In Other Words, It’s All Been Done Before
“Would I had phrases that are not known, utterances that are strange, in new language that has not been used, free from repetition, not an utterance which has grown stale, which men of old have spoken.”
Thus wrote Khakheperresenb, an Egyptian scribe, four thousand years ago.
In other words, it’s all been done before.
Zero solace can be found in the seven universal plots, neither ad-libbed in bedtime stories nor invented in later life:
1. [wo]man vs. nature
Little Red Riding Hood —> Moby Dick
2. [wo]man vs. [wo]man
Hansel and Gretel —> Sons and Lovers
3. [wo]man vs. environment
Icarus —> The Road
4. [wo]man vs. technology
The Princess and the Pea —> Brave New World
5. [wo]man vs. supernatural
If I Ran the Circus —> Stranger in a Strange Land
6. [wo]man vs. self
Humpty Dumpty —> Heart of Darkness
7. [wo]man vs. G/god
Adam and Eve —> The Giver
Even as the universal plots have been renamed, lampooned, and lumped-and-split from three to five to twenty to thirty-six, there is no safety in numbers. Whether direct or indirect, stated or implied, the lists’ universal incorporation of “versus” means that all plots boil down to one universal plot:
Someone/Something vs. Someone/Something.
Someone/Something vs. Someone/Something is, in a word, Conflict.
Want conflict? Why not want milk? To drink or not to drink, that is the question. Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of an outrageous white mustache or raise nary a goblet-levering arm against a sea of unquenched thirsts.
Alas, whether to be or not to be a writer when every past writer has written of conflict and every present and future writer must write of conflict is the more difficult question at hand. It doesn’t help that it’s easy to start a conflict, but hard to get out of one—one need look no further than Afghanistan—especially in a way that holds anyone’s interest.
Take Ulysses. Please. A writer seeking inspiration through wading through hundreds of pages of Joyce’s Ulysses to get Leopold to Molly’s yes could easily come down with a case of temporary amnesia, not to mention exhaustion, forgetting the experience is nothing new after previously sloshing through Homer’s multi-hundred-page Odyssey to get Ulysses to Penelope’s yes, even as the “original” Odyssey might not have been written by a guy named Homer (Simpson or otherwise), especially since the conflict over getting to yes was voiced eons earlier via quarreling and cave painting.
Because conflict, the sine qua non of plot, existed at the origin of writing, it follows that any writing that followed is derivative.
In other words, it’s all been done before.
What’s a writer to do?
A writer could try.
A writer could try to be original by pursuing an original solution to the hopelessness of trying to be original. A writer could think—perish the thought—the wheel need not be reinvented. A writer could postulate that another writer did more than just complain about the unavailability of originality. A writer could look up Samuel Johnson.
In a career of herculean written accomplishment, including but far from limited to A Dictionary of the English Language (1755), the edited Plays of William Shakespeare (1765), and Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets (1779), Samuel Johnson nonetheless observed, “No place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes, than a publick library … [where] most [authors] are forgotten, because they never deserved to be remembered.” Beyond casting doubt, Johnson expressed dismay over what had come before: “Whatever can happen to man has happened so often, that little remains for fancy or invention.” At times, this dread reduced Johnson to prolonged periods of melancholy, procrastination, and writer’s block. These periods, in turn, were documented in what is arguably the first reality series (albeit via biography in lieu of videography), viewing its subject from all angles, scrofulous warts and all. The beauty of James Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson (1787) resides in its portrayal of a gouty, lumpy, lumbering Englishman whose perseverance through early widowerhood, Tourette syndrome, and depression engendered a capacity to examine the warts of the human condition, including the affliction of unoriginality, from a position of strength.
In nearly every essay in the periodicals known as the Rambler (1750), Adventurer (1753), and Idler (1758), Johnson confronted unoriginality upfront by employing an epigraph making his point before his own words were underway. In Rambler No. 13, for example, Johnson opens with an epigraph from Horace (65-8 BC) : “And let not wine or anger wrest Th’ intrusted secret from your breast.” A brief history of secrecy from the Persians’ contempt of violation to the Romans’ tendency to violate to Montaigne’s laissez-faire ensues. Taken together, the epigraph and subsequent historical review in Rambler No. 13 lead Johnson and the reader to what they already know: It’s hard to keep a secret. Still, in the end, Johnson has his say: “The vanity of being known to be trusted with a secret is generally one of the chief motives to disclose it.”
