by Andrew Egan
People collaborating on works of fiction is nothing new. (Without meaning to cause an uproar, collaborative fiction is probably the best way to describe most religious texts. Maybe Shakespeare too.) But modern literary and fiction writers tend to eschew collaboration outside of occasional experiments. One such recent example: And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, a mystery written by William Burroughs and Jack Keruac and published posthumously in 2008, years after both had died. Loosely based on the events surrounding the death of David Kammerer at the hands of Lucian Carr, ATHWBITT (as no one calls it since it’s a mediocre mystery and book in general) wasn’t published in either author’s lifetimes. And like too many works of collaborative fiction, it is more interesting for reasons other than the joy of reading it.
Canadian literary historian Lorraine York explains the difficulty facing collaborative works: “Twentieth-century bibliographical and editorial practices have been particularly susceptible to this fixation on parsing collaboration because of what [literary historian] Jerome McGann calls their fascination with the singular author.” Scholarship on collaborative texts does have an obsession with attributing specific passages to individual authors with scrutiny of handwriting being particularly common.
Squabbling over who wrote what isn’t limited just to literary critics, of course. Tensions arose between the various screenwriting teams behind Jurassic World. Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver, the duo behind the recent Rise of the Planet of the Apes, were hired to write “Jurassic Park 4,” but their efforts were put aside when Colin Treverow took over the project. Eventually the WGA ruled that Jaffa and Silver would receive “Story by” credits, much to Trevorow’s dismay. According to the director, he and his writing partner provided the final script with little being taken from the original team’s efforts. At least now we know who to blame for the uber-dinosaur and German shepherd like velociraptors.
With all this squabbling over attribution in collaboration, is it really worth it? Famed Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung would argue yes and no. His work defining individuation, or the process of differentiating oneself from others, has been foundational in the study of psychoanalysis. From this perspective, it is understandable that Jung was also concerned with the nature and role of the artist, saying, “As a human being, the artist may have many moods, and a will, and personal aims, but as an artist he is ‘man’ in a higher sense—he is ‘collective man’—one who carries and shapes the unconscious, psychic life of mankind. The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his own ends, but one who allows art to realise its purpose through him.”
Read the full article: https://tedium.co/2021/07/30/online-collaborative-fiction-history
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