Random
Hi I want to talk about influence a little bit
I read this post the other day over at Montevidayo. It’s about influence. It’s not terribly long, so you can read it if you want, but I’m going to focus on Joyelle’s opening sentences, the post’s premise:
I want to begin by suggesting my discomfort with the conventions of discussing literary influence. I want to suggest that influence need not come from literary forebears, elders, teachers, or even people. For me this notion of influence, regardless of the gender of the participants, is too close to patrilineage, which bothers me for three reasons: its method of conserving property and wealth, ownership of originality; its copying over of heterosexist, male dominated bloodlines and the reproductive futurism that goes with it; and its commitment to linear notions of temporality—that what comes before causes what comes after, and that the most important thing is to move forward in time. I find all these structures suffocating and confining. I think we’re all conceptually limited by the unexamined assumptions about temporality, property, gender, sexuality, wealth and inheritance implicit in most discussions of literary influence, regardless of the gender of the writers under discussion.
When I first read this, I thought “oh very cool, nice” and went on with my life. But the post stuck with me. I couldn’t shake it. I keep thinking about it at the gym or in my car. And the more I think about it, the more accurate, and I’d say enlightening, this conception of influence has become to me and the way I understand and metabolize shit as “influence.” Essentially, my eyes have been opened in no small way by the idea’s Joyelle presents above.
For much of my writing life I’ve subscribed to the idea of lineage and forebearance (as I’m sure most probably do) because 1) it’s logical — I was taught by Matt Rohrer, who was significantly influenced by (among others) John Yau, who was taught by John Ashbery, who was given Auden’s blessing, and so on and so on; so it’s only natural that I would want to read “what came before” Matt Rohrer because he’s one of my favorite poets and I’ve tried to emulate his writing in countless ways and, further, I can go talk to him about books, whatever, so it’s nice to have some common ground — although, 2) I also never thought to question the idea of literary forbearance/lineage. And I’d argue that this is symptomatic of a deeper, more fundamentally ingrained way of thinking, borrowed in large part I believe from the college educated’s steadfast subscription to Darwin’s Theory of Evolution. It’s not a hard comparison — time happens, things change, trends emerge, call it evolution.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aDaOgu2CQtI
However, the beauty of literature is that it’s not biology — literature’s concerns are primarily conceptual, and intrinsic — “survival” is, for the most part, totally abstract — and, as Joyelle points out, the idea of progressing towards some sort of ideal, the idea of “progressing” in literature as an enterprise, is sort of insane. “The history of literature” should not be synonymous with “the evolution of literature,” because to think that way seems to me to be narrow minded, flawed, and Jonathan Franzen. I’d like to raise my hand in support of Joyelle’s argument against traditional ideas lineage and forbearance in literary influence. Influence should be wide open to be whatever you want it to be, regardless of conventions like “you can’t write this without having read that” or “you have to read Auden.” Again, as Joyelle says, influence shouldn’t even be limited to books. Influence should be whatever gets you excited to do the thing.
it’s evolution, bitches
it’s evolution, bitches
I also really liked Joyelle’s essay, although part of me feels like this idea of ‘progression’ is a little bit harder to get around than one might think. I’m not convinced it’s necessary or even good to disavow literary lineage (patrilineage, as she calls it) in order to find freedom of voice. I’m reminded of Joyce imitating Turner and Pater, or the art of Chinese calligraphy, in which one spends years drawing single lines, established characters, until, through repitition, one discovers a world of expressiveness INSIDE of those apparently rigid forms. The idea of a lineage can be confining, but it doesn’t have to be.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YV4oYkIeGJc
Word. There was some great conversation abt this last fall that Jackie Wang started (http://htmlgiant.com/random/lineage-justifiable-matricide-vs-i-mothered-you-hoes/#comment-111148294) and then I carried over at BO (http://bigother.com/2010/12/13/generationality-in-which-i-pirate-jackie-wangs-groove-to-prevent-my-becoming-bos-most-absentee-contributor/), also informed a lot by Joyelle’s ideas.
