I agree with you. Originality, insofar as such a thing is possible, springs from what one does with one's materials, not what materials one has.

Re: art imitates art

[kriz1818.livejournal.com]

I've been influenced by a college English professor who felt that the most interesting thing about genre fiction was the way its conventions are so much a part of it, like a sculpted landscape made up of layers of previous works upon and from which each new work was built. In fact I'm quite fond of that image, though I'm no longer sure that's exactly how he put it.

And then, of course, there's Terry Pratchett.

Re: art imitates art

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

The only trick is to be sure that one is actually building, rather than just redecorating preexisting rooms (to morph the metaphor slightly).

And there's nothing wrong with redecorating. Much of the literature that gives the most pleasure is redecoration of varying levels of inventiveness and style. I'm just too ambitious to be content with it. :)

Re: art imitates art

[kriz1818.livejournal.com]

Tricky, that, since it's all illusion to begin with.

And yet, we persevere. And fret over (for example) whether the conversation I'm trying to write is affecting, treacly, or incomprehensible without several yards of backstory to explain it ... Auugh!

Excuse me. I really wanted to finish this scene tonight and I'm just not making enough progress. But this has been a very interesting chat and I plan to think about it some more once I've figured out what he's going to say to her next, and how to get them to the amicable compromise I have planned for them.

Re: art imitates art

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Sounds like you and I are having remarkably similar evenings on the not-enough-progress front.

*sigh*

Re: art imitates art

[oursin.livejournal.com]

There's also a stage between building and redecorating, which is adapting or converting an existing building to some entirely different purpose. (I can look out of my window and see a Victorian parish church which is now a block of flats, but still looks like a VPC.) Because of the 'listed buildings' phenomenon in UK there is quite a bit of this sort of thing. I'm sure there is a literary equivalent!

Re: art imitates art

[dmsherwood53.livejournal.com]

Read Chip Delany's non-fiction

Re: art imitates art

[dmsherwood53.livejournal.com]

congruity with "real life
Agree this is a set of conventions. Lot of late 21 C Art will deal with what we thought was going on as contrasted to what was 'really' going on. Wish I could read it