Ever turned toward what we create, we see in it
only reflections of the Open, darkened by us.
Except when an animal silently looks us through and through.
This is our fate: to stand
in our own way. Forever
in the way.
— Rilke, From the Eighth Duino Elegy
To love does not mean to surrender, dissolve, and merge with another person. It is the noble opportunity for an individual to ripen, to become something in and of himself. To become a world in response to another is a great immodest challenge that has sought him out and called him forth.
— Rilke, Rome, May 14, 1904
Letters to a Young Poet
If we imagine our being as a room of any size, it seems that most of us know only a single corner of that room, a spot by the window, a narrow strip on which we keep walking back and forth. That gives a kind of security. But isn’t insecurity with all its dangers so much more human?
We are not prisoners of that room.
— Rilke, Borgeby gard, Sweden, August 12, 1904
Letters to a Young Poet
Extinguish my eyes, I’ll go on seeing you.
Seal my ears, I’ll go on hearing you.
And without feet I can make my way to you,
without a mouth I can swear your name.
Break off my arms, I’ll take hold of you
with my heart as with a hand.
Stop my heart, and my brain will start to beat.
And if you consume my brain with fire,
I’ll feel you burn in every drop of my blood.
— Rilke, The Book of Hours II, 7
Here’s an exercise: Think of almost any kind of cultural endeavor and then use the word “we” to describe its creation. The communal pronoun trips easily off the tongue when talking about the world of contemporary arts and entertainment, where things are often the product of teams, workshops, studios or institutions, where collaboration and idea-swapping are the norm. But now try applying it to creative writing, especially to fiction and poetry, and it can sound absurd: “We worked for years on the character development and the voice, and when we finally nailed the subtle epiphany, we cracked open a bottle of Champagne to celebrate.”
Not that there isn’t the occasional team-written novel. But the popular conception of the creative writer is still by and large one of the individual trying to wrestle language, maybe even the meaning of life, from his soul, the kind of lone battle Jonathan Franzen described himself waging in writing “The Corrections,” which he sometimes did in the dark, wearing earplugs and earmuffs, trying to hold his mind “free of clichés.”
Maybe that’s one reason for the flurry of attention recently about a teenage German novelist, Helene Hegemann, whose book about Berlin’s club scene was named a finalist for a prestigious literary prize to be awarded next month in Leipzig. After a blogger and fellow novelist announced that Ms. Hegemann had blended sizeable chunks of his own writing into hers, Ms. Hegemann, instead of following the plagiarism-gotcha script of contrition and retraction so familiar in recent years, announced that appropriating the passages from that book and other sources was her plan all along.
A child of a media-saturated generation, she presented herself as a writer whose birthright is the remix, the use of anything at hand she feels suits her purposes, an idea of communal creativity that certainly wasn’t shared by those from whom she borrowed. In a line that might have been stolen from Sartre (it wasn’t) she added: “There’s no such thing as originality anyway, just authenticity.”
The news made waves in the United States with an almost novelistic kind of timing, just before the publication last week of a highly anticipated book by David Shields, “Reality Hunger,” a feisty literary “manifesto” built almost entirely of quotations from other writers and thinkers. The borrowed words are marshaled to make a case against what Mr. Shields sees as boring fiction and in favor of genre-bending forms like the lyric essay. Mr. Shields, a novelist who migrated to nonfiction, has called it “far and away the most personal book” he has ever written. And though publishing-house lawyers required him to include an appendix listing his sources (at least those he could remember) Mr. Shields asks the reader to honor the spirit of the book by taking a pair of scissors and giving it an appendectomy.
His manifesto and Ms. Hegemann’s novel prompted the quick drawing of battle lines, coming at a time when tensions have probably never been higher between a growing culture of borrowing and appropriation on one side and, on the other, copyright advocates and those who fear a steady erosion of creative protections.
Patrick Ross, executive director of the Copyright Alliance, a trade group involving movie studios, networks and artists, took to the alliance’s blog immediately to condemn Ms. Hegemann. “Our would-be novelist says nothing is original, yet the passages she lifted from other books were original expressions in those books, even if the ideas were not new,” he wrote, adding that a creative culture dominated by borrowing and repurposing is a “culture that will quickly grow stale.”
But Mr. Shields argues that blatant borrowing has been a foundation of culture since man first took up pen and paintbrush, long before Terence complained in the second century B.C. that “there’s nothing to say that hasn’t been said before.” (Mr. Shields’s point about borrowing has certainly been made many times before, a fact he readily acknowledges.) Appropriation has breathed life into music, art and theater, he argues, and he lines up a kind of murderers’ row of writers, including Sterne, Emerson, Eliot and Joyce (“I am quite content to go down to posterity as a scissors and paste man”) to make the case that it has been an important tradition in writing, too.
But it has been a limited one, viewed with even greater suspicion now. And Mr. Shields, so firmly in the camp that sees appropriation as just another kind of collaboration, laments that expressive writing has lagged behind the other arts in using appropriation as a tool, especially in an age when the most vital artists are those “breaking larger and larger chunks of ‘reality’ into their works.”
“Why can’t literature catch up with the other arts?” he said in a recent telephone interview from Seattle, where he lives and teaches, citing recent encouraging (to him) trends like Flarf, the experimental poetry movement in which practitioners make verse out of the results of random Internet word searches. Of Ms. Hegemann’s book and her defense of it, he added: “My goodness, it’s just straight out of my brainpan. She basically did the book I wanted to do.”
You could argue, of course, that Warhol’s use of a soup can or Danger Mouse’s use of the Beatles and Jay-Z on the Grey Album represent one thing, a re-contextualizing of cultural artifacts so well known they are a kind of shorthand. But does lifting from an obscure blogger — or even importing a description of a sunset by Steinbeck or a suburban tableau from Updike — accomplish the same thing?
