truepenny | writing--art--imitation (Reply)

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.