Craft Essay, Steve Hamelman
Imprimis: definitions.
“Appropriate”: an adjective describing something that’s okay, relatively speaking (i.e., whether or not it’s okay is culturally determined). “Inappropriate”: something that’s not okay. “Appropriate”: a verb indicating an action that’s bad. “Appropriative”: tending to appropriate. “Appropriation”: the noun form of doing this bad thing. Or if you aspire to be a “creative writer,” the noun form of doing this necessary thing.
Despite what some writing teachers have been telling you.
Last week, before reciting her ekphrasis, Garnette apologized for appropriating her great-uncle’s voice.
?
Had she not honored her late great-uncle by poring over his personal war photography—of opening her heart and mind to dreadful scenes her great-uncle painstakingly recorded in image for posterity, the posterity that Garnette turned out to be—then we wouldn’t have “A Picture of Genocide,” the exquisite poem she wrote about the photograph she chose for the assignment:
"I no longer cradle the hope / and rock the dream of a big win / if it depends upon a flag- / pole impaling / the kissable tissue / between a dog-tag and a chin."
Acknowledge, sure, but don’t apologize. Please stop apologizing.
Submit it, Garnette!
Many of you wonder whether creating a persona separate from yourself is akin to “bad” appropriation—to theft. So you back off, second-guess, overthink, look over your shoulder, think of grades, think of classmates, imagine being trolled/shamed, and resign yourself to orthodoxy. How then will you write anything worthwhile? Without appropriation and persona/e, there’s no literature, no art.
Pardon the cliché, but while some artists wear appropriation on their sleeves, others are cagey about it. Poe, a shameless appropriator, was one of the cagey ones—well most of the time (see, for instance, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym). As with him and other canonical writers, the manner in which he reworked his material and the genuine originality he brought to it both camouflaged and justified the theft. Experts see what the rest of us miss. Most of us enjoy the result.
Bob Dylan’s ballad “Fourth Time Around” is a rewrite of the Beatles’ “Norwegian Wood.” Paul McCartney based “Blackbird,” 1968, on Bach’s Bourée for Lute in E Minor, c. 1717. Beyoncé, with friends, re-did it last year, keeping McCartney’s guitar/foot-tap part. She retitled it “Blackbiird.” Beyoncé had appropriated both the Beatles and Bach.
Surely you’ve all heard of genre fiction—collective appropriation for those able to master the tropes and forms.
Dylan is rock’s master appropriator, also its greatest original.
The sooner you learn to live with contradiction, the better.
Appropriation isn’t plagiarism (which is inappropriate). Plagiarism is straight copying; appropriation is taking something, often unconsciously, re-arranging it, and putting your stamp on it. The distinctive quality of that stamp, as well as, for want of a better word, the “weight” of that stamp (as if this could be measured) is where originality lies. Radically distinctive stamps are what distinguish Faulkner and Woolf and Pollack and Monk and Kahlo from the rest. We call such artists “original.”
Don’t let the artists who appear to be 100% sui generis fool you. Not Marianne Moore, not Gertrude Stein, not Sun Ra, not Herman Melville—a sizeable portion of whose greatest masterpiece, “Benito Cereno,” is copied nearly verbatim from a sea captain’s memoirs.
Who dazzles thee? The ones who dazzle me the most are those whose influences I can’t begin to unpack. Absalom, Absalom! Rothko’s rectangles. Morrison’s Jazz.
In at least one interview, the celebrated studio drummer Jeff Porcaro (Michael Jackson, Steely Dan, Toto, et al.) was equal parts grateful, humble, and candid about stealing Bernard Purdie’s famous shuffle (famous to drummers) for the addictive groove in “Rosanna.” I mean, it’s not as if experienced drummers didn’t know that; still, Jeff’s gratitude to Purdie, along with his humility and candor, was both touching and refreshing. Bar bet addendum: it was none other than John Bonham who slammed this same monster groove, with variations, into “Fool in the Rain.” Each successive virtuoso adds his/her/their own thing. That’s one thing artists specialize in: adding their own thing. Listen to the Beatles’ cover of Little Richard’s “Long Tall Sally.” Each version astonishes.
I’ve offered examples from arts other than writing in order to emphasize the codependent nature of this creative principle. The arts cannibalize each other. Or should I say fertilize?
Creative writing students are perhaps too fastidious when coming across what they suspect are inappropriate themes, language, behavior, etc. When they allow fixed moral imperatives to hinder their craft, that’s oversensitive. When they’re too judgmental of others, they thwart themselves. Be wary of anything that stifles creativity. If you feel the need to self-censor, be certain your art isn’t a casualty. It’s hard enough finding a voice and style without raising additional barriers to attainment. Good writing is permitted to shock, to hurt—rather, one should expect that it might have that effect on readers. John Greenleaf Whittier (the erstwhile “Fireside Poet,” now all but forgotten) threw a first edition of Leaves of Grass into his fireplace. That’s where being offended by literature leads righteous readers.
When Coleridge wrote in “Kubla Khan”
Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise,
he knew whereof he spoke.
