19th century France: peasants are taught to read but not write. Why? Because power and authority (and note the author in authority) reside in the ability to shape meaning with words. Those who control the production of the written word can pass on ideas in mass form. The peasant, unable to write, is trapped in his or her world of servitude. He or she can receive the word of authority but can never assume the position of authority.
Reader-response theory tells us that reading is not simply a passive activity. It argues that the meaning of a text is only formed when it is read. Without a reader, a text has no meaning. And each reader will bring a different meaning to each text. We can read for different purposes, reject what we read, give what we read our own interpretation.
But reader-response theory is no use to the French peasant. The text remains the text, no matter how it is read. He or she has no means of offering an alternative.
Until recently those of us with a good deal more education than the average French peasant could not physically change what we read, not without a great deal of effort. Writing was a time-consuming, difficult process, publishing an expensive one. We were only one step removed from servitude. We might have been able to write, but we were unable to have influence with or over writing.
How quickly things change. Digital technology means we can publish material online in moments and companies can create physical books for individual customers quickly and at little cost.
Just as significantly we can copy numerous texts written by others into word processing programmes and transform them in ways big and small. We can edit, re-order, redact, re-size, cut or add in any way we see fit. We can change the colour of the font, or we can re-write entire paragraphs. Whatever we choose to do, the transformation reflects, in some way, on how we have read the text. Our reaction moves beyond mere reader-response and into the realm of writer-response.
What are the ethics of this transformed and transformative landscape? Copyright law still prevents the copying and reproduction of published works during an author’s lifetime and up to 70 years after his or her death. But several authors are leading a move to take copyright law in a new direction. They use a creative commons licence to authorise the distribution of already copyrighted material so that people can share, use and even build upon a work they did not personally create. There are different forms of creative commons licences available, depending on the extent to which an author wants to hand over control of his or her work. For example, some do not permit work to be distributed for profit, others only allow the re-transmission of their original work, rather than any derivative material.
Science-fiction writer, Cory Doctorow, is at the forefront of the Creative Commons movement. In the introduction to his book, Little Brother (the title a reference to Orwell’s ‘Big Brother’), and to all his other books available online, he explains the genesis of his desire to share:
Copying stuff is natural. It’s how we learn (copying our parents and the people around us). My first story, written when I was six, was an excited re-telling of Star Wars, which I’d just seen in the theatre. Now that the Internet – the world’s most efficient copying machine – is pretty much everywhere, our copying instinct is just going to play out more and more. There’s no way I can stop my readers, and if I tried, I’d be a hypocrite: when I was 17, I was making mix-tapes, photocopying stories, and generally copying in every way I could imagine. If the Internet had been around then, I’d have been using it to copy as much as I possibly could.
Views on creativity and originality have, in part, been shaped by the legal implications of copyright law. They privilege the author as an individual genius, drawing on his or her inner resources to create a unique work, a work that cannot (legally) be touched by others. But this is at odds with what we know about how language works. All language comes from other language. All authors draw on what others have produced before them (be it authorised written works, or simply the language of the world around them). The creative commons movement does not deny the right of authors to make a living from their work, but it does openly acknowledge the social nature of creativity, the fact that a work only takes on meaning when it is read and that when a work can be redistributed and transformed in various ways, it takes on additional meaning.
James Bridle, who writes extensively on digital publishing, links the possibilities for textual transformation to music’s use of remixing, a creative technique once frowned upon but now widely accepted:
… it’s a surprise that remix culture has yet to enter the literary world. The cult of the author remains strong, but is under continual attack. As a result, it cannot be long until the question is not “Have you read…?” but “Whose edit did you read?” I would read a Jonathan Lethem edit of Balzac, or China Mieville’s version of Moby-Dick. I like the original, but I prefer the remix.” (from, “Which book did you like best? The original or the remix?”)
So what might a textual remix look like in practice? The following are all strategies that rely as much on the manipulation of text on screen as on producing writing on to a blank page:
Patchwork Texts: the best example is Jonathan Lethem’s essay, “The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism”, which is made up of texts Lethem cut and pasted from the Internet before crafting them into a coherent whole.
Redaction: the term used for secret service documents with sections of text deleted. Great fun can be had deleting chunks of a given text so that what remains has a new meaning of its own.
Text transformed in terms of shape, font and by using redaction
Changing one feature: What happens if you change every verb in a text? Or every adjective? Or the gender of a central character?
Changing punctuation: read the Bridle article above to see the emotions stirred up when a writer dared to add punctuation to the final chapter of James Joyce’s Ulysses.
Noun + 7: pioneered by OULIPO, writers replace every noun in a poem with one seven places on in the dictionary.
Editing texts: Shakespeare may be an author without compere, but sometimes his work can best be tackled in abridged form. Lengthy scenes can be edited to aid understanding and help performance. The act of editing also forces those doing it to seek out the most important aspects of a text. The following exchange between Macbeth and Lady Macbeth has been reduced from over 70 lines to under 20:
MACBETH
We will proceed no further in this business:
He hath honour’d me of late.
LADY MACBETH
Was the hope drunk
Wherein you dress’d yourself? Art thou afeard
To be the same in thine own act and valour
As thou art in desire?MACBETH
Prithee, peace:
I dare do all that may become a man.LADY MACBETH
When you durst do it, then you were a man;
I have given suck, and know
How tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me:
I would, while it was smiling in my face,
Have pluck’d my nipple from his boneless gums,
And dash’d the brains out, had I so sworn as you
Have done to this.MACBETH
If we should fail?
LADY MACBETH
We fail!
But screw your courage to the sticking-place,
And we’ll not fail.
A Shower of Words 