In general, I really like this. A few thoughts: I don’t think literary influence is a bad thing, but agree maybe it shouldn’t be privileged over other influences. The essay makes me think about the desire of many writers to ‘make it new’ — why ‘newness’ is so important? Let’s make things old, or make them the same, sometimes, too.
I wonder about this: “commitment to linear notions of temporality” – I understand the desire to do away with the notion of lineage, and how the essay links the notion of influence to reproductive futurity, but I also am not sure how all of the things that came before us are not a part of us. That doesn’t mean we have to call those things ‘forefathers’, for sure. I understand the idea of reframing ‘lineage’, but it’s hard for me to get away from the idea that we are not influenced.
I would say that reproductive futurity has more to do with the idea that we create anything at all than the idea of lineage. As I understand it, reproductive futurity is the idea that to be good members of society, we’ve got to create a future, have babies, “do it for the kids”, etc — so really it’s not just influence that reinforces heterosexism and reproductive futurity, but the idea that we should create anything at all.
This link is crabby —
http://bigother.com/2010/12/13/generationality-in-which-i-pirate-jackie-wangs-groove-to-prevent-my-becoming-bos-most-absentee-contributor/
I agree with your argument against evolution as a model for literary ‘progression’ – a few other thoughts on this – how would that even be measured? Can we say that literature is, objectively, ‘better’ now than it was, say 100 years ago?
But then, why do certain forms survive, and others die? For example, why is the novel the dominant form of long prose (instead of say, the picaresque, even though we can see elements of the picaresque in some novels)? The fact that some forms disappear (bring back the whore dialogue!) suggest to me that maybe there is some idea that certain forms are better suited (for whatever reason) to a particular time, place, and readership, than others, which then would lead me to think that yeah, maybe there is something we could liken to evolution at work. Certainly sales figures at publishing houses have had an evolutionary influence on what gets published. That some poets still write sonnets suggests to me that at least some writers are actively engaged with the idea of lineage. That’s not to say that there aren’t writers working outside of the dominant lineage(s), or that it’s not fruitful to reconceptualize the idea of influence.
This is about as thought-provoking as the Internet gets. Influence is one undeniable thing, as is evolution (for many of us, anyway), but it’s best not to mistake evolution for progress in literature – and in biology, too; you often hear biologists contesting the notion that evolution entails improvement per se even as organisms become ostensibly more complicated.
FUCKING WORLD FUCK ME
Kill your influences.
thank you for saying what i wasn’t smart enough to realize i was thinking
“Influence should be wide open to whatever you want it to be”–yes, yes, it should. But it isn’t.
In as much your last paragraph deals with disavowing a narrative of literary or cognitive history in which you must involve yourself, and which you must further, otherwise you are neither influenced nor cognizant, then I see sense in it, though I do happen to wonder how many people are out there actively promoting this. Otherwise, it seems terribly simplistic, to me.
It seems to take the above as the rote definition of ‘lineal’ influence–lineal influence is out to keep us from being influenced by music and bar talk and the sound our shoes make with flappy soles, jumping into puddles busily evaporating, chasing hats which seem to tempt us into the middle of the road. Lineal influence wants to take our cars out of our garages! Are you now, or were you ever, a member of the party of lineal influence!?
Like most all facets of human consciousness, I would say that biology is precisely analogous to this one. The idea that our mental life is somehow outside of the governing principles of the living universe as we know it is peculiar. Human society is incremental, and human beings are the increments–if that idea is burdensome to you, and well it may be, then the fault lies not with the idea, nor the reality. Your consciousness was composed, in whatever way it happened, by and large without your input, from the consciousnesses which came before it, the land around you, the land around them, the text within you, the text within them–and the issue of your consciousness, the same. If a radical freedom is necessary to you, then denying this will be good for you, though you still won’t have radical freedom. But what freedom you do have did come out of those other consciousnesses–what motion you do possess is in no way separate from the motion possessed by those who came before you, but it is completely individual, nonetheless, and it will move through other motions.
