“There’s no such thing as originality anyway, just authenticity,” said Hegemann in response to accusations of plagiarism.
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If a d.j. can thread together twenty different songs and package the end product as her own, why can’t a writer? This seems to be the question Hegemann is using as a defense.
My comment -
It would be premature to defend Hegemann having not read her book and seeing the extent and use of copying, but from the examples in the NYTimes article it definitely seems Ellis is overreacting. One example -
Or as one character, Edmond, puts it in the book, “Berlin is here to mix everything with everything.”
A powerful statement, but the line originally was written by Airen, on his blog.
- It doesn't seem like it would raise an eyebrow if the comment being co-opted was more well-known.
This might actually become more of a problem as our society or our sub-cultures begin to get more and more fragmented. James Joyce would never have to cite that Stephen Daedalus is quoting Shakespeare in Ulysses, but will it be necessary for someone to cite Manderfeld quoting from The Big Lebowski? Maybe for the reader's benefit, but I can't imagine how much exposition I'd have to pack into just one conversation in order for someone who is not fluent in the cultural touchstones that my friends all share to understand the subtext. Fiction books will begin to have reference pages as large as non-fiction books, like liner notes in hip-hop albums listing where every sample originated from. Or maybe, with the advent of e-readers, every bit of recycled material will be hyperlinked to the source. To use Ulysses again, Joyce wouldn't have to consistently reference imagined newspaper articles and horserace outcomes from June 16th, but use the actual articles and the actual races. I don't know if that would add or detract from a novel, but I don't think a newspaper reporter should feel his work plagiarized in that instance, even if his name is not cited within the novel. I don't know if I personally would want to read something like that, but I don't see how it would be wrong to write something like that.
This reminds me of the argument David Foster Wallace makes in E Unibus Pluram that "the belief that images are basically just mimetic devices" is something that separates younger writers from the generation that precedes it. That television, for young people, is a part of our reality - not something just to look at - and to ignore television and advertisement and products (and what they signify about the buyer/user) would be to ignore how we interact with the world (which makes his professor's insistence to avoid "trendy-mass-popular-media" incomprehensible to DFW and his fellow students). Anyway, I could see the internet doing the same thing for words, data, ideas - I mean, just look at this blog post. We don't just passively interact with words; we cut/paste, copy and link to, share our thoughts about a book we haven't read with people we haven't met, etc...
One last thought - you might be interested in this recent article from The New York Review of Books that makes the argument that the globalization of literature has made writers generalize their books to the point where a lot of local color and cultural distinctiveness is wiped away.
"Kazuo Ishiguro has spoken of the importance of avoiding word play and allusion to make things easy for the translator. Scandinavian writers I know tell me they avoid character names that would be difficult for an English reader."
(first, you might recheck your hyperlink in the opening -- it doesn't bring up shantyblog)
ReplyDeletei didn't read the hegemann excerpt, but the DJ metaphor is too effective a bait not to post regardless....all of this might be just me taking the analogy too far, but whatevs.
the i'm-a-DJ argument seems to turn upon the idea that the mashup/remix is an art itself, or at least a subdiscipline of sorts. the real business end of this artform seems to be taking one piece and having it interact with another piece or two, creating a new sensory (narrative?) unity, a unity which then might subsequently comment on the unities of the respective pieces previous to the mash up. some for instances: on the musical end, there are so many girl talk moments involving a rather classic (read: "sincere") song about love etc. that get frankensteined with some comically crude contemporary club hit -- "bittersweet symphony" and "wait (whisper song)", wherein the former lends the latter a kind of new subtlety. on the printed text end, i once saw a classmate turn in a paper that mashed up (in a way) a speech by bush and an essay by marx, achieving something that read like an IM conversation, with marx ending up sounding really prophetic and bush's discussions of america sounding like he's just reading out of the playbook of capitalism.
with this rough dynamic of the DJ/mashup artistic project in mind, a few things come up:
- does hegemann's reappropriation of texts achieve (or attempt to achieve) a new unity between ostensibly different materials? if not, her claim to be a narrative DJ seems disingenuous. the DJ-esque use of "other people's texts," even in fiction (maybe especially in fiction), depends at least a little upon people already being familiar with those texts to certain degree. if they aren't, then the DJ dimension is lost -- what remains may still be legitimate on a broad artistic level, but DJing it ain't.
- i wonder what it is about music mashups that they almost always end up as primarily hip-hop/dance. mashup artists could be working with 5-6 songs at once, but what comes out always functions as a hip-hop or dance song: the beat is the driving 4/4, uptempo, syncopation, etc., all characteristic of the same genre. no doubt there are historical reasons for this pattern, as the artform emerged out of that genre and its technological innovations. but the idea of a non-hip-hop-based mashup really excites me.
- at what point does the DJ become a mashup artist? we don't call DJ Premiere or Kanye mashup artists. it seems like when the DJ is creating material (even using previously released material in the process) in order to go along with "original" work (rhymes, or an additional part of the beat, etc.), then the DJ is still a DJ. and often with DJs, we really don't have to know/care what parts of their songs are "original" - because it is subsumed under a broader development of unity. but it still needs to be played with to a degree, or it just seems cheap, especially if one is familiar with what is being sampled.
- mashup is the apotheosis of parody, made possible only by postindustrial technological advance.
Link is fixed, thanks.
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