Literary sampling
Two days after I posted the passage from White Teeth, I was reading through the archives of the Paris Review and came across a W. H. Auden interview (which is brilliant by the way) where he quoted a line from his poem which appeared in the New Yorker: “Thousands have lived without love, not one without water.”
I couldn’t help but wonder whether that line had in some way influenced Smith’s passage.
Smith’s second book, On Beauty borrowed elements and themes from E. M. Forster’s Howard’s End though the stories are strikingly different; there are scenes that directly parallel Forester’s work. It got me thinking.
Some time ago, over dinner, I got into a discussion with a friend about his disdain for hip hop. Which turned into a discussion about originality, which he felt hip hop lacked and I vehemently argued. But tonight it came to me, i wondered how much of culture is reused and recycled, how many generations have heard the same song, seen same movie, read same book over and over again, tweaked by someone else. Hip Hop is of course the easiest target, but you don’t hear people say (well you do, but not as many you’d hear calling it “the problem” with rap music) I don’t want to see the remake, it lacks originality. Couldn’t possibly watch the new Batman film because the jokers already been done amazingly by Jack Nicholson and Cesar Romero.
Three movies that I loved while in my younger years have the exact same plot, The Shop Around the Corner (1940) , In the Good Old Summer Time (1949), and You’ve Got Mail (1998).
It reminds me of the lesson we learned early in writing school, there are only three stories: man against man, man against nature, man against himself. I wonder if the same will eventually be said about music (there are only 10 basic beats, the rest is all repetition), and if, in knowing this, people will loosen their judgment on mediums that borrow from the work thats come before it.
I wonder how much this is understood and more likely accepted by people who are in the art’s, by nature of understanding the real possibility that they will break ground (though they try with a blunt ice pick nonetheless).
(This was mostly written at 2am last night, so I’m not sure if it’s coherent. It was sparked by my rumination on Smith’s genuis and trying to figure out who had sampled Thom Yorke’s The Erasure [mr. west of course])
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