Stealing a Corpus: Appropriating Aesop’s Body in the
Early Age of Print Alex MuellerUniversity of Massachusetts Bostonalex.mueller@umb.edu
Alex Mueller is Associate Professor of English in the College of Liberal Arts
at the Universty of Massachusetts Boston. His research areas include literature
pedagogy, digital rhetoric, medieval literature, Arthurian romance, and book
history.
Alliance of Digital Humanities OrganizationsAssociation for Computers and the Humanities000382012228 July 2018article
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DHQ classification scheme; full list available at http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/taxonomy.xmlKeywords supplied by author; no controlled vocabularyupdated to pass validation
The fate of the medieval Aesop during the early age of print reveals the tensions
that arise between corporeal and proprietary understandings
of artistic production. Building upon the highly accumulative, various, and
expandable Aesopic tradition that thrived in the Middle Ages within scholastic
manuscripts, the fifteenth-century fables of Robert Henryson and William Caxton
confront movements to consolidate and transform Aesop’s sprawling literary corpus
into a singular printable property. At the same time that a single series of Aesop’s
fables, now known as the
elegiac Romulus, became
increasingly standardized within printed books, woodcut illustrations and textual
descriptions increasingly beautified Aesop’s body, transforming him from an
inarticulate slave to an eloquent aristocrat. The simultaneous metamorphosis of
Aesop’s poetic and visual corpus reveals the premodern underpinnings for current
efforts by publishing industries to immunize digital work from rogue acts of
appropriation, mashup, and remix, practices which had previously defined Aesopic
textuality. As a response to this textual vulnerability, the collapse of Aesopic work
into a singular entity reimagines the allegorical relationship between the author or
publisher and the work as proprietary, not corporeal. Rather than an extension of a
generative, deeply somatic, and grotesque process of multiple fabular authors and
commentators, the modernized Aesop obtains value as a property,
paving the way for the notion that creative corpuses can be
owned, effectively stealing away corporeal features from
intellectual production.
Argues that the modernized Aesop obtains value as a property,
paving the way for the notion that creative corpuses can be
owned, effectively stealing away corporeal features from
intellectual production.
Introduction
Perhaps the most overwhelming aspect of digital writing is its vulnerability to all
kinds of intellectual theft, from illicit copying to database hacking. While the
threats to artistic autonomy and intellectual property are significant, many forms of
digital appropriation are undeniably innovative, creative, and valuable. Even if we
set aside the privacy/security debates surrounding efforts to make information
transparent, especially given the volatile responses to WikiLeaks and Edward Snowden,
we can recognize the artistic potential of hacking, which often results in stunning
music remixes and viral video mashups. The result, of course, has led to much
handwringing, especially from self-interested corporations crying foul over
violations of copyright . Yet, such artistic acts of appropriation have
become so cool that they have led scholars such as Alan Liu to
suggest that [s]trong art will be about the
destruction of destruction or, put another way, the
recognition of the destructiveness of creation. Within the digital world, such a neo-avant garde aesthetics of destruction
has fostered an environment of textual vulnerability, in which texts are, radically,
at the will of their users.
At the same time, it is crucial to acknowledge that such an emphasis on
creative destruction can lead to an uncritical acceptance of
all forms of innovation, one of the most powerful euphemisms for
capitalistic enterprise. As Joseph A. Schumpeter pointed out in 1943, the desire for
new markets leads to industrial
mutation, part of what he later calls a perennial gale of creative destruction that incessantly revolutionizes the
economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old
one, incessantly creating a new one. This phoenix-like logic, in which a new power rises from the ashes of the
old, also undergirds medieval theories of sovereignty – what is often referred to as
translatio imperii, or the translation of power
from one civilization to the next . Histories of imperialism teach us that such an
optimistic view of destruction often serves the interests of the elite who benefit
from such innovation while disenfranchising others, especially
those cultures or industries that have been mutated or
superseded. Liu turns to the writings of the Critical Art
Ensemble (CAE), as an example of neo-avant-garde collective that will use their
technical skills of disturbance and
hacktivism as a means to disrupt
these forces of exclusion, but even the CAE adopts the elitist logic of creative
destruction by claiming that the only groups that will successfully
confront power are those that locate the arena of contestation in cyberspace,
and hence an elite force seems to be the best possibility. As Patricia Ingham warns in her recent book,
The Medieval New, such an embrace of complete destruction
and confrontation means that we have bought
entirely the notion that innovation lays waste to what has come before, as
opposed to the practices of ambivalent
homage that define many medieval
perspectives on innovation .
In this essay, I argue for the importance of understanding the politics and ethics
of medieval forms of appropriation, which are rarely acts of destruction and more
often premodern forms of sampling, remix, and mashup, which rely on degrees of
homage to ancient authorities. As Kathleen Kennedy has
demonstrated in her book,
Medieval Hackers, we encounter
early evidence of hacker culture
during the later Middle Ages when governmental, educational, and ecclesiastical
institutions attempted to control information .
Reactions to these forms of control varied, but graduates of medieval schools had
already been trained to appropriate texts critically, a practice many of them learned
in their writing exercises, which emphasized citation and reuse of existing
authorities. While the salience of this point could be made with the commentary
traditions of a number of theological texts, such as the Glossa
Ordinaria, or legal books, such as the Decretum, I have selected one canon of pedagogical texts, Aesop’s
fables, as a representative example for analysis. These animal tales are known for
their moral lessons, but they were primarily utilized in medieval classrooms for
reading and writing instruction. Students and teachers would insert interlineal
glosses, usually Latin synonyms, to challenge their expanding vocabulary and then
rewrite these fables, both in abbreviated and elaborated forms. Most crucially,
though, students and teachers appended extensive commentaries to fables in their
manuscripts, which regularly occupied more space on the page then the fables
themselves. These rhetorical amplifications often became acts of appropriation,
revisions of fables that bear the names of Aesopic authors that range from Avianus to
Walter of England to Robert Henryson.
