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I'm in the final stages of drafting my thesis, which looks at late Roman theory of rhetoric - the act of speechmaking. According to Cicero and Quintilian (two ancient rhetorical authorities), the first step in delivering an effective speech is finding a topic on which to speak. This process is called inventio, literally "invention," which comes from the Latin verb invenire meaning both "to invent" in the sense of inventing something new but also "to find or discover." A good orator, in the inventio stage, draws from loci communes, or commonplaces, to find his topics. These commonplaces are more or less stock situations that an orator can elaborate or manipulate to suit his purpose. For example, if someone is speaking in defense of a man's murder of his wife because she cheated on him (actually legal in ancient Rome - egads!), a commonplace that the speaker might start with would be the importance of fidelity in marriage.

I think what people are picking up on is that the act of writing is an act of inventio - for example, Smith uses Forster as a source of commonplaces, like class issues or female tolerance of infidelity in marriage, which she then manipulates and elaborates to suit her own purposes. She also draws from a whole slew of commonplaces not expressed in Forster - e.g. art, beauty, intellectualism, etc., and these commonplaces become themes or motifs that she traces throughout On Beauty.

It seems to me that this is pretty closely tied with biological evolution. Commonplaces are preexisting genes, some of which are viable, and some of which are not. Invention is a combination of gene expression and gene mutation. The net result of commonplaces and invention, or genes, mutations, and expressions, are works of literature or species of organisms (obviously the question of agency or control is potentially problematic). Because success of literature is limited to cultural reception and species viability limited to environmental factors, and no work or organism can ever be truly perfect, the only hope can, indeed, be to "fail better."

Katie Baratz