What We Talk About When We Talk About Boycotts

1.
In the acknowledgments for Salinger, the new biography that accompanies the documentary about the reclusive lion of 20th-century literature, the authors state: “Most biographies include photographs of and letters to and from the biographical subject, but as in the case of someone as secretive as Salinger, photographs of Salinger and letters from him were extremely difficult to come by.”

David Shields and Shane Salerno are not the first Salinger biographers to be hampered by the author’s shadow life. In fact, current U.S. copyright law is bolstered by a former biographer’s clash with Salinger over access to the author’s unpublished letters. In the 1980s, Ian Hamilton excerpted from a slew of Salinger letters that had been donated to the archives of Harvard, Princeton, and the University of Texas at Austin. The letters were quoted extensively in a draft that went out to reviewers and that was planned for publication by Random House. When Salinger’s agent, Dorothy Olding, passed along an uncorrected proof to the author in late 1986, he formally registered his copyright in the letters and told his lawyer to object to the publication of the book until all contents from the unpublished letters had been removed. Hamilton acquiesced and revised many of the letter excerpts into close paraphrases. For example, “like a dead rat…grey and nude…applauding madly” became “resembling a lifeless rodent…ancient and unclothed…claps her hands in appreciation.” The artfulness of such paraphrases aside, they didn’t appease Salinger and he sued Random House for copyright violation, breach of contract (Hamilton had signed copyright forms at the archives in question), and unfair competition (it was sometimes ambiguous as to whether the words were Salinger’s or Hamilton’s; why would consumers buy actual books of Salinger letters?)

The United States District Court for the Southern District of New York decided Salinger had enough of a case to issue a temporary restraining order pending an appeal. In any determination of fair use or copyright infringement under U.S. law, a judge looks at four factors: the purpose and character of the use; the nature of the copied work; the amount and substantiality of the use; and the effect of the use upon the work’s value.

In 1986, the Court of Appeals ruled in Salinger’s favor and thus began a new era in U.S. copyright law. Not only were unpublished works on their way to becoming covered under the fair use constraints and privileges, but a bright line was also drawn around unpublished letters. In subsequent copyright case law, a distinction was made between the vehicle of a letter (the paper it’s written on or the virtual notepad of an email) and the expression of the words themselves. This same logic is applied to unpublished creative works.

Here’s how it works: Say I write you some letters or stories in college and then go on to become famous. Years go by and we fall out of touch. One day you’re cleaning out your attic and you find a stash of my pithy dispatches from the dorms. You decide to sell them to an archive and they happily buy them and make them available for researchers studying my oeuvre. What the archive has actually bought are the pieces of paper and single-serving rights for researchers to consume them. The words themselves, my use of vocabulary and vivid imagery, these continue to remain my property. Not only that, but for up to 70 years after my death, my estate can continue to control the ownership of those words.

Given the impact of the Salinger case on copyright, for some years there was uncertainty about whether or not a writer could quote at all from unpublished letters, regardless of where they resided. In Wright v. Warner Books, a subsequent lawsuit, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals clarified that some amount of quotation from unpublished works, including letters, could qualify as fair use. The Copyright Act was then updated to include unpublished materials.

Unlike Hamilton’s biography, which was shelved and then reworked as In Search of J.D. Salinger, the new book by Salerno and Shields breaks new ground and pushes the boundaries of the sometimes rigidly imposed set of U.S. copyright rules. Salinger contains excerpts from dozens of the author’s unpublished letters. There’s a hint in the book that cooperation from Salinger’s children was part of the project at one point, though later withdrawn, so we can’t know for sure what kinds of permissions were granted. But given the secretive, almost hostile nature of Salinger and his subsequent estate’s relations with the wider world, it would be fair to assume that none of these excerpts came with the express permission from the author or his heirs. Depending on how you look at it, including extensive excerpts from those letters is either an invasion of Salinger’s privacy or a coup for fair use, a boon for biographers working in archives everywhere.

