The Sun Shines Today Also
On the quest for originality with Ralph Waldo Emerson.
What is the sharpest insult an artist can imagine? Maybe this: to have one’s work labeled derivative 😱
Derivative paintings, novels, and songs are antithetical to original works, we are told. They derive their existence from more substantial sources and are seen as inferior as a consequence. Less inspired, less profound.
If this is correct, it’s easy to understand why creators of all stripes have long struggled after that chimera called originality. Original works are things of genius; they set their own rules of engagement and defy conventions as a matter of course. Original art is pure art.
Or so the story goes. I’m just not so sure about it. In this essay I’d like to pull at several strands of the “originality narrative” with the help of one writer who has helped me gather my thoughts on the matter: Ralph Waldo Emerson.
The Retrospective Age
In two of his most celebrated essays — “The American Scholar” and “The Poet” — Emerson attempted to blaze a new trail for 19th-century American letters. He did so by envisioning an archetypical scholar-poet who could extend the nascent country’s political independence from Britain into the academy and beyond.
In “The American Scholar” Emerson defines the true scholar as “Man Thinking,” a new breed of academic shaped by Nature, study of the Past, and Action. Similarly, in “The Poet” he defines the true bard as an “Eternal Man,” one who assumes responsibility for transposing Nature’s impressions into the tongue of the common people.
Unfortunately, despite America’s Revolution and Declaration of Independence from Britain, Emerson believed his contemporaries still understood themselves primarily in terms of the past — traditions, heroes, dogmas. This posture was especially pervasive in the academy, he thought, where scholars could make careers burying themselves in old books and writing new books about them. Emerson called his age “retrospective,” one that “builds the sepulchers of the fathers.”
An Original Relation to the Universe
Against this retrospective backdrop, Emerson posed a daring question: “Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe?” Why, in other words, should we privilege the past over the present—over our present? From one angle, the Transcendentalist movement Emerson helped catalyze can be understood as an affirmative response to this provocation. (e.g. Thoreau building his wilderness house beside Walden pond.)
“Man Thinking” embraces the present. He neither venerates nor disdains the past; he simply refuses the notion that another man’s encounter with the world could supersede his own.
Hence, Emerson was not a fan of overly-bookish scholars. Eventually, one must close the books and live. When one can “read God directly,” he wrote, “the hour is too precious to be wasted in other men’s transcripts of their readings.” Here we see the essential posture of an original relation to the universe — to believe that God is no less present today than he was to our ancestors. The American scholar sets out, on his own two feet, looking for God.
The Spirit of Creativity
So too, the Poet. Emerson’s Scholar and his Poet both proceed from the same Transcendentalist axiom of self-trust. The main difference is that, while the Scholar aims to know what is True, the Poet aims to speak what is Beautiful.
The Poet likewise devotes himself to the present, which means absorbing his experiences of Nature and imparting (or constructing) their meaning through language, especially poetry. This task requires more than artistic prowess; more important, for Emerson, is the poetic instinct for the sublime. He likens the Poet to a lost traveler who finally tosses his reins on his horse’s neck and trusts the animal’s instinct to find the way home. So must poets trust “the divine animal who carries us through this world.”
At times, Emerson’s Poet appears more like a prophet than your run-of-the-mill bard — a precocious seer-sage capable of penetrating the physical world to lay bare its deeper spiritual intonations for the rest of us. Still, I find Emerson’s vision of the Poet immensely optimistic. “For, the experience of each new age requires a new confession,” he writes, “and the world seems always waiting for its poet.”
Emerson believed the spirit of creativity — that divine animal who carries us through the world — persists eternally, in every age. The most propitious moment to write the next great poem, therefore, is always and forever now — Homer and Shakespeare and the rest notwithstanding! Perhaps there is nothing new under the sun. Yet, as Emerson put it, “the sun shines to-day also.” And who will record its peculiar radiance? Who will capture the infinite novelties of this day? Who will cast off his blankets and brew his coffee and drive to work like a man walking with God?
Origin-al Art
Where does this leave the artist on her quest to create something truly original? It seems to me that Emerson might regard “derivative” works as “retrospective” in the sense described above. Whether acknowledged or not, it is a thing too-dependent on its antecedents to represent the zeitgeist of the day.
On one hand, I find Emerson’s vision of “an original relation to the universe” profound and generative; it imbues each moment with unprecedented potential the artist is free to harness. What imaginative books or songs or paintings might we create if we granted such dignity to our days?
On the other hand — and I think Emerson would agree with me here — no great work of art exists in a vacuum, free of all precedent or convention; great art exists in a conversation with the past. My mentor Scott Cairns first alerted me to the rich etymology of the word “original.” We have come to equate originality with novelty. More basically understood, however, an original work simply bears the marks of its origins. And it pays homage to its antecedents by contributing something fresh to the conversation from which it springs.
On this view, the quest for originality no longer implies liberation from the past. It implies attending to my origins until I have something meaningful to say in response, even when that response includes a critique of those who have gone before.
As a dialogue with our origins — whether distant or proximate — the quest for origin-ality in art simultaneously humbles and equips us with ample resources to deploy in our own work. All great works of art are derivative in this sense. Often, we find them great precisely to the extent they intersect with other sources. Cormac McCarthy, one of America’s greatest living novelists, would be almost unintelligible without reference to William Faulkner, who would be almost unintelligible without reference to Herman Melville, and so on.
So, yes, may we enjoy an original relation to the universe and to our art — energized by the promise of each novel day, guided by those who have gone before us.
Sources
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “The American Scholar” and “The Poet.” In The American Transcendentalists: Essential Writings. Edited by Lawrence Buell. New York: Random House, Inc., 2006.
Patton, Andy. “It’s Not a Poem Until You Discover Something: An Interview with Scott Cairns.” www.rabbitroom.com. October 15, 2021.