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January 18, 2006
boyz in the garret (collaborative writing 46/50)
Koestenbaum, Wayne. Double talk : the erotics of male literary collaboration. New York : Routledge, 1989.
1 sentence summary: the work of many historical male collaborative pairs involves an erotic element if not reveals more about the nature of their working & personal relationships--the interactions that made their writing possible--than would be understandable without this critical lens.
passages:
1. "certain readers doubtless believe that conceptions should spring from a single mind, and that collaborative works are promiscuous and unnatural. like bastards in king lear, these mongrel texts come from no centered position in a moral universe; they evoke uncertainty and condescension in a reader who demands to know at all moments a sentence's source"
2. "men who wrote a book together, it seemed, could not avoid an embarrassing transparency; i presumed that collaborative texts could not help spilling secrets that singly authored works had the composure to hide"; "a double signature confers enormous interpretive freedom: it permits the reader to see the act of collaboration shadowing every word in the text. collaborative works are intrinsically different than books written by one author alone; even if both names do not appear, or one writer eventually produces more material, the decision to collaborate determines the work's contours, and the way it can be read. books with two authors are specimens of a relation, and show writing to be a quality of motion and exchange, not a fixed thing. whether we call the will that produces a collaborative work inspiration, authority, or diligence, this 'will' is shared, sometimes miserably."
4. "double authorship...is not the only feature these disparate texts share. certain desires and dreads regularly follow in [its] wake"; the texts in this study reflect "not literary collaboration in general" but "a cohesive wave in literary and cultural history" mostly btw. 1885 & 1922.
5. "this system is, in essence, feminist: it questions heterosexuality's privilege and forces masculine writing to take seriously the threat of 'queerness.' deconstruction has taught us that any monolithic body of ideas and habits contains the very difference it condemns; within male texts of all varieties lurks a homosexual desire which, far from reinforcing patriarchy, undermines it, and offers a way out."
8-9. "double writing is both a dispersive and a retentive procedure..." but" i believe that double authorship attacks not primarily our dogmas of literary proerty, but of sexual propriety"; "i can describe collaboration as a disruptive act only if i retain a conservative allegiance to singular authority. however, i allow for meanings that authors might never have intended; a collaborative text exhibits (shameful) symptoms of double authorship, despite the men's desire to make the work seem the product of one mind."
139. by 1922, when the waste land had emerged, its double authorship concealed, male collaboration had already earned a reputation for perversity."
160. barrie's opinion occludes the possibility, in denial of the same key: "collaboration in fiction, indeed, is a mistake, for the reason that two men cannot combine so as to become one"
165. link btw. "group sex and group writing"
Posted by ttobryan at January 18, 2006 08:52 PM