Within the context of 21st century copyright law, this
combination of critical commentary and literary theft challenges
current understandings of fair use. As Robin Wharton has demonstrated about
the Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit’s decision in
Suntrust Bank v. Houghton Mifflin, 286 F.3d 1257 , interpretations of copyright have begun to separate
literary critique from creative work . In an attempt to distinguish parody from satire as a literary genre
that falls within fair use, the court in Suntrust
determined that [a] parody is a work that seeks to
comment upon or criticize another work by appropriating elements of the
original. Parody needs to mimic an
original to make its point, and so has some claim to use the creation of its
victim’s (or collective victims’)
imagination. Revisions of medieval fables also incorporated commentaries within their
elaborations on the Aesopic imagination, but the result was hardly parodic and the
previous fables were rarely victims of critique. Rather, new fables became new
members attached to the Aesopic corpus, a ceaselessly expandable body of fabular work
composed by innumerable Aesopic authors and commentators. As the fable traditions
begin to appear in print, we see acts of hacking emerge in the
form of mashups and remixes of fables – an especially poignant phenomenon in the
printed life of Henryson’s Morall Fabillis. Within these
early printed contexts, we see striking evidence of critical appropriation, in which
printers and readers remix fables for new audiences, all the while paying
ambivalent homage to their
origins. In this essay, I ultimately want to suggest that a premodern orientation
toward intellectual bodies, instead of properties, may produce more responsible uses,
critiques, and reuses of artistic work and ultimately offer formidable challenges to
self-interested uses of copyright law, as well as idealistic fantasies of a
creative commons.
From Corpus to Locus
As staples of medieval grammar and composition instruction, readers paraphrased and
elaborated upon Aesop’s fables in extensive commentaries that subsequent readers
could associate with other classroom texts and extend through marginal and
interlineal glosses. After the twelfth century, the fable series known as the
elegiac Romulus became the canonical Aesop, which students and their teachers paraphrased and expanded through
extensive glosses that accumulated in manuscripts and early printed books. The elegiac Romulus was composed of sixty verse fables that
survive in at least 170 manuscripts and fifty printed editions published in five
countries by the end of the fifteenth century . Because of the popularity of this
Aesopic corpus, the textual spaces that housed this fable series became read-write
platforms in which individual fables were compiled, rearranged, and mashed up,
stretching the limits of what we now call intellectual property.
Within an Anglo-American legal context, proprietary language for creative production
did not emerge until 1624, when the English Parliament approved an act to prevent
commercial monopolies and enhance the Crown’s power over the issuing of patents . And it was not until 1666 that booksellers
embraced the language of authorial property in their defense
against royalist claims that the Stationer encouraged piracy against the Crown. The
booksellers and printers collectively argued that the Author of every manuscript or
copy hath (in all reason) as good right thereunto, as any Man hath to the
Estate wherein he has the most absolute property. Rather than allow the Crown to destroy the Stationer and its control over the
registry of printings, this statement empowered authors to sell the rights of their
works over to booksellers. As Adrian Johns contends, This may be the earliest explicit
articulation of the idea of literary property – of an absolute right generated
by authorship, which could serve as the cornerstone of an entire moral and
economic system of print. Certainly the idea had no clear precedent behind
it. For contemporaries unfamiliar with the Crown’s attempted publication
land-grab, such a statement must have been stunning in its hyperbolic claims to
written work as property. This statement is also striking in its advocacy for
authors, not printers or booksellers. As Rebecca Curtin has pointed out, early
printers were occasionally willing to engage in alternative transactions, granting privileges to
authors in order to encourage them to enter the book market, a situation that she
claims has been replicated within open source software sharing movements in recent
decades .
Johns is likely correct that no explicit precedent exists for the printers and
booksellers’ statement of 1666, but the transformation of the understanding of the
book as a corpus to the book as a locus, particularly for the medieval Aesop, in the
preceding centuries suggests that the groundwork was already being prepared for such
a claim. Quite literally, of course, the medieval book was a body with leaves of
sheepskin, bound around a spine with animal glue, and enclosed with calfskin leather
. Figuratively, the body played a central role
in the medieval imagination, a role that Guillemette Bolens divides into two types:
contained bodies and articulated bodies. Within the articulation model, bodies are
designed for motion with limbs connected by joints – suggesting the potentiality of
movement that can only be severed through destruction or mutilation, such as
Beowulf’s wresting of Grendel’s arm from its socket . This dynamic view of corporeality was an alternative to the
containment model, in which the body’s outer layer would both define the body and
prevent penetration from outside forces, such as weapons, poisons, or corruptions.
This corporeal envelope was often understood to include protective or concealing
clothing, such as skin, armor, or sacred garb . The culture of books, in turn, provides its own rigorous
structure of containment, words alphabetized and contained within the limited space
of leaves of paper or parchment, selected folios bound together in discrete codices,
held within bookcases within libraries. This containment model is continuous from the
Middle Ages into the Renaissance and beyond, but as Paul Zumthor and Jan-Dirk Müller
have argued, books began to shed their corporeal natures shortly after the arrival of
the printing press . As Johns points out, the threat of piracy compelled
early printers to protect their industry by enclosing it within the moral comfort of
domestic spaces: A printing house was to be a printing
house. At one point the law actually stipulated expressly that
presswork could only be done at home. The idea was that activities carried out
in a patriarchal household partook of the moral order implicit in that
place. Once books became associated more often with a locus than a corpus, they became ripe
for the proprietary appropriations that would crescendo after the seventeenth
century.
When we refer to the medieval Aesop, we are referring both to the ramifying sets of
beast fables inscribed into books used in classroom instruction and the various
conceptions of the author himself. In both cases, Aesop is not a locus. The medieval Aesop is undoubtedly a corpus and (to use Bolens’ term) a radically articulated
corpus, at that. In addition to the proliferating
sets of fables and their commentaries, Aesop himself was a sprawling and monstrous
figure, whom William Caxton in his 1484
Life of Aesop
described as having a grete hede / large visage / longe
Iowes / sharp eyen / a short necke / corbe backed / grete bely / grete legges /
and large feet. Moreover, this grotesquely articulated body is obsessed with linguistic modes
of articulation, so much so that he serves cooked animal tongues to dinner guests
. By giving his animal protagonists human
tongues, he essentially reverses their fate, engaging in an allegorical fantasy of
monstrous speech. And, according to one young medieval reader, even this uncontained
corpus – and by proxy his schoolmaster – was
subject to the figural violence of its students. An annotation to the explicit in
Lambeth Palace MS 431 (fol. 136v) ends with a call to arms: Finito libro, frangamus ossa magistro [Having
finished this book, let us break the bones of the master] . Again and again, the medieval Aesop is
described in corporeal terms, but as Aesop begins to appear in print, his body and
fabular tradition are increasingly de-articulated and contained, inspiring
piratical acts of resistance designed to appropriate, mashup,
and remix Aesopic work for new audiences.
Allegorical Body Snatching
To understand the inextricable bond between Aesop’s poetic corpus and his authorial
body, it is helpful to consider the following fable, whose unorthodox message and
textual afterlife epitomize the corporeal nature of Aesopica. Here is a summary of
the tale: Late one evening, while guarding the bodies of criminals hanging from
crosses, a soldier overhears the pitiful cries of a woman distraught by the death of
her husband. Despite the king’s warning that the theft of the crucified corpses would
result in the death of the guard on watch, the soldier, unable to resist his
attraction to the beautiful widow, relinquishes his post to comfort and feed her.
