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A Plagiarism PDF
A Plagiarism PDF
THE ECSTASY OF
INFLUENCE
A plagiarism
By Jonathan Lethem
All mankind is of one author, and is adopt Lichberg's tale consciously? Or Still: did Nabokov consciously borrow
one volume; when one man dies, one did the earlier tale exist for Nabokov as and quote?
chapter is not torn out of the book, but a hidden, unacknowledged memory? "When you live outside the law, you
translated into a better language; and The history of literature is not without have to eliminate dishonesty." The
every chapter must be so translated.... examples of this phenomenon, called line comes from Don Siegel's 1958 film
-John Donne cryptomnesia. Another hypothesis is noir, The Lineup, written by Stirling
Silliphant. The film still
LOVE AND THEFT haunts revival houses, likely
thanks to Eli Wallach's blaz-
Consider this tale: a cul- ing portrayal of a sociopath-
tivated man of middle age ic hit man and to Siegel's
looks back on the story of long, sturdy auteurist career.
an amour [ou, one beginning Yet what were those words
when, traveling abroad, he worth-to Siegel, or Sil-
takes a room as a lodger. The liphant, or their audience-
moment he sees the daugh- in 1958? And again: what
ter of the house, he is lost. was the line worth when Bob
She is a preteen, whose Dylan heard it (presumably
charms instantly enslave in some Greenwich Village
him. Heedless of her age, he repertory cinema), cleaned
becomes intimate with her. it up a little, and inserted it
In the end she dies, and the into "Absolutely Sweet
narrator-marked by her Marie"? What are they worth
forever-remains alone. The now, to the culture at large?
name of the girl supplies the Appropriation has always
title of the story: Lolita. played a key role in Dylan's
The author of the story music. The songwriter has
I've described, Heinz von grabbed not only from a
Lichberg, published his tale panoply of vintage Holly-
of Lolita in 1916, forty years wood films but from Shake-
before Vladimir Nabokov's novel. Lich- that Nabokov, knowing Lichberg's tale speare and F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ju-
berg later became a prominent jour- perfectly well, had set himself to that art nichi Saga's Confessions of a Yakuza.
nalist in the Nazi era, and his youthful of quotation that Thomas Mann, him- He also nabbed the title of Eric Lott's
works faded from view. Did Nabokov, self a master of it, called "higher crib- study of minstrelsy for his 2001 album
who remained in Berlin until 1937, . bing." Literature has always been a cru- Love and Theft. One imagines Dylan
cible in which familiar themes are liked the general resonance of the title,
continually recast. Little of what we in which emotional misdemeanors stalk
Jonathan Lethem is the author of seven nov-
els, including Motherless Brooklyn and admire in Nabokov's Lolita is to be the sweetness of love, as they do so of-
You Don't Love Me Yet, which will be found in its predecessor; the former is ten in Dylan's songs. Lott's title is, of
published in March. in no way deducible from the latter. course, itself a riff on Leslie Fiedler's
The Mouse's Tale, by Jess © The Jess Collins Trust, Berkeley, Calif. and
San Francisco Museum of Modem Art, Calif. Gift of Frederic P. Snowden CRITICISM 61
ety about these matters; the notes he This tendency encourages us to see changed the course of that art: courts
so carefully added to The Waste Land the objects in our world only in were asked whether the photographer,
can be read as a symptom of mod- terms of how they can serve us or be amateur or professional, required per-
ernism's contamination anxiety. used by us. The task he identified was mission before he could capture and
Taken from this angle, what exactly to find ways to resituate ourselves vis- print an image. Was the photograph-
is postmodernism, except modernism a-vis these "objects," so that we may er stealing from the person or building
without the anxiety? see them as "things" pulled into relief whose photograph he shot, pirating
against the ground of their function- something of private and certifiable
ality. Heidegger believed that art had value? Those early decisions went in fa-
SURROUNDED BY SIGNS
the great potential to reveal the vor of the pirates. Just as Walt Disney
The surrealists believed that ob- "thingness" of objects. could take inspiration from Buster
jects in the world possess a certain The surrealists understood that Keaton's Steamboat Bill, lr.. the Broth-
but unspecitiable intensity that had photography and cinema could carry ers Grimm, or the existence of real
been dulled by everyday use and out this reanimating process auto- mice, the photographer should be free
utility. They meant to reanimate matically; the process of framing ob- to capture an image without compen-
this dormant intensity, to bring jects in a lens was often enough to sating the source. The world that meets
our eye through the lens of a
camera was judged to be, with
minor exceptions, a sort of pub-
lic commons, where a cat may
look at a king.
