Originality in literature: when did it "start"?

Dostoevsky

I was listening to a learned man talk about themes of literature and he made what I found to be an extraordinary statement: all the great writers copied their themes and ideas from people before them and moreover it was expected that they do so.

Shakespeare, for instance, made a point of avoiding what he termed "unnecessary invention". I had always assumed that originality was central to literature and that while people were obviously influenced by others I didn't expect to find that the entire culture of literature favoured imitation (plagiarism?) and was hostile to originality until relatively recently. I must be googling all the wrong things, or I totally misunderstood that man, because I'm finding it difficult to get anything online about this fundamental change in literature.

Can anybody explain this development, or its background, better? Recommended books would also be good. Thanks.

Mardy Bum

The term to describe what you are discussing is intertextuality. Julie Kristeva coined the term in 1966. Since then numerous critics and theorists have expanded on it.

It has taken over from the term 'influence' which used to be a major area of criticism. Roland Barthes wrote a very influential book called The Author is Dead a while after Kristeva's conception of the term. Kristeva has given it numerous definitions throughout the years one being "in the space of a given text, several utterances, taken from other texts, intersect and neutralise one another. It allows a critique on both formal and social levels simultaneously.

She developed the Russian theorists, Mikhail Bakhtin's theories of dialogism, and Jacques Derrida's theories of deconstruction; both of which are horrendously complicated. In lay mans terms; Everything we learn is through language. How we experience reality is through language and this language is passed down through history.

Bakhtin's theory: Signs (Words) cannot be viewed in isolation but only through the many different meanings they accrue throughout history. So to infer meaning a person focuses on the relation of one sign (word) to the other. Kristeva inserted the word "text" into that paraphrase of Bakhtin's theory- Each word (text) is an intersection of words (text) where at least one word (text) can be read. What this amounts to is the idea that the intersection of textual surfaces in a literary word can never be circumscribed and is open to endless dissemination. (basic idea of postmodernism to an extent)

There are two dimensions of intertextuality; vertical and horizontal dimensions. The horizontal level operates as an interchange between the text and contemporaneous writings which don't necessarily have to be literary in nature i.e news reports, advertisements etc
The vertical level contains two functions one being the tacit or explicit review of past literature which through its transposition into a new medium it submits to a semiological analysis and ideological dismantling i.e Homer's odyssey in Joyce's Ulysses.
The other function of the vertical level is the reinsertion of the writer's own scripts which calls them into being and marks their limits and complicities i.e Telemachus (first episode in Ulysses) has many allusions in the Calypso (fourth episode in Ulysses) episode in Ulysses however this is simply to undermine Telemachus.

Basically language cannot be owned. No authors can claim that they invented something original because we experience the world through texts and it is through these texts that authors create. All they do is transpose previous texts and it is through the method of transposition that a new text is born. When Beckett first started producing his works critics thought this was 'original' now however his work is being analysed from all different texts. Flaubert and Joyce were the first authors to really highlight the mercurial nature of language through intertextualisation in their work.

"Revolution in Poetics" and Desire in Language are seminal texts for the concept both by Kristeva.
Barthes "The Author is Dead" is also very important and Ulysses is where Barthes and Kristeva took a lot of their ideas.

PurpleBee

Shakespeare knew nothing of Death of the Author though! Shakespeare was constrained by form and literary tradition but his skill was in innovating tradition, as Pound might have said, in "making it new."

Obsession with authorship and originality as we know it today is arguably a product of the Enlightenment and Capitalism.

Da Shins Kelly

It's very hard to say that any author is really truly original. Most authors plunder plots, whether they realise it or not, and it is almost considered a literary tradition, or an accepted practice at least. Before Shakespeare, medieval authors were lifting their ideas straight from the Bible. Before them, writers were taking ideas from Greek and Roman mythology (still do). Not all of Shakespeare's ideas were original ideas, but it was as much about what he said as how he said it. Over 1,000 words in the English language can be attributed to Shakespeare. Although it is unlikely that he came up with them all himself, his works are the first appearance of them in written form (words like 'assassination', 'radiance', 'swagger', 'critic', and terms like 'foul-mouthed', 'green-eyed' 'ill-tempered', 'go-between'). He also is responsible for phrases that we still use today - 'all that glitters is not gold', 'jealousy is the green-eyed monster', 'in my mind's eye', 'in one fell swoop', 'love is blind', 'foregone conclusion', 'good riddance', 'conscience does make cowards of us all', 'break the ice', and many, many more.

We could call any writer a 'plagiarist', but it's not just about original ideas. It's also about what the author does with those ideas to breathe new life into them and keep them fresh. While Shakespeare's ideas were not all his own, he re-created them in such a way that his interpretations of them are the ones that have stood the test of time. It is his version of Romeo and Juliet that we remember. His Hamlet, based on Amleth, is arguably the greatest play in the English language, and has been told and retold too many times to count. It's a timeless piece. Shakespeare is the greatest writer in the English language because of what he did for the language as well as how he brought old ideas back to life in such a way that they are now considered the standard in play writing.

Mardy Bum

PurpleBee wrote: »

Shakespeare knew nothing of Death of the Author though! Shakespeare was constrained by form and literary tradition but his skill was in innovating tradition, as Pound might have said, in "making it new."

Obsession with authorship and originality as we know it today is arguably a product of the Enlightenment and Capitalism.

Everyone of Shakespeare's plays are reconstructions of other plays. The whole concept of intertextuality means that a text is open to an endless dissemination. He transposed the texts and through the transposition something new is created but it is all from another text. There is a great book about Shakespeare's intertextuality by Stephen Lynch, Shakespearean Intertextuality: Studies in Selected Sources and Plays. He did however create a lot of new words so he is probably the only author to have been "original" in that sense.

PurpleBee

Perhaps, although I'm little uncomfortable applying these post-modern concepts to an author like Shakespeare, it just doesn't quite fit. Endless dissemination of texts....that's a relatively new idea,

also I think Chaucer was the father of the madey-uppy word.