Seduced by this compassionate gesture, she embraces the soldier and they copulate
over her husband’s tomb. When he resumes his watch, he discovers to his dismay that
one of the bodies has been stolen. The widow is so moved by his earlier kindness to
her that she tells him, Malo mortuum
impendere quam vivum occidere [I would prefer to hang a dead man than kill
a living one], offering to substitute the body of her dead husband for the missing
criminal . At her urging, they remove the
husband's corpse from his tomb and hang it on the cross in the criminal’s place (fig. 1).
This tale of grave robbing also serves as an allegory for the way this fable itself
was exhumed, reshaped, and incorporated into other literary traditions. We may
recognize this story as the
Matron of Ephesus from the
Satyricon, Petronius’ first century C.E. satire of
Roman excess, but the tale was more frequently known throughout the Middle Ages as a
standard fable in the elegiac Romulus. This is surprising because we can identify next to
nothing Aesopic in this one, which contains nary a talking non-human animal and
includes lascivious content that cannot be easily moralized. While the elegiac Romulus emerged as the predominant pedagogical
series of fables and the basis for one popular printed version, known as the Esopus moralizatus, the number of variations of each fable
and their commentaries suggest that the medieval fable corpus had been extensively
revised and re-allegorized . One reader of this fable, for example, was dissatisfied
with the notion that the widow’s husband would not have been discovered to be a
different corpse from that of the stolen criminal. To correct this non sequitur, this commentator revised the tale, adding a
new scene in which the guard recalls that the criminal did not have any teeth,
motivating the compliant widow to grab a stone nearby and smash out the teeth from
her dead husband’s mouth . This revision
is simply one example, which suggests that these fables were considered to be
flexible works in progress, ripe for correction and appropriation, rather than
finished products to be consumed as is.
Mouvance and Premodern Remix
Following the pioneering work of Paul Zumthor, medievalists have tended to
characterize such textual malleability as mouvance or variance in an
effort to distinguish the dynamic volatility of manuscript culture from the alleged
fixity of print culture . Even scholars working outside
of medieval studies in the 1980s, such as Gerald Bruns, began to make stark
distinctions between the closed text of a print culture and
the open text of a manuscript culture. Bernard Cerquiglini famously used the strongest terms, claiming that l’écriture médiévale ne produit pas de
variants, elle est variance [medieval writing does not produce variants;
it is variance.] . Such an emphasis on the
radical elusiveness and multiplicity of texts within manuscript culture encouraged
medievalists to revise their editorial procedures, sometimes eschewing emendation
altogether, in an effort to better represent the often untidy experience of reading a
medieval text. This movement was marked in 1990 by a special issue in
Speculum devoted to The New Philology, in which
contributors, led by Stephen Nichols, critiqued their predecessors’ preoccupation with scholarly exactitude based
on edited and printed texts and embraced the representation of the past which
went along with medieval manuscript culture: adaptation or translatio, the continual rewriting of past works in
a variety of versions, a practice which made even the copying of medieval works
an adventure in supplementation rather than faithful imitation. This was a welcome paradigm shift for many medievalists, but it unfortunately
led to simplifications and exaggerations about the supposed
static or exact nature of print culture.
As Leah Price has pointed out, it even led to some convenient McLuhanism, which
allowed scholars, pace Bruns, to make essentialist
claims about the nature of print, rather than historicize particular developments
within the multiple print eras, from movable type to mass production . In particular, it is clear that early printers
continued to consider carefully variance and the difficulty of representing multiple
textual traditions, leaving space for reader involvement by allowing marginal space
for commentary and appending errata lists for correction. And as Daniel Wakelin has
recently shown, scribes and readers of the later Middle Ages were often quite
invested in emending manuscripts, making sure that variance did not undermine the
authority of their projects .
While the medieval Aesopic tradition may offer a convincing case study for students
of mouvance, this corpus is not defined
by its locus – the exigencies of its material
environment. Nor do I think it is useful to distinguish the types of Aesopic
authorship according to the stark Bonaventuran categories of scribe, compiler,
commentator, and author . As Matthew Fisher has
suggested, Bonaventure offers this fourfold schema within a sacred tradition of
theological commentary, not as a taxonomy for understanding medieval textuality more
broadly, which is how it has been too often applied . Within literary and historical manuscripts, the identities of
scribe, compiler, commentary, and author often become irretrievably blurred and
incapable of being reduced to these categories.
I want to suggest, instead, that Aesopic practices of fable revision and exegetical
allegorization are premodern examples of the now pervasive digital practice of
remixing. While remixing practices typically refer to music sampling and compilations
of previously recorded material, the aesthetics of remixing draws on the allegorical
logic of medieval school texts, of which Aesopica serves as an exemplar, or the
musical master recording so to speak. While there are various
kinds of sampling, such as the extended remix (i.e. an elaborated version of an
original track), Aesopic textuality is most aptly characterized by what Eduardo Navas
calls reflexive remixing, which allegorizes and extends the aesthetic of
sampling, where the remixed version challenges the spectacular aura of
the original and claims autonomy even when it carries the name of the
original. To establish a distinction between what he calls the original and its remix, Navas invokes Walter
Benjamin’s conception of the aura
or cult authority of an art object, which is increasingly eliminated through new
forms of mechanical reproduction . Unlike
Benjamin, who views the liquidation of the aura (or the destruction of art’s ritual value) as the creation of
art’s political potentiality , however, Navas
suggests that the reflexive remix recognizes AND challenges the authority of the aura
through allegory .
Such acts of appropriation and sampling have been characterized by Alan Liu as destructive creativity, a kind of
neo-avant-garde aesthetics that responds to the neoliberal push for constant
innovation through acts of creative destruction. This is an attractive way of understanding the subversive value of remixing,
but such a destructive artistic disposition reflects an antipathy to the past that
effaces the history of art objects and undermines the force and function of a remix.
After all, acts of sampling and remixing gain power through their ability to preserve
the material they are reconstructing, their facility to expose their sources at the
same time that they are appropriating and revising them. If a source is destroyed, it
becomes unrecognizable, thereby evacuating its potency as an act of ambivalent homage. This is the creative and constructive process that
describes the medieval development of the beast fable corpus, which clings to the
aura of Aesop, all the while expanding the collection through elaborations,
additions, and variations under other names such as Phaedrus, Avianus, and Walter of
England .
