Ding! Dong! Von Kleist is Dead!

Today, the word "classic" is fairly abused. A piece of music from twenty or thirty years ago becomes "classic rock" when before it was just "rock," the game last week was an "instant classic," and Coke became Coca-Cola Classic just 79 days after the release of New Coke. How can something become a "classic" in less than three months? Folktales are one of few things to really nail that word. Our "timeless classics" have been passed down so long we can nearly assume they've just always existed. Like the rain, the dirt, and the Uni building, folktales are old, so old and ingrained in our cultural collective that everybody can be expected to know them, or at least be familiar with them. After all, Disney makes a killing producing animation featuring these cultural bastions! So, the next question becomes, when will Disney cover Michael Kohlhaas?

We talked a considerable amount in class about the implications of Ragtime borrowing plot lines from this 1808 German novella, mostly favorably. The story, being translated to a new time and context, takes on additional and new meaning; it's harder to move the story around like that than just plopping it down and letting it go, after all. Yet, still, there was uncomfortability; the borrowing was not recorded in the library check-out. Even folktales in the retelling tip their hand obviously at the original work; the story is still easily identifiable by all, and usually they keep the name. Note that Frozen, the most recent Disney retelling of a folktale, is based off of "The Snow Queen," a Scandinavian folk tale originally written by Hans Christian Andersen. As such, the title is actually The Snow Queen in other languages; in America, it followed the titling procedure enacted by Tangled (Rapunzel) before it. On the other hand, Doctorow's only hint to the origins of Coalhouse Walker, Jr., is briefly viewed in a stein that the man throws out the window of J.P. Morgan's library. Even if there were a bigger hint, the story of Michael Kohlhaas is not nearly well known enough to be able to say that people could be expected to realize the connection there. So, it gives the whole thing an air of dubiety.

So, hold on to that idea while we diverge for a moment to talk about the '60s and '70s in philosophy and critical theory. From earlier discussions, you might be able to recognize that this is around the time postmodernism was picking up speed, but here we're going to be more concerned with a closely related body of work known as post-structuralism. Like postmodernism, post-structuralism is better defined as what it isn't than what it is; it is not structuralism. So, what was structuralism? More or less, structuralism said that culture could be understood with the model of a structure mediating between concrete reality and abstract ideas. In much the same way that language is a way to understand ideas in terms of our real worlds, but it is in itself separate from both, culture is a way to understand cultural feelings and notions in terms of the rest of the world, yet is not itself a part of those feelings or the world. On the other hand, post-structuralist authors, who all present different critiques of structuralism, might say that the structures posited by structuralism are not inherently self-sufficient like they are assumed to be by that theory, and the binary oppositions that constitute those structures (between abstractness and reality) are not as rigorous and exclusive as implied by the theory. Overall, it ends up being closely related to postmodernism in tenets and theories, but is just as complex on its own right.

Into all this steps a man named Roland Barthes. I'll save you the extensive and enlightening history of his work and life to instead just talk about one particular piece, a 1967 essay called "The Death of the Author." In it, Barthes opens by talking about the method of literary criticism that relies on the author's identity to interpret a piece of literature. That is, the experiences and biases of the author lead directly into the creation and importance of the text that they write. While this is fairly common even in our English classes and not a bad place to start (in my opinion), Barthes argues that the principle of this action is flawed, saying that, "To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing." Barthes suggests that to liberate the text from interpretive tyranny, we must instead completely divest the author and the text. "The text," he writes, "is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture." It is itself composed of multiple layers and meanings, and the final meaning of the work rests on the reader, not on the author. As Barthes writes later, "[...] a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination." In place of the "Author-God" model we tend to think of as forming our novels and media, Barthes suggests the term "scriptor," whose power is not to individually and spontaneously generate culture but to combine and compose pre-existing work in clever and interesting ways. The scriptor does not serve as explanation for the work, only as producer. Barthes writes, "[...] the modern scriptor is born simultaneously with the text, is in no way equipped with a being preceding or exceeding the writing, is not the subject with the book as predicate; there is no other time than that of the enunciation and every text is eternally written here and now." The meaning of the work is in its effect on the reader and in language itself, not in the life story of the person who ended up making it.

So what does all this have to do with Ragtime and von Kleist? Barthes here is arguing that a text is fundamentally divested away from its author, or more generally, the circumstances of its creation. And that brings us back to the dubiety surrounding Doctorow's lifting of the plot line of Michael Kohlhaas. When we talk about this, we are speaking solely in terms of the real world and the actions of a man that could be argued had no more to do with the creation of Ragtime than any other piece of culture at the time. The work that originated in von Kleist's writing and appeared in Doctorow's serves a new purpose and a new meaning in its new home, and we would be ignoring that to the detriment of the text as a whole if we were to focus too heavily on the way it moved between these two. While in academic works the line is very clear for what forms plagiarism and how you must keep yourself from committing it, that line is far, far less clear in artistic pieces. Could Warhol be argued to have "stolen" the Campbells can in his infamous work, or would it be more accurate to say that the very act of adopting or "stealing" it changes the work in a significant and meaningful way? That is, what really constitutes plagiarism or theft in an artistic work? While some cases seem more clear than others (a student trying to turn in something he just pulled off the internet being very clearly not an acceptable act), there is still dubiety over the whole affair. In a way, it could be up to the viewer of the work to decide whether what the "scriptor" has done is itself original and worthy of admiration or not. But, it's a complex and, at times, confusing question. Now that you've barreled through my wall of text, do you guys have anything to say to that?