Novelists may glance at the
stuff of the world too, but we
sometimes get called to task for
it. For those whose ganglia were
formed pre-TV, the mimetic
deployment of pop-culture
icons seems at best an annoying
tic and at worst a dangerous va-
pidity that compromises fic-
tion's seriousness by dating it
out of the Platonic Always,
where it ought to reside. In a
graduate workshop I briefly
passed through, a certain gray
eminence tried to convince us
that a literary story should al-
ways eschew "any feature which
serves to date it" because "seri-
ous fiction must be Timeless."
When we protested that, in his
own well-known work, char-
acters moved about electrical-
ly lit rooms, drove cars, and
their minds once again into close create the charge they sought. De- spoke not Anglo-Saxon but postwar
contact with the matter that made scribing the effect, Walter Benjamin English-and further, that fiction he'd
up their world. Andre Breton's max- drew a comparison between the pho- himself ratified as great, such as Dick-
im "Beautiful as the chance en- tographic apparatus and Freud's psy- ens, was liberally strewn with innately
counter of a sewing machine and an choanalytic methods. Just as Freud's topical, commercial, and time bound
umbrella on an operating table" is theories "isolated and made analyz- references-he impatiently amended
an expression of the belief that sim- able things which had heretofore his proscription to those explicit refer-
ply placing objects in an unexpected floated along unnoticed in the broad ences that would date a story in the
context reinvigorates their mysteri- stream of perception," the photo- "frivolous Now." When pressed, he said
ous qualities. graphic apparatus focuses on "hidden of course he meant the "trendy mass-
This "crisis" the surrealists identi- details of familiar objects," revealing popular-media" reference. Here, trans-
fied was being simultaneously diag- "entirely new structural formations generational discourse broke down.
nosed by others. Martin Heidegger of the subject." I was born in 1964; I grew up watch-
held that the essence of modernity It's worth noting, then, that early ing Captain Kangaroo, moon landings,
was found in a certain technological in the history of photography a series of zillions of TV ads, the Banana Splits,
orientation he called "enframing." judicial decisions could well have M*A*S*H, and The Mary Tyler Moore
"Double Mona Lisa (Peanut Butter + Jelly)," by Vik Muniz, from Reflex: A Vik Muniz Primer
© 2005 Aperture. Artwork courtesy Aperture, New York City. Licensed by VAGA,
62 HARPER'S MAGAZINE / FEBRUARY 2007 New York City. Muniz's work will be on view through May 7 at P.5.t, in New York City
Show. I was born with words in my Whatever charge of tastelessness Thomas Jefferson, for one, consid-
mouth-s-t'Band-Aid," "Q-tip," -x-. or trademark violation may be at- ered copyright a necessary evil: he
rox"--object-names as fixed and eter- tached to the artistic appropriation favored providing just enough incen-
nal in my logosphere as "taxicab" and of the media environment in which tive to create, nothing more, and
"toothbrush." The world is a home lit- we swim, the alternative-to flinch, thereafter allowing ideas to flow
tered with pop-culture products and or tiptoe away into some ivory tower freely, as nature intended. His con-
their emblems. I also came of age of irrelevance-is far worse. We're ception of copyright was enshrined
swamped by parodies that stood for surrounded by signs; our imperative in the Constitution, which gives
originals yet mysterious to me-I knew is to ignore none of them. Congress the authority to "promote
Monkees before Beatles, Belmondo the Progress of Science and useful
before Bogart, and "remember" the Arts, by securing for limited Times
USEMONOPOLY
movie Summer of '42 from a Mad to Authors and Inventors the exclu-
magazine satire, though I've still nev- The idea that culture can be prop- sive Right to their respective Writ-
er seen the film itself. I'm not alone in erty-intellectual property-is used to ings and Discoveries." This was a
having been born backward into an justify everything from attempts to balancing act between creators and
incoherent realm of texts, products, force the Girl Scouts to pay royalties society as a whole; second comers
and images, the commercial and cul- for singing songs around campfires to might do a much better job than the
tural environment with which we've the infringement suit brought by the originator with the original idea.