Mr. Shields’s book relies on thinkers from Wittgenstein to DJ Spooky, melding them into a voice that can sound at times eerily consistent. He contends that in a world where the death of the novel has been announced with great regularity for almost half a century, such an open-source approach is the only way to keep literature alive. Even the most original-seeming writing borrows from the centuries of writing that came before, so why not simply be more honest and, he suggests, maybe do something more interesting in the process?
“So much of the energy of great work to me is feeling the echo effect on every line, of not knowing where it came from,” he said, citing a quote — this one attributed — from Graham Greene that he uses as one of the book’s epigraphs: “When we are not sure, we are alive.”
The law and conventional ethics are still probably a long way from embracing the kind of world that Mr. Shields and Ms. Hegemann envision. But Louis Menand, the Harvard professor and New Yorker staff writer, suggested that, as with any creative movement, if the results are compelling and profound enough, even rigid conventions come around to making what seemed like a sin into a virtue.
“If something is really successful, then the law tends to get changed and society changes to allow it to happen,” he said. “The test has always been in the pudding.”
Want the change. Be inspired by the flame
where everything shines as it disappears.
The artist, when sketching, loves nothing so much
as the curve of the body as it turns away.
What locks itself in sameness has congealed.
Is it safer to be gray and numb?
What turns hard becomes rigid
and is easily shattered.
Pour yourself out like a fountain.
Flow into the knowledge that what you are seeking
finishes often at the start, and, with ending, begins.
Every happiness is the child of a separation
it did not think it could survive. And Daphne, becoming a laurel,
dares you to become the wind.
— Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus II, 12
She who reconciles the ill-matched threads
of her life, and weaves them gratefully
into a single cloth —
it’s she who drives the loudmouths from the hall
and clears it for a different celebration
where the one guest is you.
In the softness of evening
it’s you she receives.
You are the partner of her loneliness,
the unspeaking center of her monologues.
With each disclosure you encompass more
and she stretches beyond what limits her,
to hold you.
— Rilke, The Book of Hours I, 17
The great secret of death, and perhaps its deepest connection with us, is this: that, in taking from us a being we have loved and venerated, death does not wound us without, at the same time, lifting us toward a more perfect understanding of this being and of ourselves.
— Rilke, Letter to Countess Margot Sizzo-Noris-Crouy
January 23, 1924
You who let yourselves feel: enter the breathing
that is more than your own.
Let it brush your cheeks
as it divides and rejoins behind you.
Blessed ones, whole ones,
you where the heart begins:
You are the bow that shoots the arrows
and you are the target.
Fear not the pain. Let its weight fall back
into the earth;
for heavy are the mountains, heavy the seas.
The trees you planted in childhood have grown
too heavy. You cannot bring them along.
Give yourselves to the air, to what you cannot hold.
— Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus I, 4
Oh, if only our parents were born at the same moment we were, how much conflict and bitterness we would be spared. But parents and children can only go after each other — not with each other. And so an abyss lies between us, which, now and then, nothing but a little love can span.
— Rilke, Early Journals
What should I say about your tendency to doubt your struggle or to harmonize your inner and outer life? My wish is ever strong that you find enough patience within you and enough simplicity to have faith. May you gain more and more trust in what is challenging, and confidence in the solitude you bear. Let life happen to you. Believe me: life is in the right in any case.
— Rilke, Furnborg, Jonsered, Sweden, November 4, 1904
Letters to a Young Poet
Bless the spirit that makes connections,
for truly we live in what we imagine.
Clocks move alongside our real life
with steps that are ever the same.
Though we do not know our exact location,
we are held in place by what links us.
Across trackless distances
antennas sense each other.
Pure attention, the essence of the powers!
Distracted by each day’s doing,
how can we hear the signals?
Even as the farmer labors
there where the seed turns into summer,
it is not his work. It is Earth who gives.
— Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus I, 12
“They keep telling you, when you’re older, you’ll have experience — and that’s supposed to be so great. What would you say about that, sir? Is it really any use, would you say?”
“What kind of experience?”
“Well — places you’ve been to, people you’ve met. Situations you’ve been through already, so you know how to handle them when they come up again. All that stuff that’s supposed to make you wise, in your later years.”
“Let me tell you something, Kenny. For other people, I can’t speak — but, personally, I haven’t gotten wise on anything . Certainly, I’ve been through this and that; and when it happens again, I say to myself, Here it is again. But that doesn’t seem to help me. In my opinion, I, personally, have gotten steadily sillier and sillier and sillier — and that’s a fact.”
“No kidding, sir? You can’t mean that! You mean, sillier than when you were young?”
“Much, much sillier.”
“I’ll be darned. Then experience is no use at all? You’re saying it might just as well not have happened?”
“No. I’m not saying that. I only mean, you can’t use it. But if you don’t try to — if you just realize it’s there and you’ve got it — then it can be kind of marvelous.”
“. . . Experience isn’t any use. And yet, in quite another way, it might be. If only we weren’t all such miserable fools and prudes and cowards. . . .”
— Christopher Isherwood, A Single Man
“. . . You want me to tell you what I know.
“Oh, Kenneth, Kenneth, believe me — there’s nothing I’d rather do! I want like hell to tell you. But I can’t. I quite literally can’t. Because, don’t you see, what I know is what I am? And I can’t tell you that. You have to find it out for yourself. I’m like a book you have to read. A book can’t read itself to you. It doesn’t even know what it’s about. I don’t know what I’m about.”
— Christopher Isherwood, A Single Man
The Floating Library 