The Ecstasy of Influence

by Jonathan Lethem

  Unfortunately, no one was ever able to locate the Updike review in question.

  “The American commons …” to “… for a song.” Bollier.

  “Honoring the commons …” to “… practical necessity.” Bollier.

  “We in Western … public good.” John Sulston, Nobel Prize winner and a co-mapper of the human genome.

  “We have to remain …” to “… benefit of a few.” Harry S. Truman, at the opening of the Everglades National Park. Although it may seem the height of presumption to rip off a president—I found claiming Truman’s stolid advocacy as my own embarrassing in the extreme—I didn’t rewrite him at all. As the poet Marianne Moore said, “If a thing had been said in the best way, how can you say it better?” Moore confessed her penchant for incorporating lines from others’ work, explaining, “I have not yet been able to outgrow this hybrid method of composition.”

  UNDISCOVERED PUBLIC KNOWLEDGE

  “… intellectuals despondent …” to “… quickly and cheaply?” Steve Fuller, The Intellectual. There’s something of Borges in Fuller’s insight here; the notion of a storehouse of knowledge waiting passively to be assembled by future users is suggestive of both “The Library of Babel” and “Kafka and his Precursors.”

  GIVE ALL

  “… one of Iran’s finest …” to “… meditation on his heroine?” Amy Taubin, the Village Voice, although it was me who was disappointed at the door of the Walter Reade Theater.

  “The primary objective …” to “… unfair nor unfortunate.” Sandra Day O’Connor, 1991.

  “… the future will be much like the past …” to “… give some things away.” Open-source film archivist Rick Prelinger, quoted in McLeod.

  “Change may be troubling … with certainty.” McLeod.

  “… woven entirely …” to “… without inverted commas.” Roland Barthes.

  “The kernel, the soul …” to “… characteristics of phrasing.” Mark Twain, from a consoling letter to Helen Keller, who had suffered distressing accusations of plagiarism (!). In fact, her work included unconsciously memorized phrases; under Keller’s particular circumstances, her writing could be understood as an allegory of the “constructed” nature of artistic perception. I found the Twain quote in the aforementioned Copyrights and Copywrongs, by Vaidhyanathan.

  “Old and new …” to “… we all quote.” Ralph Waldo Emerson. These guys all sound alike!

  “People live differently … wealth as a gift.” Hyde.

  “… I’m a cork …” to “… blown away.” This is adapted from the Beach Boys song “ ’Til I Die,” written by Brian Wilson. My own first adventure with song-lyric permissions came when I tried to have a character in my second novel quote the lyrics “There’s a world where I can go and / Tell my secrets to / In my room / In my room.” After learning the likely expense, at my editor’s suggestion I replaced those with “You take the high road / I’ll take the low road / I’ll be in Scotland before you,” a lyric in the public domain. This capitulation always bugged me, and in the subsequent British publication of the same book I restored the Brian Wilson lyric, without permission. Ocean of Story is the title of a collection of Christina Stead’s short fiction.

  Saul Bellow, writing to a friend who’d taken offense at Bellow’s fictional use of certain personal facts, said, “The name of the game is Give All. You are welcome to all my facts. You know them, I give them to you. If you have the strength to pick them up, take them with my blessing.” I couldn’t bring myself to retain Bellow’s “strength,” which seemed presumptuous in my new context, though it is surely the more elegant phrase. On the other hand, I was pleased to invite the suggestion that the gifts in question may actually be light and easily lifted.

  KEY TO THE KEY

  The notion of a collage text is, of course, not original to me. Walter Benjamin’s incomplete Arcades Project seemingly would have featured extensive interlaced quotations. Other precedents include Graham Rawle’s novel Diary of an Amateur Photographer, its text harvested from photography magazines, and Eduardo Paolozzi’s collage-novel Kex, cobbled from crime novels and newspaper clippings. Closer to home, my efforts owe a great deal to the recent essays of David Shields, in which diverse quotes are made to closely intertwine and reverberate, and to conversations with editor Sean Howe and archivist Pamela Jackson. Last year David Edelstein, in New York magazine, satirized the Kaavya Viswanathan plagiarism case by creating an almost completely plagiarized column denouncing her actions. Edelstein intended to demonstrate, through ironic example, how bricolage such as his own was ipso facto facile and unworthy. Although Viswanathan’s version of “creative copying” was a pitiable one, I differ with Edelstein’s conclusions.