both supplemented and blotted out estate of Margaret Mitchell against But Jefferson's vision has not fared
our natural world. I can no more claim the publishers of Alice Randall's The well, has in fact been steadily eroded
it as "mine" than the sidewalks and Wind Done Gone. Corporations like by those who view the culture as a
forests of the world, yet I do dwell in Celera Genomics have filed for market in which everything of value
it, and for me to stand a chance as ei- patents for human genes, while the should be owned by someone or oth-
ther artist or citizen, I'd probably bet- Recording Industry Association of er. The distinctive feature of modern
ter be permitted to name it. America has sued music downloaders American copyright law is its almost
Consider Walker Percy's The for copyright infringement, reaching limitless bloating-its expansion in
Moviegoer: out-of-court settlements for thou- both scope and duration. With no
sands of dollars with defendants as registration requirement, every cre-
Other people, so I have read, treasure young as twelve. ASCAP bleeds fees ative act in a tangible medium is
memorable moments in their lives:
from shop owners who play back- now subject to copyright protection:
the time one climbed the Parthenon
at sunrise, the summer night one met ground music in their stores; stu- your email to your child or your
a lonely girl in Central Park and dents and scholars are shamed from child's finger painting, both are auto-
achieved with her a sweetand natural placing texts facedown on photo- matically protected. The first Con-
relationship, as they say in books. I copy machines. At the same time, gress to grant copyright gave authors
too once met a girl in Central Park, copyright is revered by most estab- an initial term of fourteen years,
but it is not much to remember.What lished writers and artists as a which could be renewed for another
I remember is the time John Wayne birthright and bulwark, the source of fourteen if the author still lived. The
killed three men with a carbine as he nurture for their infinitely fragile current term is the life of the author
wasfallingto the dusty street in Stage- practices in a rapacious world. Pla- plus seventy years. It's only a slight
coach, and the time the kitten found
giarism and piracy, after all, are the exaggeration to say that each time
Orson Welles in the doorway in The
Third Man. monsters we working artists are Mickey Mouse is about to fall into
taught to dread, as they roam the the public domain, the mouse's
Today, when we can eat Tex-Mex woods surrounding our tiny preserves copyright term is extended.
with chopsticks while listening to of regard and remuneration. Even as the law becomes more re-
reggae and watching a YouTube re- A time is marked not so much by strictive, technology is exposing
broadcast of the Berlin Wall's fall- ideas that are argued about as by those restrictions as bizarre and arbi-
i.e., when damn near everything pre- ideas that are taken for granted. The trary. When old laws fixed on repro-
sents itself as familiar-it's not a character of an era hangs upon what duction as the compensable (or ac-
surprise that some of today's most needs no defense. In this regard, few tionable) unit, it wasn't because
ambitious art is going about trying to of us question the contemporary there was anything fundamentally
make the familiar strange. In so doing, construction of copyright. It is taken invasive of an author's rights in the
in reimagining what human life as a law, both in the sense of a uni- making of a copy. Rather it was be-
might truly be like over there across versally recognizable moral absolute, cause copies were once easy to find
the chasms of illusion, mediation, de- like the law against murder, and as and count, so they made a useful
mographics, marketing, imago, and naturally inherent in our world, like benchmark for deciding when an
appearance, artists are paradoxically the law of gravity. In fact, it is nei- owner's rights had been invaded. In
trying to restore what's taken for ther. Rather, copyright is an ongoing the contemporary world, though, the
"real" to three whole dimensions, to social negotiation, tenuously forged, act of "copying" is in no meaningful
reconstruct a univocally round world endlessly revised, and imperfect in sense equivalent to an infringe-
out of disparate streams of flat sights. its every incarnation. ment-we make a copy every time
CRITICISM 63
we accept an emailed text, or send or ative results. So let's try calling it day wraps fish or builds an archive.
