My Very "Unoriginal" Post

“Originality” is the impossible requirement and expectation of writers, musicians, and artists of this age. During my junior high and high school years, I tried my hand at a number of writing and art competitions, and every single one listed “originality” as a criterion for the participants. Needless to say, I grew up believing (and I’m sure many other people do as well) that originality meant a plagiarism-free, fresh, unprecedented idea or work. After all, we understand related words such as “origin” and “original”. However, I propose that originality simply cannot be achieved in any piece of writing.

In his article, “Intertexuality and the Discourse Community,” James Porter declared that, “Not infrequently, and perhaps ever and always, texts refer to other texts and in fact rely on them for their meaning. All texts are interdependent: We understand a text only insofar as we understand its precursors” (34). He went on to illustrate this idea with the example of Thomas Jefferson and the Declaration of Independence. Although Jefferson is credited with the authorship of the Declaration, researchers have discovered that much of his writing was borrowed from other texts in his culture. Porter thereafter asserted, “The creative writer is the creative borrower, in other words” (37).

The concept of intertextuality—the reliance of text upon other text—isn’t simply the negligence of citation. Rather, written discourse is built upon the ideas of previous writers. If we examine the basic plotlines of books, we encounter the same themes over and over again. Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” wasn’t the first, and certainly not the last, tale of tragic love. Charles Dickens’ “Oliver Twist” was but a blip in a long line of stories dealing with identity and family. Scores of sagas like Homer’s “Iliad” concerning feats of power, pursuits of glory, and dark twists of deception and betrayal abound in literature today. The veneer of writing may change over the ages, but the basic content doesn’t. I’m reminded of the biblical verses from Ecclesiastes 1:9-10: “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. Is there anything of which one can say, “Look! This is something new”? It was here already, long ago; it was here before our time.”

 I think people write more extensively and in-depth about topics they know very well. And what subject do we know more about than ourselves? C.S. Lewis stated, “There is one thing, and only one, in the whole universe which we know more about than we could learn from external observation. That one thing is Man. We do not merely observe men, we are men. In this case we have, so to speak, inside information; we are in the know” (Mere Christianity, 23). As humans, we can’t escape ourselves—we can’t observe, report, or write anything untainted by our human perspective. According to Walter Fisher, a person’s life is “a story that participates in the stories of those who have lived, who live now, and who will live in the future” (Narration as a Human Communication Paradigm: The Case of Public Moral Argument, 381). Perhaps this is why it seems that everyone is writing about the same things: we know nothing else to write.

It is rather laughable then, how strongly we emphasize “originality” in this country. In order to be “original” in the true sense of the word, someone would have to somehow transcend human experience to discover maybe new senses, new colors, and new shapes never seen or imagined by mankind (because of course, even imagination derives its ideas from what already exists. But then, even to use the words, “senses, colors, and shapes” is quite limiting because those are concepts we already understand). And THEN, not only would this privileged someone need to disconnect himself from humanity to discover some new “thing,” but he would also need to come back and attempt to describe and explain his revelation to other people. However, the unfortunate business of it all is, if the said person succeeds in his task, his work still couldn’t be purely labeled as “original,” because he would’ve had to resort to ideas, words, and images his audience could understand—an act in itself very unoriginal.

In the above example, the person with a shot at originality was cheated of the title because of his audience. My example is pretty extreme, but I think it’s related to what Walter Fisher said in his article about the role of audience in the process of writing:

Any story, any form of rhetorical communication, not only says something about the world, it also implies an audience, persons who conceive of themselves in very specific ways. If a story denies a person’s self-conception, it does not matter what it says about the world…The only way to bridge this gap, if it can be bridged through discourse, is by telling stories that do not negate the self-conceptions people hold of themselves. (391-2)

Writers may search for that golden fleece called “originality,” but let’s face it—if they don’t meet the expectations of the readers, their material will be rejected. From personal experience, I always try to keep my intended audience in mind as I write certain papers. As a result, my writing styles and word choice change depending on the discourse community I’m appealing to. James Porter delved into this subject in greater detail, but two sentences seemed to sum it all: “We might then say that the audience of each of these texts is as responsible for its production as the writer. That, in essence, readers, not writers, create discourse” (38).

If our goal as writers is to be “original,” we have several unavoidable factors to contend with that frankly, are insurmountable. Therefore, let us settle for the status of “creative borrowers,” and throw our pennies in the well, to join with the lot of wishful writers from ages past.