User:Nadiners/ nextessay

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Where does the ‘spirit’ reside in a ghostwritten text?

Warning: What you are about to read is not ghost written.

What if it had been written by someone else, a ghost? A ghost who would listen to me, as the author, then write down my thoughts in a structured and comprehensible way. His job would be to keep my voice and my story, and have a nicely edited text ready to be read by the public. However, his skilled use of the language, and his choice of words might influence and read other interpretations to my actual story. Or, we might end up sharing the story, wether desired or not. What if my ghost writer were a machine? If technology were advanced enough to give the creative literary skills of a human and have the consciousness to understand the storyteller? Would this then turn the machine into a sort of slave, he wouldn’t express his opinion, he would do what he is told.

The scale of participation of a ghost can vary from being nearly just an editor, but in most cases the ghost writer is hired to do most of the writing. Before any work is done there should be an agreement, a signed contract, so the ghost will sign over all the rights to the whole work he would have done, so the copyright fully belongs to the credited author.  The relationship between the two can vary on a large scale from a master – slave status to a collaboration.

The spirit I refer to is synonymous to creativity. Who possesses the creative side? the ‘author’ (the one who is credited for the work), or the ‘writer’ (the ghost). I will investigate this throughout a variety of creative industries in humans and machines.

Who is the “I”?

In Cybernetic and Ghosts, Calvino investigates the idea of a machine replacing the human writer. He believes the writer is confined to the rules set out by writers before him. So can the words of the writer express his own true voice. Writing, being a technology, a machine we use everyday, in effect influences our voice, we do not speak the same way we would write. So where is the “I” in what is written? who is the “I”? And in these operations the person "I," whether explicit or implicit, splits into a number of different figures: into an "I" who is writing and an "I" who is written, into an empirical "I" who looks over the shoulder of the "I" who is writing and into a mythical "I" who serves as a model for the "I" who is written. The "I" of the author is dissolved in the writing. The so-called personality of the writer exists within the very act of writing: it is the product and the instrument of the writing process. A writing machine that has been fed an instruction appropriate to the case could also devise an exact and unmistakable "personality" of an author, or else it could be adjusted in such a way as to evolve or change "personality" with each work it composes. Calvino is as confused as ‘I’ am, who’s voice is it? The ‘I’ indicates the person telling the story, though it’s a false ‘I’, should it be ‘we’, if there is collaboration with either another human or a machine. So, as mentioned earlier, what if the machine didn’t replace the writer but was the ‘slave’ of the one who is telling the story. In French a ghostwriter is translated as nègre or nègre littéraire, implying slavery, thus directly giving a negative connotation to the job. The ghostwriter is simply to be told what to do, and not give his opinion, which leads to the dehumanization of the writer. On a moral/ethical level would it be more justified to give this job to a machine, whom we consider is not in possession of consciousness . On the other hand, ghost writer, Andre Crofts, tells his experience to the guardian (interpreted by a journalist). He admits being in a very comfortable position: “I could stick my nose into everyone’s business and ask all the impertinent questions I wanted to. At the same time, I could also live the pleasant life of a writer...”  He explains that through his work he meets the most extraordinary people, only accepting stories that interest him. This is after a reputation he had to gain of course. He also mentions that often the reader won’t modify his writing and will trust his words.  “Once given the power to make changes they nearly always decide they can’t actually think of a better way of putting things and leave it virtually untouched.”  This would normally be after the ghost would have caught the author’s voice, if not, the project is doomed. My Grandparents My grandparents felt the need to tell their life story for posterity. Maybe in fear of being forgotten, and in the hope that they will be remembered as told in a rosy ghost written book. They hired a ghost writer as they felt incapable of writing in perfect Hebrew, the book was then translated to English. Having read the English version, and knowing my grandparents, the voice simply wasn’t theirs. Maybe it was lost through mediation. So did the ghost change their voice? or was it a natural process from oral telling to writing to then translating? My fear in this case is that the ‘spirit’ was very weak from the very first moment.

Ghost Writer - The book

What threw me in this direction was actually this small book by Tim Mackintosh-Smith called ‘Ghost Writer’. And here he takes the notion of ghost writing onto another level. Putting himself in the skin of an ancient manuscript from Aleppo. Here, Mackintosh-Smith in the voice of the manuscript describes his; birth, his author and his journey right up to the Bodleian Library in Oxford. This makes us question who the ghost really is? Would it be the first person being the manuscript telling his story, or author of the manuscript (Abd al-Latif ibn Yusuf ibn Muhammed ibn Ali) born in 1162, so he has been dead for a while. Now he is being revived through the personification of his manuscript. Or is the author of the physical book ‘Ghost Writer’ that is ghosting the whole thing. Maybe everyone takes on the role of the ghost, because the story wouldn’t be what it is without all the characters. This adds another dimension to the whole idea of ghost writing, which led me to question all types of ghosting, through various forms of creation. In writing, painting, design and technology.


