The Ecstasy of Influence

 

The current issue of Harper's Magazine has a brilliant essay by Jonathan Lethem titled "The Ecstasy of Influence," discussing issues of artistic influence, inspiration, appropriation, and plagiarism...as well as the murky (and fertile) creative realm where these things can be hard to separate from one another.

"In a courtroom scene from The Simpsons that has since entered into the television canon," writes Lethem, "an argument over the ownership of the animated characters Itchy and Scratchy rapidly escalates into an existential debate on the very nature of cartoons. 'Animation is built on plagiarism!' declares the show's hot-tempered cartoon-producer-within-a-cartoon, Roger Meyers Jr. 'You take away our right to steal ideas, where are they going to come from?' If nostalgic cartoonists had never borrowed from Fritz the Cat, there would be no Ren & Stimpy Show; without the Rankin/Bass and Charlie Brown Christmas specials, there would be no South Park; and without The Flintstones -- more or less The Honeymooners in cartoon loincloths -- The Simpsons would cease to exist. If those don't strike you as essential losses, then consider the remarkable series of 'plagiarisms' that links Ovid's 'Pyramus and Thisbe' with Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet and Leonard Bernstein's West Side Story, or Shakespeare's description of Cleopatra, copied nearly verbatim from Plutarch's life of Mark Antony and also later nicked by T. S. Eliot for The Waste Land."

This is a particularly apt discussion for those of us writing fiction and poetry inspired by fairy tales, for very often the tales we are working with aren't anonymous folk stories passed down from the dawn of time, but stories penned by specific authors such as Hans Christian Andersen, Charles Perrault, Madame D'Aulnoy, etc. The power of fairy tale literature is rooted not in novelty and originality but in tradition and repetition. Our pleasure in it comes from re-discovering old, familiar stories made fresh and new by a particular writer's skill -- much as a piece of jazz improvisation is best appreciated if one has a familiarity with the music on which it is built. Although some contemporary fairy tale re-tellings are purely inspired by source material old enough to avoid charges of plagiarism and problems of copyright violation, other re-tellings bear the influence of fairy tales of more recent vintage, such as version penned by Anne Sexton, Angela Carter, and Walt Disney. At what point does it become as artistically permissible to re-work versions of Beauty and the Beast by Angela Carter or Jane Yolen (for example) as it is to re-work Madame de Villeneuve's original 18th century story? And at what point does a writer cross the line between being influenced by a previous work, and appropriating that work as one's own? If you think there are quick, easy answers to these questions, I highly recommend Lethem's essay, which contains much food for thought.

"Most artists are brought to their vocation when their own nascent gifts are awakened by the work of a master," he writes. "That is to say, most artists are converted to art by art itself. Finding one's voice isn't just an emptying and purifying oneself of the words of others but an adopting and embracing of filiations, communities, and discourses. Inspiration could be called inhaling the memory of an act never experienced. Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void but out of chaos. Any artist knows these truths, no matter how deeply he or she submerges that knowing."

Lethem concludes his essay by looking at art as part of a gift exchange economy rather than the market economy. If the implications of this idea intrigues you, then I highly recommend Lewis Hyde's extraordinary book on the topic: The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property. For me, it was one of those formative texts that shaped the way I look at art, and life.

(Art in this post: The pencil drawings at the top are by Alan Lee; the two ink drawings are by John Batten.)

Comments

[Midori]

Terri,
Thanks for writing about this article! I read it last night and loved it.

[Gwenda]

It is a truly fabulous piece. And I have now ordered the Hyde from Amazon (I love his stuff, but had never even heard of this one so thanks for the heads up).

[Terri Windling]

Gwenda: I'm a big Lewis Hyde fan. I don't think there's anything he's ever published that hasn't challenged or changed the way I think about life. He's working on a book now about " 'cultural commons,' that vast, unowned store of ideas, inventions, and art that we have inherited from the past." Sounds fantastic.