First things first, hip-hop and pop music wouldn’t exist as they are today without the art of sampling. (Think Snoop Dogg, 2pac, Ice Cube-really any early 90s West Coast hip-hop without George Clinton?!) Sampling: cutting, scratching, and manipulating material from really any recorded source is not only intrinsically tied to hip-hop, but is a vital part of music-making today and has been since at least the 60s in the U.S. DJs such as Girl Talk and Doomtree use pure sampling to make mash-up albums such as Wugazi, even selling out venues. Sampling as a technique in music can be compared to pastiche and collage in the visual arts, seen in some of Picasso’s works and Pop Art, among countless others. While sampling is more widely accepted (and copyright laws are more widely enforced) in some artistic genres more than others, it’s not surprising that literary sampling or collage would be looked down upon due to institutional issues with plagiarism and writers’ claims to ownership. This is where the age-old controversies surrounding originality and authenticity arise. The 17-year-old German writer Helene Hegemann has been very blunt about her opinions on the subject after the controversies surrounding her “sampling” of several un-cited sources in her bestseller Axolotl Roadkill. She is quoted to have stated, “There’s no such thing as originality anyway, just authenticity” after the scandal broke.

Axolotl Roadkill is in itself a literary example of the art of sampling commonly found in hip-hop, electronic music, and collage, with Helene Hegemann at the turntables. Her aesthetic and views on the controversy can be summarized in a quote from the novel, in which the narrator Mifti and her brother Edmond discuss Berlin as a mash-up:

“‘Is it mixed by you? It’s mixed like shit! Berlin is here to mix everything with everything, man!’ ‘Did you make that up?’ ‘Berlin is here to mix everything with everything, man? I steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels my imagination, Mifti. Films, music, books, paintings, cold-cuts poetry, photos, conversations, dreams…’ ‘Street signs, clouds…’ ‘Light and shadows, that’s right, because my work and my theft are authentic as long as something speaks directly to my soul. It’s not where I take things from –it’s where I take them to.’ ‘So you didn’t make it up?’ ‘No. It’s from some blogger’” (7).

What I took away from this chaotic-choppy-experimental-drug-induced-psychosomatic-bildungsroman-type-diary- was a commentary on the effects of the rapid increase of technology and the speed and ease at which media and pop culture are spread and can be accessed on our collective (un)consciousness, on top of the drugs of course. Laws can’t seem to keep up with technology, and the term “stealing” has become ambiguous for the generation that has grown up surrounded by this type of consumption and culture. Pop culture in the form of music, movies, celebrities, video games, and digital communication (e-mail, texts, social media) pervades Axolotl Roadkill, and its effects seem to have penetrated the very consciousness of the protagonist’s generation. Pop culture inscribes standards of beauty: “[…] discussing Heidi Klum and the fact that that bitch is imparting medieval standards to my entire generation, and I think: is this the life I wanted to lead when I was thirteen?” (49). It even dictates life and death: “[…] I always thought, if he’s not on Facebook any more he must be dead” (92).

Mifti perceives the effect of this pervasive global pop culture as a rupture in the world as she knows it, a sort of dichotomy between real and imagined worlds that are colliding in the digital age. Hegemann writes:

“There’s just this one world of natural laws, one world of social laws and constraints, one world or moral laws and conventions and there’s this one world of games and pretences’ […] ‘So what happens if you exchange the world of social laws for the world of games and pretences in your private life? That’s what we do all the time isn’t it?’ ‘No idea. But I definitely think we’re far more than an insider phenomenon now’” (60-61).

For much of the novel she sees the world as two-dimentional: “After that night I wrote on all my T-shirts in permanent marker: I SEE THE WORLD IN TWO DIMENSIONS” (43). That is, however, until she has a sobering moment, experiencing the elements in the “real” world.

“I look out of the window. It can’t be true; today’s not the 16^th of August. There’s snow on the grown. Within a matter of moments, I’m utterly convinced that I’m dreaming. If this is a dream, I think, the whole of humankind is doomed. I turn around, I bite my lips, I feel the wind, I realize it’s all real, it’s all three-dimensional. ‘What can you do to wake up from one of these tricky in-between worlds, Bryan?’” (126).

Mifti seems to be stuck in one of these so-called “in-between worlds.”

Her sister, Annika, who she calls a “weird fascinating monster dictator,” embodies the hegemonic power structure that dictates Mifti’s world. She continues:

“Annika explains that our world is in constant flux and trends are the trailblazers of this process of change. So as to ride the crest of the wave and not have to react to tides, she and her agency maintain an international network – the majority of whom will spend tomorrow making a deliberately ironic music video for the agency’s Facebook page at a fancy-dress party with the theme ‘Strange in Brandenburg’. As part of the event, thirty to forty poorly paid ‘PR trainees with their fingers on the fashion pulse’ will be singing Alice Cooper’s ‘Poison’, ‘showcasing the high-quality summer collections of the labels the represent on a continuous basis’” (64).