2.
With an abundance of caution, I recently sat with the Salinger archive at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. For a novelist treading water in the middle of a draft, an archive is both an escape and a frustration. It might be fun to see the prosthetic eye Denis Johnson wore during his walk-on role in the film adaptation of his book Jesus’ Son (yes, the Ransom Center owns that motif from “Emergency”), but it doesn’t get me any closer to the end of my own book.

There are two Salinger archival boxes, both nondescript and smelling faintly of old typewriter ribbon. The reading room rules forbid you from removing more than one folder at a time from the document boxes, so the hungry archival researcher is forced to observe a measure of restraint. At most, you can walk briskly back and forth between the cart where the boxes sit and the well-lit wooden desks where you can plumb the sleeved documents for their secrets. I decided to skip the letters from Salinger to long-time friend Elizabeth Murray, from 1940 to 1963. According to the finding aid, they dwell on such things as the breakup of Salinger’s first marriage and his relationship with Oona O’Neill, daughter of Eugene O’Neill and the fourth wife of Charlie Chaplin. Instead, I went straight for the story manuscripts.

The first was the manuscript for an unpublished story named “Birthday Boy,” about a young man in the hospital for depression who is visited by his girlfriend on his birthday. Apparently from the early 1940s, the story is fledgling and uneven, as if Salinger hasn’t quite found his stylistic swagger. On the top right hand corner of the first page are some notes in red pencil. They’ve been partially erased and then crossed over with a regular lead pencil. I can’t be sure, but the red-penciled letters look like the rejection comments of an editor.

The second manuscript was for an early draft of a story called “I’m Crazy,” which eventually appeared in the December 1945 issue of Collier’s. It was also the literary debut of Holden Caulfield, who would go on to become the endearing and angst-ridden protagonist of Catcher in the Rye.

Despite the fact that some degree of quotation from unpublished works has won legal ground under fair use, most archives insist that no quotation is allowed without permission from the estate and the archive. If you follow this line of reasoning, as Hamilton was forced to do, even paraphrasing too closely is an infringement. According to this notion of copyright, I may report facts and ideas, but not expression. As one archivist put it in an email: “only if you are speaking generally about the manuscripts (supplying a description, for example)” do you not need permissions.

Curiously, though, under all three sets of rules — copyright, fair use, and most archive policies — I am free to use my iPad to take good resolution images of unpublished manuscripts so long as I don’t share them publicly. Who can say if this extends to the privacy of my own home where I might convert an unused closet into a Salinger shrine? Such is the fickleness of U.S. copyright law.

Although I won’t or can’t or shouldn’t quote directly from the unpublished manuscripts, nothing prevents me from describing them in general terms. So I can, for instance, tell you that in the fledgling draft of “I’m Crazy” in which Holden appears for the first time, the narrative is in third person. When it is published in Colliers, the narrative stance switches to first person. And by the time Holden crosses the transom into Catcher, as we all know, he’s found his full-blown voice, a blend of angst and innocence that has captured readers for generations. (The book continues to sell about half a million copies a year.) That Holden first walked onto the novelistic stage in third person might come as a profound shock to Salingerites — it did to me. A simple point of view switch is par for the course in many burgeoning novels, but this one is particularly momentous. Here, in the archive, we see Salinger before he’s broken through. We might have assumed that Holden had come to Salinger fully formed, as if through a divine channel, but the sobering news — and the glimmering gift of such archives — is that he emerged fitfully and through a series of false starts.

Perhaps one day soon the morass that is U.S. copyright law will be simplified. At the very least, maybe more of us will understand it. In preparing to write this piece, I reached out to an award-winning novelist, a respected journalist, an academic, and a staff member of an archive. They all chimed in with slightly different answers about whether or not unpublished letters and creative work could be quoted, paraphrased, or described in general terms. If writers and researchers can’t absorb the law, then the lay public has very little chance. Chances are, though, the reading public could care less about the fate of unpublished stories and letters when so much new Salinger work is allegedly about to hit the streets. Salerno and Shields assure us that between 2015 and 2020, we’ll see, among other things, five new Glass family stories and fiction that further fleshes out the story of Holden Caulfield. That’s better than waiting for the clock to run out on Salinger’s copyright on former work. I’ll take that over a first run of “Birthday Boy” in the pages of The New Yorker in the year 2083 any day.

