Toward Pop Literature

BEAUTY, ELAINE SCARRY WRITES, is what incites a copy of itself. Beauty “makes us draw it, take photographs of it, or describe it to other people. Sometimes it gives rise to exact replication and other times to resemblances and still other times to things whose connection to the original site of inspiration is unrecognizable.” I like this definition, which Scarry takes from Wittgenstein, because it also implicitly defines the impulse behind human creativity. As such, throughout On Beauty and Being Just, Scarry privileges examples of beauty drawn not only from nature, or real life, but from other works of art. Thus Leonardo, she says, began by copying faces drawn by Verrocchio. He was making fan art.