On the Wor(l)d as Collage, or Intertextuality
by Terry Nguyen
A syllabus on intertextuality in the form of a collage of citations.
Like many writers I feel ambivalent about words, I know they don’t work, I know they aren’t it. I don’t in the least feel that everything is language. I have a sense that there has been language from the beginning, that it isn’t fundamentally an invention. These are contradictory positions but positions are just words.1
**
Collagist’s Note: Years ago, an older writer advised me that reading is just another form of writing. After that conversation, I felt an inordinate amount of pressure to read widely and deeply, as my writing would presumably flow from that pond of language, accumulated over time in the vats of my brain. The mind is porous like a sponge, so I was told, soaking in the texts it has long steeped in. (I remember somebody saying, “You’ve got to steep yourself in things.” So I steeped myself, in thrillers, commercials, news magazines.2)
On my best writing days, I marveled at how my sentences would cohere. Each one felt like a small miracle, as if someone had planted the phrases overnight and left them for me to harvest. But on bad days, my mind seemed to operate on autopilot, spitting out predictable, fill-in-the-blank prose. I would stare at the page, wondering if I am any better than a word processor or a deep learning algorithm.3 Then one day, after a series of very very bad days, I remembered the collage. The sticky joyousness of cutting and pasting images on a canvas. And I realized that writing is collage: the harvesting of language, of words and the writer herself is tasked with organizing these structural units of thought into sentences, into sense. Language as a crumpled dollar bill, continuously used in circulation. I interpret this syllabus to be an attempt at steeping the reader into a mood of language composed of multiple voices aside from my own.
**
When I said.
A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.
And then later made that into a ring I made poetry and what did I do I caressed completely caressed and addressed a noun.4
You have twenty-six abstract symbols that mean absolutely nothing. And yet, in any arrangement, arbitrary or contrived, any arrangement whatsoever, we are orchestrating meaning. Those symbols, as they interact with one another, generate something greater than themselves. So it’s kind of like the brain itself.5
Collage, as defined by the Merriam Webster dictionary: An artistic composition made of various materials (as paper, cloth, or wood) glued on a surface; a creative work that resembles such a composition in incorporating various materials or elements. Collage is derived from the French verb coller, meaning “to stick.”
Take that old, material utensil, language, found all about you, blank with familiarity, smeared with daily use, and make it into something that means more than it says…Words are being set down in a force field. It’s as if the words themselves have magnetic charges; they veer together or in polarity, they swerve against each other. Part of the force field, the charge, is the working history of the words themselves, how someone has known them, used them, doubted and relied on them in a life.6
**
Collagist’s Note: New York is a swarm of signs and unholy advertisements. I encounter haphazard phrases daily like dropped pennies; I pick them up to store in my pocketbook (iPhone Notes App), safekeeping these found letters that have gone on a walk (Walking is reading. Writing is walking7): cruel embankments, necrologists of the newspapers, pompous rivers, sozzled, jealous spaghetti
Sometimes, a readymade poem materializes.
On Sterling Place in Crown Heights, Brooklyn: Find a curve of wind to dance an echo into whose skin you are / I Miss My Dead Friends
**
Literature as I knew it was a constant series of attempts to make one word stay put after another by following certain definite rules; or, more often, rules that were neither definite nor definable, but that might be extracted from a series of examples, or rules made up for the occasion—that is to say, derived from the rules followed by other writers. And in these operations the person “I,” whether explicit or implicit, splits into a number of different figures: into an “I” who is writing and an “I” who is written, into an empirical “I” who looks over the shoulder of the “I” who is writing and into a mythical “I” who serves as a model for the “I” who is written. The “I” of the author is dissolved in the writing. The so-called personality of the writer exists within the very act of writing: it is the product and the instrument of the writing process.8
The writer is the subject of narration transformed by his having included himself within the narrative system; he is neither nothingness nor anybody, but the possibility of permutation from S to A, from story to discourse and from discourse to story. He becomes an anonymity, an absence, a blank space, thus permitting the structure to exist as such. At the very origin of narration, at the very moment when the writer appears, we experience emptiness.9
**
As Joseph Cornell did it, the world can be safekept in a box, enclosed but alive in composition within the bounds of enclosure. In his visual landscape of shadow ephemera, forgotten images are revived like puppets on a stage. Cornell’s art appears to be based upon the notion that the most basic data on the nature of things is recorded in all manner of ephemera, that is, things short-lived and soon to be destroyed. Decayed and peeling plaster, postage stamps, theatre stubs, a fading photo, the movements of a hand of a clock, yellowing newsprint, emblems of nations and insignia of noble and powerful families that no longer exist, soap bubbles (ephemeral planetary spheres that last a few seconds).10
In collage, with Cornell, context matters. Left on a desk or lost in the trash, the same objects might appear forlorn, dejected, devoid of meaning. But when framed and composed with Cornell’s aloof elegance, a marble, a beaded necklace, a piece of string achieves its discerning aura as art, elevated from the matte mundanity of daily living.
**
Now people take parts of things and a text can take its meaning from its context or its intention. It’s a more complicated world now.11
Each person
Has one big theory to explain the universe
But it doesn’t tell the whole story
And in the end it is what is outside him
That matters, to him and especially to us
Who have been given no help whatsoever
In decoding our own man-size quotient and must rely
On second-hand knowledge.12
As Bernadette Mayer did it:
- Rewrite someone else’s writing. Experiment with theft and plagiarism.
- Systematically derange the language: write a work consisting only of prepositional phrases, or, add a gerund to every line of an already existing work.
- Get a group of words, either randomly selected or thought up, then form these words (only) into a piece of writing—whatever the words allow. Let them demand their own form, or, use some words in a predetermined way. Design words.
- Take an already written work of your own and insert, at random or by choice, a paragraph or section from, for example, a psychology book or a seed catalogue. Then study the possibilities of rearranging this work or rewriting the “source.”13
- “The Poetics of Disobedience,” Alice Notley, 1998. ↩︎
- Speedboat, Renata Adler, 1976. ↩︎
- “The AI Reader,” Terry Nguyen, Dirt, 2023. ↩︎
- “Poetry and Grammar,” Gertrude Stein, Lectures in America, 1985. ↩︎
- “Unhinged Articulation,” Ralph Angel, Número Cinq, 2013. ↩︎
- “Someone Is Writing A Poem,” Adrienne Rich, 1993. ↩︎
- “My Typographies,” Paul Elliman. ↩︎
- “Cybernetics and Ghosts,” Italo Calvino, 1967. ↩︎
- “Word, Dialogue, and Novel,” Julia Kristeva, 1980. ↩︎
- “Notes on the Nature of Joseph Cornell,” John Coplans, Artforum, 1963. ↩︎
- Three Conversations with Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Laura Hinton, Jacket Interview, 2003. ↩︎
- “Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” John Ashbery, 1975. ↩︎
- Experiments List, Bernadette Mayer, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E #3, 1978. ↩︎