1.
Over 46 million blogs exist on Tumblr. That figure is peanuts compared to the 845 million users on Facebook or the 462 million on Twitter, but the five-year-old company is currently enjoying a period of exponential growth. Given the its simplicity, this newfound popularity should come as no surprise. After all, it’s easy to use Tumblr — you hardly have to do anything. While users certainly have the ability to post original content to their blogs, the vast majority choose to “reblog” content previously posted by other users. In other words, to tumble is to appropriate — not generate — content. Almost every blog on Tumblr is a pastiche of images, memes, or quotes that belong to others. Whether Tumblr represents a unique form of self-expression or just another way to bookmark online curios is a different question; at the most basic level, however, we can say that each user’s blog represents an amalgamation of (possibly related) content. This ability to easily aggregate others’ content has allowed the platform to carve out a sizable niche on the Internet and earn the distinction of being one of today’s hippest (and most valuable) Internet properties. That said, we should recall that Tumblr is not the first technology to engage in this practice. Consider the early-modern European analogue to Tumblr: the commonplace book.

Maintained by writers such as John Milton and Ben Jonson, commonplace books were personal notebooks teeming with aphorisms, quotations, and annotations. In a world without Wikipedia, the commonplace book was especially handy for argumentation, for it was a reservoir of useful wisdom that could be memorized and deployed in rhetoric and composition. In fact, in his essay “The Commonplace Bee: A Celebration,” Princeton professor Anthony Grafton writes that the 16th-century humanist Justus Lipsius argued exclusively via citations he memorized from his commonplace book. Lipsius, who once offered to recite Tacitus with a dagger to his throat, liberally quoted other greats like St. Augustine, Cyprian, and Cicero in order to broadcast his erudition and insulate himself from criticism. “When challenged,” according to Grafton, Lipsius “replied, calmly, that his opponents, even if already old men, needed to go back to school.” (Maybe Lipsius served as inspiration for Newt Gingrich — last week’s New Yorker “Talk of The Town” noted that Gingrich has amassed dozens of shoeboxes’ worth of interesting quotes on scraps of paper since high school.)

But perhaps the phenomenon of keeping a commonplace book dates back even earlier than the Renaissance. Grafton notes that Seneca, first-century Roman Stoic philosopher, likened the commonplace book to a literary honeycomb:
We should follow…the example of the bees, who flit about and cull the flowers that are suitable for producing honey, and then arrange and assort in their cells all that they have brought in. These bees, as our Virgil says, “pack close the flowing honey, and swell their cells with nectar sweet.” We could so blend these several flavors into one delicious compound that, even though it betrays its origin, yet it nevertheless is clearly a different thing from that whence it came.
Here Seneca described the intellectual synthesis that results from annotation in the commonplace book. His words also illustrated the dominant strain of thought regarding the commonplace book’s purpose, in which the book guided its owner en route to erudition. Given the onerous demands on those who wished to be learned, the commonplace book would serve as the ideal aid to scholars. Erasmus nicely situates us: “Anyone who wants to read through all types of authors (for once in a lifetime all literature must be read by anyone who wishes to be considered learned) will collect as many quotations as possible for himself.” No small task.

2.
True, like Tumblr users, owners of commonplace books actively compiled information. True, the “quote” button on the Tumblr dashboard seems especially reminiscent of commonplacing. And true, Tumblr serves as a memory aid in a similar vein, allowing one to bookmark and revisit content that, in the abyssal space of the Internet, might be impossible to find without the right keywords the next day. Tumblr may be all of these things, but it’s definitely not the study aid described above. But before we bust this analogy, let’s consider the commonplace book’s less serious purposes. While championing its role as a scholarly tool, Erasmus also extolled the commonplace book for its whimsical qualities. In describing Thomas More’s daughters, avid keepers of commonplace books, Erasmus delighted in the frivolous aspects to their art of commonplacing, observing, “they flit like so many little bees between Greek and Latin authors of every species, here noting down something to imitate… there getting by heart some witty anecdote to relate among their friends.” Entertaining friends with a witty anecdote — learned casually “here” and “there” — seems more like preparation for cocktail party repartee than for a career in academia. The Roman writer Aulus Gellius’ nonchalant approach to commonplacing resembles that of the average Tumblr user as well. Gellius, who Grafton introduces to us in “The Commonplace Bee,” said that “[he] used to jot down whatever took my fancy, of any and every kind, without any different plan or order.” Such carefree recording of interesting quotes is not different to what one sees on Tumblr, where untold numbers of daily, inspirational, or random quotes circulate in the site’s unpredictable ecosystem.

