voice and Empire

Brian Spears recently tweeted to my attention two pieces debating the ethics of poetic appropriation of experiences you didn’t have and words you didn’t speak. The first is by Abe Louise Young, a poet who helped to curate an online collection archiving the oral histories of people who lived through Hurricane Katrina. The second is by Raymond McDaniel, a poet who used text from those oral histories with acknowledgement but without permission in his book of poetry, Saltwater Empire. (For the record, I have never met McDaniel despite geographical proximity.) There are things I disagree with in both pieces: McDaniel’s disdain for the autobiographical & his apparent belief that he has the right to exist in “the state of being categorically indiscriminate” (good luck with that), and Young’s equation of aesthetic experiment with political indifference for starters, but seeing as I’ve got issues of about something outside one’s direct experience on the brain, I’m going to focus on that.

Imagination. Engagement. Appropriation. Is one of these things not like the others?

Last week, I pulled out the a-word during my discussion of Virginia Woolf, Jack White, and Jack Kerouac. In that post, I made the beginning of a case for the idea that being inspired by or desiring the life of someone you could not possibly be mistaken for is not, inherently, wrong or bad. Of course, Woolf, White, and Kerouac didn’t literally use words that someone else spoke. They, for good or ill, came up with their own words to try to reach social worlds that seemed distant. They also did so within genres that made the creative act clear–Woolf was writing a novel, inventing a character; White  was counting on being judged on his musical chops and whether or not he had earned, musically, his quotations & homage, and Kerouac was explicitly writing in the first person, inviting us to see what he saw and then critique how he saw it.

Here we’ve got a case of someone else’s words and someone else’s experience. I think the problem we perceive here has more to do with the latter than the former. McDaniel cites his source, so it’s not exactly plagiarism. We could count words and quibble about fair use,* but that wouldn’t resolve the bigger question mark, which is how to read what he did: Is he using someone else’s painful experiences to refract off his own, and thereby root it in a context that feels more culturally important, relevant, serious, etc? Or is he using textual material to say something creatively? I’ll admit to being intrigued by his description of the “aesthetic and ethos” of the book. He describes sitting by an apartment swimming pool in August: “All three—water, air, rain—felt like different shapes of the same substance. Different, yet the same. Impossible.”

My critical mind is fairly open on the question of the potential literary value of telling stories that aren’t exactly yours. I’m a fan of the Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, I’m sympathetic to arguments that Buffalo Child Long Lance made the best out of a rotten social hand when he passed himself off as a Blood Indian and subsequently wrote an autobiography that should be read as a complex social allegory rather than fact, and I get absolutely furious when people criticize Woman Warrior as a memoir because so much of it is devoted to telling other people’s stories or lack of story. (Probably because I once studied with Bradley, I do hate James Frey, however.)

My less theoretical mind, though, is much more sympathetic to Young than to McDaniel.  McDaniel points out that he acknowledges the Truth Alive site, its creators, and its narrators in his book and includes a section discussing his method. I understand, to some extent, why this had to be enough for him: he didn’t want collaborators, he wanted material. Asking for permission would have meant giving other people a say in how his book turned out. In his mind, getting that material rather than making up his own was a way of getting outside of himself and acknowledging others’ voices. There is an argument to be made for using quotations rather than coming up with some fictionalized, truthy version, and there’s also, as Young points out, a tradition of poetry of witness. There are ways, Young suggests, that you can ethically engage.

McDaniel has tradition on his side too, although it’s a tradition that’s getting fairly picked apart in the critical world–the tradition of Pound and every other modernist that’s used source texts at will and with an insistence on the mystery & insularity of the creative process. Collaboration is not an aesthetic that gets much traction in this tradition.

If the issue, then, isn’t that it’s impossible to use others’ lives and texts to drive your own work but that McDaniel “did it wrong,” what beyond his biography tells us so? I am perhaps swayed by the way Young narrates her own decision as a poet to devote her time and energy in New Orleans post-Katrina not to writing poetry about it but to giving people who were potentially being reduced to media images a chance to speak publicly about it in a well-supported way. Yes, she could have gone the McDaniel route and used all the text around her as a prop for her own work, but she didn’t. I’m sympathetic to that choice, and perhaps my sympathy has something to do with growing up female and absorbing the idea that someone has to do what should get done before she does what she might want. Is that the only ethical choice one can make as a poet, or as a poet who has at least as much privilege as to have gotten an MFA? I don’t know if I’d go that far, either.

