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What Is Originality?
Editors, publishers, and producers are eternally on the lookout for an “original” story or play. They talk glibly about this precious quality as if it might be found in any ash can or any corner.
Originality, however, like genius, must be rare. Still, competent people, especially leaders in the literary field, use the word promiscuously.
“I consider even an old, down-at-the-heels situation original if it has a new, fresh treatment,” a well-known novelist has said.
Another notable said, “Put in more pep; a new twist will lift up your second and third acts. A few clever lines, aglow with originality, wouldn’t be amiss either.”
Such talk is sheer nonsense. What is a new twist to you may be an old twist to somebody else. The same goes for questionable clever lines or so-called fresh treatment.
“Fresh treatment” is merely rearrangement; the face-lifting may tighten a line here and there, but it creates nothing original.
I heard one dramatist say, “Originality is something we cannot profane with a definition. You simply feel it. It is something like an aroma. You can’t touch it with your fingertips. Perhaps ‘unique’ is the word. I don’t know. A spark out of the author’s genius might light up a piece of writing so that it’ll dazzle you with its brilliance.”
It would have been helpful of him to tell young writers how to create such an “aroma” . . . that untouchable something.
If we want a definition of originality, our best method is to take a masterpiece, whether a place, novel or short story, and see where this or that giant of literature carries its originality.
War and Peace by Tolstoy; “The Necklace” by de Maupassant, “The Gift of the Magi” by O. Henry, are a few of the works which readers treat with special respect.
The plots in these stories are not extraordinary either. The themes are just as orthodox. The question is—what makes them so enduring? Why do they defy time?
If you reread them, you will be forcibly reminded of one thing—each one is outstanding for its character portrayals. The characters are people whom we know; perchance we recognize ourselves in them. The authors apparently knew their characters intimately and, with a few bold strokes or with detailed drawing, made them come to life.
Origin means the beginning of something—something that did not exist before. Here are a few examples: The concepts of monotheism, of relativity; the invention of the linotype; the wheel.
Leeuwenhoek was original with his microscope. Making a fire was an absolutely original contribution.
Twenty-five hundred years ago, Zeno presented an absolutely new dialectical approach to man and to the world. Descartes, Feuerbach, Hegel and Marx accepted Zeno’s basic dialectical principle but they interpreted it differently. Did this make them original too? While the first three explained the world in terms of idealism, Marx turned their idealistic interpretation on its head, so to speak, and created the most controversial philosophy in the world, dialectical materialism.
If we are to keep originality on the high level to which it rightfully belongs, we must admit that Descartes, Feuerbach and Hegel were not original thinkers.
But let us pursue the definition of originality in writing. A new approach, one might say.
If we insist that original must mean that no one has ever used that theme or style before, not one play by Shakespeare, Molière or Ibsen is original. In that sense, the themes or styles of these authors are certainly not original, for they have been used from time immemorial.
No doubt Jesus, Darwin, and Marx were advocators of new, revolutionary thoughts. Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, and Einstein all brought something restlessly new to human knowledge. Faraday, Tesla and Edison were in the first rank of the originators of physics. Galen and Hippocrates were the pioneers in medicine. Nietzsche’s Zarathustra foreshadowed Adolf Hitler, the destroyer of civilization.
In art, Matisse discarded the familiar precepts of painting and created a revolution with his flat patterns; Cézanne was the forerunner of Cubism, and Picasso the creator of many a new “ism.” Seurat was the originator of pointillism. El Greco became known as the father of the elongated style.
The sum total of all this is that in the arts there are originators of new slants, new approaches, new surprising twists, but very few artists ever bring forth such original creations as Einstein’s relativity.
Originality, like genius, is rare.
No matter what we think of Gertrude Stein or E. E. Cummings, and others of their kind, we must still consider them the creators of something so radically new, so different, that we have to give them the doubtful distinction of originality. But they are not necessarily great. Far from it.
We once heard about a mad genius who discovered a distinct type of airplane—an absolutely revolutionary airplane—one that couldn’t fly. It was certainly original!
However, one must not detract from the achievement of man. Nature is full of many astounding and original ideas, which existed before a homo sapien ever put in an appearance on this globe. The manner in which man has solved some of these mysteries is little less than mysterious.
Still, originality must mean the beginning of something. In the arts, however, we cannot discover startling originality—only trends, styles, twists, slants, tricks, exaggeration, minimization, emphasis on parts instead of a whole. Originality, then, is rare in the field of literature and, for that matter, in all fields of art.
If we consider originality almost non-existent, then what shall a writer strive for? Characterization. Living, vibrating human beings are still the secret and magic formula of great and enduring writing. Read, or better, study the immortals and you will be forced to conclude that their unusual penetration into human character is what has kept their work fresh and alive through centuries, and not because they may have used a new “slant” which seemed to many to be “original.”