Shoulders of giants, etc…
Sunday, April 12th, 2009I am hoping to write my dissertation on something having to do with copyright/ownership of ideas. I’m not sure exactly how it will all shake out yet. One thing I’m really interested in is unconscious plagiarism. Anyways, the April 6th edition of The Nation has a perfect example of the kind of thinking about originality that baffles me. It’s from a review/interview of a poet about her latest book.
In honor of my point, I’ll quote directly:
Howe admits to being lonely in the Eng-
lish department at the University of Cali-
fornia, San Diego, where she was offered
her first permanent teaching job in the late
1980s. “It was a time of strange contradic-
tions, when people who loved literature were
considered reactionary and people who de-
spised it were in the vanguard.” She gently
rejects certain experimental processes like
appropriation. Any poet wary of the vogue
for borrowed language, not to mention
computer generated poems, will relate to
her helpless conviction that “perhaps I am
only being summoned by my nameless vo-
cation to engender the words I use out of my
own body and not to seek them elsewhere.”
Okay, so far the poet in question has “politely” denounced the more experimental forays of her own colleagues. This I can kind of understand. It can be weird and annoying when people are doing work that is different from your own vision of a discipline. There is value in the old and standard, and it is definitely frustrating and potentially dangerous when people think something is better just because it is new. Still, the part that drives me insane about her supposed thoughtful, “polite”, position is what she says/does in the text immediately following this statement against “appropriation” and those darned experimental whippersnappers:
In A Wedding Dress she [Howe] had quoted the theo-
logian Johann Metz on the damage that can
be incurred by our obsession with informa-
tion: “One finally experiences oneself as a
kind of newspaper–so many headings, so
many items jumbled together with no con-
nection that bears witness to our transcen-
dental part.”
I’m telling you, there is not even a paragraph break between her invocation of anothers words and her rejection of techniques that use anothers words. So this woman who is disdainful (and, I bet, fearful) of the very idea of admitting that we build off of the work of others, or allowing that creative work could come from doing so, is, in her newly published book, quoting someone else in order to even find a way to speak about what bothers her. This transcendental whatever that she is searching for that is somehow lost if we, heck, I don’t know, admit that there are other people thinking, feeling, and creating in the world whose work might BEAR ON OUR OWN. Whose work we might even OWE our own to. I mean, we might even, say QUOTE these people.
This doesn’t mean that people can’t be original — daringly, beautifully, perhaps even transcendentally so — but lets at least call a spade a spade. We write with words that others have written. Putting someone elses words in quotation marks is maybe an attempt to cordon off what “belongs” to another thinker, but when we use it, we’re making it our own in some way, we’re drawing on it and speaking to it and hoping we don’t completely muck up the message and the point of whatever someone else is trying to do, or maybe we do and maybe that’s the point. If we’re good scholars, I bet we’re nervous, because we see something as belonging in some ways to someone else, and we know how much what we think and write can mean, and we just hope we’re doing it justice with benefit of context.
I don’t have a problem with wanting to speak to something personal and real and feel that that language is your own, but the idea that words don’t bring with them what they’ve said before, even the idea that a person can say something totally new (”engender the words I use out of my own body”) just doesn’t make sense to me.
And does “obsession with information” translate to “evil internet”? Because, sure, the internet has a lot of issues, but it didn’t come along and take a bunch of good people and make them evil. And it didn’t all of the sudden create more information than there was before, to my mind. It’s different, but its still part of the same somehow. Go ahead and watch gossip spread through a middle school lunch room. Then say that information is hard to come by. Or that words that others have said can’t matter when we make them our own.
To be fair, I’m probably twisting some of what is being said in this interview because of the way it spoke to my own interests and concerns. But, that kind of makes my point, too.
Ugh. Rant over. Sorry. I still managed not to curse, but my head hurts. (I realize this was a totally strange thing to go off about. My next post will be about happy easter craft projects. Also, does anyone know the rules for when you leave punctuation outside quotation marks? Thanks.)
Does this mean I should reconsider eating them? They smell realllllllly good. What a baking FAIL.
