CUTTING IT WITH COLLAGE
What is a collage?
Exercise 1 focuses on making a collage. A collage is an amalgamation of
extracts from pre-existing texts usually by several different authors. Col-
lages often bring together textual fragments from unrelated sources. These
fragments are removed from their original contexts and pieced together
into new formations.
Collage became prominent in the visual arts and in literature in the
early part of the twentieth century. Part of the modernist movement, it was
a technique used by the artists Braque, Picasso, Kurt Schwitters and others
in the early 1900s, and was also taken up by modernist poets such as
Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot. Some of Schwitters works, for example, are
‘assemblages’, containing objects such as rail tickets, stamps or newspaper
cuttings. Collage has continued to be important in postmodernist writing,
though somewhat transmuted into quotation, pastiche and intertextual
reference.
A literary collage usually brings together chunks of writing drawn from
a number of different sources and juxtaposes them. It lifts texts, or parts of
texts, out of their original environments, and places them together to form
a new context. In a collage we are usually conscious of certain discontinu-
ities between the elements, but also of new continuities produced by the
interface between them. The main characteristic of this kind of technique
is therefore juxtaposition , whereby unconnected texts can be put side by
side in such a way that a relationship between them is forged. Juxtaposi-
tion is enormously important in experimental writing, because it allows
ideas to resonate with each other without necessarily being seamlessly
joined together. This discontinuous structure means the connections
between the texts retain a greater fluidity, so that the meanings interact
with each other in multiple ways.
Sometimes the collage consists of a text which is primarily written by
the author, but into which quotations from other authors are inserted.
Sometimes the author withdraws entirely from the scene of the writing, so
that none of the words are his or her own. However, even in this case, the
author plays an all-important role in the rearrangement of the texts.
Collage, therefore, encourages you to approach creative writing through
other means than personal experience. Your creativity is expressed
through your choice of texts, the way you structure their relationship, and
the degree to which you transform them.
Many twentieth-century writers have used collage techniques. For
example, T.S. Eliot’s long poem ‘The Waste Land’ (1963) is a kind of
collage, because Eliot inserts words and references from mythological,
Writing as recycling 67