  The phrase Je est un autre, with its deliberately awkward syntax, belongs to Arthur Rimbaud. It has been translated both as “I is another” and “I is someone else,” as in this excerpt from Rimbaud’s letters:

  For I is someone else. If brass wakes up a trumpet, it is not its fault. To me this is obvious: I witness the unfolding of my own thought: I watch it, I listen to it: I make a stroke of the bow: the symphony begins to stir in the depths, or springs on to the stage.

  If the old fools had not discovered only the false significance of the Ego, we should not now be having to sweep away those millions of skeletons which, since time immemorial, have been piling up the fruits of their one-eyed intellects, and claiming to be, themselves, the authors!

  —Harper’s, 2007

  The Afterlife of “Ecstasy”

  The previous essay roused mostly happy static for me. Lawrence Lessig wrote to Harper’s: “I was troubled by the link between the creativity evinced in the essay and ‘plagiarism’—especially troubled when I found buried in the text the only sentence I have ever written that I truly like. (Which sentence will remain a mystery here.) I was troubled because the freedom that Lethem depends upon—the freedom to integrate and build upon the work of others—does not need the license the plagiarist takes … it is not too much to demand that a beautiful (or ugly) borrowed sentence be wrapped in simple quotation marks.” I replied: “A call for quotation marks suggests that an essay such as mine ought to be considered in the context of academic, scientific, or journalistic discourses—realms where standards of accurate citation are necessary and sensible. Perhaps my essay should be judged in that context. Yet, assembling it, I was aware of my own impulses to beguile, cajole, evoke sensation, and even to manipulate, impulses not so different from those underlying my novels and stories … Artists are among other things mischievous, and we should try to remember that we wish them to be. In songs, films, paintings and much poetry, allusions and even direct quotations are subsumed within the voice of the artist who claims them. Citations come afterward, if at all. There are no quotation marks around the elements in a Robert Rauschenberg collage …” This wasn’t really contentious. Lessig’s letter, as I saw it, welcomed me to the ranks of the “Copyleft” All-Stars: hip-hop samplers, digital provocateurs, and their legal defenders. And, now, one stodgy, midcareer novelist. If Motherless Brooklyn’s success had obligated a brief stint as Oliver Sacks Jr., trying not to disgrace myself on the Tourette’s-advocacy circuit, now I made another round of panels and conferences, playing Robin to Lewis “The Gift” Hyde’s Batman, for a minute or two. At the height I (Mailerishly) debated Judge Richard Posner on a Chicago stage. The Men Who Care About Borrowing Too Much are without exception noble-intentioned, generous men, and I relished my brief days in their vanguard, before I melted back into the novelist crowd.

  Yet the essay was also a Rorschach blot. I’d tried to occupy abandoned acreage in the middle of a battlefield, between the extremes of copyright-abolitionist anarchy and what I saw as a retrenchment behind the romantic notion of the capital-A Artist in a Promethean vacuum (a notion stoked behind the scenes by corporate interest, and by a commentariat addicted to dummy cries of “plagiarist” whenever a little cobbling-work cropped up). I’d offer the polarized zone testimony f
rom a middling type, making his rent on copyrights and not reliant on legally actionable (or even particularly obvious) borrowing, who still couldn’t fudge his belief that sublimated swipes—and apprenticeship in slavish imitation—were basic to writing, and nothing new. If so, falling silent while other artists were forced to defend shrinking turf was shabby.

