How much does the character of the author affect the work?

Death and a Dictionary

I recently read Simon Winchester’s The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary. The subtitle captivated my attention when I saw it on the clearance shelf and captures the essence of the book. It takes something that sounds quite boring and tedious (making a dictionary), combines it with crime thriller terms (you immediately think, “Why the heck does anyone get murdered in the making of a dictionary?!”), and then you reflect back on the fact that maybe making a dictionary from scratch in the first place is kind of interesting because it poses such an overwhelming challenge (figuring out what every word is!).

In the end, the Oxford English Dictionary took over seventy years to make, and the protagonists of this nonfiction were both dead eight years before the book’s release. However, one of these protagonists, William C. Minor, the “madman” of the title, is really the focus of the book, and it puts the author in an odd spot. On the one hand, Minor was an interesting scholarly figure who sent in thousands and thousands of words with quotations for inclusion in the Oxford English Dictionary, and he was able to do this while battling schizophrenia every night. On the other hand, Minor murdered an innocent man in the street, leaving behind a widow and seven children. The text often reflects the author’s struggle to want to paint Minor as a hero. It vacillates because clearly Winchester feels like he can’t overlook the murder of an innocent man. It’s an odd case due to the fact that Minor is a completely sane person during the day. He apologized to the widow and sent her money often, and she forgave him, and even came to visit him at the asylum, bringing him books. However, at night the surgeon completely loses his grip on reality and hallucinates that he’s under attack.

So, we have someone who, because he was locked in an asylum surrounded by books and unable to leave, contributed huge efforts to the Oxford English Dictionary, a great achievement for all English-speaking people of the world and anyone who appreciates language. But he never would have been in the position to help achieve this if he hadn’t murdered someone. The ambivalence Simon Winchester clearly feels about this has had me thinking about how much a person’s character and deeds affect their works and contributions to society.

Nazism and Philosophy

“The French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre read Heidegger (in six straight days at a table in Lex Deux Magots, according to Sartre’s waiter)...” - Heidegger and a Hippo Walk Through Those Pearly Gates by Thomas Cathcart and Daniel Klein

This concept of a murderer-scholar was in my head when I came across an article about Martin Heidegger. Evidently his Schwarzen Hefte (Black Notebooks) are going to be published for the first time, but the article where I read this news was titled “Martin Heidegger's Black Notebooks Reignite Charges of Anti-Semitism.” Heidegger is famous as a philosopher turned Nazi, and some scholars debate the significance of this on his thought. Does his philosophy necessarily lead to Nazism? Can we read Being and Time without concern for his later conversion to the Nazi party? Many people think so, and I would say the enduring significance of his magnum opus reflects that point of view; however, it’s fascinating to read the impassioned debates of people on the opposing sides of this controversy.

In the New York Times’ coverage of Emmanuel Faye’s “Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism Into Philosophy,” Adam Kirsch writes:

“Most readers would agree that Heidegger was a Nazi, and that this matters to his philosophy; it has remained for Faye to argue that Heidegger was a Nazi philosopher, which is to say that he was no philosopher at all, and that his books are positively dangerous to read. In fact, he comes very close, on the book’s last page, to saying that Heidegger’s collected works should be banned from libraries.”

Clearly, it’s beyond the parameters of this blog post to settle this specific debate - especially because most of my knowledge of Heidegger comes from PhilosophyBro’s summary of Being and Time:

“The truth is, the single word 'being' just wasn't meant to bear as heavy a load as this project puts on it. So think of 'Being', the essential thing we're trying to get at, like a Party, and think of 'to be', the verb, as 'to rage'… who do we know who rages the hardest? That's right, fucking Bros, that's who. They're the Dasein at this party.”

I have to assume that’s an accurate analogy…

However, the main question still remains. Even if we agree that it’s a great work of philosophy, doesn’t it seem odd to want to internalize the philosophies of a Nazi? There’s a certain part of us that can’t help but connect the person with the work that person wrote. How important is the character of the author when we read a work?