I think my hang up is with the imbalance of power that the existence of the book embodies. One person speaks and it’s “just” oral history. Another uses that speech to create, and it’s art. In an ideal world, there’d be no way anyone could appropriate these narrators’ words because they would already be well-known in their own right. They’d be getting recognition not just as victims but as people who have done work to tell a story important for our culture to hear. Using an oral history today, right now from post-Katrina New Orleans is qualitatively different than using a long-dead Chinese poet because it perpetuates a systematic problem that is ongoing–meaning, it’s happening in the present so it can be changed, in some small way, by acting in the present. I can do that by reading some of the original texts and thinking about the way I approach writing.

There’s only one thing I wrote last week that these two pieces have really caused me to question, which is my assessment that the writers I talked about got away with their brand of ventriloquism because they did it well. By that standard, I should say I can’t possibly answer the question of whether or not McDaniel did something ethically wrong until I’ve read his poetry–when of course the two questions are unrelated. I have his book on request at the library now.* But I’d have to acknowledge to leave this question to be answered by “time,” by waiting to see if there is uptake of McDaniel’s work on the level of aesthetics and poetic tradition (whatever that may be), is another way of leaving this imbalance of power intact in the present. I think the most I can do right now is be aware of that, and think about how that will influence my own writing and teaching while accepting, and maybe even embracing, that others will not reach the same conclusions I do for their own work.

* I’m assuming that McDaniel is making next to no money from his book, the same amount that most poets make for their books. He was, however, in the process of gaining a fair amount of recognition, which in the world of academy-based work can eventually translate into financial gain. If, for some reason, he was making a ton of money from this book, the copyright or wrongness of this would be much more clear. He’d owe royalties.

*Not promising I’ll read the whole thing. The title of the long poem he built around text from the oral histories is entitled “Convention Centers of the World.” That title to me, as a writer, smacks of Big Idea and Intellectual Construct without Jagged, Unexpected Language to go with, and I’m not interested in that.

It Might Get Complicated

“By the time I was about 18, somebody played me Son House. That was it for me. This spoke to me in a thousand different ways. I didn’t know that you could do that, just singing and clapping, and it meant everything. It meant everything about rock and roll, it meant everything about expression and creativity and art. One man against the world. And one song. “
–Jack White, in It Might Get Loud

“But the difficulty remains, one has to choose. For though I have no wish to be Queen of England—or only for a moment—I would willingly sit beside her; I would hear the Prime Minister’s gossip; the countess whisper, and share her memories of halls and gardens; the massive fronts of the respectable conceal after all their secret code; or why so impermeable? And then, doffing one’s own headpiece, how strange to assume for a moment someone’s—anyone’s—to be a man of valour who has ruled the Empire; to refer while Brangaena sings to the fragments of Sophocles…But no—we must choose. Never was there a harsher necessity! or one which entails greater pain, more certain disaster; for wherever I seat myself, I die in exile: Whittaker in his lodging-house; Lady Charles at the Manor.”
–Virginia Woolf, from Jacob’s Room

Earlier this summer, I took a walking tour of Denver with my friend the Kerouac specialist. He took me to a baseball field on the side of town that used to be the black & immigrant side of town. We stopped in front of the chainlink fencing alongside the foul line, and he read me a passage from On the Road (or was it the journal? I’ve forgotten) in which Kerouac talks about the feeling of elation, of immersion in the present moment and physical delight of sports, that he gets from watching young black & Mexican and “Indian” men playing baseball. He is so happy about being out on that summer night watching them that he talks about how he wants to be one of these guys, he thinks his soul might have been better off had he been poor & colored. On first read, any English major of the 2000s vintage cringes at this. Way to objectify and idealize the other while ignoring one’s own privilege, JK. On second read, as my friend suggested, we might want to ask another question–is there a more charitable way to read this passage? Is it possible that Kerouac was not just in earnest but making a point we should consider?

If there is, it has something to do with coming to terms with the free floating nature of identification and creative inspiration. I think that’s what both Virginia Woolf & Jack White are trying to describe in the passages I quoted above. Encountering both It Might Get Loud and Jacob’s Room for the first time in this past week, I couldn’t help but connect Woolf’s & White’s meditations about the fundamental strangeness of relating so profoundly to a life that could not possibly be yours that you feel driven to try to inhabit it in your work.