The reflexive remixes that are familiar to most of us, such as alternative versions
of popular books, songs, or movies, have been produced for decades behind the closed
doors of publishing houses, music studios, and film editing rooms, but the emergence
of read-write platforms such as blogs and wikis render such textual and visual
mashups much more visible. As Martin Irvine has astutely observed, remix has become a convenient metaphor for a
mode of production assumed (incorrectly) to be specific to our post-postmodern
era and media technologies (though with some earlier
precursors), and usually limited to describing features
of cultural artifacts as outputs of software processes
(especially in music, video, and photography. Rather than limit remixing to materials and genres, Irvine proposes a
semiotic model, drawing on the work of C.S. Peirce, to demonstrate the generative,
dialogic, and recursive nature of all meaning making. If we accept remixing as
inherent to all types of expression, then the material form of
an expression appears as a moment of orchestrated combinatoriality
in the ongoing interpretive, collective, meaning-making processes that
necessarily precede and follow itIrvine 2014, 33 [italics are mine]. Aesopic fables and commentary, as they appear within particular manuscripts
and printed books, operate as orchestrated compilations, which both recognize and
challenge its predecessors, inviting future readers to do the same. Irvine suggests
that his semiotic model for remix can counter misrecognitions about
original authorship and proprietary artifacts that sustain copyright law and
confuse the popular understanding of Remix as something outside the normative
and necessary structures of meaning-making in ordinary, daily
expression. For Irvine, our obsessions with copyright and ownership are based on
erroneous conceptions about artistic originality and intellectual property, which
undermine remixing as a creative act.
Mixing Flowers and Fruit in Fables
The medieval expansion and canonization of Aesopic fables, for example, would have
been impossible without the capacity to remix previous textual corpora. And in at
least one sense, mixing and appropriation have always been central
values of fable writing and reading. Take for instance the opening lines of the
standard prologue to the
elegiac Romulus, which employs
horticultural language to express the ways in which fables are composed and then used
by their readers: This present work ventures to be
pleasurable and useful; serious things are more alluring when they are
embellished with sport [Dulcius arrident seria picta iocis]. This garden brings
forth fruit with flowers. The flower and the fruit win favor, the one by its
flavor and the other by its beauty. If the fruit pleases you more than the
flower, select [lege] the fruit; if the flower more than the fruit, select the
flower; if both, take [carpe] both.Ut iuvet et prosit conatur pagina
presens: / dulcius arrident seria picta iocis. / Ortulus iste parit fructum cum
flore, favorem / flos et fructus emunt: hic sapit, ille nitet. / Si fructus
plus flore placet, fructum lege, si flos / plus fructu, florem, si duo, carpe
duo. This textual enterprise mixes the serious with the playful, and more
precisely the serious embellished by the playful. The Latin used
here is picta, which would normally refer to something painted,
implying that the sport inherent in fable telling serves as a veneer for what lies
underneath. Yet, the fruit (the serious message) is not privileged over the flower
(the aesthetic attributes of the fables). Instead, the fabulist uses the verbs
lege [select] and carpe [take] to explain what readers might do to
the fable text, taking either the fruit or the flower, or both. While we might expect
that readers would select particular aspects of a text to take away, the writer
perceives the material as an open source, in which both or all may be
taken. This acknowledgement of the entirety and variety of produce that might be
harvested from the text suggests that appropriation is a textual act expected of the
fable reader.
One reader who embraced this fable thievery was Robert Henryson. In his own version
of the Romulan prologue, Henryson offers the following line, translated almost
directly from his source: And clerkis
sayis, it is richt profitabill / Amangis ernist to ming ane merie sport
[And clerks say that it is very profitable to mix merry sport amongst serious things]
. By claiming that he learned this mantra from
clerkis, he characterizes the
elegiac Romulus as a collection collaboratively
compiled by a number of unnamed authorities. Perhaps more interestingly, he alters
the relationship between sport and ernist [serious things] slightly,
moving away from the Latin seria picta iocis, or sport painted upon serious
matter, towards a more balanced mix, the result of Henryson’s to ming. He appears to endorse
appropriation and remixing as characteristics of fable writing, but his next use of
ming a few lines later is
accompanied by a direct citation of a singular authority. With sad materis sum merines to ming Accordis weill; thus Esope said, I wis, Dulcius arrident seria picta iocis.[It is fitting to mix some merriments with
solemn matters; indeed Aesop said so. Serious things are more alluring when
embellished with sport.] By naming Aesop, Henryson recognizes the aura of
his fabular object and reflexively remixes his source material, distilling the vast
number of compilators and commentators who contributed to the elegiac Romulus into the authority of a single author.
On the one hand, it was conventional to cite Aesop as the origin for fables, but on
the other, Henryson had just attributed the sentiment of mixing merry sport amongst serious things to anonymous
clerkis. Aesop was a
particularly elusive author to pin down since he was considered to be the singular
progenitor of beast fables, all the while performing the author-function for a
host of fabular authors and commentators. Even though the phenomenon of hanging a
corpus on the name of an auctor, such as Cato, was
fairly common among medieval school authors, even Cato’s
Distichs was not attributable to other identifiable authors in the ways
that beast fables were associated with multiple Aesopic authors such as Phaedrus and
Avianus . Compare, for example, the discussion of Cato as
author of the Distichs to the discussion of Avianus
as an Aesopic author in the Accessus ad auctores. For an English translation, see Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism c. 1100-c. 1375. In an act of excessive homage, Henryson
recites three different versions of the same Romulan phrase within the space of ten
lines. In the first instance, he offers a fairly faithful rendering of the aphorism,
making just one significant substitution: rather than translate dulcius as
sweeter or more alluring, he selects richt profitabill [very
profitable], which privileges the moral profit of the fables over their aesthetic
delights. The second version, however, offers a more qualified perspective than the
first: rather than suggest that any kind of frivolity may be mixed with serious
things, he tweaks it slightly, saying With sad materis sum merines to ming [to mix some merriments with solemn
matters]. As if he is dissatisfied with either translation, his third version is the
original Latin line itself: Dulcius
arrident seria picta iocis. While this kind of translation and citation
might seem egregiously repetitive, this redundancy reflects the redundant nature of
many fable collections, which offered multiple versions of the same fable in the same
manuscript . For example, one fourteenth-century
Austrian manuscript, Codex Vindobonensis Palatinus 303 is a veritable cornucopia
of Aesopica, containing six different versions, and even one set, known as the
prose Romulus, appears twice. Henryson may
have been influenced by his immersion in this pedagogical tradition, but it is also
important to note that his three renderings of the line cleverly mimic the three
levels of appropriation encouraged by the Romulan prologue: selecting one, or
selecting another, or taking the whole thing. Understood this way, Henryson first
takes the fruit, next takes the flower, and then, having decided he wants them both,
he takes both, offering his own remix of the Aesopic mantra.
