Mona Llsa by Maria De Campos
Long before I’d ever heard the term literary appropriation I came across Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), which confused the hell out of me. It really did. It was transgressive and subversive. I just didn’t know you were allowed to do that sort of thing. It broke with convention and unspoken rules, it was akin to stealing someone’s boyfriend or cheating in an exam. Something you might want to do but didn’t dare. Don’t get me wrong, I love Wide Sargasso Sea, but I couldn’t quite get my head around the idea of taking someone else’s story and putting your own interpretation onto it. A bit like Ian Rankin finishing off William Ilvanney’s The Dark Remains which, coincidently, is also a prequel. But my introduction to Wide Sargasso Sea was long before the advent of fan fiction, where it is the norm to create your own stories featuring your favourite fictional characters.
Hard Work Maketh the Writer
Until I knew better, I had this idealistic notion that all writers were gifted with a creative power, and inspiration would effortlessly flow through them in fevered bouts of productivity. Once overcome by the muse they would work in a trance-like state oblivious to corporeal hindrances such as food or sleep until the job was done. I saw them as near-mystical beings blessed with the ability to interpret the world in a beautiful and unique way. This ridiculous notion is what prevented me from writing until later in life as I believed that not being in possession of such superpowers was proof I didn’t have any writing talent. When I sat down to write there was no spiritual experience, I didn’t produce flawless spellbinding work and so I assumed I just didn’t have it. My doors of perception always seemed to be wedged shut. In my naive and purist beliefs, all writers were visionaries who, almost involuntarily, exorcised unique ideas and masterpieces. But then Jean Rhys came along and took someone else’s story and reinterpreted it from an entirely different perspective. This was mind-blowing stuff.
Modenschau by Hannah Höch
Fast forward a couple of decades and I encountered Jean Rhys on crack – a.k.a Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2009) by Seth Grahame-Smith. For anyone unfamiliar with a mash-up novel, or ‘frankenfiction’ as it has been termed, it takes a classic novel from the 18th or 19th century (out of copyright) and reworks it with another genre, usually horror and more specifically the supernatural (most mash-ups feature zombies, werewolves or vampires) with titles such as Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, Alice in Zombieland, and Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, and so on. They can also be known as hybrid genre, multigenre, fusion genre, remixes, parodies and knockoffs. This is taking literary appropriation to another level. The mash-up novel is a happy citizen of remix culture and is a descendant of music mash-ups, themselves a product of hip-hop and house music sampling. If we dig further we can also see the roots of literary mash-ups in the work and ethos of the Dadaists, who used collage, surrealism and assemblage extensively. An academic interpretation might conclude they are a prime example of metamodernist intertextuality. Of course, appropriating and ‘recycling’ is not a new concept in literature, it was common among the Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights for example to reuse and borrow each other’s ideas and words. And I don’t think there is a novel or poem in existence where the influence of previous authors or poets can’t be detected. There is a fine line between appropriation and inspiration/influence, and without the latter we would see very little movement or development in the arts.
Money Over Inspiration
Literary mash-ups however, seem to take it too far. The literary appropriation is blatant to the point that a mash-up novel isn’t simply inspired by the original but actually just takes it wholesale and inserts its own flourishes here and there. Integral to the mash-up novel is parody, which I explored in my last blog post on Satire in Literature, and again this relies heavily on the original work.
“It is a truth universally acknowledged that zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains. Never was this truth more plain than during the recent attacks at Netherfield Park, in which a household of eighteen was slaughtered and consumed by a horde of the living dead.”
This is the first line of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, we can see how reliant it is on the original,
“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”
P&P&Z is clearly playing on the formal language used in P&P and juxtaposing this with out of context images and ideas e.g. the living dead.
Dead Kennedys
So far so creative genius in their ingenuity. But are mash-ups really an innovative development in literature, one of these techniques that come along and change the course of things forever, like stream of consciousness, or are they a product of consumer culture where the driver is profit rather than creativity? Remember how I used to think all writers had to be touched by the hand of God to possess ethereal talent? Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is the opposite of this. What came first was the marketing idea; an editor at Quirk Books was looking around for the next big thing and began pairing popular archetypes such as pirate, zombie, ninja, dinosaur etc with work in the public domain (as mentioned, this is important as there are no copyright restrictions) e.g Tess of the D’Ubervilles and Ghosts* – not catchy enough, A Christmas Carol and Poltergeists* – getting there…Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, perfect. He had a title now needed someone to write the content, and using 75% of the original made it even easier, why reinvent the wheel?
The cover was released before the book and sales were driven on this image alone. Of course, it was a sensation and the mash-up element ensured it captured TWO consumer markets – the Jane Austin fans and horror fans. A stream of similar titles followed. But was it a shrewd move that ensured double revenue or was it a case of trying to appeal to everyone and pleasing no one?
Were mash-up novels a gimmicky flash in the pan, or have they changed the way genre is written and consumed? Is genre still even a thing? It seems the boundaries are ever-blurring – with romantasy, hist-horrical, sci-noir, sci-cozy, gothic fantasy, silkpunk, etc etc.
Rule Breaking, Convention Bending
I’m all for breaking with rules and conventions – while I’m not a literary mash-up fan (in terms of the genre), I like the concept. When we listen to a piece of music that has been sampled, we’re given a different perspective on it and it bestows a fresh and contemporary meaning. I think the same can be achieved with literature if done well. Although not a mash-up novel in the strictest sense, Slaughterhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegut splices storytelling elements and themes that didn’t normally sit together; a semi-autobiographical war story combined with time travel and creatures from fictional planets. The end result is a powerful anti-war satire and exploration into free will.
A brilliant example of literary appropriation is Madeline Miller’s Circe (2018). Circe brings the myths and characters from Greek mythology, principally the Odyssey, and presents them to us in a modern retelling from a different point of view, i.e. Circe, the witch. Circe is appropriating Greek mythology and like Wide Sargasso Sea, taking an existing story and re-framing it from the female lens. But unlike mash-ups, it doesn’t parody or heavily rely on the existing text, it takes an idea and develops it into its own story. What is interesting about Circe is that it makes Greek mythology accessible. Not many people would pick up Homer or Euripides for light reading, Greek mythology being seen as too academic or intellectual, and beyond the realms of popular culture. But Circe straddles this divide and perhaps introduces a new generation and legion of fans to these myths and stories. Circe repackages Greek mythology for the modern reader, but is it creative genius or lazy opportunism?
Where does your work sit – are you a full-on mash-up artist or do you flirt with a light sprinkling of influence?
* Titles are my own.