No doubt there will be some way in which I have misunderstood you, and written afoul of what you actually think, especially since you have only sketched a surmise, so I will stop here, rather than involve your beliefs in too many potentially inapt specifics.
As to her actual essay, I found it very beautiful. It seems to be describing the same exact process that has always been true, in her own way, by composing a straw man out of the ideas which annoy her most, no matter how many other ways human beings have conceived of influence. She is not actually promoting an alternative, merely promoting what is as though it were an alternative.
So it goes.
“Influence should be wide open to whatever you want it to be”–yes, yes, it should. But it isn’t.
In as much your last paragraph deals with disavowing a narrative of literary or cognitive history in which you must involve yourself, and which you must further, otherwise you are neither influenced nor cognizant, then I see sense in it, though I do happen to wonder how many people are out there actively promoting this. Otherwise, it seems terribly simplistic, to me.
It seems to take the above as the rote definition of ‘lineal’ influence–lineal influence is out to keep us from being influenced by music and bar talk and the sound our shoes make with flappy soles, jumping into puddles busily evaporating, chasing hats which seem to tempt us into the middle of the road. Lineal influence wants to take our cars out of our garages! Are you now, or were you ever, a member of the party of lineal influence!?
Like most all facets of human consciousness, I would say that biology is precisely analogous to this one. The idea that our mental life is somehow outside of the governing principles of the living universe as we know it is peculiar. Human society is incremental, and human beings are the increments–if that idea is burdensome to you, and well it may be, then the fault lies not with the idea, nor the reality. Your consciousness was composed, in whatever way it happened, by and large without your input, from the consciousnesses which came before it, the land around you, the land around them, the text within you, the text within them–and the issue of your consciousness, the same. If a radical freedom is necessary to you, then denying this will be good for you, though you still won’t have radical freedom. But what freedom you do have did come out of those other consciousnesses–what motion you do possess is in no way separate from the motion possessed by those who came before you, but it is completely individual, nonetheless, and it will move through other motions.
No doubt there will be some way in which I have misunderstood you, and written afoul of what you actually think, especially since you have only sketched a surmise, so I will stop here, rather than involve your beliefs in too many potentially inapt specifics.
As to her actual essay, I found it very beautiful. It seems to be describing the same exact process that has always been true, in her own way, by composing a straw man out of the ideas which annoy her most, no matter how many other ways human beings have conceived of influence. She is not actually promoting an alternative, merely promoting what is as though it were an alternative.
So it goes.
Darwin’s theory of natural selection is not about progressing toward an ideal.
literary influenza
Yeah, I sort of feel time must be linear (I have not read much philosophy so I can’t quote anybody or site any belief system) but lineage in literature is what I have a problem with.
Re: why there are certain forms and not others >>> I think about this a lot, and my vague theory is this: aside from “physically” fixed forms like a sonnet or a haiku, the difference between forms is primarily semantic. For example, within the categories of “novel” and “poem” and “short story,” the variety is so enormous as to render the terms almost arbitrary. I’m sure an argument can be made against that, but to do so would require, at some point, defining “poem” and “novel” and “short story” and I’m pretty sure that can’t satisfactorily be done.
Although I’m not going to be an asshole and sit here and say I see no difference between “Bob the Gambler” (http://www.amazon.com/Bob-Gambler-Frederick-Barthelme/dp/039592474X) and “Danse Russe” (http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15539) I just feel that a form shouldn’t be definition. I don’t know what it should be.
Though to say “…certain forms survive, and others die” is the kind of rhetoric I have trouble with. What is survival and death in things that aren’t alive, you know?
I’m not trying to call you out or anything, I’m just really interested by this discussion. Thank you for engaging.
