If you haven’t seen it, here’s a nice little story from a recent edition of Inside Higher Education about the appearance of suspiciously literary graffiti on walls around the campus of UC-Santa Barbara. So far, campus security officers have documented at least five cases of literary allusion (along with 10-15 cases of more traditional graffiti, mostly F-bombs and crudely-drawn genitalia). Is this a literary crime wave?
The graffiti in question consists of a drawing of a muted trumpet, along with the word “Trystero.” The campus newspaper promptly rounded up the usual suspects for comment, including Professor of English Alan Liu, who has been known to assign The Crying of Lot 49. One theory holds that students, having actually done the assigned reading, found this a useful way to voice their complaints against some outrage by student government. Liu speculates that the graffiti, like the novel, reflects “a critique of information and communication networks.” Matthew Bowman, the community relations and training officer at the UCSB Police Department, suspects English majors, since the quality of the artwork isn’t good.
Several of the comments that follow the IHE story note that the same graffiti has appeared on other college campuses over the years, and one speculates that it might just be a form of viral advertising for a new brand of condoms. (The concept of “viral advertising” for condoms is, I think, best left unexplored.) But beyond the fact that this is one novel that students actually seem to have read, the story made me wonder why some works of literature lend themselves so neatly to graffiti, while others seem condemned to spend eternity on the page.
Some years ago, my wife and I looked out the window of a hotel in Montreal to see the words “Eyeless in Gaza!” scrawled on a wall. Was it the work of an angry Miltonist, offering this critique of modern culture from Samson Agonistes? An Aldous Huxley reader, with a taste for non-chronological narrative? An advertisement for the post-punk, avant-folk band? Sadly, we realized, it was probably the third, since it’s music fans, rather than poets, who tend to express their enthusiasm on any freshly-painted surface. It’s rare to see “Milton is God!” scrawled on the wall of the London underground (although the confusion might have seemed natural enough to Milton).
Cult status helps get you on the wall. It’s no coincidence that it’s Pynchon these students have chosen to quote: anything postmodern or paranoid gets you in the club, with extra points for obscurity. (Personally, I’d have gone for Oscar Wilde, but I suppose one has to know the whole story to see the paranoia.) For me, one of the pleasures of a career spent on a college campus has always been the quality of the graffiti. College students, or at least the sober ones, usually don’t feel the need to scrawl obscenities on the walls. (They have ratemyprofessor.com for that.) Literary tagging is the art of public mystery, meant to separate the foxes from the sheep. Get the allusion, and you know that you’re in the information network. Your tuition dollars haven’t been wasted, and once you get that goatee to grow, you’ll be ready to hit the bars in Williamsburg.
But I can’t help wondering if writers aren’t missing an opportunity here. Publication is simply making words public, and its original meaning wasn’t far from scrawling on a bathroom wall. Here’s how Chaucer uses the word, as cited in the OED:
1425 CHAUCER Troilus & Criseyde (Harl. 3943) V. 1095 Hir name allas publisshed [v.r. punysshed] is so wide That for hir gilt it ought I-nough suffise.
In other words, one might find the name “Criseyde” written in your local men’s room. (But if you dial the number now, you get Paris.) “Publish” and “punish” are variants in this passage, but the meaning is essentially the same. To be published as a whore is punishment enough. And most of my experiences with publishers suggest that little has changed.
So why be decorous? Why not paint the name of your favorite poet ??? or better yet, an entire poem ??? on the wall of your local Barnes and Noble some midnight dreary? Why not daub your nearest Gap with literary aporia? How long does it take to scribble a sonnet on a bathroom wall? If you get caught, you’ll certainly be punished.
And you don’t even need an agent.