I’m writing this essay the night before it’s due, in order to avoid blacklisting by our industrious editor. I have no excuse for not finishing earlier, other than that I am lazy, and selfish, and am already trying to write several hundred words every day towards a master’s thesis. Of course, several hundred words are not very many. Other people work much harder than I do – many of them are under the age of five, others are attached to life support machines. I don’t know quite where my time goes but I know that a lot of it is wasted. I am not trying to excuse myself for being so late. Rather, I am just explaining that if this essay is convoluted, unoriginal, bigheaded, and probably wrong, it is because I have only written it because I don’t know what a Flanagan blacklist entails and I don’t want to find out.
As writers for The Modest Proposal, we are all lucky to have Flanagan cracking the whip and demanding content. [Editor’s note: “Thanks!”] We are lucky to have Bobby Schweizer’s classy, clean-cut web design as a medium for our essays, the kind of webpage that will make readers take us seriously. The last thing we need is constructive criticism. This is the only thing we cannot do for ourselves.
I have spent a lot of time in group workshops for creative writing, and the truth of it is, most “constructive” criticism is blind, obtuse, wrong, selfishly motivated and ignorant. Many people only have the energy to skim bland works and make blander suggestions, not bothering to understand what the piece actually wants to do. If a critic does get excited enough about a piece to criticize it honestly, he or she is likely to tear it to shreds, in defense of his or her own ego. We, the writers of The Modest Proposal, are a cache with impressive credentials as arm-chair intellectuals and flaneurs, candidates for perfectly successful careers writing for our private selves. We are not going to make any sort of literary journal worth a damn unless we agree on a sense of what we can help each other with, and why we have decided to write as a collective.
This is why, from the beginning, I signed up to write about Jonathan Lethem. The recent winner of a MacArthur ‘Genius’ Grant, Lethem has accompanied the release of his latest novel, You Don’t Love Me Yet, with an essay in Harper’s Magazine entitled “The Ecstasy of Influence” which crusades for a new definition of copyrights. Or maybe it would be better to say, Lethem accompanies his crusade for a new definition of copyrights with a novel; You Don’t Love Me Yet reads like a very entertaining vehicle for the ideas he’s outlined for Harper’s. (The essay was published in February of this year, and is available here: The Ecstasy of Influence).
Lethem has long been one of my favorite novelists. His first six works, before his official ‘literary’ novel The Fortress of Solitude, were smart, genre-blending page-turners – the kinds of plots that would keep me reading Dan Brown’s stilted, awkward prose combined with the kind of prose that would keep me reading Raymond Carver’s stilted, awkward plots.
Letham’s Harper’s article is like his fiction: accessible, intellectually exciting. He mainly argues that originality is an overrated and perhaps even non-existent virtue; that all artists should not only admit to, but embrace, great theft and distortion from past works of art. By our current standards of intellectual property, Lethem argues, all artists are plagiarists. And this is exactly what makes art good.
In a surprise ending to the essay, Lethem includes a gimmicky “key,” wherein he cites all of the ideas he has plagiarized in earlier paragraphs. He cites William Gibson, Mary Shelley, David Foster Wallace, Walter Benjamin, Saul Bellow, and, most often, Lewis Hyde (we will forgive him, this once, for stealing from so few women). He not only cites these people’s ideas but direct lines, phrases, and wordings which he lifted from other contexts and uses, very prettily, to his own ends. And he makes no apologies to the influences he has forgotten: “The key to the preceding essay names the source of every line I stole, warped, and cobbled together as I ‘wrote’ (except, alas, those sources I forgot along the way).”
The importance of originality bashing, for Lethem, has to do with legal definitions in current Western copyright culture. Artists of Lethem’s generation and younger grew up with television, movies, and internet; yet we are expected not to use any of these influences in creating future art. Our earliest stories were told to us by Disney, although Disney gathered these stories from fairy and folk tales, spurning originality itself. Although all of this source material was originally commonwealth property, Lethem points out, “Disney’s protectorate of lobbyists has policed the resulting cache of cultural materials as vigilantly as if it were Fort Knox.”
This “enclosure of commonwealth culture for the benefit or a sole or corporate owner” offends Lethem, who lifts a definition of art in a gift economy from Hyde’s wonderful book, The Gift. Lethem and Hyde believe that some part of any artwork is not created, but rather received by the artist as a gift; whether an audience buys a book, pays museum admission, or steals a painting from the Louvre, part of the experience of the art is always received, in the same way, as a gift.
In writing for this wiki, we are offering our ideas to each other in the same way - in asking for help, and peer review, we are not asking for constructive criticism so much as we are offering our ideas up to be used by a greater, group mind. The spirit behind open source software, and wikis, like the one TMP uses, lies within the realm of this “gift economy,” which includes the idea that many people with creative control will create a better product than one tyrant creator. As Joan Didion points out in “I Can’t Get that Monster Out of my Mind;” the deserving auteur is rare; directors (like George Lucas) make worse films when they’ve become successful and are allowed more creative control from their studios (Episodes 1, 2, 3).
We are young and our ideas are not our own. [Editor’s note: “My ideas are my own, including this ironic intrusion”] and so I propose that we approach our own contributions to TMP and the contributions of our peers as one and the same thing – work which belongs to the community first, and to us as individuals only as an afterthought. The goal of this journal is to create a changing, organic and challenging intellectual atmosphere. Rather than approach our work as something finished and submitted to a committee of critics, we should see the journal itself as part of the creative process; rather than posting articles on the wiki and accepting criticism passively, we should surrender them completely, and allow each other to make changes directly into the article. We should not put our names on our articles. We should not submit paragraphs of constructive criticism and expect the original author to make our changes. We should, at worst, write a new article in response, and at best, change the essay or article itself. We should not save copies of original drafts, on-hand to “fix” what a peer has changed on the wiki. If the first idea, or phrase, was better, it will be as obvious to replace after the change as its presence was obvious before. Working as a collective, all of our essays will smooth and solidify, surprisingly quickly, into the elements of a journal that we all agree is in its finished state – where each word, and each idea, is inevitable.
Of course I don’t know if this is going to work, or even if this is any different than what everyone else already has in mind. I am one lazy person, and there have been a lot of convoluted email discussions back and forth, and in this essay I’m just fencing the ideas that Jonathan Lethem stole. What I am hoping is a taste of my own medicine; for someone else to come along on the wiki and change this article, without my permission, until it’s worth the pixels it’s written on. Plus this way, we can all write essays the night before they’re due, and still expect a brilliant finished product. [Editor’s note: “It should be pointed out to Petty that I removed almost all of the contractions from her article, thus rendering it far less casual. Any boredom endured during its reading should be pointed to the Blacklisting soul of TMP’s Founding Editor.”]
