Postmodern Plagiarisms

Mirjam Horn

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9783110394269
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Englische Literaturkritik

This monograph takes on the question of how literary plagiarism is defined, exposed, and sanctioned in Western culture and how appropriating language assigned to another author can be considered a radical subversive act in postmodern US-American literature. While various forms of art such as music, painting, or theater have come to institutionalize appropriation as a valid mode to ventilate what authorship, originality, and the anxiety of influence may mean, the literary sphere still has a hard time acknowledging the unmarked acquisition of words, ideas, and manuscripts. The author shows how postmodern plagiarism in particular serves as a literary strategy of appropriation at the interface between literary economics, law, and theoretical discourses of literature. She investigates the complex expectations surrounding the strong link between an individual author subject and its alienable text, a link that several postmodern writers powerfully question and violate. Identifying three distinct practices of postmodern plagiarism, the book examines their specific situatedness, precepts, and subversive potential as litmus tests for the literary market, and the ongoing dynamic notion of the concepts authorship, originality, and creativity.

1 Introducing Plagiarism Beyond Illegitimate Plunder

When it comes to explaining the objective of this research project, I oftentimes encountered certain reservations: literary history is paved with allegations against text kleptomaniacs, offensive epigones who adorn themselves with borrowed plumes and live off the creative endeavors of another author. Stealing text is considered a punishable offense corresponding to personal defamation with the ruthless ambience of deceit and unjust enrichment. Betrayed authors and intermediaries of the literary industry such as the publisher as well as the general public cry out for revenge against illegitimate appropriations, expect an explanation from the putative thief, and demand justice for his or her wrongdoings. The responses to plagiarism are so informed by an interest in the conviction and retribution that the term’s application still echoes its etymological basis: the Roman poet Martial, in his Epigrams, famously coined plagiarism the “elegant offense” (Alford 1995) of a fellow poet stealing another writer’s verses. Referring to this thief as plagiarius Martial adjudged a term that heretofore had described the abduction of free human beings, or even children, into slavery.1 In this sense, plagiarism became personified as a textual offspring held captive, forced to belonging to the wrong father (child) or working for the wrong master (slave).

The contemporary application of the term ‘plagiarism’ still echoes Martial’s confrontation of a righteous author-owner of an original text and another person who aims at the former’s superior status. Literary theft is therefore considered a direct personal insult, the worst charge brought against a writer and his or her status in the literary scene. Once initial suspicion has settled, the media delight in poring over the words, pages, or whole works in question, and compare ideas, plot lines, and verbatim passages. It does so because we take for granted the originality of the author-owner’s pre-text,2 the major ideas, and the characteristic style and impact it has left in the minds of readers and critics, which, all in all, have qualified it as dear and sustainable for the literary canon of our culture.

The plagiarist’s action thus deceives on at least three levels: first, by stealing text from the original author and, in the case of legal allegations, committing an infringement of intellectual property (individual level); second, by deceiving the public’s trust in the originality and individuality of the written material and its producer (public level); and, third, by betraying a culture’s collective archive that is consequently ‘contaminated’ with foreign substances (cultural level). The process of unearthing these three levels is consequently summed up in a public verdict of the convicted culprit that may derive from a detailed presentation of evidence and/or an examination of the plagiarist’s defense strategies and willingness to confess and repent.

This public trial of plagiarism, which closely follows the structure of a classic literary or media scandal,3 therefore presents a resolution that may be more compelling and effective in its publicized inspection than an actual legal case in court. Philipp Theisohn, in his account on literary theft as an “unoriginal literary history” (2009; my translation), further stresses the importance of the public narrative plagiarism produces: “Plagiarisms occur because we narrate them. […] We are less interested in the mere fact of a text being copied than in the story we can tell about it: what we call ‘plagiarism’ only becomes visible against the background of a plagiarist narrative” (Theisohn 2009: 14, 15; my translation, original emphasis).4

The narrative we read and help fashion involves protagonists, textual cues as evidence and metatextual dialogues in the media, as well as a figurative language for the willful deceit that expresses general outrage, malicious glee, and/or open contempt in the face of a devalued literary practice.5 The language employed in this ‘plagiarist narrative’ offers further hints for examining the impact of literary theft: with respect to Martial personifying text as an abducted person, plagiarism is considered a “social abnormality […] imagined as despotic – contagious, sickening, unnatural, and terminal […,] a bastard offspring, an illegitimate child that enacts a primal crime: patricide (murdering its origin) followed by incest (breeding monsters out of its own flesh)” (Groom 2002:27). Here, the crime of kidnapping is linked to two other heavily tabooed practices: on the one hand, it measures up to homicide in the family for its betrayal of cultural and textual heritage; on the other, it corresponds to illegitimate sexual intercourse (“incest”) that only produces “bastard offspring,” i.e. impure text. That way charged with some of our society’s most abhorred taboos, stealing material that has previously been published and therefore acknowledged as ‘original’ by the discourses of law, the literary economy, and educational institutions is therefore an intensely pathological act, the most damaging misbehavior within the production of art and especially literature. Plagiarism as a disease qualifies as “the severest charge that one writer could lay on another” as it points towards “the defining ethical position of the writer, scholar, and critic, and of the profession of the humanities as a whole” (ibid.). An author thereby assumes the parental responsibility for the social salvation and moral health of a culture.

This responsibility, in turn, is mirrored in a culture’s accepted modes of creativity and an understanding of authorship as individual ownership as they echo some significant facets in and for the history of ideas of modern (Western) civilization: individual maturity and accomplishment, order and progress as well as reasoning and replicability. An author in his or her assigned position to observe, narrativize and negotiate ideas and images, events and experiences, perspectives and paradigms embodies and preserves these facets. The contemporary author has to fill the role of an individual writerly subject, an instance the public – economic intermediaries, the media, and the reader/bookstore customer – can relate to.

