Originally appeared in the Boston Globe.
'I'm suggesting [originality] is an overrated virtue.'
By Harvey Blume | March 4, 2007
WHEN I VISITED the writer Jonathan Lethem he boasted of his
new novel, "You Don't Love Me Yet," being "a profoundly
unimportant book." He emphasized its irrelevance as we chatted in his Dean
Street apartment, in the Boerum Hill section of Brooklyn, on the block where he
grew up and that he used as a setting for "The Fortress of Solitude"
(2003), his best known novel.
That book recounts the complex friendship between Dylan, a
white teenager, and Mingus, his black counterpart, in mid-1970s Boerum Hill.
The tale is both realistic -- in depicting racial tension and a neighborhood
heading from bohemianism to gentrification -- and fantastic: Mingus and Dylan
are able to muster superpowers. With its combination of grit and fable, the
novel appears to be working its way into the fabric of Brooklyn life: Just days
before my meeting with Lethem, a lawyer mounted what The New York Times called
"The Fortress of Solitude" defense, arguing that her client was not
responsible for a rampage he committed because, like Dylan and Mingus, he had
been obsessed with comic book superheroes as a kid.
Lethem chuckled about this story, but told me he had no
desire, at the moment, to enter further into Brooklyn lore and no aspiration to
be the "Faulkner of Dean Street." A big reason "You Don't Love
Me Yet" is set in Los Angeles, he said, is that "I know nothing about
Los Angeles."
Besides being a prolific novelist and short-story writer,
Lethem is an essayist (granted a MacArthur Fellowship in 2005 for his varied,
often genre-blurring literary efforts). In "The Ecstasy of Influence: A
Plagiarism," in the February issue of Harper's, he mounts a sustained
argument for a greater intellectual commons -- more plagiarism, less copyright
-- and concludes the piece by divulging exactly where he got every idea in it,
including, at times, the very words. The essay both makes a case for what
Lethem, quoting Thomas Mann, calls the "higher cribbing," and
provides an example of it.
IDEAS: There's a character, Carl, in "You Don't Love Me
Yet" who invents slogans for a living. He seems to express your view of
quotation, appropriation, and ultimately plagiarism.
LETHEM: As my rush to accuse myself of plagiarism in the
Harper's piece probably shows, I don't feel much of the guilt normally attached
to the practice, which seems to me organically connected to creativity itself.
IDEAS: Do you approve of plagiarism, in part, because you
feel it is a form of memory, it preserves?
LETHEM: Exactly! Who would be reading Confederate poet Henry
Timrod's lyrics if Bob Dylan had not appropriated them for his album
"Modern Times"?
IDEAS: But there's another side to it, a helplessness. Carl
can't get the slogans out of his head. And when he puts the slogans out in the
world, they infect other people. When another character hears Carl say
"You can't be deep without a surface," she fights what she calls
"the phrase's colonizing effects."
LETHEM: [Laughing] You've just pursued the resemblance
between Carl's anxieties and everyone's fear of passivity in the grip of
cultural and commercial languages that invade us all the time.
IDEAS: And that's what you are getting at in your short
story "Access Fantasy," about people putting on patches that compel
them to go around spouting advertisements for beer, cheese, or whatever?
LETHEM: Right. I take it for granted that we are all at risk
of being colonized by the languages of the marketplace. It's hard to form an
alternative to those commercial languages. I'm arguing that the resilient,
useful alternative will not be some rarefied area of exclusion where none of
these voices are allowed in. It will instead engulf them, encompass them,
rework them, repurpose them.
IDEAS: OK, but if there is, as you say, so much ecstasy, and
maybe agony, of influence -- so much influence -- what is originality?
LETHEM: I'm suggesting it is an overrated value. When we're
satisfied or enraptured or delighted by something -- a painting, a song coming
over the radio, a novel -- we look to ratify that feeling and make it seem
respectable. "Oh," we say, "it's very original, it's quite
relevant."
I'm saying we don't actually care as much as we are told we
ought to about originality. And I'm saying that, as a writer, I know that
language is loaded with metaphor, fraught with pre-existing meanings, colonized
by its nature. Language is loaded with fiction even when you try to depict
reality. But the scientific and business paradigms of our culture favor things
being verifiable or provable.
IDEAS: Which is why, in literature, this is the age of the
memoir, or at least the pseudo-memoir?
LETHEM: But more than that, it's the age of edification. We're
not very comfortable with the uselessness of art, the dreamlike fantasizing,
baroque impulse, the mischievous need to make things that are not useful.
"You Don't Love Me Yet" is not going to teach you
anything. It's not incisive about Los Angeles. It's not incisive about its
characters because they don't have enough of a career, they're just wannabes.
It's really only a book about language and life and the impulse to make art.
It's about evoking feeling in the reader, I hope -- laughter, embarrassment,
yearning.
IDEAS: Are you running away from Brooklyn in the book?
LETHEM: Not personally. I am living on the same block I grew
up on, so obviously I'm not running away.
But as a writer, I wanted to re-engage elements of play and
serendipity that characterize some of my earlier work. "The Fortress of
Solitude" represented some of the most responsible writing I've done. By
taking on the freight of my own and other people's stories -- a kind of
collective cultural memory -- I incurred a degree of responsibility.
IDEAS: You wanted to be irresponsible in the new novel?
LETHEM: Yeah, to reconnect with an amateurish, posturing,
devilish nature. I wanted to court a more occult presence, not become the
secret mayor of Brooklyn.
IDEAS: You allude to autism often in your work. In the new
novel, you just about declare Carl to be a high-functioning autistic. Why so
much interest in autism and Asperger's syndrome?
LETHEM: It's evocative for me. I'm enticed by it
IDEAS: Not that I'm diagnosing you.
LETHEM: But don't be afraid of diagnosing me. I see
Asperger's as a defining property in a lot of areas where it is denied by the
participants. So I don't want to be denying it in myself.
And when I think about Asperger's syndrome I think about
communities and subcultures, for example, the science fiction subculture, and
science fiction conventions. What kind of people go there, to feel they have a
people? When I go, it feels to me that they are bound by a thinly coded, super
high-functioning Asperger's affiliation. And there's the Internet, which is a
kind of autistic Greenwich Village, a place where people wander around trying
to figure out whether they fit.
There are subcultures in a lot of my work. I see them as
places where people try to make livable utopian subsets of the world.
Harvey Blume is a writer based in Cambridge.
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