Let us take the example of plunderverse’ rhetorical manifesto according to Bretts:
Plunderverse limits its own expression to the source text, but attempts a genuine, divergent expression through the selection, deletion or contortion of it. Plunderverse makes poetry through other people’s words. The constraint is not random, but merely an accelerated variation of the basic fact of language: we already speak in each other’s words. Plunderverse exaggerates the constraints through which we realize and discover our own voice, re-enacting the struggle against influences and cultural histories. It does not try to obscure, bury or overcome influence, but, in fact, celebrates the process by which influences vary into and inform our own voices. It foregrounds the process of language acquisition, reveals the debt of influence and exploits the waste of language.
Underlying the above manifesto is another kind of witticism, non-verbal but equally dangerous, namely that of legitimising theft and destruction- this time literary destruction and theft as distinct from borrowing, allusion or intertextuality and by extension, any kind of theft and destruction. There is a moral hole at the centre of this ‘plundering’ that is appalling. It seeks to deface an already finished work under the fallacy that we speak in each other words, anyway. Bretts occludes the fact that even if we utter each other’s words, they come out with differing tonal ranges and combinations that do not make any two sentences the exact same thing. It is indeed wastage if someone where to take my poetry and, through cancellation and selection, pretend to have ‘written’ a new ‘original’ poem. Plunderverse exemplifies the laziness that powers the avant-garde, as it is now constituted, by promoting or seeking to atrophy personal imagination and true creative impulse. It celebrates war and despoliation, literally, war on words and, metaphorically, war as a ‘phenomenon’ in itself; and as a means of balance in wasteful and over-producing economies. Listen to him: As Bataille wrote, economies that depend upon wastefulness must obscure the waste or risk the insurgence of destabilization. The Vikings, in their indelicate raids, pillaged the excesses of communities without destroying the waste-producing structures (allowing them to return and plunder again in the future).
Should one walk into a gallery and begin to take bits and pieces of a painting to create a collage of another painting. The new work would amount to a destruction and theft of the old. Surely one would be flogged out of the gallery as Jesus Christ flogged religious whores out of the synagogues of his youth.
True wit should deploy syntactical brevity, measured cadence, memorable expression, even the pun, but all within an ambience of truthful utterance developed through demonstrable logic and not empty binarisms, antithesis or the maxim; it should not provide wayward moral injunctions in its subtext.
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Notes 1. Eighteenth-Century Life – Volume 27, Number 2, Spring 2003, pp. 67-95. 2. Hunter Paul, J. “Couplets and Conversation” in The Cambridge Companion to Eighteenth Century Poetry ed. John Sitter (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001) 13. 3. Roger D. Lund Eighteenth-Century Life – Volume 27, Number 2, Spring 2003, 79. 4. Ibid. 1 5. Ibid. 80 6. See “Plunderverse: A cartographic Manifesto” at http://www.poetics.ca/poetics05/05betts.html 7. Ibid.80 8. Hunter 20
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