Emulating the Virtuous

One of the first things they’ll teach you as an English major is not to equate the author’s biography with your analysis of the work. It’s also a rule that will be immediately broken by your classmates, and then broken by your professor shortly afterward. On some visceral level, it’s difficult for readers to entirely divorce the person who wrote the work from the work itself. While I generally try to avoid this form of analysis, I can’t help but want to read more about an author I love - biographies, interviews - anything that lets me learn more about the person who’s crafted such magnificent compositions.

Philosophy for Life and Other Dangerous Situations , a great book written by a journalist who interviews people who have lived their lives according to certain philosophies, introduced me to Plutarch’s Lives of Grecian and Roman Noblemen (ParallelLives). Plutarch’s idea is that young people need to read about virtuous people who they can model their lives on, which will inspire them to be morally good people. Jules Evans’ Philosophy for Life... is framed around the concept of using ancient wisdom as a therapeutic toolkit for good mental health (he believes philosophy helped him through a mental breakdown), and the angle here is that emulating virtuous people can make you virtuous.

Who are your heroes?

This had me wondering if I ever read books written by or about “virtuous” people. I’ve never been one to look up to “heroes,” but just thinking about the people who wrote the books I tend to read, or the authors I’ve read biographies of, the quick answer seemed to be that there weren’t excessive amounts of virtue to be found. I’d never before considered the idea that the authors I’m reading should also be role models for me, only that the writing captivate me. Should I be thinking of what effect they might have on me as my unwitting role models? In that case, creative types don’t have the best reputation in terms of having healthy relationships and finding satisfaction and contentment with life.

The two authors I’m probably most familiar with biographically are Jack Kerouac and Franz Kafka.

Kerouac could be extremely selfish, and this led to some appalling behavior in relation to his ex-wives and daughter. His life as a whole is a sad, downward spiral from a hopeful kid excited to go see the world and discover the mystical “it,” to a hopeless alcoholic, depressed, pessimistic, and cursed by the success of his writing, which brought him fame that only exacerbated the problems he was struggling with. Not exactly an ideal role model.

When reading Kerouac, I feel like I’m not supposed to think about his character flaws and instead pay attention to the writing, and accept the tragedy as presented in The Legend of Duluoz, rather than compare it against my background knowledge about his life. But when you’re dealing with a writer like Kerouac who drew so heavily from his own life, how do you just disregard the biographical? All the choices he made that you know put him in the situations he’s describing?

Or take Franz Kafka. While his stories don’t appear to be particularly autobiographical, scores of Kafka scholars immediately disregarded that first English major rule and analyzed the works according to his life. They write that the totalitarian bureaucracies like the courts or the Castle are representative of his father, who ruled the Kafka household unquestioned and according to his arbitrary whims. Milan Kundera claims this whole industry of “Kafkologists” removes Kafka from his proper context within the Modern literature of the world and pigeonholes him into these little autobiographical readings. Looking at Kafka’s works, the world can be a cruel place, even if you just have to laugh at the absurdity of it all, and looking at Kafka’s life, he struggled in all of his relationships and had excruciating engagements with women that were eventually broken off. Some have described his five-year epistolary engagement with Felice Bauer as a form of psychological abuse, and by all accounts, Kafka felt a certain sense of relief when he was diagnosed with tuberculosis because it freed him to take sick leave from his job at the insurance company and live out in a cottage where he could write - pretty grim stuff.

Must we only read the virtuous?

Now these considerations don’t make me think I should stop reading authors like Kafka and Kerouac by any means, but I’ve concluded that maybe I should make sure to pepper in some positive role models for myself every now and again. Literature and philosophy may be fascinating, but there are other things to consider in life as well, such as your relationships with others and your contributions to society.

So let me know what you think. Do you consider the deeds and characters of the authors you read? Or do you think that the works themselves are all that really matters? Is the virtue of the writer worth considering?