  But the battle depends on pretending acreage in the middle doesn’t exist (the term for this is “straw man”). The future went on being overrated by its advocates and enemies both, at the expense of noticing that digital culture was only a focusing lens for tendencies as creaky as (at least) Shakespeare and Sing Out! magazine. The essay wasn’t concerned with Internet culture in itself (which is why it barely mentions it). My target was the reactionary backlash at what Internet and sampling culture happened to make (even more) obvious: the eternal intertextuality of cultural participation—of reading, writing, making things from other things. Calling for playful acknowledgment of that fact didn’t equal self-proclamation as a revolutionary, but the opposite: This matter was old as the hills, which is why I’d combed the hills to find old words to say so. I’d pitted the piece specifically against “the violence and exasperation of another avant-garde, with its wearisome killing-the-father imperatives,” yet a critic as sharp as n+1’s Marco Roth could get inflamed at what he called “the fantasy of the writer as a hip-hop DJ.” Sigh. The truth was, anyway, that on close inspection “Ecstasy” contradicted itself internally, as any rhetoric conflating file-sharing pirates and Thomas Jefferson were likely to have done. To defend the words I’d drawn into conjunction from so many places was at least as silly as attacking them. The essay was now an artifact whose weird repercussions I could try to fathom as innocently as anyone else.

  Somatics of Influence

  If over time I felt anything lacking in the exhaustive Frankenstein’s monster of “Ecstasy,” it was less that I wished I’d driven intellectual pilings deeper—screw it—but rather that the whole thing was so top-down cognitive, such a dissertation. I’d said all except what might matter most: that I felt influence, and thrilled to it, with my body, and did so before I knew it had a name. The collective “I” of “Ecstasy” couldn’t investigate the mystery of a boy-reader’s buzz at detecting the throb of the forgotten Victorian poems parodied in Carroll’s Alice, or how it felt to surmise the existence of Edward G. Robinson from a Bugs Bunny aside, indicating occult histories waiting to exfoliate themselves to your curiosity. Never mind the intertextual erotics of twentieth-century popular music, that vast song-with-annotations, and what a throb of quote-recognition could do to you listening alone on headphones, or in a group on a dance floor, decades before “sampling.” (Dancing was itself a laboratory of free-form imitation, every quote instantaneously claimed by your body’s fingerprint-inimitability.) Never mind the way your hungry eye warped inside-out seeing your hero Robert Crumb draw satires of your hero Philip Guston’s paintings that themselves riffed on Crumb’s earlier comics. On the other side of the argument, disgust and other bodily alarms were routinely enlisted: Plagiarized writing smelled wrong, originality gleamed—you knew it when you saw it (except when you were wrong, which was constantly, since there was always some precursor to be discovered). You’ll never listen to Led Zeppelin in the same way after you’d heard the Willie Dixon songs they’d stolen: So this tale of disenchantment and censure was supposed to go. Well, actually, though they should have cut Willie Dixon a check (and eventually did), Led Zeppelin used his songs to change the way I heard everything, including Willie Dixon, and my body declared this a positive good. I couldn’t want the new stuff not to exist, or to be too deferential to the old, any more than I wanted the old stuff I found myself compulsively driven to excavate backward—the songs, the books—to have been toppled or eradicated by what came next (the “weary killing-the-father imperatives”). Sometimes more is more. I’d shied from personal testimonies, wishing to test my intuitions in a communal tongue. Now, omitting the personal somatics of influence felt like neglect.

  As for canons, why should it be that to valorize reuse indicated, of all things, an enmity to canons? I was a fiend for canons. Sampling was “Ancestor worship,” according to D.J. Spooky. Let a million canons Bloom. Only, canons not by authoritarian fiat but out of urgent personal voyaging. Construct your own and wear it, an exoskeleton of many colors.

  Or maybe I did want to spin some turntables, at least for a minute or two. My first fiction after “The Ecstasy of Influence” was this collage. Count it as one of several money-put-where-mouth-is gestures but also as a confession of the addictive qualities of the scissors and pastepot. After the bogus dissertation of “Ecstasy,” this was a Rauschenberg collage, and it was a relief to let the torn paper and glue blobs be obvious.

