In this thread, whit3hawk raises an interesting point about who is the “creator” of a piece. Rather than highjack the CoCC thread, I thought I would open another one here.
Whatever JFK’s level of involvement in Profiles in Courage, we usually think of the creator of a piece of art or writing as whomever “thought up” the piece. What whit3hawk calls the brain.
The artisans who execute the piece are often forgotten, many times even unrecorded. Who worked on Titian’s masterpieces? We know he worked in the shop of the Bellini brothers, but what Bellini’s were actually executed by Titian? Rodin’s work was executed by foundries that are generally known (e.g., Alexis Rudier). But the process of realizing the large casted bronzes from the small maquettes is an artistic process itself. Dale Chihuly “creates” abstract sketches on paper that are executed in glass by a large workshop. What is the connection between his designs and the finished “Chihuly” work?
Are we too parsimonius in our credit? Look at any label in an art museum, with its one line for the creator. There isn’t room to list the “executors”. How much credit do they deserve, and does it detract from the credit due the artist?
There’s plenty of room to give credit, when someone wants to. Legitimately ghost-written books include the line “with” or “as told to”, musical recordings list sidemen, producers and recording studios (perhaps not as common now as in the days where you had a 12x12 inch album cover, but still done), movies credit pretty much everyone who got their hands on a draft of a script, etc.
The question is, when someone develops a concept, leaves the development to someone else, perhaps approves the final manuscript and then takes all the credit, is that truly “authorship”?
In a case such the one in Cecil’s column, I’d have to go with giving credit to both Sorenson and Kennedy – with Sorenson getting the majority of the credit for doing the actual writing.
More on this sort of question can be found here and here.
Basically, authorship is usually too spread-out to neatly attribute to one person. Movies today are a great example. Who made the movie? The director, who oversees the shots and handles the actors? The actors, who actually deliver the lines and action? The screenwriter, who came up with the dialogue and general scene structure? The cinematographer, who actually lights and frames and handles the camera for every shot? The producer, who brings a critical eye to the overall production, and coordinates everything that’s going on? The editor, who makes and often helps choose the final sequence of shots? The composer, whose score taps directly into our emotions …?
Anything outside of the most simplistic scenario, where one person originates an idea, develops it, renders it, and distributes it, is being dishonest. But we’re simple people, and we like simple explanations (Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas).
Architecture also faces this little problem–but the “art” of designing a buiding seems to me to be categorically different from the “art” of its construction, and I’m willing to call both art (and both include “craftsmanship.”)
There is a funny passage near the end of Gulliver’s Travels–in the part with the reasonable talking horses. The horses are so reasonable that they don’t lie or cheat, or love or search or travel, but they do have poetry, a horrible Vogon-sounding kind of poetry that consists solely of praising virtue (of the “reasonable” kind). It struck me that writing by committee often turns out this way–bland, predictable and without too much passion because it must meet the requirements of the collaborators, each of who may have a need to be reasonable about one thing or another.
There are brilliant editors, who do make work better and remake it too. Nonetheless, it is rare, I think, for a work to succeed if there is not a single person with a driving vision of what the work is supposed to be–be that person the “author” or the “editor” or someone who gets another title. If that person can communicate that vision to the reader, then you might really get something. It’s often this vision/spark that makes a piece great, and it doesn’t necessarily come from the person who contributes numerically the most words.
In the case of Profiles in Courage, it’s not clear to me whether JFK or Sorenson gave the work what it has–was the idea alone enough so that the book could “write itself,” or was the idea just a scaffold on which something unseen got erected?