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Related Posts:
Love of Literature and Hatred of Fellow Man: Ezra Pound's Pisan Cantos

The Physical Writing Process [Pt. 6 Franz Kafka – Quartered Onionskin Paper] & Conclusion

The Physical Writing Process [Part 1: Jack Kerouac – Typewritten Scrolls]

Cryptomnesia in Literature

Imagine the long hours spent crafting the perfect novel - revising each sentence to perfection, fleshing out each character, and tying the plot into a cohesive whole - only to discover that the novel already exists. Another author wrote it a long time ago. At some point in the distant past, you read it and then forgot all about it. When the memory came back to you, you mistook it for your own original idea.

That, in essence, is cryptomnesia. While it may sound like something out of the Twilight Zone, there is evidence to suggest that this is a very real phenomenon. For some time, I feared the idea of unknowingly plagiarizing in my own writing. Do you know how many short stories I powered through as assigned reading in college that I can’t even remember the titles or authors of anymore? All these things could be bouncing around in my faulty memories, just waiting to come out as bursts of “inspiration.”

@JosephPascale once thought Confirmation Bias and Cryptomnesia were major threats to a writer. Now he's not so sure. http://t.co/L2JlAwLl
— trapezemag (@trapezemag) May 25, 2012

Nabokov and the Tale of the Two Lolitas

I first came upon the term cryptomnesia in connection to the novel Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov. Evidently, an 18-page short story dealing with a similar plot involving a girl named "Lolita" (for whom the story is named) was published in Germany 40 years before Nabokov’s novel. As far as I can tell, Nabokov never acknowledged the existence of a connection to this other story, and discussion of the connection only began back in 2004, when Michael Maar published an article drawing a connection between the 1916 short story by German author Heinz von Lichberg titled “Lolita” and Vladimir Nabokov’s novel also titled Lolita [Maar expanded it into a full book, The Two Lolitas, later]. Maar didn’t accuse Nabokov of plagiarism, but thought it was a case of cryptomnesia, as the book of short stories would have been readily available in Berlin in the 1920s, where Nabokov and von Lichberg both lived.

In Christopher Caldwell’s New York Times report on the alleged case of cryptomnesia, he writes:

“Maar finds the coincidence of plot, narrative and name '’striking.’' He does not accuse Nabokov of plagiarism, since ‘'he was a genius on his own.’' (As some are too rich to steal, apparently, others are too smart to crib.) Maar prefers the word ''cryptomnesia,'' a process by which things are learned, forgotten and then mistaken for original inspirations when recalled.”

Reading it now, I found that the Times article came to a similar opinion as I have after contemplating the problem of cryptomnesia over this past decade. Caldwell describes the novel as “a word game sustained across some 300 pages,” and says of Nabokov, “Honing a distinctive literary voice obsessed him.” The writing in Lolita is so rich, the style so artful, that even if the plot and characters come from a misinterpreted memory, it doesn’t dampen the art of the novel at all.

“Human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece” ― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

For all we know, what happened with Nabokov wasn’t even cryptomnesia, but a purposeful allusion to an obscure short story that had a great impact on him. To reduce the novel to the bare minimum of plot and characters is to lose most of its significance. Writers and artists draw inspiration from past works and create their own versions all the time. There’s nothing inherently immoral or plagiarist about this. In fact, perhaps it’s our culture’s idea of plagiarism that is in the wrong here.

Creativity and Pure Originality

Back in college I took an Advertising Copywriting class, and the professor always liked to say that creativity wasn’t about being totally unique or original - it was about finding a new combination of old ideas. I had a professor with a similar mentality when I took a medieval literature class in graduate school. He said that originality was overrated in our current society.

