By Jonny Lowndes 

The 20th Century often expressed itself as footnotes to Edgar Allan Poe. Any literature that concerned itself with the new urban sublime was ripping off his story, The Man of the Crowd; any that tried to ‘explain the ways of the dead god to man’ - that tried to mate Milton and Nietzsche - used Poe’s inscrutable streets, decaying manses (for example the House of Usher) and shelterless interiors (the noisy boudoir of A Tell-Tale Heart) as a crucible; any that hailed science (The Gold Bug) or crime (the Dupin stories) as subjects fit for literature did so from behind Poe’s wizened aegis. 

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By Ollie Thomas

‘Flowing into’ or ‘flowing onto’? The former, in the earliest Latin uses – as rivers flow into the sea, blood into the heart, or words into our ears. But metaphorical ‘influence’ was figured long before then, by Muse inspiring poet, or god inspiring prophet. Such inspiration – making breath flow into – came from above, even if you were a Delphic priestess reaching your trance by sitting over a fuming crevice.

Influence is, from this beginning, a power-relationship, and the influenced, being less powerful, are like wrestlers pinned down and no longer in a position to exercise their volition ‘freely’. So we are ‘under’ the influence of alcohol even as it circulates within us. Most of us are first initiated into familial power-relations, and perhaps it is unsurprising that literary influences have often been figured as old men (of course, the authors were mostly men): the sort who ruled households in Proto-Indo-European society, and served as councils of elders in many of its daughter-societies; the sort who were constantly mentioned as exempla in Roman discourse, and whose wax busts were kept in noble houses and paraded at funerals (if wax can be moulded to be like them, so can we…). Although the past is ‘behind’ us in the normal English metaphor, and below us archaeologically, genealogically these old men are still figured as above us, though physically they are not on an Olympus.

One story, then, is that literary influence, flowing down a ‘genealogy’ of authors, threatens to flood us. The ‘anxiety of influence’, aside from a fear of drowning, could be the fear that we won’t live up to our fathers, and/or as Harold Bloom did one can give it a Freudian spin – the latent desire to get rid of them. But if we actually believe in the Freudian dimension of this, what ‘mother’ do our influences threaten to keep us from? Perhaps the Muse of originality. Already in the 5th century BC, Choerilus of Samos complained ‘O happy the servant of the Muses who was skilled in song in those days, when their meadow was still uncut: now it has all been made into allotments and genres have reached their boundaries, so that we are left last in the race without anywhere to take our newly-yoked wagon, however hard we look around.’ No doubt some authors are anxious about, say, treading in Shakespeare’s footsteps, as Brahms was initially nervous about taking on the Beethovenian symphony. Dryden’s translation of the Aeneid quotes from the original as its motto: ‘he follows his father, though his strides are not so great’ – the original refers to Ascanius running alongside Aeneas as they leave Troy.

Perhaps, however, Dryden’s reverence stems from the inherently epigonal nature of a translation. A useful comparison is Statius in the century after Vergil. He already ended his epic about Thebes with a similar allusion to the same scene as Dryden: ‘My Thebaid… live on, I pray, but do not assail the divine Aeneid – rather follow at a distance and constantly adore its footsteps’. This time, Statius sets his book up as Creusa, the wife of Aeneas who follows loyally behind him and Ascanius, but does (as Statius fears) go missing. This reverence is evidently playful posturing rather than genuine expression of anxiety; similarly, Choerilus followed his complaints with an epic poem about historical Greek relations with Persia – profoundly innovative content for the genre.

After all, to return to the Freudian aspect, most of us grow up to love our fathers. To turn the ‘anxiety of influence’ model on its head, some poets were eager to trace themselves back to figures of authority. A guild of singers from ancient Chios had the name ‘Homeridae’ (originally, probably ‘guild of the public gathering’, after their performance-context). To publicise their most impressive songs, they reinterpreted their name as ‘sons of Homer’ and by the late 6th century BC had invented a biography for the legendary maestro (e.g. his blindness, which makes him a prophet-like figure of mystique). Though these Homeridae, then, were closely aware of the power of an authorial name, they effaced their own names in favour of Homer’s. Of course, this required some very specific circumstances – the guild setup, and low circulation of books so that there was no standard edition and no interest in copyright. However, it still seems closer than anxiety as a description of the relationships of, say, Roman poets to their predecessors. When these authors mention their poetic forebears, they are more life-givers with whom we can play than stern fathers whom we must live up to or overcome; playing is, after all, at the root of poetic ‘al-lus-ion’.