These are the last lines of a poem remarkable for, among other things, violent scenes of . . . well, I guess you could call it geographic orgasm enhanced by the drumbeat of imminent war . . . remarkable for the way he tells us that to be a poet is to be dangerous, possibly to arouse dread—albeit “holy” dread—in readers. Poetry isn’t easy on anyone.
You haven’t read “Kubla Khan: or, a Vision in a Dream. a Fragment”? [In mock paternalistic voice]: Well, we’ll just have to see about that—!
In any event, it’s no good worrying about it. You’ve been appropriating all your life; you just haven’t been aware of it. Kind of like the gas station owner in No Country for Old Men. The psychopath Anton Chigurh in one of his most deranged speeches tells this perplexed innocent that he’s been putting up everything his whole life, and now a coin toss will decide his fate. Chigurh flips it. The man calls it. Heads. “Well done,” says Chigurh. The gas station owner is not slaughtered on the spot.
A not far-fetched analogy = cooking. A cook needs ingredients, many of which derive from faraway cultures. Take spices. A soup recipe requires one teaspoon of turmeric. You also need a cup of mung beans grown in Brazil. Will you proceed or not? Will you eat or not? To cook is to appropriate the produce of other cultures, distant nations. How is that different from appropriating a voice for a narrative, whether verse or prose? O student, did you drink tea or coffee today? It doesn’t make you an imperialist.
A few years ago one of my graduate students, a fine one too, asserted she’d have no problem destroying every single extant copy of Lolita, which the class was reading. We were sitting in a circle, just as we are now. Students froze. I almost blurted, “What the fuck are you doing in this program?” Wisely taking a less confrontational approach, I asked, “Do you eat pizza? Hummus? Ever tried ramen? Surely you’ve tasted chocolate milk?” She blinked. Said nothing. We sat in embarrassed silence.
(When you find yourself teaching a course like this one, don’t take such things personally. I wrote a glowing reference for her.)
Artists gather “ingredients,” which they reshape and remix to suit their goal: sometimes consciously, sometimes not. The best—Plath, Shakespeare, Hurston, Joyce Carol Oates—are the ones who take what they need and then add their own individual touch. Every writer worth reading does it. Most of them aren’t imperialists.
(How did we get here?)
Now let’s talk for a few minutes about “inappropriate” irony and satire. (“Inappropriate” having congealed long ago into an Absolute.)
Another female student in that same seminar entered class with a pained smile. Taking her seat, she held up Lolita and said, “I feel guilty for saying this, but I loved this book.”
One should never apologize for enjoying a novel. It doesn’t mean you condone heinous abuse of minors.
Overheard: podcasters claiming your generation doesn’t “get” irony. If true, it’s not because you’re the first generation taken aback by sarcasm directed at a subject or object. Morally, you’re no better or worse than any previous generation. It’s because you’re the first generation to be fully baked in the polarizing apps of social media, which cultivate extreme positions with gray areas removed from what was once called civil discourse. Social media cannot exist unless millions of posts undermine civil discourse.
I referred the class to Azar Nafisi’s Reading “Lolita” in Iran. Said they should treasure Lolita.
What were we talking about . . . right, social media. Posts. Engineered to boost advertising revenue, algorithms reward reductive reactions, often conveyed in an emoji, to the stimulus at hand. Users live by the number of “likes” or views they receive for a post. Nuance is almost impossible to express in such platforms, especially since body language and vocal tone are absent. Irony, the bedrock of satire, depends on nuance. In this disembodied metaverse, irony is supplanted by blunt-force sarcasm in lieu of true satire that, yes, may still offend—humor will always offend someone—but not necessarily the targeted subject. That itself is ironical. Irony cannot thrive in such an environment.
Female readers in Iran treasure their contraband copies of Lolita.
I don’t think it’s because they’re okay with child rape.
But now I’m getting outside my field. Worse, I’m becoming tedious. And I think I’ve made my point. Mansplaining on salary doesn’t justify it. Your turn.
[Twenty minutes later.]
Wonderful discussion! And time’s up. Before leaving, please note this assignment:
Read As I Lay Dying, “The Poetics of Disobedience,” and “What You Mean I Can’t Irony?” You can find the authors easily enough. Then, in your chosen genre, adopt a persona and write something inappropriate but also well-crafted and idiosyncratic. Try to tick me off, to hurt my feelings, to test my patience. You won’t. And so, make yourself uncomfortable instead. And for goodness’ sake, don’t apologize at any point in the process. MWC = 2000. Due next week. Oh, and read “Kubla Khan” too!
A member of the English Department at Coastal Carolina University, Steve Hamelman has published articles, book chapters, reviews, and two books (But Is It Garbage? On Rock and Trash and All by Myself: The Single-Artist Rock Album) on American fiction and/or popular music. His “creative” work has appeared in journals such as The Blotter, The Minnesota Review, and The Flannery O’Connor Bulletin. He is the review editor for Popular Music and Society and Rock Music Studies and, outside of academia, the co-founder of, and drummer in, the band Virtue Trap, active since the year 2000.
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