Aesopic Mashups in the Early Age of Print
In addition to serving as a source for Henryson to sample and remix, the medieval
fable offered practice in literary amplification and collaborative constructions of
knowledge that set the stage for the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century printers of
Aesop, who attempted to codify their editions through compilation, or what could be
likened to the digital mashup. Within remix culture, the mashup is an aesthetic mode
that combines two or more discrete and recognizable artistic products (e.g. images,
sounds, words) to extend or elaborate upon their meaning or significance. One of the
best examples in the world of music is Danger Mouse’s
Grey
Album, which is a mashup of Jay-Z’s Black
Album and the Beatles’ White Album. In the
case of early printers, they combined previously disparate series of fables,
commentaries, and images into single editions, expecting readers to play an active
role in their reception and interpretation.
Henryson’s adoption of remixing as a central fabular practice also encouraged his
early readers and illustrators to appropriate his text in kind. One manuscript in
particular, British Library MS Harley 3865, is an intriguing case in point because it
is a handwritten copy/adaptation of the 1571 Bassandyne print, published
approximately a century after Henryson likely composed it [ca. 1485] . For more on the dating of the manuscript and its
relationship to printed editions, see Fox’s discussion in The
Poems of Robert Henryson, lii-lxiv, especially lix-lxiv. The
handcrafted illumination that accompanies the fable,
The
Preaching of the Swallow, presents a scene that serves as a mashup of
previous elements from a variety of previously published woodcut images (fig. 2). To begin to comprehend the peculiar nature of this copied/adapted
illustration, a brief summary of the fable is in order: The narrator, happening upon
a flock of birds gathering around a swallow perched in a hawthorn tree, hides behind
a hedge to listen to their conversation. Warning fellow birds to dig up the hempen
seed that a fowler has just sown, the swallow predicts that these seeds will
eventually become the rope that the fowler will use to fashion a net, which he will
then use to catch and kill the birds that feed on the crops. Mocking the swallow’s
prudence, the birds ignore her advice and allow the seeds to germinate in the soil. A
year passes and the narrator returns to the scene to find the seeds have now sprouted
short stalks, which the swallow again implores the birds to pull up. Spurning her
counsel once again, the birds allow the stalks to grow to full bloom, until the
fowler harvests them to construct a net. He places the net on the ground and casts
fresh seed for the birds to eat. For the third time the swallow warns the birds, but
they greedily devour the new seed as the fowler catches them up in his net and kills
them. Henryson offers an allegory for this fable, in which the swallow represents a
preacher, who warns his flock (the birds) against the entrapments of the devil (the
fowler).
Given the presence of the human preacher at the pulpit and the gaggle of birds in the
tree, it is clear that the Harley illustrator tried to accommodate both literal and
allegorical elements of the fable. This conflation might seem appropriate for a genre
heavily inflected by allegory, but this combination of two interpretive modes is
actually a radical departure from the standard image that would accompany this fable,
which depicts the fowler casting seed in view of the swallow and the birds (fig. 3). The unique nature of the Harley illustration might motivate us to call it
an original creation, but upon further inspection, it would be
more appropriately called a reflexive mashup of other previously published
Aesopic figures. Navas defines the reflexive mashup as a form [that] uses samples from two or more
elements to access specific information more efficiently, thereby taking them
beyond their initial possibilities. To understand how this illustration operates as a reflexive mashup, the
printing history of these Aesopic images must be carefully considered.
I want to suggest that three of the elements of the Harley illustration, the bird in
the hand, the preacher at a pulpit (that looks more like a pedestal), and the
disembodied head on the hill (lower left corner), were redrawn as imitations of
symbols that originate in the standard frontispiece to the earliest printed book of
fables, first compiled by Heinrich Steinhöwel in 1476, which contained not only the
standard Latin fables of the medieval curriculum, but also their German translations
(fig. 4).
The frontispiece that serves as the primary source for the Harley
illustrator, however, was not Steinhöwel’s edition, but rather that of Thomas
Bassandyne, the resemblances of which are clear through visual comparison (fig. 5). In the lower right hand corner is a clear depiction of the bird in the hand
and in the lower left hand corner a preacher in pulpit-pedestal can be spotted
adjacent to the lower left edge of Aesop’s toga. A head on a hill is not readily
apparent in this frontispiece, but a man falling down an embankment can be seen to
the left of the pulpit-pedestal.
Let us consider first the preacher in the pulpit-pedestal, which is the most
striking and complicated image in the Harley illustration. While the preaching figure
matches exactly the preacher in Bassandyne’s frontispiece, Bassandyne’s preacher
differs significantly from Steinhöwel’s statuesque man atop the pedestal that
occupies the same position on the page. We know this figure to be Aesop because many
of the images represented in Steinhöwel’s frontispiece refer directly to scenes in
the
Vita Aesopi that commonly prefaced fable collections
after the thirteenth century and served as the source for Caxton’s Aesop. The episode in question, in which the Babylonian King
constructs a statue in Aesop’s honor, is also illustrated in one of Steinhöwel’s
other woodcuts (fig. 6), as is the case for most of the
images that appear in the frontispiece. In this sense, this titular collage of Aesopic images serves as a visual
index for the illustrations to come. We can easily imagine, for example, a hypertext
version of the frontispiece, in which the viewer would click the images to gain
access to episodes in the life of Aesop. Henryson’s fables, however, do not include
the Vita Aesopi, making the Bassandyne frontispiece a
partial homage (or an orphaned link, if you will) to Steinhöwel’s woodcuts. The
preacher in the pulpit-pedestal, which appears to originate in the Bassandyne
edition, complicates this reflexive relationship to the Steinhöwel frontispiece and
recasts Aesop on the pedestal as a preacher, who will appear in a remediated form in
the Preaching of the Swallow fable that appears in
Henryson’s collection. The Harley illustrator, by contrast, viewed the titular
collage less as a set of premodern hyperlinks to prior or subsequent Aesopic texts
than as raw material to be photo-shopped for a new use. In the
case of Henryson’s fable, the actual appearance of Aesop at a pulpit-pedestal would
have seemed entirely appropriate, particularly because of his direct invocation at
the outset of the moralitas, in which he is
described as a nobill clerk . . . [a]ne
poet worthie to be lawreate [noble clerk . . . a poet worthy to be a
laureate] who composed this fable for gude morall edificatioun [good moral edification] . The tension identified earlier in Henryson’s prologue – between
fables produced by many anonymous clerks and a singular Aesop – emerges again, this
time in a vexed attempt to cast laurels on the fable. This shift in textual authority
from the multiple clerical collaborators to classroom auctor is dramatized in the Harley illustration, which includes an
accretive figure that is a swallow, a preacher, and finally Aesop himself.