We shouldn’t liberally assign neuroses to authors who figure an artistic influence as a father-figure. In any case, the concept of father, whether or not Freud was right, is too historically-determined to make any such assignment straightforward. But it may be worth asking whether this image of influence has itself had a beneficial influence on the history of art. Most obviously, has it made the canon patriarchal? A second point: in a recent interview on BBC Radio 3, the pianist Stephen Hough generated some surprise for listing several of his contemporaries as major influences on his playing, and I think it is true that current conceptions of influence place too much weight on a generation-gap. Influences are limited to one direction in time, of course: ‘Eliot influenced Shakespeare’ only works as a shorthand for the truism that ‘living in a world which has read Eliot makes a difference to how one interprets Shakespeare’. I was delighted to find the alternative image of a {cheeky younger brother}/{older brother} relationship in the Homeric Hymn to Hermes (5th century BC): as the poem presents Hermes as a cheeky younger brother who steals things from Apollo, it cheekily borrows and overturns features of the Homeric Hymn to Apollo, such as the question of which god was first to patronise lyre-playing. Fraternality is also the message of Pope in appendix 7 to the Dunciad: he assembles a mass of basically parallel abuse levelled by critics at him and at Dryden. So too Eliot in The Waste Land, a tissue of fragmented allusions, quotes Baudelaire’s ‘hypocrite lecteur – mon semblable, mon frère’, and thus shows himself to be a reader of Baudelaire’s, and thus his like and his brother.

By De Froment, who intends to rewrite this soon, but sweetly met his deadline.

“Let’s go out on Friday and get shitfaced”. “It was a great night, we got absolutely battered”. “Chris is hilarious - he was ratted that night”. There’s a lot of talk of drinking, of how much people have drunk, and of how much they’re going to drink. It’s a part of our culture. The lads get pissed. The girls get pissed too. It’s a badge of honour for some, and a pleasing topic for some holier-than-thou it-wasn’t-like-this-in-my day hand wringing for others. The plague of binge drinking. The youth spilling out of pubs and hitting each other in the face. For fun. ‘Cause they’re rat-arsed. The language of drunkenness is rich, and talk of how much everyone’s drinking is around us all the time, from our nearest and dearest, and from the great and good. We’re bathed in it, pickled in it.

    
All this talk may only be making things worse. There’s an interesting phenomenon known in psychological circles as pluralistic ignorance, and it looks like this. A survey was done of some undergraduates (why undergraduates? Because they lurk within arm’s reach of psychology departments, and they can be bribed for their answers with points towards their course grade). “On a scale of one to ten, how comfortable are you with the level of drinking on campus?” “How comfortable do you think the average undergraduate is with the level of drinking on campus?” Take the average of the answers to question one, and you know how relaxed the average undergraduate says they are with the level of drinking. Then we want to know how this compares with the answers to question two. It turns out undergrads consistently think their average peer is more comfortable with the amount everyone’s drinking than they really are. For some reason they get an inaccurate picture of the norm.

Getting a norm wrong on its own is hardly going to make the room spin. However it doesn’t end there. If you come back to these people three months later, or to the men, at least, they’re happier with the level of drinking than they were to begin with. They’ve internalized the norm that they picked up on several months earlier. The trouble with this is that it wasn’t the norm at all. They’ve conformed to a norm that doesn’t even exist. On top of this, it looks like their boozing may go up with their comfort levels too. Interestingly none of this seems to affect the women. They get the norm wrong, but that’s where it ends.

Pluralistic ignorance about drinking norms writ large might explain why people are drinking more and more, and sounding more and more blaze about it. On the other hand mistaken exaggeration of the norm might explain why so many irritating rent-a-gobs think the country’s morals are going down the drain, when they’re not. That’s an empirical question, really.