Purposeful “Cryptomnesia” Throughout the History of Literature

As a point of comparison, let’s jump back to the 14th Century and examine "The Father of English Literature." Geoffrey Chaucer didn’t think it was sagacious to admit to purely inventing stories. Even when he was making up a new story, he would claim it was a translation from another language to add more authenticity to it. This is a very different mindset than the prevailing attitude in our society that artists must be “original” and “unique” in order to be creative. Look at what many consider to be Chaucer’s best work (no, not The Canterbury Tales, which is more famous, but incomplete), the poem Troilus and Criseyde (ca. 1385). The story is set during the siege of Troy, with characters from ancient Greek literature. Chaucer’s source for this poem was Boccaccio's Il Filostrato (ca. 1335-1340), and Boccaccio had based his on a French poem called Le Roman deTroie (The Romance of Troy, ca. 1155-1160) by Benoît deSainte-Maure, which is itself a retelling of the Trojan War, probably largely based on Homer’s poems (ca. 1260-1240 BC). That’s the history of the poem working backward from Chaucer, but moving forward from Chaucer, some 200 years later we find Shakespeare’s play Troilus and Cressida (ca. 1602), which was inspired by Chaucer’s poem. An interesting fact the Wikipedia entry notes is:

“The story was a popular one for dramatists in the early 17th century and Shakespeare may have been inspired by contemporary plays. Thomas Heywood's two-part play The Iron Age also depicts the Trojan war and the story of Troilus and Cressida, but it is not certain whether his or Shakespeare's play was written first.”

So there could have been a lot of versions of this story going around at the turn of the 17th century. I’m sure if you looked into it, you could find additional modern retellings of this story dating to our age.

But my point in tracing all these different versions of Troilus is to show that originality was never a requirement for writers throughout history. The fact that Shakespeare’s version essentially shares the same plot he took from Chaucer’s doesn’t invalidate Shakespeare’s as a masterpiece in its own right. To boil it down to just the threadbare plot and characters is to lose so much of what people celebrate in Shakespeare. Would it be any different if Shakespeare had indeed read the poem or seen another play version of it, but forgot and thought the play was entirely his own creation?

Cryptomnesia: Total Recall - The Case of Friedrich Nietzsche

Everything I’ve considered thus far assumes that the cryptomnesiac’s later version of the work is distinctly different from the original, subconsciously remembered version. Even though they share similarities, the new version is decidedly different.

But what do you make of the case of Friedrich Nietzsche, the philosopher - or anti-philosopher (as may be more appropriate)? Or in this case we could simply call him a novelist, since we’re discussing Thus Spoke Zarathustra. According to Shell of Man:

“Friedrich Nietzsche’s book Thus Spoke Zarathustra includes an almost word for word account of an incident also included in a book published about 1835, half a century before Nietzsche wrote.”

The fact that it is “almost word for word” is what makes this case of cryptomnesia seem different to me. It was Carl Jung who discovered the duplication of the earlier story and declared it cryptomnesia. According to Frances Oppel in Nietzsche on Gender:

"The piece of text 'secretly crept up and reproduced itself' [quote from Jung] in "Of Great Events" (Z 2). Jung recognized the story about seamen stopping on an island to hunt rabbits, having read it in his grandfather's library. He wrote Elisabeth Forster-Nietzsche, who confirmed that she and Nietzsche had read the same book in their grandfather's library, when Nietzsche was eleven. This, Jung informed his Zarathustra seminar, 'shows how the unconscious layers of the mind work.'"

The case of Nietzsche is particularly fascinating, since there’s the tragic downward spiral of his descent into madness late in life. Could it be that at a young age his genius mind had near total recall of memories, but as he aged and his brain faltered, whole chunks of intact memories came back to him with the sources missing?

From the point of view of one phobic of cryptomnesia, the near-perfect reproduction of a text can add no new value to the art - to argue that, one would enter the farcical territory of Borges, with his Pierre Menard who perfectly reproduced Don Quixote to the adulations of critics who could now apply contemporary literary theory to the “new” work.

