Is originality attainable in literature? William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare

Stanely Mushava: Literature Today

There is perhaps nothing new under the library bulb. Every creative spark is likely to have a classic equivalent in the galaxy of literary enterprise. The budding writer’s immediate challenge is to say something new or different and so branch away from the shadow of the established writer.The importance of originality cannot be overrated, yet it is the most elusive virtue in the catechism of creative writing. Once you have a template for originality, you have lost it. For Albert Einstein, creativity is the ability to hide your sources. For Harold Bloom, originality is the ability to distort your sources.

But stashing paper trail occasionally misfires even for the rich and famous. Melania Trump was recently caught with her hand in another woman’s cookie jar but plagiarism already is an overcrowded hall of shame featuring even saints like Fareed Zakaria.

Ironically, nothing is further from originality than avoiding sources altogether. Literary entrants who hate reading and love writing risk may not sound dry but they risk sounding stale.

Books are not to be avoided because, according to the wise Abraham Lincoln, they serve to show a man that his original thoughts are not very new after all. Writing involves not just the cause, the case, not just the idea but the argument hence the need to fuse, localise, update and give new life to inspiration.

Few can accomplish as much without being adequately read.

Budding writers who lose sleep over originality may find it easier either to blend their sources into an unfamiliar mix or to import from less unfamiliar sources.

Creative writing is powered by emotion and, unfortunately for the budding writer, while new emoticons are being pumped out all the time, no new emotion has been invented in six millennia. Whatever theme you are going to happen into, chances are an eloquent jerk has already been on the podium before you and said everything there is to be said.

An imaginative bystander may consider cashing in on factionalism with a novel or two but 400 years ago, Ben Jonson was already traversing that territory with “Sejanus”, a timeless play in that order.

A crushworthy muse can fluster an artist to dizzy peaks of poetic delirium but Solomon’s favourite off-throne diversions, particularly his refined taste for African royalty, were already inspiring the most infectious love poetry millennia ago.

Code-smart writers may even venture light years beyond the ordinary experiences Wole Soyinka or William Shakespeare with post-apocalyptic dystopia. But, having no extra-terrestrial audiences, they too will revert back to the language of emotion and appeal to the strivings of the human spirit in order to strike a rapport with their earthly audience.

C.S. Lewis laughs at his science fiction colleagues for taking us through cryptic mazes, galaxies and high end control rooms only to deflate back to ordinary feelings of love, betrayal and ambition.

Low-life writers in the fast lanes of the 21st century may credit themselves as originators of sleaze but it is hard to imagine a new low in that territory. With respect to style, it is not unusual for culture critics to credit as experimental or disruptive a work of art set to an exhausted template.

But if originality was a virtue, most artists would never go past St Peter at the Pearly Gates. The most regarded would probably never fare past the poor king and his zealous Byron’s “Vision of Judgement”.

Film critic Jim Jarmusch advocates “profession piracy” in a “MovieMaker” magazine entry. “Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination.”

“Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. “Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work and theft will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent.

“And don’t bother concealing your thievery – celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: ‘It’s not where you take things from – it’s where you take them to,’” argues the critic.

Most creative endeavours are informed by a sense of mission but there is often a creepy undercurrent which occasionally leads to originality. The greatest of these is envy.

“Then I saw that all toil and all skill in work come from a man’s envy of his neighbour. This also is vanity and a striving after wind,” writes wise Solomon.

The matter is controversially pursued by Harold Bloom in his influential texts on poetic inspiration, “The Anxiety of Influence” and “A Map of Misreading” .

Bloom acknowledges the grip of extra-literary influence, as mapped by Jarmusch, on every poet but argues that a poet is urged to write by reading other poets. However, admiration soon turns into antagonism when the new poet discovers that all he intended to say has been exhausted by his poetic heroes.

Noticing, to his anxiety, that many Adams preceded him on creation morning and named everything, he sets about staging cultural parricide.

“Initial love for the precursor’s poetry is transformed rapidly enough into revisionary strife, without which individuation is not possible,” writes Bloom.

To give new names to the world around him, the budding writer convinces himself that the first Adam erred, even at the expense of misreading him. And so originality emerges out of subversion. But originality can be elusive when groupthink thrives in the name of originality. Fyodor Dostoyevsky occasionally landed barbs on the NGO-speak of his time.

“Many of our young women have thought fit to cut their hair short, put on blue spectacles, and call themselves nihilists. By doing this they have been able to persuade themselves, without further trouble, that they have acquired new convictions of their own,” he narrates in “The Idiot”.

“Others have but to read an idea of somebody else’s, and they can immediately assimilate it and believe that it was a child of their own brain,” he lays bare the political economy of free thought.

Writing from within a movement is inevitable but originality gains on aesthetic innovation. Contemporaries equally exert the “anxiety of influence”. Often, names that last are those who work in relative obscurity.

Barricaded from establishment, the obscure comrade convinces himself that the rest are in error and pushes in his or her own direction. Great minds condemned to work in poverty or obscurity occasionally prefaced their classics-to-be rambling, self-important justifications of their work ethics.

By standing apart, obscure names endure when group waves have subsided.

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