Yeah, I can see how maybe the post might come off as simplistic — like we are all just beings in cubes surrounded by books never leaving or eating or looking at anything else ever, and maybe it seems like the lines of lineage are painted to rigidly. But this sort of dogmatic conception of lineage is something I’ve encountered relatively frequently in academia. People ask “what’s your writing like?” and your expected to answer with who you’ve read and studied under and who your literary “roots” are, and that sort of thinking is what feels simplistic to me. Again, like I said, it’s a natural and even logical way of thinking, but it makes sense to challenge it and question it while also acknowledging the merit that’s there.
I’m not sure if that really responded to any of your points, but thank you for putting thought into this.
Well, I figured I was probably coming at it from a deficient viewpoint, in as much as I’ve no higher education and I’ve never had to deal with that specific kind of stultifying perspective and expectation, but it seemed (in both the essay and the post) too absolutely stated. I was more or less responding in one shot off of the impressions I gathered while reading both pieces, so it would probably be foolhardy to try connecting all the dots in a reply, anyway.
I would say that the fundamental agitation I had while going through these posts was that it seemed to be taking the reduced form of one argument and replacing it with the reduced form of no argument–replacing we come out of other people with we come out of everything. Neither of those statements seem terribly useful to me on their own. The first is too simple because it clearly can’t account for all of what goes into a person’s work, and the second because it is patently not true. It’s a figurative statement meant to hint at how complicated the process is without actually investigating it, or saying anything about it.
However, I also have a view of influence which I’ve spent some time with, so I kind of come to these conversations with one already in the chamber, which means I probably tend to have the conversation on my terms. If that’s kind of what I was doing up there, then maybe I should have defined those terms. When I say influence I’m not talking about superficial style, usually, though that’s part of where you have to look. I’ve noticed most people talk about influence in a kind of “I’m feeling like a pancake this morning, Bob” fashion. It’s whatever they feel like. If I read and enjoyed this book, it ‘influenced’ me. It’s a choice, it’s something I have control over. Then there are the people who insist either that they haven’t been influenced, or that influence doesn’t really mater, or that the ways they’ve been influenced are too infinitesimally nuanced to even be comprehended by our tiny human brains.
But when I think about influence, it tends to mean more than just ‘who taught me this neat trick’, or ‘I wrote without commas after I read Cummings’. It’s who informs the structure of your reality, without whom your entire art would cease to function, or exist?. Who gave you your idea of what a poem actually is? On a basic level the simplest way to describe what it is to write a poem is to say that you are writing what you think a poem is–and if you look at all the many ways humans have tried to define what poetry is, all the ways they’ve evolved in themselves to think of it as, you realize there is no through-line. If you tried to plot them on a chart, all of the dots would be connected to each other, but few of them directly–the dots at the furthest end would connect with the dots toward the middle, some of which would connect with those at the beginning–but ultimately you would be left with no single salient quality that we consent to as essential to a piece of writing before it can be a poem. This means that what we think a poem is, what we think poetry is for, is unbelievably important in reading and writing poetry. So it is also important that we know what others think of poetry as, think it’s for, when we read them–and these ideas don’t just come out of nowhere. I saw someone the other day, when asked who influenced him, who said that he loved Milton the most, but it was impossible to be influenced by him in this day and age. His view of the issue was purely stylistic, and he certainly had a style nothing like Milton’s. My question, though, were I to actively look through what he wrote, would be if Milton informed what he was using his style to accomplish, or if the Stevensian surface ran through to the bottom, and so on. And it’s questions of this magnitude which I find in ‘lineal’ influence–which is to say, following a drunken beaver through a chewed up forest.
