It’s a pity that T. S. Eliot didn’t live to hear the new top 40 on Sunday evening. Or watch
Kill Bill on BBC One, later the same night. While it’s hard to imagine the American émigré, ardent royalist, High Tory, Anglo-Catholic critic and poet who passed away 40 years ago thrilling to Eric Prydz’s remix of the Pink Floyd classic
Another Brick in the Wall, or luxuriating in the epic flow of blood unleashed by Uma Thurman’s samurai swordplay, he would have appreciated what they were up to.
Eliot, as a biography by Craig Raine out this month reminds us, was, in poetic terms, a creator of mosaics as much as a painter of new canvases. Much of his poetry, including his masterpiece The Waste Land, involved the rearrangement of existing material, the weaving of echoes and influences, to create something new out of something borrowed.
And that, in their very different ways, was what Eric Prydz and Quentin Tarantino did. For both of their works rely on reworking other artists’ originality — Prydz manifestly stands on the shoulders of Roger Waters, while Tarantino’s film borrows massively from the library of several Japanese directors.
Eliot, in his own fashion, acknowledged the debt that his poetry owed to others. In his essay on the English dramatist Philip Massinger Eliot argued: “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.” And even that acknowledgement was itself a piece of literary larceny. As Raine points out, Eliot lifted the thought from an essay by George Saintsbury on Laurence Sterne, where Saintsbury had written: “When a man of genius steals, he always makes the thefts his own.”
And yet, despite the sanction of Eliot and Saintsbury, the accusation that an artist has plundered his ideas from others still carries a toxic charge. In his novel Atonement, Ian McEwan made extensive use of the writer Lucilla Andrews’s memoirs of wartime nursing. When the scale of his debt was made public late last year, he was accused of outright plagiarism. Although a number of distinguished writers rode to McEwan’s defence, the allegation still hung in the air, with the suggestion lingering that somehow McEwan had been guilty of a sin against the Spirit of Art.
But as just one evening’s immersion in the BBC’s output demonstrates, modern culture is a carnival of creative borrowing. It’s not just Eric Prydz — much of contemporary dance music relies on sampling not just chords and riffs but huge chunks of other artists’ back catalogues. Even when the borrowing is less transparent, the debt can still be audible. The echoes of the Beatles are apparent in the work of Oasis, and the influence of the Kinks on Blur is equally notable.
In cinema, there are few directors who reference other works quite as devotedly as Tarantino, but as the recent releases of films as diverse as Starsky & Hutch and Poseidon show, our Quentin is not the only Hollywood figure quarrying the Seventies for inspiration.
So why, when there is so much creative plundering going on, does the allegation of plagiarism still have the capacity to taint an artist? Perhaps because our aesthetic antennae twitch with irritation when the only flash of inspiration in a work comes from another’s hand. What should matter is not how much is borrowed, but how much is added.
The problem with Kill Bill is not that Tarantino obviously enjoys Japanese cinema, but that all he produces is a pallid, shlocky Hollywood version of the genre, a vulgar pastiche. Claiming originality for Kill Bill, next to the films from which it borrows, is like lauding Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas as a worthy successor to the Colosseum.
The superiority of Blur over Oasis, a superiority underlined by Damon Albarn’s continuing creativity, while the Gallagher brothers rest on their royalties, lay in Blur’s subtle capturing of the inspiration of past bands, in contrast to Oasis’s cruder appropriation of pubby nostalgia.
In that context we can see that, even if Ian McEwan did lift whole chunks from Lucilla Andrews’s memoirs, this borrowing was then embedded in a wholly original, and wholly impressive, new novel. In a similar way, even though The Waste Land is pregnant with the echoes of other writers, no art before achieved an effect quite like it.
Which is why I’d urge anyone tiring of the creative cannibalism that characterises modern popular culture to turn to Eliot — to appreciate how a real genius uses the work of others. Eliot respected the tradition he worked in so much that he took the greatest care to fashion something even better from it. It was a desire to honour the past, not exploit it, to tend the graves of dead artists, not rob them, that inspired Eliot.
The heart of his success as an artistic innovator, therefore, rested on that temperamental conservatism that made him, in his personal life, a Royalist, an Anglican and Tory. I wonder if that’s a lesson Eric Prydz, Quentin Tarantino, or even Liam Gallagher, are yet ready to learn . . .
The repeated trials are very trying
Channel 4’s offshoot, More4, or as I’ve learnt to call it Michael Moore4, is trumpeting next week’s drama The Trial of Tony Blair at every available opportunity. The production, which is sold as a “satire”, rests on the premise that the Prime Minister, at some future point, might find himself arraigned before some international body for the “crime of aggression” he committed in invading Iraq.
The appetite for putting Mr Blair in the dock for having the temerity to remove a dictator still seems inexhaustible. Previous generations would be mystified. From our bombardment of the Danish fleet in 1806 to Churchill’s sinking of the French Navy at Mers el-Kebir in 1940, British Prime Ministers have been more than ready to take pre-emptive action to avert potential threats.
But rather than reflect on that lesson, those who shape our culture would rather vilify politicians who are prepared to take risks for our freedoms. And hours are devoted to discussing the rights and wrongs of Saddam Hussein’s death, while scarcely a moment is found to honour the memory of all those he slaughtered before he was toppled. It’s an attitude that is beyond satire.
Razor question
Many thanks to all those readers who suggested that the answer to my razor problems (having to replace not only the blades but the holder every few months to keep up with the manufacturer’s innovations) is to opt for an electric, rather than a wet, shave. But that kind suggestion begs another question. Which is more environmentally costly? Generating a mini-mountain of razor waste or using electricity to power my daily shave? No wonder David Bellamy and Bill Oddie have beards.
Michael Gove is Conservative MP for Surrey Heath
