Harold Bloom made a whole book out of the idea of the "anxiety of influence", which is that those who come after greatness always look back at that which inspired them and it causes an anxiety, a worry about how the forerunners are forming the present work. I haven't read the book, but I've read enough of Bloom to know that there's probably a lot more to unpack in such a complex idea. It's similar to what my friend, Dustin Simmons, studies in his conceits of the "reception" of ancient literature. While Simmons' ideas are often more of "What are the modern expressions and allusions to the classical past?" than "How did the classical past cause anxiety for the creator of new work?", the two branches of reflecting on the past are interesting avenues to wander down, and I encourage you to give it a go whenever you've the time.
What I wanted to talk about is an inversion of Bloom's anxiety, using the term "enthusiasm" instead.* The basic idea: the creator of allusive art is infusing her passion as learned through previous iterations.
There's likely some stigma attached to this enthusiasm. In its most crass sense, this is the origin of fan fiction (a subset of genre writing in which aficionados of the source material write additional--or, in some places, replacement--stories within that same world), which in and of itself has some baggage. I don't disagree with that, as a matter of course, though I don't fundamentally agree with it, either. The negative connotation of the word comes from the schlock that gets passed around as a result of fan fictions' more...esoteric tastes. People like E.L. James (whose mainstream erotica drew pointed attention because it is rooted in the Twilight Saga, beginning its journey as a cultural phenomenon as fan-fiction of the vampire-teenager love triangle story) can sometimes gesture toward the heightened wish fulfillment that fan-fiction generates. Fandoms are known for the expansiveness of their enthusiasm, which can sometimes manifest itself in tawdry tales--or even more extreme imaginings.
But that isn't always the case with fan-fiction. Burgeoning writers (and I include myself in that) have found great use for learning the craft by playing in others' sandboxes. While I remember some of my earliest writings--the sort of thing I did in elementary school, almost as soon as I began reading--I always had the most momentum when I was able to write off of something else. The first book i ever finished, beginning to end, was one based upon Spider-Man comics. While it could be fairly argued that comics, by nature of their collaborative design, are harder to classify as fan-fiction (since a multitude of voices are a part of the chorus of their creation), I certainly wrote as an enthusiast of the world and works. It was in this way I cut my teeth on storytelling: By not having to invent everything on the page, I was able to acclimate myself to the role of storyteller. Ideas of characterization, motivations, and continuity were all modeled for me. By building off of this influence, I was able to grow into the kind of writer that I've become now.
Additionally, it's an old motif: Christians have been cribbing ideas from pagans since the beginning of the religion; Milton gives us a 10,000 line biblical fan-fic in the form of Paradise Lost; Shakespeare mined Ovid and Livy; Dante straight up resurrected the spirit of Vergil as his guide in The Divine Comedy. There are choices that Homer made and were preserved throughout subsequent generations, to the point that we actually have a list of epic conventions that, in some ways, have become the taxonomy of our literature. The idea that we pull off of the past in order to create the new isn't a new thing.
This pulls me back to the idea of an "enthusiasm of influence". I believe that there's a simple reason why allusions, call backs, references, and continuity considerations is appreciated--indeed, sought after--by writers: It is a recognition and homage of what has come before.
I wouldn't go so far as to say that writers are always operating under an influence of enthusiasm. In fact, I'd argue that most writers are under perpetual anxiety in their writing that what they're writing has been said by someone else--and said better, too. Certainly, plagiarism is an issue, and while I'm not interested in teasing out the differences between allusion and intellectual theft, I think that our source-centric academia is partially responsible for the idea of attribution being the sacrosanct section of our ways of thinking. Nevertheless, writers often write because something else has inspired them. I know that's the case for me.
I'm currently writing (read: Thinking about maybe starting to begin the process of commencing the plans I would need in order to put down in ink an idea or two that could potentially be leveraged into possibly turning into) a novel about an imaginary town in rural central Utah. The idea is that I'd be writing about what I know--a place for which I have enthusiasm, you could say--and a religion I know in an attempt to understand both better. As I have been formulating how I would write this book, I can easily point to two major influences: Alan Moore's new Jerusalem and Tova Mirvis' old The Ladies Auxiliary. The first I haven't even finished a third of, but I think I can see what he's trying to do in his million word novel, while the second one I read in college and haven't picked up since then, but still remember enjoying a lot.