Ghost Painting

We can apply this method of ghost writing also to painting. There is a similarity and something to understand in the two domains, although they have rather different purposes. For example an art forger is one who enters the skin of the painter and draws in the style of, in his voice. In the film ‘F for Fake’, Orson Welles talks about art forger Elmyr de Hory, who sold his soul to the devil. Elmyr explains in an interview that he has no creativity, only the skill. He is incapable of coming up with his own style, however he can perfectly imitate Picasso’s or Modigliani’s style to perfection, so much so that he fools the experts, making us doubt their very job titles. But here, in art forgery, it is the ghost haunting the storyteller, rather than the storyteller haunting a ghost. the ghost finds a person and enters his skin, another art forger, Guy Ribes, explains his method in an interview on French TV show ‘Le terrien du samedi’ (translated): you must know everything about the painter’s life, what day in his life he would have painted the piece, because I put myself in his psychology, in his soul, to think like him, I have to be him, to be able to have his magic. The other way round would be, an artist (with the concept) hiring artisans to physically create their piece, yet the artist remains the sole author of the piece. Jeff Koon’s even has his own factory full of ghosts. Today drawing machines are being developed, machines can already create visual art, however is the programmer behind his machine in possession of the spirit. Unless the machine out of its own terms decided to wake up one morning and create disorder on a canvas, physically or digitally. So who is the author? Or can we accept that in most big art works there is nearly always a collaboration. In Walter Keane’s case pretending to be the artist behind the Big Eyes portraits, which, in fact his wife Margaret was the artist, working in virtual slavery to maintain his success. Here Margaret is undoubtedly in full possession of the spirit. Walter had simply put his name on her creativity, thus stealing her whole identity and her soul.

Celebrities and Politicians

Why do people get ghost writers? does it change the way we perceive the text? Compare Mein Kampf, which was written by Adolf himself, to Mussolini who got his autobiography ghost written. “Mussolini’s book is a Fascist dictator’s memoir written as you would expect a Fascist dictator to write it. To be sure, Hitler is writing at the bottom of the ascent and Mussolini at the top, but the temperamental difference is arresting nonetheless." (The New Yorker) Is maybe Hitler’s book more representative of himself because there was no input from anyone else, so in true possession of his soul, if one can say he had one. Hard to judge as I haven’t read either of their books.

Celebrity autobiographies are also very common, let’s take famous figures such as Victoria Beckham or Gerri Halliwell. Their fame led them to publish autobiographies, as it was sure to sell. Ghostwriters are inevitable in the production, without them the text wouldn’t exist. Not only are the lyrics to their most famous songs ghostwritten, also they feel they need an extra ghost to write about their life. “Girl Power” is very contradictory to the male songwriter called Richard “Biff” Stannard. So where is their soul?  Do they just become objects? who are they really? What words would they use if they could use words?

Bots

Sex bots on dating websites are writing to you, and neither of you (the reader nor the bots) are conscious of it. “A lot of people think this only happens to dumb people, and they can tell if they’re talking to a bot. But you can’t tell. The people running these scams are professionals, they do this for a living.” (quote from rollingstone.com) You as the reader, may not recognise that you are chatting to a bot, and the reason why it is not as evident as we think, is because after all the bots don’t actually make up things to talk about. The humans behind them do, humans programme and control them. Humans here possess the soul, they give their machines personalities. The bots are just there to carry out the automatic commands and in masses. So until the bots won’t have the crazy desire to talk about random sex with random profiles, it will be humans doing the job for them.

To defend the fact that behind the bots the spirit lies in the human, Walter J Ong gives this beautiful comparison with musical instruments and the technology of writing:

The fact is that by using a mechanical contrivance, a violinist or an organist can express something poignantly human that cannot be expressed without the mechanical contrivance. [...] To achieve such expression of course the violinist or organist has to have interiorized the technology, made the tool or machine a second nature, a psychological part of himself or herself. This calls for years of ‘practice’, learning how to make the tool do what it can do. Such shaping of a tool to oneself, learning a technological skill, is hardly dehumanizing. The use of a technology can enrich the human psyche, enlarge the human spirit, intensify its interior life. Writing is an even more deeply interiorized technology than instrumental musical performance is. But to understand what it is, which means to understand it in relation to its past, to orality, the fact that it is a technology must be honestly faced.


Conclusion

The relationship can vary between the author and the writer, they could be collaborators in which case the spirit lies in between both. And if humans use technology, they create and give their spirit to the technology which in some cases could change the way they sound had they not been using the technology, but it is the humans that shapes and gives a spirit to the piece.

Bibiliography

used in previous text

  • Politics and the English Language - George Orwell
  • Exercises de style - Raymond Queneau 
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