Gathered, not made: A brief history of appropriative writing

Combining his quest for total objectivity with passionate bibliophilia, Walter Benjamin once dreamed of authoring an essay which would consist entirely of quotations from his sources. I'm not sure what my motivations were, but last year I wrote a poem roughly a third of which consisted of direct quotations from a 1979 guide to artists' videos. For the texts of other recent poems I've lifted from such sources as the table of contents of a 1950s literary journal, a review of an obscure 1960s film, a clumsy article on the pop music scene in Switzerland, and the intermittently legible legend on an old Mexican retablo. In some cases I simply transcribed the passage I wanted, while in others I also had to translate it. What amazes me about these acts of literary larceny is how satisfying I find the process. Even though the words are not mine, I derive from them the same kind of pleasure and pride I get from lines I have written in a more conventional manner. Why, I wonder, should it be creatively satisfying to simply transpose lines another has written into a text I intend to sign with my own name?

It is to answer that question that I decided to delve a little into the history of appropriative literatu.re. I wasn't interested so much in the twentiethcentury tradition of collage poetry-exemplified by The Waste Land and The Cantos-as in a more extreme approach in which, rather than weave obvious quotations into his or her words, the writer becomes a kind of scribe, transferring small or large passages, usually without attribution or other signals that these words were written by someone else.

The epitome of this kind of writer is, of course, Borges's splendid invention Pierre Menard, that fictional early-twentieth-century French poet who sets out to rewrite Cervantes's Don Quixote word for word. (In the 1980s, Borges's text was often cited in relation to so-called appropriation artists such as Sherrie Levine and Richard Prince.) The idea of erasing the lines between authors was one which Borges returns to again in his short essay "The Flowers of Coleridge." There, he raises the notion previously espoused by Shelley, Emerson, and Valery that all literary works are the creations of a single eternal author (a point he tries to demonstrate by tracing a recurring idea through Coleridge, H. G. Wells, and Henry James). Arguing for the essentially impersonal nature of literature, Borges reminds us that George Moore and James Joyce "incorporated in their works the pages and sentence of others" and that Oscar Wilde "used to give plots away for others to develop." More recently, a whole school of critical theory has developed ideas remarkably similar to those Borges espoused. Roland Barthes, for instance, defined the literary text as "a multi-dimensional space in which are married and contested several writings, none of which is original."

The following list doesn't include any Wildederived stories, alas, but there are plenty of instances of writers utilizing "the pages and sentences of others." I don't pretend that this is an exhaustive list-I'm no literary scholar and didn't go far beyond what I could find on my own shelves. However, I think it does suggest the extent and vitality of covert and overt textual pilfering. If nothing else, it has given me a better idea of why it seems so natural, and so creatively satisfying, to avail myself of the words of others.

(In emulation of Borges's bibliography of Pierre Menard's "visible" works, I've assigned each entry a letter.)

a) Isidore Ducasse's (a.k.a., le Comte de Lautreamont) Les Chants de Maldoror (1868). Some eighty years after this proto-surrealist masterpiece was published, scholars discovered that long passages in it were direct quotations from an 1853 encyclopedia of natural history. Although Ducasse left no explanation of his borrowings in Maldoror, he did pen a defense of plagiarism in his sardonic manifesto Poesies. "Plagiarism is necessary," he wrote, because "it stays close to the wording of an author, it uses his expressions, erasing a false idea and replacing it with a correct one." Ducasse's famous remark that "poetry should be made by all" encapsulates his challenge to conventional authorship.

b) Blaise Cendrars's Kodak (1924), a book of poems ostensibly inspired by Cendrars's travels in North and South America. Decades later, Cendrars revealed that the purportedly "documentary" poems in the book were actually slightly revised quotations from a novel called Le mysterieux Docteur Cornelius by Gustave Lerouge. According to Cendrars, he wanted to demonstrate that Lerouge, a popular novelist little appreciated by the literary establishment of his day, was in fact a writer of considerable poetic ability. While no one caught on to Cendrars's borrowings, the Kodak company objected to his unauthorized use of its trademarked name in the title. In subsequent editions the book carried the title Documentaires.

c) Hugh MacDiarmid's Cornish Heroic Songs for Valda Trevlyn (1937-38), a collection of poems MacDiarmid abandoned only after writing some seven hundred pages. In his introduction to MacDiarmid's Selected Poems (1993), Eliot Weinberger describes how the Scottish poet composed much of the book by transcribing "long passages from obscure travel and science books, reviews in the Times Literary Supplement, Herman Melville's letters, the writings of Martin Buber, Thomas Mann's Tonio Kroger." As Weinberger explains it, MacDiarmid had "discovered that the way out of the traditional prosody and rhyme he had hitherto employed almost exclusively was to break prose down into long jagged lines."