Sure, when it came to the futility of secrecy, it had all been said, done, and written before. But not that way. Not in a way that would make a reader think, “Come to think of it, that’s right.”
Upon encountering Adventurer No. 84, the epigraph is, once again, borrowed from Horace: “But take the danger and the shame away, And vagrant nature bounds upon her prey.” There follows a funny yet disturbing Johnson-era account of a stagecoach ride among dissembling strangers, including an “intimate of lords and dukes” (butler), an investor “largely in funds” (broker’s clerk), and a “friend of judges” (transcriber). Once each character’s true character has been revealed, Johnson concludes, “Every man deceives himself while he thinks he is deceiving others.”
Come to think of it, that’s right.
In Idler No. 88, the epigraph comes courtesy of Pythagoras (570-495 BC): “What have I been doing?” After a discourse on the discrepancy between the great philosophers’ fame (great) and accomplishments (not-so-great), it’s Johnson’s turn to philosophize: “We do not, indeed, so often disappoint others as ourselves.”
As compiled in W. J. Bate’s Selected Essays from the Rambler, Adventurer, and Idler, Johnson’s come-to-think-of-its, distilled from epigraphic forerunner and expository follower, keep coming:
* Every man recounts the inconveniences of his own station, and thinks those of any other less, because he has not felt them.
* He that considers how little he dwells upon the condition of others, will learn how little the attention of others is attracted by himself.
* The general remedy of those, who are uneasy without knowing the cause, is change of place.
* None are so industrious to detect wickedness, or so ready to impute it, as they whose crimes are apparent and confessed.
* As pride sometimes is hid under humility, idleness is often covered by turbulence and hurry.
* There are men who always confound the praise of goodness with the practice.
* He that is loudly praised will be clamorously censured.
* We have less reason to be surprised or offended when we find others differ from us in opinion, because we very often differ from ourselves.
* How readily the predominant passion snatches an interval of liberty, and how fast it expands itself when the weight of restraint is taken away.
* We have all the same general desires, but how those desires shall be accomplished will forever be disputed.
* We are most inclined to love when we having nothing to fear.
* The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope.
Given that any given epigraph in the Rambler, Adventurer, and Idler gives away the ending to any given essay, the plot—the inescapable conflict within human nature—played out along the way couldn’t help but be unoriginal. Nonetheless, Johnson’s gift to and lesson for writers in his and any other time is found in finding an original way with words to recapture insights from writings of writers who came before. This re-creation of relevance relieves the writer of the burden of creating in a vacuum. In bestowing a writerly sigh of relief, Johnson is both rational (in clarifying a writer’s task) and subversive (in demystifying originality).
In other words, as Samuel Johnson so aptly put it, people “more often require to be reminded than informed.”
The Rational Subversive: In the Name of Reason
At one time, for a long time, the following facts were thought to be irrational and subversive:
- All men are created equal.
- All men and women are created equal.
- Separate but equal is not equal.
- The Earth is round.
- Evolution happens.
Given mankind’s fondness for the irrational, what does it mean to be rational? For starters, it means rational is a close relative of reason. Reason is “the power of intelligent and dispassionate thought, or of conduct influenced by such thought,” while rational is “derived from reason or based on reasoning.”
What does it mean to be subversive? Once again, everything’s relative. Subversion is “the act or an instance of subverting or overthrowing a legally constituted government or institution.” Subversive, in turn, denotes “tending to subvert or advocating subversion, especially in an attempt to overthrow or cause the destruction of an established or legally constituted government.”
Putting two and two together, the mission of The Rational Subversive is to utilize reason to subvert irrational yet entrenched beliefs that can be rooted in any field of human endeavor, not just government. Because words survive longer than people—a rational statement, if ever there was one—The Rational Subversive’s debunking of irrationally accepted doctrines will often find corroboration in literary works.
Finally, what does it mean to be a rational subversive? There is no formal definition in the dictionary, but the following characteristics come in handy:
- Taking time to think.
- Employing careful, not careless, thought.
- Favoring facts, no matter how inconvenient.
- Harnessing common sense to combat nonsense.
- Resisting slavery to the moment, wild swings in public opinion, cacophonous catchphrases, herd mentality, groupthink, the whipsaw, the kneejerk, the reflex, and the reactionary.
Given what The Rational Subversive is up against, espousing reason is, in itself, subversive.
