Yes, Maria: I’ve had this argument elsewhere in relation to other literary work.
Plagiarism (or appropriative writing) is a fascinating phenomenon. It didn’t appear as a ‘problem’ until the 18th century, when lawyers set us on the path of copyright confusion and arguments over moral rights by seeking to fix the notion of ‘literary property’. Prior to this, Chaucer routinely ‘translated’ or ‘paraphrased’ from others. Ben Jonson ‘adopted’ in his own work poetry from the recently deceased Christopher Marlowe. And Milton sought to ‘steal as much as possible from the Bible’. Shakespeare didn’t consider himself to be an ‘author’ but considered himself rather to be a storyteller, lifting whole screeds of work by other wordsmiths and incorporating them into his productions. No one thought anything of this.
Even after the invention of the ‘author’ as a kind of literary proprietor in the 18th century, wordsmiths regularly felt free to ‘convert the substance or riches of another to his own use’ (as Ben Jonson put it). Samuel Coleridge made frequent reference to ‘questions of origins and originality and the practical and moral problems of derivativeness and plagiarism’. But he openly admitted that he had ‘appropriated … sizable passages from others’ work without acknowledgement’. The difference in attitude in the 18th century is demonstrated by the fact that Coleridge was publicly charged with plagiarism. It is curious to note that his accuser was his friend, Thomas De Quincey, who was himself a notable plagiarist in his own right, and that the passage Coleridge was accused of plagiarising had itself been plagiarised. The cyber-plagiarising of the Internet is nothing compared to these guys. This change in thinking is mirrored by the way authors began to regard the term ‘plagiarism’. Prior to the coming into being of the ‘author’, it was the legitimate appropriation of material for literary use; after the invention of the ‘author’, it became stealing some else’s ‘intellectual property’.
There’s a long and honourable tradition of cocking a snoot at the bourgeois tabu against plagiarism. According to my old mucker, Chris Grieve, 'The greater the plagiarism the greater the work of art'. Grieve himself incorporated ‘found text’ into the poetry of his literary persona Hugh MacDiarmid. In the 1960s he published a poem entitled ‘Perfect’ about a gull’s wing. Its text was almost word for word taken from a short story by Welsh wordsmith Glyn Jones. This led to accusations of plagiarism, to which Grieve gruffly gave the aforementioned response. Not that the ensuing correspondence in the Times Literary Supplement made any difference. You can still find the piece today in MacDiarmid’s collected works.
There was thropughout the 20th century a respectable literary tradition of ‘collage poetry’, exemplified by ‘The Waste Land’ and ‘The Cantos’, in which, rather than weave obvious quotations into his or her words, the wordsmith became a kind of scribe, transferring to his or her own work small or large passages, usually without attribution or other signals that these words were written by someone else.
The epitome of this kind of wordsmith is Borges' splendid invention, Pierre Menard; a fictional early-20th century French poet who sets out to rewrite Cervantes' Don Quijote word for word. In the 1980s, Borges's text was often cited in relation to so-called ‘appropriation artists’ such as Sherrie Levine and Richard Prince. The idea of erasing the lines between authors was one which Borges returned to again in his short essay ‘The Flowers of Coleridge’. There he raises the notion, previously espoused by Shelley, Emerson, and Valery, that all literary works are the creations of a single eternal author (no, not 'God' but the community of all wordsmiths - the writing world); a point he tries to demonstrate by tracing a recurring text through Coleridge, H. G. Wells, and Henry James. Arguing for the essentially impersonal nature of literature, Borges reminds us that George Moore and James Joyce ‘incorporated in their works the pages and sentence of others’, and that Oscar Wilde ‘used to give plots away for others to develop’. More recently, a whole school of critical theory has developed ideas remarkably similar to those Borges espoused. Roland Barthes, for instance, defined the literary text as ‘a multi-dimensional space in which are married and contested several writings, none of which is original’.
Examples of heroic plagiarism include:
a) Isidore Ducasse. In his proto-surrealist masterpiece,
The Songs of Maldoror (1868), Ducasse appropriated long passages from an 1853 encyclopedia of natural history. Although Ducasse left no explanation of his appropriations in
Maldoror, he did pen a defence of plagiarism in his sardonic manifesto ‘Poesies’. ‘Plagiarism is necessary,’ he wrote, ‘because it stays close to the wording of an author, it uses his expressions, erasing a false idea and replacing it with a correct one.’ Ducasse's famous remark that ‘writing should be made by all’ encapsulates his challenge to the orthodoxy of conventional authorship.
