Maggots and Monuments

Let's face it: many--perhaps even most--artists are parasites. Just look at Shakespeare: Of his plays, almost all borrowed plots from older sources. Yet most of us would be hard-pressed to cite Boccaccio for Romeo and Juliet, or even Plutarch (translated by Thomas North )for Julius Caesar or Antony and Cleopatra.

Admittedly, Shakespeare (yes, for once and for all, WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, not Edward de Vere or some other conspiracy theory crank) amalgamated, rearranged, and lyricized his sources in such remarkable ways as to make him utterly immortal. Ben Jonson declared in his preface to the First Folio, the first collected volume of Shakespeare's works published in 1623,

"Thou art a Moniment, without a tombe,/And art alive still, while thy Booke doth live"

 But still, my point is that imitation, intellectual thievery, allusion--whatever you want to call it, it's a part of the act of creation. I had to laugh today when I read Margaret Cavendish's view on the subject. She's not exactly a household name, but I find Cavendish intriguing, not just because she was a published female writer in the mid-seventeenth century, or even because she was a royalist at a time when Charles I, the king of England, had lost his grip on the country--and on his head (courtesy of Oliver Cromwell and his associates). Mostly, I love/hate her because she was utterly shameless. She had her opinions, and she published them loud and clear--most of which involved her own exceeding adequacy in relation to others' utter inadequacy. Just take this bit: towards the end of Nature's Pictures, published in 1654, she includes a cute little story in which the Olympian gods are determining which books to keep in their library of Fame and which ones should be cast into Hell to be burned, or else drowned in the river of oblivion. Cavendish declares that none of her contemporaries' work should be saved,

for most of the moderns have been like a company of Ravens, that live upon dead carckasses, so they upon old Authors, and some have been like Maggots, that have been bred in their dead flesh, which is the living works of dead Authors, and some like Hornetts, and some like Bees, but very few rightly begotten from Nature...

Isn't Cavendish great? She tells it like it is. And she doesn't like people who steal other people's stuff instead of inventing their own.


The thing is, our culture seems to have a congenital, hereditary disease to do just that. Just look at the Low Library here at Columbia--though don't be fooled, it's actually not used as a library now (photo credit Wikipedia):

The Low Memorial Library. Now where have I seen that before?....

Think it looks familiar? Well, it should. Not only is it modeled on the Pantheon in Rome:

Ah, yes, the Pantheon...hmmm...See what I mean?

 But it also happens to look like every other neoclassical building built--not in the first or second century AD--but in the nineteenth or even twentieth century, which abound in New York City. One nineteenth-century real estate magazine, detested by Low Library, even wrote, "there is scarcely any original designing done in this city, except the vagaries of the incompetent. The rest is mostly a copybook reproduction of classical and other detail" (qtd. in The New York Times, Feb 17 2002). And Columbia is full of such buildings. Just look at Bulter, the main library. Now, don't get me wrong, it's beautiful, especially at night; but isn't there something rather pretentious about using a neoclassical model, complete with the names of classical and and classic authors inscribed above its columns, for a building completed in 1934? Columbia, it would seem, had a bit of an identity crisis, after it moved from Park Place, to 49th Street, and finally to Morningside Heights in 1896; with no original buildings to its name after the latest move, it was the landless younger brother in  in an Ivy League governed by architectural primogeniture, so to speak.

But then again, who am I, the proud Princetonian, to scoff? After all, my alma mater literally has stones from Oxford colleges cemented into Firestone Library. Its Graduate College tower is practically an exact replica or that of Magdalen College, and the cloisters of Rocky/Mathey? Well, they have New College, Oxford written all over them. Can we say architectural envy?

I find this insatiable desire to connect with the old, or the ageless, fascinating, given the simultaneous, seemingly equally insatiable desire for progressiveness. These institutions are at the cutting edge of research and education, and they want to show it. I get daily emails about exciting events: forums discussing the Middle East, conferences on epidemiology, and lectures regarding new literary fields (disability studies--who knew?). (Side Note: This is, by the way, a typically American value; the idea of progress for progress' sake does not exist in most countries. I discovered in England that my British friends could just not relate to my stories of motivational middle-school mantras like "Yes we can!" and "If you believe it, you can achieve it." I can't imagine why...)

Yet at the same time universities' profound inability to wrench themselves from admiration of the past is embedded within their very stones. Ambivalence is literally constructed into the fabric of our universities, and our culture as a whole.

So what do we do now? To be honest, I'm not entirely sure. But I don't think we should deny the ambivalence, forget our duty to the past, or blind ourselves to the future. Haven't we seen enough of all variants of this in recent politics? By all means, make progress, but only with a firm grasp of what has come before, and what can be done with it. Think Shakespeare, not maggots.