forward one-and is impossible any- that-not a right but a monopoly on Most books fall out of print after
more to regulate or even describe. use, a "usemonopoly"-and then one year, yet even within that period
At the movies, my entertainment consider how the rapacious expan- they can be sold in used bookstores
is sometimes lately preceded by a sion of monopoly rights has always and stored in libraries, quoted in re-
dire trailer, produced by the lobbying been counter to the public interest, views, parodied in magazines, de-
group called the Motion Picture As- no matter if it is Andrew Carnegie scribed in conversations, and plun-
sociation of America, in which the controlling the price of steel or Walt dered for costumes for kids to wear
purchasing of a bootleg copy of a Disney managing the fate of his on Halloween. The demarcation be-
Hollywood film is compared to the mouse. Whether the monopolizing tween various possible uses is beauti-
theft of a car or a handbag-and, as beneficiary is a living artist or some fully graded and hard to define, the
the bullying supertitles remind us, artist's heirs or some corporation's more so as artifacts distill into and
"You wouldn't steal a handbag!" shareholders, the loser is the com- repercuss through the realm of cul-
This conflation forms an incitement munity, including living artists who ture into which they've been en-
to quit thinking. If I were to tell you might make splendid use of a healthy tered, the more so as they engage the
that pirating DVDs or downloading public domain. receptive minds for whom they were
music is in no way different from presumably intended.
loaning a friend a book, my own ar- Active reading is an impertinent
THE BEAUTY OF SECOND USE
guments would be as ethically bank- raid on the literary preserve. Readers
rupt as the MPAA's. The truth lies A few years ago someone brought are like nomads, poaching their way
somewhere in the vast gray area be- me a strange gift, purchased at across fields they do not own-artists
tween these two overstated posi- MoMA's downtown design store: a are no more able to control the
tions. For a car or a handbag, once copy of my own first novel, Gun, imaginations of their audiences than
stolen, no longer is available to its With Occasional Music, expertly cut the culture industry is able to control
owner, while the appropriation of an into the contours of a pistol. The ob- second uses of its artifacts. In the
article of "intellectual property" ject was the work of Robert The, an children's classic The Velveteen Rab-
leaves the original untouched. As artist whose specialty is the reincar- bit, the old Skin Horse offers the
Jefferson wrote, "He who receives an nation of everyday materials. I regard Rabbit a lecture on the practice of
idea from me, receives instruction my first book as an old friend, one textual poaching. The value of a
himself without lessening mine; as who never fails to remind me of the new toy lies not it its material quali-
he who lights his taper at mine, re- spirit with which I entered into this ties (not "having things that buzz in-
ceives light without darkening me." game of art and commerce-that to side you and a stick-out handle"),
Yet industries of cultural capital, be allowed to insert the materials of the Skin Horse explains, but rather
who profit not from creating but my imagination onto the shelves of in how the toy is used. "Real isn't
from distributing, see the sale of cul- bookstores and into the minds of how you are made .... It's a thing
ture as a zero-sum game. The piano- readers (if only a handful) was a wild that happens to you. When a child
roll publishers fear the record com- privilege. I was paid $6,000 for three loves you for a long, long time, not
panies, who fear the cassette-tape years of writing, but at the time I'd just to play with, but REALLY loves
manufacturers, who fear the online have happily published the results you, then you become Real." The
vendors, who fear whoever else is for nothing. Now my old friend had Rabbit is fearful, recognizing that
next in line to profit most quickly come home in a new form, one I was consumer goods don't become "real"