Mifti, on the other hand, represents the subordinate class, on the margins of this rapidly changing society in which originality ceases to exist. She explains:

“All I think any more is: that’s why. That’s why I’m not regarded as socially acceptable by generally accepted standards, and that’s why I don’t have my sights on the target of being utterly suitable for some kind of normal labour market – because it’s not just about whether you experience something or miss out on it, all it’s about is the degree of intensity, isn’t it, Madonna?” (144).

Despite the fact that Mifti is completely entangled in this cultural mash-up, she occasionally resists, shouting, “Fuck capitalism!”, proposing the formation of a “culture annihilation crew,” and attending an “unexplored territories party” and “concept-free parties” (65, 70, 71). Her drug use, or at least her heroin use, is seen as untrendy by her peers: “Heroin, well, you know, it’s kinda sorta uncool in the year 2009” (140). “Ha ha, heroin, how out is that?” (161).

Mifti’s world is “an underworld in a land that’s menstruating, turning to shit day after day and plunging all the existences patched together out of fantasies to their doom and its relentless putrefaction” (101). Annika’s “life of regularity” stands in stark contrast to her chaotic existence where binaries such as truth and lies, sobriety and intoxication, and pop culture and intimacy are confused and blurred (54). While talking with her neighbor Lars about his art project entitled Intimacy, she states that, “I’d probably have taken photos of movie stills from Intimacy” (85). While her response is cheeky and ironic, it demonstrates the way in which global pop culture has permeated her [private] existence. He responds by telling her about his fellow classmate who “re-created peripheral settings, because the peripheral settings are life the thing that makes us remember intimate situations most incisively, so that’s what she recreated” (86).

So what can be taken away from this pastiche of a novel about the effects of the digital age and global pop culture on society? Mifti is a 16-year-old upper-class girl who has experienced some significant trauma in her lifetime. Even disregarding her drug habits and excessive partying, she is by all accounts, mentally unstable. Her mind constantly flutters from one idea to another like the rapidly changing trends in pop culture. She explains in her arrogant and cheeky humor while visiting a concentration camp, “I find it hard to exercise full concentration because it seems so incredible old-fashioned” (98). She doesn’t attend school because “I just found the unserious side of life much better, that sexy moment, the provisional, the luxurious and the playful elements. The fact that it makes no sense at all to be alive” (96). Living in excess, in partial oblivion, in the present moment is the only way she knows how to live.

It’s so fitting that the controversy surrounding her “plagiarism” is the manifestation of the very issue that is central to the novel. Simple yet incredibly relevant in this argument, Hegemann writes, “They’ve imbued me with a language that is not my own” (42). And she took it and ran; Axolotl Roadkill is the authentic product of such mash-up culture. I now leave you to experience some sampling, (as if you haven’t had your brain rocked enough with the novel!).

http://www.whosampled.com/song-tag/Rolling%20Stones%20500%20Greatest%20Songs/samples/1/

We’ve all asked or been asked those “where were you when…” questions of specific historical events that shook the world as we knew it in our lifetimes. I remember the moment very clearly when I learned of the 9/11 attacks. I was a sophomore in high school; the whole school stopped what they were doing, turned on the TVs, and watched as the Twin Towers collapsed. From the shocking deaths of politicians, activists and artists to bombings and instances of violence, every generation remembers certain traumatic events that help to form and forever mark their collective memory. In his novel Amuleto (1999), Roberto Bolaño frames his narrative around the trauma of one of those so-called “where were you when…” moments through the first person account of Auxilio Lacouture, a Uruguayan woman who moved to Mexico City in the sixties. During the Student Movement in 1968, Auxilio spent twelve days in hiding in a stall in the women’s bathroom on the fourth floor of the Department of Philosophy and Literature of the UNAM during the Mexican army’s occupation of the autonomous university from the twelfth to the thirtieth of September. This traumatic experience repeatedly returns to the narrator, following and haunting her existence. Time and space overlap and blur throughout this nonlinear and non-teleological novel whose plot relies on a narrator whose memory is admittedly questionable. She writes, “I came to Mexico City in 1967, or maybe it was 1965, or 1962. I’ve got no memory for dates anymore, or exactly where my wanderings took me; all I know is that I came to Mexico and never went back” (Bolaño 2).

Time is distorted in this novel, where past, present and future are at times indistinguishable and simultaneous. Auxilio’s recurring traumatic memory in the bathroom of the UNAM in September of 1968 serves as the lens through which she views her own experiences. She describes:

“I don’t know why I remember that afternoon. That afternoon of 1971 or 1972. And the strangest thing is that I remember it prospectively, from 1968. From my watchtower, my bloody subway carriage, from my gigantic rainy day. From the women’s bathroom on the fourth floor of the Faculty of Philosophy and Literature, the timeship from which I can observe the entire life and times of Auxilio Lacouture, such as they are” (Bolaño 56).