But even in Nietzsche’s case, his one section of cryptomnesiac text is only four pages of a work over 300 pages long. It’s the sort of book where a passage from another text wouldn’t be out of place, even purposefully inserted, since it’s full of allusions and often features Nietzsche’s subversive interpretations of extant ideas. All that said, it’s another case of cryptomnesia with virtually no harm done.

Cryptomnesia and Plagiarism in Our World

It seems to me that when Jung was looking into cryptomnesia, it was because of a Freudian fascination with the subconscious. However, when people talk about it today, it’s connected with a cultural fear of plagiarism - in this case, a plagiarism so treacherous that you don’t know you’re doing it. This fits into a conversation where college students are frequently told that you should never “plagiarize yourself,” by which instructors mean not to reuse papers from previous courses.  It’s evident that there can be serious concerns of actually plagiarizing word-for-word, stealing content, and falsifying sources, but it seems to be something growing beyond these arenas.

Our society has developed an uncomfortable relationship with plagiarism and copyright infringement. However, they seem to be foolish fears. Fear of plagiarism related to school is rooted in cheating. School has been slow to adapt to the Information Age, with its abundance of that which used to be scarce, and the extreme fear of plagiarism shows a slowness to adapt. Instructors drill the fear of plagiarism into students so much that students think they can’t write a paper without citing every line because they’re writing on topics they’re just learning, and obviously they had to learn that information from somewhere, like their textbook.  I suspect that something similar is going on with the battles that extend copyright well beyond its original intention - a slowness, an inability, and a fear to catch up with the fast pace of technology and the way people are using it to change the world. These realms stand in stark contrast to the blogosphere, where content and links are freely exchanged.

There’s a great essay on this topic by Jonathan Lethem called “The Ecstasy of Influence” - although it’s not technically an essay - he subtitles it, “A plagiarism.” He patched the whole thing together together from other sources, turning it into a completely new work. Toward the end of the essay, he claims:

“Any text is woven entirely with citations, references, echoes, cultural languages, which cut across it through and through in a vast stereophony. The citations that go to make up a text are anonymous, untraceable, and yet already read; they are quotations without inverted commas. The kernel, the soul — let us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterances — is plagiarism.”

Although, actually, while Lethem clearly is claiming this, he’s using the words of Roland Barthes and Mark Twain mashed together into this one quote. Fear of plagiarism is permeating our culture to the point that people are forgetting that we learn by absorbing the ideas of others and appropriating them to our own uses.

Cryptomnesia: A Writer’s Greatest Enemy?

So, do you have to fear that your greatest ideas were subconsciously stolen? Do you think writers, artists, or anyone should be worried about cryptomnesia? Do you think it’s fine that the same stories have been repeated so often throughout the history of literature, or were hacks like Chaucer just being unoriginal? And where does plagiarism and copyright law fit into this conversation?

Modern Kierkegaard - Reincarnations on Twitter

A couple of weeks ago, I received a notification on my phone that I had been followed by "Modern Kierkegaard" on Twitter. I clicked on the profile, which was described as “Søren Kierkegaard's philosophy adapted for today,” and I enjoyed the ironic truth of the most recent tweet:

People beg for followers even when they know the followers will never read their tweets - what madness!!
— Modern Kierkegaard (@KierkegaardNow) January 26, 2014

I decided to retweet this to my own Twitter account, which includes 1,660 people I’m following that I don’t pay a terrible amount of attention to, and I moved on with my day.

However, while my phone remained in my pocket, the machinations of the Twitter app went into effect, deciding that if I followed this account, added it to one of my lists, and immediately retweeted a tweet, I must love it, so it took it upon itself to set up some sort of favorite account feature. Now whenever @KierkegaardNow posts a tweet, my phone vibrates and the tweet appears in my notifications.

I have to say, it’s quite reassuring to be trudging across the tundra of a tough day in the 21^st Century and have a philosopher reach through 170 years to share some words of wisdom with you via the technology in your pocket.

