The Inevitability of Influence

I turned seven years old in the summer of 1980, a few months after The Empire Strikes Back debuted in theaters. I saw that film only twice that year (first with a friend and his parents on opening weekend, and a second time with my own family at a matinee a few weeks later), but it pretty much defined the primary culture of my childhood.*

My younger brother and I spent most of our playtime in the early '80s either setting up epic Star Wars action figure battles in the basement or role-playing Luke and Han--trapped in Cloud City, in Vader's Super Star Destroyer, or, when it snowed, in the trenches of Hoth. In short, we lived a Star Wars life.

Fifteen years later, I wrote an eight-page comic book script for an artist hoping to begin a penciling career at the publishing house I worked for, and one exchange I'd written, between the story's hero and the woman who had betrayed him, went like this:

GIRL
I love you.

GUY
I know.
The publisher, ten years older than me (and as big a Star Wars fan as one can be without dressing up like a Stormtrooper every weekend), read the script before I gave it to the artist and, in the margin next to the hero's response above, wrote, "OK, Han."

Until reading that comment, it had not occurred to me that I'd lifted a line directly from one of the most important movies of my adolescent life. This line had been so ingrained in my psyche from an early age that I didn't even recognize it for what it was: a scoundrel's cocky response to a sincere declaration of love. To the rest of the world it was one of Han Solo's character-defining moments in the film; to me, it was a valid response to the phrase, "I love you"--just as shooting an expert swordsman with your revolver was the smartest way to win a swordfight.†

Harold Bloom's groundbreaking treatise, The Anxiety of Influence (published in 1973), explores this phenomenon of borrowing in the work of poets--although as Bloom discusses it the borrower isn't quite so oblivious as I was (hence the use of the word "anxiety" in the title).

Regardless of the quality of my fiction writing (about which I make no claims), I believe that the soul of what I write is--as T. S. Eliot pointed out fifty years before Bloom‡--not only largely borrowed from the authors whose work I have subsumed as part of my worldview over the years, but is also, in the words of Bloom, "a misreading...an act of creative correction that is actually and necessarily a misinterpretation" (30).

David Foster Wallace's work, for example, is such an unavoidable, looming presence in the library of my mind that I cannot seem to help but occasionally parrot his themes as well as his style, all poorly no doubt. And a poor-man's misinterpretive DFW is not worth much when the real DFW's work is readily available. But I have trouble remembering what writing meant to me before I read A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, which isn't even a novel but a collection of the best creative nonfiction ever written. Of course when I do remember the days pre-Wallace, I tend to remember the work of Kurt Vonnegut, whose outlook and style I inevitably borrowed, or that of Salinger, or Kafka, or Carver. All these amazing stylists who shaped me, a shape that is too rigid to re-form, except perhaps through the influence of still other writers I have yet to read.

But what's the alternative? To write in a void? Cædmon did it, allegedly through divine inspiration, but I'm not an illiterate goatherd living in the seventh-century English countryside. I'm a former English lit major whose life, both personal and professional, is surrounded by books. Is it impossible for me to forge an entirely new path? Bloom would say yes.

I suppose my only hope, returning to Eliot, is to improve the way in which I borrow: "Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different than that from which it is torn" (72). This is my goal.

Next up: Everyone sits back and laughs as I keep pushing a boulder up a hill.§

______________________________________________Pointless footnotes:

* I had seen Star Wars at least once or twice before Empire, during one of its many re-releases in 1978 or 1979, but it did not stick with me the way Empire did. Contra slightly older fans of the trilogy, the key elements for me were Luke Skywalker the apprentice (not Luke Skywalker the farmboy), Han Solo the scoundrel (not Han Solo the mercenary), Yoda (not Obi-wan), Boba Fett (not Darth Vader), Hoth and Bespin (not Tatooine and Yavin), etc.

† As Indiana Jones did in Raiders of the Lost Ark, released a year after Empire. Both of these iconic moments in the films were, famously, suggested by Harrison Ford himself.

‡ Making me, incidentally, one of those "bad poets" that Eliot identified in his essay on Philip Massinger (see Eliot's actual words [not the often-quoted, but imprecise, "good poets borrow, great poets steal"] on Nancy Prager's blog here: http://nancyprager.wordpress.com/2007/05/08/good-poets-borrow-great-poets-steal/). T. S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1921).

§ See Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, trans. Justin O'Brien (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1955).