The above sampling of the many contexts in which practices like de/composition show up indicates that these practices are productive, generative, and manifold. They are substantial contributors to the field of writing with sources, characterized by a set of shared procedures that can ground a reconceptualizing of the field beyond its traditional neglect of creative tinkering. I attribute the commonality and consistency in procedures of de/composition to the fact that these same procedures explain not just how one moves from source text to reused text, but also how one moves from anything to something else—that is, how to generate further text, how to make more, how to put things together. At the broadest level, then, these procedures are productive and reliable approaches to generating text. Reuse is not an eccentric form of production, but a practice that illuminates and informs writing and invention in general. However, valuing reuse calls for an expanded notion of “new text,” or text generation. The texts generated via reuse include those that represent through de/composition a reading of another text. These modes of reading also comprise forms of writing: they demonstrate or perform a reading, rather than report it separately. I want to emphasize, then, that such modes entail production and performance, not just repetition through reuse. Reused material can be material that has been assimilated and re-
voiced by the re-user, then presented as part of a performance. Reuse on its own can be productive practice. We recognize its invention more readily when we avoid approaching texts like de/compositions as though they are essays with “too many” quotations and not enough “new” material.
To be more specific, the procedures of reuse underlie, for instance, the movement from model to imitation, from brainstorm to draft, from draft to revision, from writing assignment to response, and from reading material to response or interpretation—in short, movement from preexisting text to new text, whether or not re-appropriation also occurs. I see this continuity between reuse and general invention in some reliable strategies for creative writing that Hazel Smith develops in The Writing Experiment. She presents a group of techniques for language manipulation that can assist writers throughout the composing process, from beginning to write to finalizing what has been written (what she calls editing). These techniques largely coincide with those that I have been tracing in examples of reuse. They include rearrangement, substitution, addition, subtraction, amplification, combination, adjustment, refining, and rewriting. Those in this list that differ from my procedures actually contain within them the same procedures that I have identified. Amplifying and refining, for instance, are tasks that involve adding to the pieces that one already has, as well as deleting, substituting, rearranging, and combining them. Smith shows that once a writer has a starting-point, he or she can begin manipulating (i.e., executing these procedures) and thus can generate something else and produce some movement from the initial text. Whether the starting-point is a preexisting text or one newly improvised, the same manipulations can guide further production. Anything made of language can thus be made to produce more language via these self-generating procedures.
These insights may seem obvious when explicitly stated, yet they deviate from a contrary, normative approach to invention: one that begins not with language per se, but with an idea, what Smith calls “running with the referent” (18). However, she rightly recognizes that referential invention rarely happens in isolation: instead, most writing emerges out of some combination of manipulating language and working with referents (19). There is always some feedback between language and ideas, for writing is simultaneously a material and mental process. Furthermore, it is likely that one’s idea for a starting-point will emerge out of some prior interaction with text, making that idea partly mental, partly material.
To concretize my argument, I reproduce in Table 2 a series of examples that Smith uses to demonstrate how amplification and refinement can generate new text. Importantly, Smith builds these selections out of a set of “just-made” textual parts, rather than “ready-mades” as in overt reuse. Though just-made, her starting-points are not, however, original: they include the cliché “matchstick thin arms and legs” (29). I make visible the key procedural moves: italicizing additions, bolding substitutions, underlining combinations, and striking through deletions.
Table 2: Procedures of Reuse in Text Generation
Version 1 She is very thin and her arms and legs are like matchsticks. She opens the fridge door and closes it. She walks away then turns back. She opens the fridge door, takes out a yoghurt, and shuts it again.
Version 2 She is becoming thinner by the day. Her arms and legs are so frail you can see the
veins stand out and her face is hollow and creased. She is losing her hair, it
sprouts only in tufts. She paces up and down outside the fridge and then opens the door. Inside are rows of plain and fruit-flavoured yoghurt, egg sandwiches and cartons of milk. She closes the fridge door abruptly. She walks away, then turns back and opens it again. She looks around. She takes out a yoghurt, peels off the lid, and quickly swallows a spoonful. Then she shuts the door, feeling acutely anxious and repelled by her behaviour.
Version 3 She is becoming thinner by the day. Her arms and legs are so frail you can see the veins stand out and her face is hollow and creased. She is losing her hair, it sprouts only in tufts. She circles in front of the fridge and then opens the door. Inside are rows of plain and fruit-flavoured yoghurt, egg sandwiches and cartons of milk. She
slams the fridge door abruptly. She edges away, then turns back and opens it
the lid, and quickly swallows a spoonful. Then she lets the door go, feeling acutely anxious and repelled by her behaviour.
Though rearrangement does not occur in these examples, it easily could. In moving from the third version to a fourth one, I might reposition the final sentence ahead of the first, convert its verbs to past tense, and shift the paragraph from description of present events to reflection upon past events. I thus indicate that the subject felt acutely anxious and repelled by her behavior and then suggest why by listing her actions as Smith does here. I might also incorporate more combination in shaping version 3 into a monologue, perhaps uttered by a character expressing concern for a friend or family member. Combining some of these sentences into one long sentence by inserting several and’s and then’s would convert this excerpt into the more spontaneous, rambling prose common of speech.
With Smith’s examples, I am relying upon the same patterns of language manipulation that I employ in textual reuse, even though Smith is, in theory, generating new, “non-reused” text. The slippage between reuse and “regular” text generation is palpable because the distinction between them is minute. Invention does not occur on a blank page. Instead, it happens amid prefabricated givens, whether they are well-circulated clichés, the just-made kernel phrases like “matchstick thin arms and legs” that Smith helps writers to develop, or the short narratives that R. G. Parker extends into ever-longer paragraphs in an exercise also called “amplification” (40- 43). These core procedures—copying, combining, arranging, substituting, adding, and deleting— are so fundamental to invention that they appear throughout the archive of modern English instructional materials, including the textbooks like Parker’s that I surveyed in Chapter 1.
IV. DE/COMPOSITION AND ITS ALLIES IN THE ARCHIVES OF ENGLISH