Some of the Kierkegaard tweets that struck me:

Man turns outward, away from the source of his happiness, hungry for distraction.
— Modern Kierkegaard (@KierkegaardNow) January 30, 2014

Anxiety is our new religion, and we wearily rise every morning to worship.
— Modern Kierkegaard (@KierkegaardNow) February 3, 2014

Some believe their misery makes them superior to all other people and in this they are trapped.
— Modern Kierkegaard (@KierkegaardNow) February 3, 2014

The unhappy person is one for whom the content of life lies outside the self.
— Modern Kierkegaard (@KierkegaardNow) February 4, 2014

What our age lacks is reflection and passion.
— Modern Kierkegaard (@KierkegaardNow) February 6, 2014

When one is preoccupied, the loss of the eternal does not even occur to him.
— Modern Kierkegaard (@KierkegaardNow) February 8, 2014

According to the description, Modern Kierkegaard is “an account by @Good_Philosophy. Created by @Philosophy_Muse” and @Philosophy_Muse says it was created by @ReidPlummer, so I’m guessing it’s thanks to him we have these tweets. 

Reborn on Twitter

It seems that anyone or anything from the past can be reincarnated as a Twitter account. You can find a Twitter incarnation of any of your favorite, long-dead philosophers, authors, or religious prophets. As someone who’s wondered how many conflicts in Seinfeld episodes would have been avoided if they had cell phones, I thoroughly enjoyed the night I discovered Modern Seinfeld.

But how accurate are the reincarnations? In a recent interview, Larry David responded to an @SeinfeldToday tweet by saying, “I could guarantee you that show would not get on the air,” and in a Reddit AskMeAnything, Jerry followed up, “Oh this is a very painful subject. As you can probably imagine, over the nine years of doing the show, Larry David and I sat through hundreds of ideas that people wanted to do on the show. And most of the ideas are not good.”

The Father of Existentialism... 

in 140 Characters or Less

So since I can’t convince a Danish translator to travel back in time with me so we can explain to Søren what Twitter is, give him a general gist of what our times are like, and ask him if he thinks the account accurately represents him, I’m left to contemplate it on my own. In all honesty, if Kierkegaard was really on Twitter, he probably wouldn't write many of his own Tweets. He would create a panoply of fake Twitter accounts, write in a different viewpoint on each account, have the accounts start to argue with each other, and then he would retweet some of the arguments on his own account. 

However, from my limited knowledge of Kierkegaard, I think the Twitter account does a nice job of catching some of his essence. Kierkegaard's an extraordinarily creative writer, whips up fantastic metaphors and analogies, and makes me laugh out loud with his "aesthetic stage" writing (see his passage on why boredom is the root of all evil). I can be pretty skeptical about his religious writings though. In Fear and Trembling, it seems to me that he sets out with the idea that it had to be okay for Abraham to be willing to kill his son, so he wants to prove how it can be okay (his idea that morality is suspended in the religious stage). But I don't think he ever truly considered the concept of Abraham being in the wrong.

My favorite take on the Abraham story is Kafka's parody of Fear and Trembling, which presents a series of absurd Abrahams, one who can't even make it out of his house to realize there's a choice to be made. When Kafka read Kierkegaard's diaries, he strongly identified with him, but when he read Fear and Trembling, he wrote, "It’s as if a next-door neighbor had turned into a distant star."

Curiously, Kierkegaard always seems to come to me in some sort of abridged form. If you'll notice the books in the top image, the anthology features excerpts from his major works, and the Parables of Kierkegaard, a book I highly recommend, is a collection of his inventive analogies and metaphors, extracted from their original locations deep within his texts and presented by themselves on the single page or two they take up.

Finding Focus on Twitter

There may be plenty to savor if you find a good Twitter account and dig deeply into it, but with follow lists reaching into the thousands, most posts on Twitter go ignored in an endless stream of updates. The only reason I was able to get so much reflection out of the Modern Kierkegaard account was because Twitter decided to auto-notify me of every update.