Bolaño’s treatment of time and space in Amuleto corresponds to Bhabha’s idea of the present and the “in-between” space. He writes, “Such art does not merely recall the past as social cause or aesthetic precedent; it renews the past, refiguring it as a contingent ‘in-between’ space, that innovates and interrupts the performance of the present. The ‘past-present’ becomes part of the necessity, not the nostalgia, of living” (7). By seamlessly intertwining different layers of time, material, geographical, and imaginary spaces, and seemingly real, imagined, and hallucinatory episodes, Auxilio is trapped in the [traumatic] space of the in-between.

Although unclear to the reader her reason for leaving Montevideo, Auxilio is one of many transnational subjects in Mexico City. When she first arrives, she shows up at the door of two exiled Spanish poets she admires offering free services as a maid in order to spend time with the eccentric writers who share her nomadic existence. Bolaño writes:

“Like me, they were wanderers, although for very different reasons; nobody drove me out of Montevideo; one day I simply decided to leave and go to Buenos Aires, and after a few months or maybe a year in Buenos Aires, I decided to keep traveling, because by then I already knew that Mexico was my destiny and I knew that León Felipe was living in Mexico, and although I wasn’t sure whether Don Pedro Garfías was living here too, deep down I think I could sense it. Maybe it was madness that impelled me to travel. It could have been madness. I used to say it was culture. Of course culture sometimes is, or involves, a kind of madness. Maybe it was a lack of love that impelled me to travel. Or an overwhelming abundance of love. Maybe it was madness” (Bolaño 3).

León Felipe and Don Pedro, Spanish poets in exile during the Franco dictatorship, are not the only fellow wanderers she encounters in the capital. She meets Paolo, an Italian journalist who is waiting in Mexico to go to Cuba to interview Fidel Castro. Bolaño’s alter ego appears as Arturo Belano, a young Chilean poet living in Mexico who travels to Chile to take part in the revolution in 1972, only to return after Allende was overthrown. The encounters between writers center around the “Encrucijada veracruzana,” or Veracruz crossroads, the bar frequented by the members of the community of poets living in Mexico City. However, imaginary encounters as well as encounters with the dead coexist with the living, such as the ghosts of poets León Felipe, Don Pedro, and Remedios Varo. The diverse political contexts of the late sixties/early seventies throughout the Hispanic world intersect at this symbolic bar, where sociopolitical unrest and repressive regimes from Mexico, Cuba, Chile, Uruguay, and Spain meet and overlap. Through the perspective of the unreliable memory of the narrator, Bolaño’s hallucinatory novel blurs the lines between reality and imagination, complicates national space, and problematizes linear time. Furthermore, these narrative techniques help to divert from the nationalist narrative of 1968 towards a more transnational perspective of the events of the late sixties and early seventies in Mexico.

Lastly, I’d like to touch on the recurring image of the cicada in Bolaño’s work. Early in the novel, Auxilio self-identifies as a cicada when describing her nomadic and bohemian lifestyle. Bolaño writes, “Sometimes I’d go for a whole week without spending a peso. I was happy. The Mexican poets were generous and I was happy. That was when I began to get to know them all and they got to know me. I became a fixture in their group. I spent my days at the faculty, busy as a bee or, to be more precise, a cicada […]” (17). In the context of Amuleto, 1968, and transnationalism, the cicada is a particularly interesting metaphor. Cicadas are found on every continent except Antarctica, since at least Ancient Greece to the present, their existence spanning vast amounts of space and time. They are known for their song, referenced often in literature, mythology, and pop culture. Cicadas are also known for their cyclical emergence, where the insects will surface from hiding places in trees or in the ground in tremendous numbers. This imagery invokes the concept of generations and collective movements. Like 1968 as a symbol for a global protest movement, the cicada can also represent a global phenomenon.

However, the diverse forms that this so-called global movement took on in the sixties in different regions due to the sharp contrasts in socio-political, economic, and cultural environments throughout the world is also reflected in the cicada’s song that varies from region to region. In the famous Latin American song, “La cigarra,” the cicada is romanticized as it sings until its death. This image is replicated in the end of Amuleto. The final image in the novel presents a mass of singing (ghost) children heading toward the abyss to their death. All that is left is their song, “[…] And although the song that I heard was about war, about the heroic deeds of a whole generation of young Latin Americans led to sacrifice, I knew that above and beyond all, it was about courage and mirrors, desire and pleasure. And that song is our amulet” (Bolaño 184). This song, the song of the cicada, the song of those that were murdered in the Tlatelolco Massacre in 1968, the song of those that sacrificed their lives in protest and opposition to repression and violence throughout the history of Latin America and the world, captures in one image both the particularities of 1968 in Mexico and its transnational connections.

Here is a link to some examples of cicada songs around the world.