Both of these influences are things that I'm enthusiastic about, to one degree or another. Moore's purple prose is part of the purpose, an enjoyable exploration of language for language's sake while slowly pushing a magical-realism story. While I'm not the wordsmith that Moore is, and I don't want to push my prose as far as he does (quick example: "He tacked against the east wind, chortling only intermittently as he traversed the wide-angle Art Deco front of the Co-op Arcade, abandoned and deserted, windows emptied of displays that stared unseeing, still stunned by the news of their redundancy."), nor do I want my book to be magical realism**. As for Mirvis, I cribbed her style of writing in first-person plural throughout--yes, the narrator of The Ladies Auxiliary is "we"--a couple of books back, putting my own spin on the idea. It's actually quite a bit of fun, but I decided to avoid the stylistic influence and rely more on the idea of a closely knit religious community in which everyone's piety is a show, but their inherent goodness isn't. I'm not taking Mirvis' captivating Batsheva and creating a parallel character, either. Instead, I'm selecting the things that have influenced me and putting them into my own version.
While I believe I'm responding this way out of my own enthusiasm, I do so knowing that I'm open about this. And here is where my own ignorance of Bloom's argument will show, because I somewhat doubt that Shakespeare worried that people might try to consider him another Vergil--or, more likely, another Spencer. Shakespeare borrowed widely, but always gave it a hearty helping of the Shakespearean difference, the unique characterization that only he could enfold into the players on the stage. I don't have Shakespeare's gifts, but I consciously emulate him wherever I can get away with it (he's quoted in every book I've written since college). That's my enthusiasms, which I share with those who've made a difference in my writing.
My anxieties? Well, those are internal and exclusive to me.
----
* Again, I have to confess that I'm responding to the most superficial research on the term. I'm not attempting to refute Bloom's arguments in his book, and I'm certainly not trying to set out a new literary theory here. This is to take a phrase (enthusiasm of influence) and turn it into a philosophical possibility.
** Though, if you're talking about Mormonism, faith healings, and answered prayers, you may as well embrace the genre title.
What I wanted to talk about is an inversion of Bloom's anxiety, using the term "enthusiasm" instead.* The basic idea: the creator of allusive art is infusing her passion as learned through previous iterations.
There's likely some stigma attached to this enthusiasm. In its most crass sense, this is the origin of fan fiction (a subset of genre writing in which aficionados of the source material write additional--or, in some places, replacement--stories within that same world), which in and of itself has some baggage. I don't disagree with that, as a matter of course, though I don't fundamentally agree with it, either. The negative connotation of the word comes from the schlock that gets passed around as a result of fan fictions' more...esoteric tastes. People like E.L. James (whose mainstream erotica drew pointed attention because it is rooted in the Twilight Saga, beginning its journey as a cultural phenomenon as fan-fiction of the vampire-teenager love triangle story) can sometimes gesture toward the heightened wish fulfillment that fan-fiction generates. Fandoms are known for the expansiveness of their enthusiasm, which can sometimes manifest itself in tawdry tales--or even more extreme imaginings.
But that isn't always the case with fan-fiction. Burgeoning writers (and I include myself in that) have found great use for learning the craft by playing in others' sandboxes. While I remember some of my earliest writings--the sort of thing I did in elementary school, almost as soon as I began reading--I always had the most momentum when I was able to write off of something else. The first book i ever finished, beginning to end, was one based upon Spider-Man comics. While it could be fairly argued that comics, by nature of their collaborative design, are harder to classify as fan-fiction (since a multitude of voices are a part of the chorus of their creation), I certainly wrote as an enthusiast of the world and works. It was in this way I cut my teeth on storytelling: By not having to invent everything on the page, I was able to acclimate myself to the role of storyteller. Ideas of characterization, motivations, and continuity were all modeled for me. By building off of this influence, I was able to grow into the kind of writer that I've become now.
