I could begin by stating that I didn’t actually write THE PLAGIARIST. In fact, I could claim that I didn’t write it and leave it there, let readers speculate and pick it apart. After all, it’s not called THE PLAGIARIST for nothing. Which is partly why I feel I should provide some kind of an explanation. It’s not like I’ve created a book where people can follow the plot and identify with the different characters. And while the way the book’s assembled makes perfect sense to me given my reading background and my research into literary theory concerning the avant-garde and the postmodern, I’m more than able to see why many readers would find THE PLAGIARIST a ‘difficult’ text.

I tend to have two modes of writing: the first, which accounts for the majority of my output, involves sitting down and typing and seeing what happens. Chances are I’ll start with a short scene and wind up with a 3,000 word short story. Or a novella. It’s happened. The second, an approach I’ve developed more recently, begins when I set myself a specific challenge, involving techniques, themes, word counts or timescales. THE PLAGIARIST was created by the second method.

I’ve long been a fan and student of William Burroughs’ work, and find his cut-up trilogy of the 1960s, which consists of The Soft Machine, The Ticket That Exploded and Nova Express, and the theories surrounding the cut-up method fascinating. Like many others before me, I’ve followed Burroughs’ advice to try cut-ups for myself: ‘cut-ups are for everyone,’ he writes in The Third Mind. I’m in good company. Not only with the many writers who experimented with cut-ups in the late 1960s, but with major-league cult authors like Kathy Acker, who drew heavily from Burroughs’ ideas on a technical level and said that she used The Third Mind as a manual to teach herself how to write. But I never considered putting together a cut-up novel, or publishing a cut-up text until recently.

Quite by chance, I stumbled upon the work of Kenji Siratori and picked up a copy of BACTERIA=SYNDROME. It made me realise that the automated cut-up programs I had found on various websites could be used for more than just tinkering. I figured I could kick out a full-length cut-up novel using these programs in a few weeks. I failed miserably, but did kick out a full-length cut-up novel in about three months from conception to being ready for publication. The reason I failed was because I didn’t want to be as random as all that (although I’m reliably informed that Burroughs and those who followed, including Carl Weissner, Claude Pélieu, Jürgen Ploog, etc., weren’t nearly as haphazard in their approach as may be believed, and weren’t averse to editing, contrary to claims made at the time). First, I wanted to use material that seemed relevant to me and the themes I was wanting to weave through the text. I also wanted to pull some loose semblance of plot into it. And while I was only very light in my editing, I did edit some sections, and completely cut others, for a variety of reasons.

‘Why I wrote THE PLAGIARIST makes me think of the song ‘How I Wrote Elastic Man’ by The Fall. Yes, my mind is given to wandering, and that’s precisely why I wrote THE PLAGIARIST. My aim was to write something that taps into the psyche (now here we go) presenting the substance in a style correspondent with cognitive patterns, which operate by random triggers. People don’t have linear thought processes so why should narrative be subject to the imposition of false order?

I wanted to create a text that contained everything. I didn't want to just give a snapshot of modern society, but to condense the whole of that society into a single book. And I wasn't going to be satisfied with just describing the sensations, the alienation, the confusion, I wanted to recreate it with an intensity that drags on the nerves and screams at the senses. I wanted to produce a work that instils in the reader a sense of overkill, oversaturation, to induce a dizziness and bewilderment. Waking up and being bombarded with news before getting in a car and driving to work where you open your emails to find three dozen spam mails all advertising viagra is one thing - it's overwhelming. Describing the sensation in narrative is, by and large, quite underwhelming. I wanted to overwhelm. I wanted to create a text that provokes a very definite response, that's both physical and psychological. I wanted to create a text that had the capacity to inflict pain.

But more than that, I wanted to create a text that didn't just absorb and reflect our fragmentary culture in a postmodern way, but that amplified it and posed questions about how the individual engages with - or becomes disengaged from - that society, and also the self.

What forms character? So many different elements. We absorb different things from our everyday life, and those things inform our ideas, our opinions. Increasingly, we are what we consume. And we consume information even when we're not aware of it: much 'learning' is subliminal, it's coded. And so I wanted to construct a text that contained the code, so to speak. The code is embedded within the effluvia and detritus of everyday life. It's all around us. It's the TV, the Internet, it's advertising, it's the workplace. It's Shakespeare, apparently. Harold Bloom contends that Shakespeare is not only the most influential author of all time, but that Shakespeare is the Western canon. I'm not convinced, but by taking Hamlet as an Oedipal tale and recontextualising that over Bloom’s Oedipal theory of influence, as put forward in The Anxiety of Influence, I'm exploring the possibility that high culture cross-pollinated with popular culture and infiltrates the awareness of the masses. Which is why I've cut sections of Hamlet with spam emails, news stories, film quotes, song lyrics. These things are the fabric and texture of life. Hence, THE PLAGIARIST is art that reflects life, the goes a step further. It encapsulates life, it IS life. Form and content are inseparable.

But what of plot? Well, arguably life has no definite plot other than a beginning and an end, between which a mess of events happen in a haphazard fashion. And things repeat themselves, like the daily drive or walk or train ride to work. You hear or read the same phrases over and over through the years. So phrases recur throughout the text, sometimes unchanged, sometimes subtly altered or mutated. There is a beginning – or at least a point at which ‘the reader’ joins the journey, and an ending, with proper narrative closure. So in this respect, it’s perhaps not as unconventional as it first seems. There is some structure, and despite the recreation of random triggers, I did actually spend some time on the sequencing of the sections. but that’s only so important: THE PLAGIARIST is not a linear text, ad as such need not be read in a linear fashion, cover to cover. It’s perhaps better to dip in, to choose your own adventure. And perhaps ultimately that’s why I 'wrote' THE PLAGIARIST. What I put into it is only half the story. The other half is down to what the reader brings to the text. As Barthes said, the birth of the reader is at the cost of the death of the author. The author(s) of THE PLAGIARIST is not only dead but cremated, his ashes scattered to the four winds. I hope the readers are feeling creative.

 

 

Christopher Nosnibor, April 2008

 

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