b) Hugh MacDiarmid's
Cornish Heroic Songs for Valda Trevlyn (1937-38), a collection of poems Chris Grieve had MacDiarmid write for his wife but which was abandoned after some seven hundred pages had been written. In his introduction to
MacDiarmid's Selected Poems (1993), Eliot Weinberger describes how Grieve composed much of the book by transcribing ‘long passages from obscure travel and science books, reviews in the Times Literary Supplement, Herman Melville's letters, the writings of Martin Buber, and Thomas Mann's
Tonio Kroger.’ As Weinberger explains it, Grieve had ‘discovered that the way out of the traditional prosody and rhyme he [MacDiarmid] had hitherto employed almost exclusively was to break prose down into lines [according to the natural rhythm of the language]’, thereby ‘finding’ the poetry latent within it.
d) Stefan Themerson's
Bayamus and the Theatre of Semantic Poetry (1949), a novella in which the author replaces certain words with their dictionary definitions. Here, for instance, entering the salon of a brothel, the narrator describes some of its features:
There were four openings: three of them serving as entrances with wooden structures moving on hinges for closing them, and one, not very large, filled with panes of glass fixed in a movable frame and covered by a sheet of pale yellow cloth lowered from a roller above, and by a sheet of green cloth hanging on a rod and drawn across so as to keep out sun and draught.
In other words, the room had three doors and a window.
Themerson, a Polish exile who founded the avant garde Gaberbocchus Press in London in I948, believed that turning to dictionary definitions was a way ‘to translate poems not from one tongue into another but from a language composed of words that they had lost their impact, into something that would give them a new meaning and flavour.’ Revitalising old work, in other words, like they sometimes do in the movies.
e)
Oulipo: la litterature potentielle (1973), a compendium of various literary methods assembled by the Paris-based writers' group Oulipo. Without crediting its ‘author’ Stefan Themerson, Raymond Queneau introduces ‘Definitional Literature’, which consists of replacing every word in a sentence with its dictionary definition. A sentence thereby expands automatically; and if one then subjects this expanded sentence to the same process, the text once again grows in size.
f) Kathy Acker's story ‘New York City in 1979’ (1979). Taking a cue from William Burroughs, whose books were patched together from cut-up manuscripts, Acker wove together her own tales from the punk underworld with all manner of texts. In her 1989 essay ‘A Few Notes on Two of My Books’, she recalls ‘New York City in 1979’, which combines an account of life on Manhattan's Lower East Side with Baudelaire's description of his diseased mistress, Jeanne Duval. Resisting the ‘appropriationist’ label many have tried to give her, Acker commented, in the same essay, ‘When I copy, I don't “appropriate”. I just do what gives me most pleasure: write.’ Even if one knows that Acker is copying, it's hard to tell her sources and where the lines lie between copied and ‘original’ words. For Acker, textual borrowing was part of an assault on the capitalist system. A few years before she died, she heralded the rise of the Internet as a way of challenging the concept of literary ownership which lies behind copyright law.
g) Julio Cortazar's
Hopscotch (1963). Chapter 34 of this cornerstone of literary postmodernism weaves together in alternating lines a long unattributed quotation from an old-fashioned novel and a passage in the voice of
Hopscotch's narrator. Since it's very hard to shift orientation at the end of each justified line of type, and even harder to keep both narratives in mind simultaneously, the reader is tempted to proceed by skipping every other line, reading first the entire quote and then Cortazar's words. But the great Argentinean fictioneer slyly blocks this strategy by having the second text continually comment on what is happening in the first one, compelling the reader to read Chapter 34 line by mind-bending line. As well as being a wittily subversive piece of fiction, this chapter of
Hopscotch is a precursor of philosophical texts such as Jacques Derrida's
Glas, a book in which a column of quotations from Jean Genet runs continuously alongside the author's discussion of Hegel.
h) Ted Berrigan's poem ‘cento: A note on Philosophy’ (1964-68), in which every one of the fifty-eight lines is taken from another poet. Like his friend and fellow poet Ron Padgett, Berrigan frequently borrowed lines from others, particularly in his poetic sequence ‘The Sonnets’. In a 1971 interview, Berrigan admits to another kind of borrowing. Starting with ‘any sort of ghastly poem’ he comes across, Berrigan tells how he ‘rearranges a few lines, moves things around, changes a couple of things...’ and makes a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. Here the wordsmith becomes a kind of editor-plagiarist.
But, whatever… It’s a rule of the Board and I should observe it if I’m going to avail myself of its facilities. Like keeping a suitably straight face when doing a church gig or a Burns Supper.
For anyone who’s interested, here’s an interesting article on plagiarism -
http://www.harpers.org/archive/2007/02/0081387 .
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