So commonplace books did not always serve scholarly ends — fine, you say. But what about the question of audience? Commonplace books were very private documents, while Tumblr pages are public. Well, this is only notionally true — the audience for a random, non-celebrity, unspecialized Tumblr blog is effectively zero. (Trust me — I speak from experience.) In this case, if information is public but not accessed by anyone, is the distinction between public and private still germane? The possibility that someone else — say, a future employer or girlfriend — could access one’s Tumblr blog could introduce an element of image-consciousness, but it’s unlikely that this fact would substantially alter the content of one’s collection of material created by others.

But the most serious flaw in the analogy regards the information society in which Tumblr exists: we live in an archival age, in which memory has reached a point of near-irrelevance. With the right keyword, we can instantly recall any message, photo, or article instantly. That memory is never endangered by the specter of forgetting endangers memory more than ever. Thanks to this ultimate memory aid, we never have to remember anything, so we forget. In the age of the commonplace book — an age of admittedly considerably less information — scholarly minds whizzed with quotations, constantly maintained because anything, if forgotten, could be lost forever. The stakes were high: aphorisms, entire speeches had to be deployed in conversation or rhetoric by heart — they weren’t just talismans to be reblogged because they seemed neat.

But maybe we’ve been too critical of Tumblr. It may lack to scholarly direction of the commonplace book, but there’s beauty in minutiae. What seems to be trivial could be of utmost importance. At the very least, the indirect, more playful medium of Tumblr is not inconsequential — its value just may not be legible to us yet. As Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei famously declaimed, “In this material world, the space for thought is narrowing; the world is lacking in imagination and meaning. Stories, dreams, fantasies — they could all become vehicles for expression.” That China has blocked access to Tumblr testifies to the platform’s potency as a vehicle for expression. Maybe we’ve underestimated the power of the reblog.

3.
In the case of the commonplace book at least, we have been operating under the assumption that the accumulation of knowledge is a noble enterprise, almost beyond reproach. Nietzsche, naturally, presents the dissenting voice. In “On the Use and Abuse of History for Life,” he writes that information only serves to weigh us down. “In the end modern man drags an immense amount of indigestible knowledge stones around with him, which on occasion rattle around in his belly, as the fairy tale has it.” Within the sphere of Tumblr, this question rears its head as well — do we really need to refresh our Dashboard again to see if Zooey Deschanel or our ex-boyfriend has posted something new? From this Nietzschean point of view, the acquisition of knowledge doesn’t only fail to improve our lives — it makes them more difficult.

Oscar Wilde would agree. In “De Profundis,” he wrote, “Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.” In the practices of commonplacing and reblogging, this last phrase has literally become true: their passions a reblog. While Nietzsche warned us about history’s capability to imprison us, Wilde would be more concerned that these technologies could efface our identities and, as a result, diminish our capacity for original thought. On one’s Tumblr page, consciously or not, one forms one’s identity by appropriating other people’s words and images. And when using a commonplace book, as demonstrated by Justus Lipsius, one undergoes an exercise in recitation, not ratiocination. Wilde is right — these collections, online or in print, induce a sort of intellectual passivity.

In ultimately questioning the dangers of both the commonplace book and Tumblr — departing from the initial task of sorting out the imperfect analogy between them — we’ve now said so much as to say nothing definitive. We’ve evaded responsibility for an all-consuming conclusion and instead now sit at the intersection of these two technologies, at once so similar and so different. Consider the Tumblr blog. Consider the commonplace book. And then, finally, consider your consideration of the two.

Image: Wikimedia