The third remixed element of the Harley illustration, the disembodied head, is
perhaps the most peculiar contributor to this increasing tension between multiple and
singular models of authorship. Given the fact that the head is bereft of any
discernible body and lacking the color of other figures in the illustration, it is
easy to overlook. It is quite possible, in fact, that the illustrator remained
undecided about what to do with this head, leaving it unfinished. After all, the only
reasonable explanation for its existence is its juxtaposition with what appears to be
the hedge that the narrator hides behind in order to eavesdrop on this parliament of
fowls. The insertion of a witness into a fable is a departure from the conventions of
the genre and a complication of point of view that Henryson champions throughout his
collection. Despite his deferral to Aesop's authority throughout his fables, Henryson
consistently asserts himself as an interpretive interloper in one way or another. The
Harley illustrator seemed to sense the authorial conflict represented by a narrative
figure who could threaten the credibility and coherence of Aesop, the
well-established author of the fable. As a possible compromise, the illustrator
returns to the frontispiece, but this time to a low point in Aesop’s life, his
violent demise – or what we might view as an allegorical or Barthean moment of
authorial death. This image of a man falling down a hill is actually an illustration
of Aesop being tossed over a cliff, an episode from the
Vita
Aesopi absent from Henryson’s fables and the Bassandyne print (fig. 7). The correspondence between the two images in their entirety, a floating
head and a prostrate body, are not convincing replicas of each other, but if we
examine the position of Aesop’s body in relationship to his statue, we can see that
his head is placed in a similar position as the disembodied head, both situated below
the pulpit-pedestal. If we are expected to associate these two images, a crisis of
textual authority arises because the head behind the hedge would presumably be the
narrator or Henryson, himself. Furthermore, his disembodiment, and arguably his
botched erasure from the scene, reflects an attempt by the illustrator to privilege
the figure of the preacher Aesop, a figure who would increasingly become the
exclusive author of all beast fables.
Aesop’s Grotesque Body in an Early Age of Print Reproduction
During the latter part of the fifteenth century when Henryson was composing his
fables, the Aesopic corpus experienced a transformation that coincided with the
arrival of the printing press. This newly mechanized system of textual production
witnessed a division and dismemberment of fable collections into discrete textual
traditions, now available in a variety of vernaculars, including English, French,
German, and Italian. Printers were then faced with the daunting prospect of
distilling a highly dynamic and encyclopedic genre, which contained multiple sets and
variations of fables and their commentaries, into a reproducible form that could be
easily absorbed by a new reading public. Despite Aesop’s new public façade, readers
were increasingly faced with what Benjamin called graduated and hierarchized mediation, still a far
cry from his description of the state of the press in the late-nineteenth century, in
which an increasing number of readers became
writers. Rather, I would suggest, this unstable moment of transition in the fifteenth
century between script and print led to increasing efforts to contain the authorial
aura of Aesop, which can be witnessed in the changing nature of descriptions and
illustrations of his physical body. And even more fascinatingly, this corporeal
transformation is accompanied by attempts to consolidate the widely varied and
dynamic fable corpora into a singular and reproducible Aesopic corpus.
One text mentioned at the outset of this essay that was often retained from earlier
manuscripts, but absent in the Bassandyne Henryson, was the biographical
Vita Aesopi, the standard preface to the curricular fables,
which provides a surprisingly monstrous illustration of Aesop's physical body, as
recounted by Caxton (see above, paragraph 8). It is no accident, of course, that
Caxton’s striking description matches the figure of Aesop in Steinhöwel’s
frontispiece to the fables, crafted only eight years earlier. Perhaps more than any
other depiction of Aesop, this humpbacked barefoot giant could be described as
grotesque, incompatible with the traditional image of the classical author
represented in Romanesque sculpture. Furthermore, his status as a venerated medieval
classroom authority is belied by what is described in the text as his initial
stuttering of a language comprehensible only to himself, an impediment that
highlights the corporeality of poetic production and threatens the very possibility
of an Aesopic literary corpus.
As printed Aesops were reproduced over time, the grotesque corporeal features of
Aesop became increasingly difficult to detect. For example, if we turn to the 1571
frontispiece of the Bassandyne print of Robert Henryson’s fables, we find a more
normalized authorial figure (see fig.
5). This more shapely Aesop is still, however, an odd match for Henryson’s
own physical description of the fabulist that appears in his
The
Lion and the Mouse fable. The narrator even goes so far as to present
Aesop as the most beautiful man he had ever seen : His gowne wes off ane claith als quhyte
as milk,His chymmeris wes off chambelate purpour broun,His hude off scarlet, bordowrit weill with silkOn hekillit wyis untill his girdill doun,His bonat round, and off the auld fassoun,His beird wes quhyte, his ene wes grit and gray,With lokker hair quhilk over his schulderis lay.[His gown was of a cloth as white as milk,
his shirt was of a deep purple fabric, his hood was scarlet, bordered skillfully
with silk, fringed unto his girdle below, his bonnet was round like the old
fashion, his beard was white, his eyes were large and grey, with curly hair which
lay over his shoulders.] While we can easily identify the spectacular aura of the corporeal
metamorphosis between the Aesops that appear in the frontispieces of the Steinhöwel
(1476) and the Bassandyne (1571) printed editions, Henryson’s bearded and grey-eyed
Aesop bears no likeness to the bumbling disruptive anti-hero of Caxton’s Aesop.
Like the insertion of disparate graphical features of Aesop into the remixed Harley
illustration of
The Preaching of the Swallow, Henryson’s
introduction of a curly-haired fabulist is a symptom of a growing conflict between
competing notions of textual authority in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. On
the one hand, textual and visual fabular corpora had largely been open sources, ripe
for conversion for new uses and audiences. On the other, the encyclopedic
accumulation and expansion of fable collections required printers to develop
editorial apparatus to create an appearance of textual control. In Henryson, this
tension is palpable, simultaneously acknowledging appropriation as a core value of
fabular production while offering a singular model of authorship through a beautified
Aesop. Moreover, it is hardly a coincidence that the physical body of Aesop
experiences a dramatic makeover at the same time that the Aesopic corpus becomes
increasingly codified and closed.