from the intangible and infinitely re- unlikely to have imagined for it my- without being actively reworked:
producible fruits of an artist's labor. self. The gun-book wasn't readable, "Does it hurt?" Reassuring him, the
It has been the same in every indus- exactly, but I couldn't take offense at Skin Horse says: "It doesn't happen
try and with every technological in- that. The fertile spirit of stray con- all at once You become. It takes
novation. Jack Valenti, speaking for nection this appropriated object a long time Generally, by the
the MP AA: "I say to you that the conveyed back to me-the strange time you are Real, most of your hair
VCR is to the American film pro- beauty of its second use-was a re- has been loved off, and your eyes
ducer and the American public as ward for being a published writer I drop out and you get loose in the
the Boston Strangler is to the could never have fathomed in ad- joints and very shabby." Seen from
woman home alone." vance. And the world makes room the perspective of the toymaker, the
Thinking clearly sometimes re- for both my novel and Robert The's Velveteen Rabbit's loose joints and
quires unbraiding our language. The gun-book. There's no need to choose missing eyes represent vandalism,
word "copyright" may eventually between the two. signs of misuse and rough treatment;
seem as dubious in its embedded pur- In the first life of creative proper- for others, these are marks of its lov-
poses as "family values," "globaliza- ty, if the creator is lucky, the con- ing use.
tion," and, sure, "intellectual proper- tent is sold. After the commercial Artists and their surrogates who
ty." Copyright is a "right" in no life has ended, our tradition supports fall into the trap of seeking recom-
absolute sense; it is a government- a second life as well. A newspaper is pense for every possible second use
granted monopoly on the use of ere- delivered to a doorstep, and the next end up attacking their own best au-
CRITICISM 69
www.audiomagazine.com
the Walter Benjamin quote. Christ- USEMONOPOLY I'd finished, his words were so utterly
ian Keathley's Cinephilia and History, dissolved within my own that had I
or the Wind in the Trees, a book that "... everything from attempts ... " been an ordinary cutting-and-pasting
treats fannish fetishism as the secret to "defendants as young as twelve." journalist it never would have oc-
at the heart of film scholarship. Robert Boynton, The New York curred to me to give Dahlen a citation.
Keathley notes, for instance, Joseph Times Magazine, "The Tyranny The effort of preserving another's dis-
Cornell's surrealist-influenced 1936 of Copyright?" tinctive phrases as I worked on this
film Rose Hobart, which simply "A time is marked ... " to "... what essay was sometimes beyond my ca-
records "the way in which Cornell needs no defense." Lessig, this time pacities; this form of plagiarism was
himself watched the 1931 Hollywood from The Future of Ideas. oddly hard work.
potboiler East of Borneo, fascinated "Thomas Jefferson, for one ... " to "Kenneth Koch ... " to "... deluge of
and distracted as he was by its B- ''' ... respective Writings and Discov- copycats!" Emily Nussbaum, The New
grade star"-the star, of course, being eries.''' Boynton. York Times Book Review.
Rose Hobart herself. This, I suppose, "... second comers might do a much
makes Cornell a sort of father to better job than the originator
... " I found this phrase in Lessig, who YOU CAN'T STEAL A GIFT
computer-enabled fan-creator re-
workings of Hollywood product, like is quoting Vaidhyanathan, who him- "You can't steal a gift." Dizzy
the version of George Lucas's The self is characterizing a judgment writ- Gillespie, defending another player
Phantom Menace from which the ten by Learned Hand. who'd been accused of poaching
noxious Jar Jar Binks character was "But Jefferson's vision ... owned Charlie Parker's style: "You can't
purged; both incorporate a viewer's by someone or other." Boynton. steal a gift. Bird gave the world his
subjective preferences into a revision "The distinctive feature ... " to "... music, and if you can hear it you can
of a filmmaker's work. term is extended." Lessig, again from have it."