Additionally, it's an old motif: Christians have been cribbing ideas from pagans since the beginning of the religion; Milton gives us a 10,000 line biblical fan-fic in the form of Paradise Lost; Shakespeare mined Ovid and Livy; Dante straight up resurrected the spirit of Vergil as his guide in The Divine Comedy. There are choices that Homer made and were preserved throughout subsequent generations, to the point that we actually have a list of epic conventions that, in some ways, have become the taxonomy of our literature. The idea that we pull off of the past in order to create the new isn't a new thing.
This pulls me back to the idea of an "enthusiasm of influence". I believe that there's a simple reason why allusions, call backs, references, and continuity considerations is appreciated--indeed, sought after--by writers: It is a recognition and homage of what has come before.
I wouldn't go so far as to say that writers are always operating under an influence of enthusiasm. In fact, I'd argue that most writers are under perpetual anxiety in their writing that what they're writing has been said by someone else--and said better, too. Certainly, plagiarism is an issue, and while I'm not interested in teasing out the differences between allusion and intellectual theft, I think that our source-centric academia is partially responsible for the idea of attribution being the sacrosanct section of our ways of thinking. Nevertheless, writers often write because something else has inspired them. I know that's the case for me.
I'm currently writing (read: Thinking about maybe starting to begin the process of commencing the plans I would need in order to put down in ink an idea or two that could potentially be leveraged into possibly turning into) a novel about an imaginary town in rural central Utah. The idea is that I'd be writing about what I know--a place for which I have enthusiasm, you could say--and a religion I know in an attempt to understand both better. As I have been formulating how I would write this book, I can easily point to two major influences: Alan Moore's new Jerusalem and Tova Mirvis' old The Ladies Auxiliary. The first I haven't even finished a third of, but I think I can see what he's trying to do in his million word novel, while the second one I read in college and haven't picked up since then, but still remember enjoying a lot.
Both of these influences are things that I'm enthusiastic about, to one degree or another. Moore's purple prose is part of the purpose, an enjoyable exploration of language for language's sake while slowly pushing a magical-realism story. While I'm not the wordsmith that Moore is, and I don't want to push my prose as far as he does (quick example: "He tacked against the east wind, chortling only intermittently as he traversed the wide-angle Art Deco front of the Co-op Arcade, abandoned and deserted, windows emptied of displays that stared unseeing, still stunned by the news of their redundancy."), nor do I want my book to be magical realism**. As for Mirvis, I cribbed her style of writing in first-person plural throughout--yes, the narrator of The Ladies Auxiliary is "we"--a couple of books back, putting my own spin on the idea. It's actually quite a bit of fun, but I decided to avoid the stylistic influence and rely more on the idea of a closely knit religious community in which everyone's piety is a show, but their inherent goodness isn't. I'm not taking Mirvis' captivating Batsheva and creating a parallel character, either. Instead, I'm selecting the things that have influenced me and putting them into my own version.
While I believe I'm responding this way out of my own enthusiasm, I do so knowing that I'm open about this. And here is where my own ignorance of Bloom's argument will show, because I somewhat doubt that Shakespeare worried that people might try to consider him another Vergil--or, more likely, another Spencer. Shakespeare borrowed widely, but always gave it a hearty helping of the Shakespearean difference, the unique characterization that only he could enfold into the players on the stage. I don't have Shakespeare's gifts, but I consciously emulate him wherever I can get away with it (he's quoted in every book I've written since college). That's my enthusiasms, which I share with those who've made a difference in my writing.
My anxieties? Well, those are internal and exclusive to me.
----
* Again, I have to confess that I'm responding to the most superficial research on the term. I'm not attempting to refute Bloom's arguments in his book, and I'm certainly not trying to set out a new literary theory here. This is to take a phrase (enthusiasm of influence) and turn it into a philosophical possibility.
** Though, if you're talking about Mormonism, faith healings, and answered prayers, you may as well embrace the genre title.
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