But most of how we write isn’t, by necessity, tied up in these questions. It can be the case that your work is permeated almost utterly by your influences, but usually it’s more complicated than that–you’re looking at the bones, the infrastructure; it’s important to see, but most people don’t have flesh made out of calcium.
the pen ic illin more mightily than the ess-word
yea i regularly get confused and anxious about whether or not im a poet.. i’ve even said on occasion that the main reason i keep calling my writing “poetry” is that it’s a fun+effective marketing angle.. i dont think hardly anyone outside of my already existing community would see what i’m doing and think to call it poetry
in the case of novels being “the” form for long prose– it might be that it has something that tends to work well for people; there are certain narrative structures/myths that are known to show up in every culture (see “monomyth” i think). just like chocolate is a food that many many humans love to eat, there could also just be something about novels..also though, if you look at what kinds of texts fit into the category of “novel,” there is so much variation.. not only in genres like “romance” vs “adventure” or something, but also considering experimental fiction that gets called “novels” but could also pass as poetry, visual art, or other forms if it wanted to..the category of “novel” seems to be dominating long prose, but what the word “novel” means to people seems to have changed and will keep changing. it may be a completely different form in 100 years and people could still call it “novel” if there isn’t any hard break.reallythat’s interesting (for me) to think of in relation to poetry too. almost no contemporary poetry looks/sounds anything like poetry from 1800, and the overt continuity that does exist seems to have been cultivated intentionally by people who came into the artform with that idea of “lineage” (my teacher last fall was all about reading/identifying the “echoes of {old poet} in the work of {new poet}.”)i rly think what has been called “poetry” and what has been called other thingslike “visual art” that has language in it,or “fiction” or “nonfiction,” is just based on historical specifics that are kind of arbitraryin that, if they happened again, they would come out differently.(i heard that “poetry” was originally the word for all literary writing, up until about 200 years ago. is that true?)a prominent poet came along and decided to make poetry without any rhyme,and now ~200 years later it’s the most common kind of poetry.was it inevitable that poetry “evolve” to rhyme-less forms? i dont think so.maybe it’s connected to other changes in culture since 1800, but i dont think it “had to happen.”maybe it seems like poetry inevitably “has to” change over time,but it could also just die out, if people stopped consciously adapting it.there are other forms, like music and especially rap, that provide a lot of the same benefitsmy focus has beenwhat to do with the arbitrariness of the categories? i know i could call my work pretty much anything and get away with it,and yetsometimes that freezes me upinstead of freeing me. i almost wish that, going forward, there could be a wayof having less focus on the categories/genres of culture.maybe the internet will allow for that, with something as broad as “blogging,”a form defined (at this point) more by how it’s distributed than by anything in the actual posts.i know i can just call my writing “poetry” and get away with itand maybe it will generate a lot of useful change in the artform, even.but i knowthat calling it ‘poetry’ is also kind of arbitrary, and that kind of bothers me sometimes,feels almost dishonest.i want to publicly acknowledge that it’s not inherentlyany different from webcomics, image macros, visual art, typography, fiction, etc.why do the labels mess with me so hard?sometimes i actually feel very playful about it,and just want to fuck with itand see if i can, with the help of a community, reroute an entire artform.that’s usually when i make my videos and posts saying tweeting and macros are literature, etcthe same thing happens with people fighting over what the word “vegan” means (or “feminist,” in which case some people actually started using a different term, “womanist,” to separate out their different meaning).seems usually more practical to just keep using the same fraught term,but it’s kind of frustrating dealing with the factof everybody having a different idea of what it meansand them contesting what you’re doingeven when u feel that your work has nothing to do with them hahakind of lol’ing at the human racewe’ve made so much crap, we have our culture and heritage, “lineage,”history and schools of philosophy and everything,and in some ways we’re just as simple as any other animalwe <3 sex, food, and chillin in comfortwe poop into bowls of water and send it undergroundnice post andrew
WTF dudes who can read dis shit
Whoa, Joyelle’s “essay” is as dumb as anything I’ve read in the last ten years. Does she believe she’s thinking seriously about hard problems? “I don’t like it! It’s heterosexist!” Yawn.