"... early in the history of photog- The Future of Ideas. "A large, diverse society ... intel-
raphy" to "... without compensating "When old laws ... " to "... had lectual property." Lessig.
the source." From Free Culture, by been invaded." Jessica Litman, Digi- "And works of art ... " to " ...
Lawrence Lessig, the greatest of pub- tal Copyright. marriage, parenthood, mentorship."
lic advocates for copyright reform, and "'I say to you ... woman home Hyde.
the best source if you want to get rad- alone.''' I found the Valenti quote in "Yet one ... so naturally with the
icalized in a hurry. Mcl.eod. Now fill in the blank: Jack market." David Bollier, Silent Theft.
"For those whose ganglia ... " to Valenti is to the public domain as "Art that matters ... " to "... bought
"... discourse broke down." From David is to _ and sold." Hyde.
Foster Wallace's essay "E Unibus Plu- "We consider it unacceptable ... " to
ram," reprinted in A Supposedly Fun "' ... certain unalienable Rights .. .'''
THE BEAUTY OF SECOND USE
Thing I'll Never Do Again. I have no Bollier, paraphrasing Margaret Jane
idea who' Wallace's "gray eminence" is "In the first ... " to "... builds an Radin's Contested Commodities.
or was. I inserted the example of Dick- archive." Lessig. "A work of art .. ." to "... constraint
ens into the paragraph; he strikes me "Most books ... one year " Lessig. upon our merchandising." Hyde.
as overlooked in the lineage of authors "Active reading is ... " to " do not "This is the reason ... person it's di-
of "brand-name" fiction. own ... " This is a mashup of Henry rected at." Wallace.
"I was born ... Mary Tyler Moore Jenkins, from his Textual Poachers: "The power of a gift ... " to "... cer-
Show." These are the reminiscences Television Fans and Participatory Cul- tain extra-market values." Bollier, and
of Mark Hosler from Negativland, a ture, and Michel de Certeau, whom also the sociologist Warren O.
collaging musical collective that was Jenkins quotes. Hagstrom, whom Bollier is para-
sued by U2's record label for their "In the children's classic ... " to phrasing.
appropriation of "I Still Haven't "... its loving use." Jenkins. (Inci-
Found What I'm Looking For." Al- dentally, have the holders of the copy-
THE COMMONS
though I had to adjust the birth right to The Velveteen Rabbit had a
date, Hosler's cultural menu fits me close look at Toy Story? There could "Einstein's theory ... " to "... public
like a glove. be a lawsuit there.) domain are a commons." Lessig.
"The world is a home ... pop- "That a language is a commons ...
culture products ... " McLeod. society as a whole." Michael Newton,
SOURCE HYPOCRISY, OR, DISNIAL
"Today, when we can eat ... " to in the London Review of Books, re-
"... flat sights." Wallace. "The Walt Disney Company ... alas, viewing a book called Echolalias: On the
"We're surrounded by signs, ignore Treasure Planet ... " Lessig. Forgetting of Language by Daniel Heller-
none of them." This phrase, which I "Imperial Plagiarism" is the title of Roazen. The paraphrases of book re-
unfortunately rendered somewhat lead- an essay by Marilyn Randall. viewers are another covert form of col-
en with the word "imperative," comes "... spurred David Byrne ... My Life laborative culture; as an avid reader
from Steve Erickson's novel Our Ec- in the Bush of Ghosts ... " Chris Dahlen, of reviews, I know much about books
static Days. Pitchfork-though in truth by the time I've never read. To quote Yann Mar-
CRITICISM 71