Authors as mediums and buffs

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Take the case of Tarantino. Tarantino started out as a film buff immersed in film. He obsessed, and the films he directs are not simply "homages", they don't merely make references to the films he likes, his films are authored by the films that formed him. It is not particularly original to say this, but it is interesting to reflect on the idea.

In fact the central plot line of "Kill Bill" is almost completely plagiarised from an earlier film, right down to the scene where the heroine escapes from a wooden casket. Of course Tarantino has his heroine escape using Kung Fu.

Take another example, that of Bob Dylan. He was a Tarantino of sorts. Robert Zimmerman was a music buff, an obsessive and a fan of Woody Guthrie. In fact he was also a rather sinister mythomane. He went to Woody Guthrie, immobilised and dying, in order to help himself get anointed as a folk singer. Imagine Mark Chapman singing John Lennon his songs as Lennon died. Dylan had the politics of a young bourgeoisie suburbanite, but by taking advantage of Guthrie on his death bed he acquired a veneer of 1930s-40s social activism.

In a programme about the Civil Rights movement a black women protester says something along the lines of:

"How could this little white boy write songs that my father could sing while working on the plantations in Georgia?"

She is mystified. But there is no mystery. Captain Beefheart said:

"Give me any song of Dylan's and I'll tell you where he took it from."

And I had that experience too. I opened a book of old British folk songs and found, almost word for word, a famous "Bob Dylan song" there.

Of course, Dylan has written some of the best songs, and Tarantino has made some good films. Dylan says: "I believe in the songs." but "I don't know where they come from." Well, mystery solved. Here is an example of the text as author. The text spoke through nerdy white suburbanites like Tarantino and Dylan and authored further texts, using Dylan and Tarantino as mediums.

Of course this process of authorship becomes clearer in translation itself, as my friend suggests, where it is the effect of the original text that authors the new translated text. The reader then contributes to the process of the creation of the new material. The text is also the author.

So let's move on to Pushkin. Pushkin wrote the great play: "Mozart and Salieri", later somewhat bowdlerised by Peter Shaffer as "Amadeus". In this play the reason why Salieri kills Mozart, the buffoon (have you read his whining letters to his father?) is not because Salieri is Jealous or because Mozart desecrates the divinity of his own music with his levity and scatological wit.

The point, according to Salieri is that the innovativeness of Mozart's work threatened the foundations of a musical edifice: the hard work of centuries. Mozart's musical insights were a cruel and almost accidental conduit of the divine threatening the architecture of music - Masonic themes emerge.

But Pushkin's Salieri was wrong because Mozart was actually a product of that architecture. He was deeply immersed in music by a father very keen to exploit his talent and his sister's. To begin with, the music was its own author through the boy.

Another example: For many, Octavio Paz in "The Labyrinth of Solitude" was speaking with insight about the heart of a Mestizo Mexican identity, but he wasn't really. To say that Mexicans are the way they are because of the traumatic rape of the "Indian mother" by the "Spanish father" is highly contentious. Paz was involved in creating a Mexican identity. He was not a truthful observer he was a confectionist of Mexican identity.

Authors are the mediums and confectioners, DJs and editors of existing culture, and "the text" is often the true author. Bob Dylan knew nothing about working in the cotton fields or about going to war, but the songs he listened to generated the songs and that he "trusted", and they did contain the experiences of people who both worked and fought.