Corporate Textuality and the Aesopic Commons
As the Harley illustrator demonstrates through a remixing of manuscript and print
technologies, it would be enormously reductive and technologically deterministic to
conclude that the printing press ushered in this move towards singular authorship and
literary property. After all, the Aesopic corpus experienced a number of educational
and political transformations throughout the late-sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, as can be witnessed in the printed editions of John Brinsely (1617 and
1624), John Ogilby (1651 and 1668), Sir Roger L’Estrange (1692), and Jean de la
Fontaine (1668-94) . Within late-seventeenth-century pedagogical
discourse, however, we begin to see less of an emphasis on fable interpretation and
more of a focus on the fable itself, particularly as it would relate to childhood
development . And throughout the subsequent
centuries, Aesopica would play a central role within the development of the speaking
animal tale of children’s literature, a progenitor for Lewis Carroll’s
Alice in Wonderland (1865) and Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows (1908). By the mid-twentieth
century, the effacement of the fabular interpretative tradition had become so acute
that the classicist Lloyd W. Daly could publish a collection entitled Aesop Without Morals, an English translation of the fables
with their morals relegated to an appendix, much in the manner of answers in the back
of a schoolbook . Condemning the simple
one-line morals as an encumbrance and little more than an insult to our
intelligence, Daly offers the fables in isolation as mirror[s] of self-reflection. While he acknowledges the variability of the Aesopic tradition, he refers to
the fables as both a literary product and a floating, common property, suggesting that the fables are designed to promote individual intellectual
development. By unmooring the fables from their morals, Daly’s fables
float as unified objects of reflection, affording them a
romantic completeness that suggests that their artistic evolution had come to an end.
Aesop’s fables could now become common products designed for select, private, and
individual consumption.
While we might be tempted to view Daly’s amoral approach as
idiosyncratic, even more recent editions, such as Olivia and Robert Temple’s
Aesop: The Complete Fables (1998), reflect this modern
tendency to reduce Aesop to a containable property. As a Penguin paperback designed
for the mass market, the translators bypass the unruly medieval Latin tradition
entirely and rely exclusively on Émile Chambry’s 1927 edition of the Greek prose
fables. They justify their choice in a Note on the Text
this way: We have taken Chambry’s text to represent
the complete fables for the purposes of this volume,
although every scholar would probably alter the text by taking away some and
adding others according to his or her own personal choices . . . the
complete fables of Aesop is whatever the editor of its
Greek text chooses to say it is. By claiming that the completeness of the corpus – the
qualifying scare-quotes of which are eliminated in the title and back cover
description of the edition – is determined by the editor, Aesop becomes a commodified
property with boundary lines that are defined by personal
choices and particular purposes, euphemisms for
market demands that ride on hyperbolic claims such as the first translation ever to make available the complete corpus. This contention relies upon both the denigration of Aesopic authors such as
Babrius and Phaedrus, whom Robert Temple calls second- or third-rate adapters, and the devaluation of the dynamic commentary tradition, represented by some appalling, even idiotic morals that the Temples separate from the fables. Such an attempt to purify
the Aesopic corpus from its grotesque literary history and messy commentary tradition
effectively makes Aesop a property defined by mass-market aims and idiosyncratic
editorial limitations.
This transformation of Aesop from literary body to literary property, I want to
suggest, represents the way open source material, particularly creative work produced
before (or outside of the restrictions of) copyright, can become consolidated and
redefined as intellectual property, often at the expense of its
corporeal identity, as well as its free and open use. Consider
the example of incunabules, the first texts printed during the latter half of the
fifteenth century. While these printed volumes are often available to the public
within rare book archives, most of us only know incunabules through their
availability via the online database,
Early English Books
Online (EEBO 2003-2017). Produced centuries before the introduction of
copyright, these books were regarded as open sources that scholars could easily
reproduce and use without restriction . . . until 2011. The terms of service
developed by ProQuest, the publishing company that owns EEBO, now state: The electronic
versions of any public domain works that may be included in EEBO are the copyright
of ProQuest LLC. For all works in the collection, the printing or saving of texts
is permitted only for private or educational use. Further reproduction is
prohibited. This attempt by ProQuest to control an entire digitized corpus
of microfilmed early editions demonstrates how far we have moved away from the
corporeal nature of textual production, in which hands and bodies produce, embody,
and perform texts . And to some extent, even the
early association of books with libraries perpetuated this shift. As Michael Camille
suggests, The whole history, development, and, to
some extent, the institutional aims of the modern library have been to exclude
the body from the site of reading, to make a silent desomatized optics of the
biblioteca the simulacrum of purely mental
experience, a process that will only accelerate in the future with the
increasing incorporeality of the electronic word. Within the recent emergence of digital libraries, texts have migrated even
further from the body to become consolidated into the loci of databases, hidden behind the most indulgent proprietary fantasy
of all: the paywall. To protect the online value of these
intellectual properties, publishers have erected password-protected screens that
require readers to pay a premium for full access to content. Blaming the decline of
print subscription and advertisement, scholarly journals and the news media justify
the blocking of free access as their only means of revenue generation. The paywall is
also a proprietary metaphor that reveals the foundation of many institutions that
produce knowledge, from the university to the newsroom: an artificial barrier that
creates scarcity, enhances value, and accumulates capital. Moreover, the forms of
access the paywall regulates are unevenly distributed across universities, and even
across fields in ways that map onto the unequal structures of funding that have come
to define the modern university. In this sense, the paywall not only offers a means
toward understanding how the contemporary university has become an engine of
inequality, but also contributes to it directly. I am indebted to my colleague
Emilio Sauri for these observations about the social function of the paywall and
its effects on access within higher education. Given the high institutional
cost of subscribing to EEBO, ProQuest perverts the Romulan take both mantra in order to recast this incunabular
body as a an intellectual property whose doors are closed to many users. It is
locked, fixed, monetized, and controlled by a singular entity, a move presaged by
Aesopic printers and modern editors, who increasingly consolidated Aesop’s expandable
corpus into one classical figure.