Woolf and White move in kind of opposite but similar directions. Woolf chooses to center JR in the life of a character who has more privilege than she does, while White passionately wants to adopt the persona of an artist with less social/political power than he as a white male has. Both of them are inspired by what life must look like in those very different shoes, and even more than that, recognize themselves and their ambitions in that other life. In doing this, they in some way transform their content beyond recognition as potentially autobiographical. In Woolf’s case, it might seem like she’s either misidentifying with a male character or not gutsy enough to make a woman her protagonist. For White, the charges could be worse, he could appropriating an aesthetic rooted in experiences he certainly hasn’t had.

I’d say they get away with it because they do it mindfully & really well, and by that I mean they do it not to get points for accurately representing how someone else lives but to get at what they themselves, as individuals & artists, so urgently had to say. Woolf doesn’t just disappear inside of Jacob even as she inhabits his world (a world of formal education and independence that was off limits to middle class women of her day)–she uses the realistic contours of his life to make us see life in general. Not only that, but her narrator never lets us forget how gender-driven Jacob’s social world is. She uses her own difference as a lens to make Jacob more complicated and his world less predictable yet even more familiar somehow.

What I like about how Woolf & White talk about their (mis)identifications is that they both use them to talk about the illusion of identification in the first place. As Woolf’s narrator points out in the quoted passage–in which she’s literally talking about which point of view to adopt to describe the scene but on another level, I think, also talking about how one organizes one’s fantasy life–whether you choose to situate yourself next to a male or female character, you are always outside of them, you are always guessing and “in exile” from the reality of their lives. You are also missing other viable perspectives. White, at another point in the film, talks about the problem of being a white suburban adolescent loving Son House–how was he going to get away with singing like him? His solution was to throw people completely off the scent by starting a band with his sister and dressing up like a kind of cartoon character. I guess the thought was people would just have no idea what to expect, so they’d have to at least listen to what came out. He had to find a way to channel the authenticity of his passion into a form that acknowledged his distance from the source. No one other than Son House can ever be him, but that’s no reason not to take your tradition where you find it.

I’m really invested in working through these questions as a critic and as a writer. So much of the time, I find myself in an awkward position of having to check my awareness of myself of a woman at the door in order to be as happy about the work of male artists as I want to be. I love a lot of what the guitarists in IMGL say about creativity, but am I even allowed to relate to them? What do I have to revise to apply their lessons? When I’m reading the work of minority (a term I’m ambivalent about but gets the point across for now) writers, how far can I go in assuming that, as artists, they must be positioning themselves not just as identity x but as creators, inspired by other artists no matter what tradition they are biographically associated with?

So, while I love that IMGL got made, there was also a frustration to watching it that I just had to kind of get past in order to love it. It’s never anybody’s intention, but when featuring “the greats” means featuring a bunch of dudes without, the idea that men make great music and women make great women’s music gets perpetuated. The musicians self-consciously position themselves in terms of race and class, but gender completely flies under their radar. (I think White was the only one to refrain from comparing or equating his guitar to a woman. And perhaps not coincidentally, he’s the only one of the three to have worked with a female performer for a long stretch of his career.)

Ultimately, I think I have to qualify my love for watching male guitarists jam over conversation until there’s a sequel in which a group of women rock artists–I don’t know who exactly, but surely one of the guitarists from Sleater Kinney would be in there–can do likewise, because I think it would be fascinating, not just fair play. But, in the mean time, I’m not going to say it didn’t inspire me, too.

I’ve been catching up on who you are

About a year after moving to my next city, I’m moving to my next blog–in which I hope to have some conversations out loud, whether that means I’m starting them or just piping up to say me too, me either, or huh, hadn’t thought about it that way.

While I haven’t been writing, I’ve been reading. SOS, I think about your phonecall to Holophane often and I promise I’m going to read Julie Klausner, TBQ, as soon as her book comes in at the library. I’m looking to Seacoast of Bohemia for how to live like a scholar and become a thoughtful teacher (nice blog theme, btw), and I wanted to give The Ethical Exhibitionist a high five for posting stuff to Scribd and making me realize I wasn’t the only one thinking about what it means to have an audience in the year 2010. I’m thrilled for Wide Lawns and her (growing) family!

The main reason why I haven’t been writing is that I’ve been thinking, and while I did that, I got a little older and a little less…emo, for lack of a more accurate characterization (and thanks to LCB for that one), and a little closer to being ready to use my own name. At first, I thought I didn’t miss writing in this format. Over the past few months, as I’ve tried to sort through the roles of writing in my daily life, I’ve realized that the writing I did in the blog world didn’t waste energy I should have been using to write other things, it just allowed me to write and think about different things. And I realized I definitely miss being part of conversation in this format.

So, here’s to talking again, if only to myself for the time being.