Collaborators

There are times when you wouldn’t want to be known as a collaborator: you could get strung up from a lamp post. Sleeping with the enemy carries risks: think of the mess that undercover police operatives can get into when infiltrating activist groups, or of Ang Lee’s film Lust, Caution.

Even in literature, the transgression of boundaries that collaboration involves – the notion of the ‘individual author’ becoming unstable – makes critics uneasy. But it happens: Pound’s involvement in Eliot’s Waste Land was crucial; Conrad and Ford collaborated on three novels, Stevenson collaborated on plays with W. E. Henley and on fiction with Lloyd Osbourne. In contemporary poetry, the movement from page to stage has prompted new collaborative work (such as The Debris Field, ‘devised, written and performed by Simon Barraclough, Isobel Dixon and Chris McCabe’). And on the page too, I think collaborations are becoming more frequent. (Writing is – or can be if you want it to be – so much more a social activity than it was pre-internet.) An example of an extreme form of collaboration between Elizabeth Mikesch and May-Lan Tan – in which the writers ‘vandalise each other’s sentences until it’s no longer clear who has written what’, even to themselves – is here, in The Quietus.

The first issue of the Sonofabook magazine will contain work by two pairs of collaborators.