Many have now joined the open access revolution, which seeks to
resist the increasing author-facing charges and subscription fees imposed by academic
publishers. Yet, even for digital initiatives such as the Text Creation Partnership
(TCP), which creates freely available XML/SGML encoded editions of a number of early
printed books, including those on EEBO, the access to the books is limited to their
textual transcriptions. And while the EEBO-TCP is enormously valuable for
cross-corpus searching, lexicographical study, and textual analysis, these printed
codices are effectively reduced to data, alphabetic texts that have shed their
codicological features. These books are now encoded text files
of digital scans available on EEBO, which are, themselves, de-somaticized images of
individual pages from early printed books. As Rebecca Welzenbach notes, for users who want to quickly get at the
content of the texts, not work with the data itself, XML files are not useful
unless they are indexed by a search engine and presented in a web
interface. By reducing them to data, the physical features of the books that are
represented visually on EEBO – namely, the marginalia, the illustrations, the textual
layouts, the fonts, and even handwritten corrections – are eliminated, effectively
stripped of the corporeal traces of author, printer, or reader. The texts are now
available to be transmitted to new locations and uploaded to new interfaces: EEBO-TCP
users are even encouraged not to worry about where they
discover the data, but where it comes from. While the TCP clearly provides a valuable resource for many digital humanists
and early book scholars, it also perpetuates the increasingly proprietary character
of the digital book, which has become defined more by where we find it, than
who created it or what it is. For example, Henryson is not even
listed as the author of the
Morall Fabillis on
EEBO-TCP’s Author browse feature. Instead the credit is given to Aesop, yet
another example of the consolidation of this corpus into one authorial figure . More importantly, these text files are in danger of
becoming metonyms for the books themselves, just one member of the corpus standing in
for all.
From the perspective of Aesopic poets and early humanists like Henryson, this
privileging of one member of a corpus (i.e. one author, one text) at the expense of
the others (i.e. illustrators, commentators, etc.) would have seemed inimical to the
common good, especially to many in the fifteenth century who had been thoroughly
schooled in Ciceronian notions of the body politic. In his
De
Officiis, Cicero uses a corporeal metaphor to describe the danger of
self-interested proprietary claims: Suppose, by way of comparison, that each
one of our bodily members should conceive this idea and imagine that it could
be strong and well if it should draw off to itself the health and strength of
its neighboring member, the whole body would necessarily be enfeebled and die;
so if each one of us should seize upon the property of his neighbors and take
from each whatever he could appropriate to his own use, the bonds of human
society must inevitably be annihilated.Ut, si unum quodque membrum sensum hunc
haberet, ut posse putaret se valere, si proximi membri valetudinem ad se
traduxisset, debilitari et interire totum corpus necesse esset, sic, si unus
quisque nostrum ad se rapiat commoda aliorum detrahatque quod cuique possit,
emolumenti sui gratia, societas hominum et communitas evertatur necesse
est. For Cicero, if the act of appropriation itself can be
appropriated and limited to one member, the communal body cannot thrive. His
insistence on the body as a symbol of a republic is, in turn, replicated in the fable
The Belly and the Members that became a central
feature in many Aesopic collections, including the elegiac
Romulus and Caxton’s Aesop, as well as a
contentious political metaphor in England for the relationship between a monarch and
her subjects throughout the seventeenth century . Henry Turner calls this hierarchical conflict the problem of the more-than-one, or the
tension between the part and the whole, as well as the laws and power necessary to regulate
relationships among people and the values that justify this regulation. Just as this conflict arises for artists caught between the protections of
copyright law and the free culture of the creative commons, this struggle is palpable
for Henryson and his contemporaries, who were caught in the cradle of their
incunabular moment, vying with printers for their share of the marketplace. According
to Turner, this contention gave rise to the sixteenth century
corporation, which attempted to actualize the corporeal
identity of political and knowledge communities: At once an artificial person and
a fictive community, the corporation is both one and many,
enjoying rights and freedoms that are simultaneously rights of persons and
rights of collectivities. As both a singular figure and a textual community of authors and
commentators, the medieval Aesop serves as a prototype of the early modern
corporation and a representative an intellectual gift economy, in which scholarly or
artistic work is transparently shared and used. But just as medieval practices of
appropriation have become exploited for privatized and monetized within digital
databases, the corporation has become too often an entity that immunizes stakeholders
against risks at the exclusion of others.
Even if we were to agree to reclaim the corporeal nature of intellectual work, how
might we move beyond the proprietary language that grips our conception of a
creative commons? On the one hand, if we perceive of a creative commons as
shared property, appropriation cannot exist. We cannot appropriate what is already
proper to us. If, on the other hand, we agree with Roberto
Esposito that our understanding of the commons is the totality of persons united not by a property but
precisely by an obligation or a debt, then any assertion of subjectivity
or interpretation cannot exist either . Any
contribution to the community is defined by a duty to be performed, not the
participation of a desiring subject. The opposite of community, for Esposito, is
immunity, which negates any participation or indebted fulfillment of office . This cynical impulse drives restrictive claims
to intellectual ownership championed by copyright attorneys and
publishing corporations like ProQuest. Immunity opens the space for subjectivity, but
it is exclusively hostile to any notion of a creative community.
And while some communities, especially those that oppress others, should be subject
to critique and sanction, creative communities cannot survive on cycles of
destruction and immunization. If we want such artistic communities to thrive, we must
reject, following Esposito, any understanding of community based in common property,
since such a proprietary conception of knowledge production only leads to restrictive
claims to intellectual property and copyright, which are often at odds with creative
and interpretive practices, particularly within the contexts of Aesopic textuality
and digital remix. We might go so far as to challenge the very use of the term
appropriation, or taking for one’s own what is proper to another, since
this fundamentally suggests the use of someone else’s property. Yet, as postcolonial
analyses have shown, even cultural appropriation may not be simply reduced to
theft and often becomes, as Kathleen M. Ashley and Véronique Plesch
suggest, a two-way process, one in which exchange
and creative response may take place. Such dialogic artistic practices may indeed operate as acts of ambivalent homage, obscuring the language of property within the act of
appropriation.
Aesop’s fables and EEBO’s incunables are now available in more libraries and
databases than ever before, but the cost of their massive distribution has been the
gradual diminution of their corporeal character. Whereas Aesopica had been produced
by multiple fabulists and commentators and early printed books had been mashed up by
their readers and illustrators, these corpuses have increasingly become a floating, common property and a
textual landscape to be mined. Within the longue durée of remixing and the increased assertion of intellectual
property rights, it is difficult to imagine a neo-Aesopic corporation through which
appropriation and interpretation are no longer immunized, or without office. There
may be, however, a munificent way to conceive of creative communities
that synthesizes Esposito’s biopolitics with Turner’s theorization of the early
modern group person. As Esposito notes, the Latin root munus of
community can mean both an obligation and a gift. And while he goes to great lengths
to reject the voluntary connotation of munus
by demonstrating the gift’s requirement of gratitude , we only need to turn to the Aesopic invitation to take both to find a communal body based
in generosity, goodwill, and the production of new fabulists, such as Avianus, Marie
de France, and Robert Henryson. This addition of auctores to Aesopica is a model of what we might call an articulated
corporation, a singular artistic corpus that invites and accumulates new members.
Within such a grotesque vision of artistic production, intellectual work is no longer
a property to be owned, but a multi-membered body to be fed, nurtured, and
continually reshaped and redressed for new occasions and new creators.
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