  Always Crashing in the Same Car

  (A Mashup)

  As soon as I was outside the city I realized night had fallen. I turned on my headlights. It seems to me that one of the strongest gratifications of night driving is precisely that you can see so little and yet at the same time see so very much. The child awakes in us once again when we drive at night, and then all those earliest sensations of fear and security begin shimmering, tingling once again inside ourselves. The car is dark, we hear lost voices, the dials glow, and simultaneously we are moving and not moving, held deep in the comfort of cushions as once we were on just such a night as this one, yet feeling even in the softness of the beige upholstery all the sickening texture of our actual travel. For night driving our eyes, too, must remove one kind of inner transparency and fit on another, because they no longer have to make an effort to distinguish among the shadows and the fading colors of the evening landscape the little speck of the distant cars which are coming toward us or preceding us, but they have to check a kind of black slate which requires a different method of reading, more precise but also simplified, since the darkness erases all the picture’s details which might be distracting and underlines only the indispensable elements, the white stripes on the asphalt, the headlights’ yellow glow, and the little red dots. It’s a process that occurs automatically, and if I was led to reflect on it that evening it was because as the external possibilities of distraction diminished, the internal ones got the upper hand within me, and my thoughts raced on their own in a circuit of alternatives and doubts I couldn’t disengage.

  At first I paid no attention, then it came again, flashing across my eye, and then yet again, until at last, forced to take a closer look, I saw sunlight glinting off the hood of a car. I adjusted my mirror and thought no more of it—I was after all on a road, cars are to be expected. Yet when after a number of divagations and turns and accelerations it was still with me, I begin to pay it more heed. Can it be that I was being followed? But was it always the same car that pursued me? I could no longer say. I tried not to think too obsessively about my pursuers, but what else was I to think about? They were behind me, watching me, waiting for me to make a mistake. So far I had made no mistakes.

  There seemed a figure in the driver’s seat, or if not a figure perhaps only a raised headrest, the sun glinting off the dirty windshield making it difficult to say anything with certainty. The other car at first was not with me and then it was, unless it was another similar car. It was there, then was gone, then there again. I stopped for fuel and saw no car but then, driving again, there it was, behind me. That car that was chasing me was faster than mine. From time to time it became easy to believe I was not being followed, the pursuit behind, I came to believe, extremely subtle, invisible more often than visible. The car sometimes freshly washed, sometimes covered with mud, the paint such that it caught the light differently at different times of the day, making me always think, “Could that possibly be the car? Aren’t I mistaken?”

  In my escape I headed for the center of the city. I jockeyed for an opening in the line of cars; finally someone slowed for a tenth of a second at the yield sign and I got in. Cars shot past me at seventy and eighty miles an hour, the drivers sprawled behi
nd their wheels, fish-eyed and hostile. I saw a gap and went for it, flooring the Cutlass and feeling the characteristic lag in the transmission. I moved the car into the slow lane as we turned around the central drum of the interchange, accelerating when we gained the open deck of the motorway, traffic speeding past us. It was a healthy decision; the pursuer was constantly behind me but we were separated by several other cars as we joined the fast westward sweep of the outer circular motorway.

  Everywhere the perspectives had changed. The concrete walls of the slip road reared over us like luminous cliffs. The marker lines dividing and turning formed a maze of white snakes, writhing as they carried the wheels of the cars crossing their backs, as delighted as dolphins. The overhead route signs loomed above us like generous dive-bombers. I pressed my palms against the rim of the steering wheel, pushing the car unaided through the golden air. Two airport coaches and a truck overtook us, their revolving wheels almost motionless, as if these vehicles were pieces of stage scenery suspended from the sky. Looking around, I had the impression that all the cars on the highway were stationary, the spinning earth racing beneath them to create an illusion of movement.

  We stopped at a traffic signal, in a long column. I felt definitely more hostile toward the cars that preceded me and prevented me from advancing than toward those following me, which however would make themselves declared enemies if they tried to pass me, a difficult undertaking in view of the dense jam where every car was stuck fast among the others with a minimum freedom of movement. In short, the man who was my mortal enemy was now lost among many other solid bodies where my chafing aversion and fear are also perforce distributed, just as his murderous will though directed exclusively against me was somehow scattered and deflected among a great number of intermediary objects.