Building on Michel Foucault’s concept of the author function (see 1968) that addresses the supposed originator of text as a phenomenon rather than a historical person, I relativize the biographical author by referring to him or her as an ‘authorial subject.’ This subject serves to order, attribute meaning and value, as well as assist in canonizing and sustaining a certain amount of text we have come to call ‘a work.’ Consequently, in its ethical legitimacy mentioned above, the author subject is asked to follow a culture’s dominant regulations assuming individual originality as a key feature. In turn, an author has no (copy)right to seize texts that are fixed licensed entities since appropriate authorship in a free-market culture necessarily links literary property with ethical propriety as well as the aesthetic notions of authorship with that of the legal and economic system.

Looking again at the imagery that communicates plagiarism’s destructive force with respect to these Western concepts and implications for individual creativity, Martial, in another epigram, compares misappropriated material to “a black raven, perchance wandering on the Cayster’s banks, [that] is laughed at among Leda’s swans: so, when a sacred grove is afire with the varied tones of the tuneful Athenian nightingale, an impudent jay jars on those Attic notes of woe” (1968 [1919]: 64–65). The cunning raven and thieving jay betray the beautiful, the “tuneful” ideals of Western cultural productivity by wresting them from their rightful ranks, drowning the song of righteous authors. Thus, plagiarism is driven by the interest, as Richard Hurd claimed in 1751, “to creep servilely after the sense of some other” (qtd. in Groom 2002: 26), of the genuine author who is acknowledged as the original source for the painting, design, chess problem, narrative, or lyrics. With the plagiarist narrative under way, that original creator is pitied as the victim, re-acknowledged and endorsed as a productive member of the literary “field of cultural production” (see Bourdieu 1993 [1983]) and therefore can be compensated on a legal basis (e. g. Copyright, German Urheberrecht). Chapter 2.1.2 of this study, “The Extra-Aesthetic Notion of Plagiarism: The Case of Literary Theft,” will take into account the legal backup for the notion of authorial individuality and textual integrity, and it will address the difference between the broad phenomenon of plagiarism and the specific legal enforcement of intellectual property rights that protect “the music of the tuneful nightingale.”

Beyond the interrelations of the literary-economic and legal positions towards literary theft as well as the metaphoricity assessing the notoriety of plagiarism in Western culture and literary history, we may further look at the culprit’s motives to commit textual theft. This is especially of interest since the motivation for the strategies of literary appropriation presented in this study significantly differs from ‘standard’ plagiarist intention, that is literary theft with the goals of deceit and self-enrichment. Therefore the following distinction will assist in narrowing down the objective of this book.

We usually recognize a plagiarist to deceive the public for personal unjustified gain. Harvard sophomore Kaavya Viswanathan, for instance, met allegations of plagiarism after the publication of her debut novel How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life in 2006. She had taken consecutive phrases from five other novels, received $500,000 for a two-book-contract with Little, Brown and Company, and pleaded not guilty holding her photographic memory responsible for the verbatim coincidences (see Smith 2006a and 2006b). Although so-called cryptomnesia, the condition of unconsciously memorizing events (and texts) past, often serves as a popular defense argument for obvious parallels in source materials and is even supported by psychological and neurological expertise (see Juskalian 2009; Swan 1994; F. Taylor 1965), the public interest nevertheless lies in establishing a forethought of self-enrichment through deceit – and thus asks for public redemption of the fraud.

With an eye to the academic discourse in general and the obtainment of doctoral degrees in particular, textual poaching in recent years has seen a dramatic increase concerning prominent figures from politics. In Germany, for example, former German defense minister Karl Theodor zu Guttenberg as well as members of the European Parliament Silvana Koch-Mehrin and Georgios Chatzimarkakis were stripped of their degrees for extensively plundering various newspapers, scholarly articles and books, and federal documents in their dissertations. These cases were interestingly disclosed in the collaborative efforts of online communities that meticulously ploughed the submitted documents for verbatim appropriation. On the online forum GuttenPlag Wiki, by self-definition a “collaborative documentation of plagiarism” for zu Guttenberg’s dissertation, for example, the results were visualized with an animated barcode and commented as follows: “1218 plagiarist fragments from 135 sources on 371 of 393 pages (94,4 %) in 10421 plagiarized lines (63,8 %) as of April 3, 2011” (2012: n.pag.; my translation). These exceptionally fast discoveries presenting numerical evidence as well as the public outcry and open letters by academic interest groups forced the alma maters in charge to initiate proceedings against zu Guttenberg, Koch-Mehrin, Chatzimarkakis and others who intended to keep their titles. The exhaustive documentation and public trial of policy makers who heavily rely on their authenticity and integrity with voters discredited them and sparked an animated discussion on academic malpractice and counter-measures to be taken by universities to safeguard their integrity as well as marketing endeavors promoting Germany as an international state-of-the-art educational location (Bildungsstandort).6

The case of German debut novelist Helene Hegemann serves as a third example for contemporary plagiarist scandals for reasons of unjustified personal gain. At first, Hegemann confirmed the media’s appraisal of a wunderkind authoress with the immaculate talent to capture contemporary urban subculture and hedonist lifestyle in her debut novel Axolotl Roadkill (2010). Yet, similar to Viswanathan, she soon met allegations of plundering various sources such as literary blogs, other novels, and theater plays.7 Hegemann, with her publisher Siv Bublitz, quickly summoned acknowledged plagiarists including political dramatist René Pollesch or French avant-garde writer Maurice Blanchot to defend her writing ‘strategy’: both demanded a “detachment from this excess of intellectual property by means of a right to copy and transform” (Hegemann and Bublitz 2010: n.pag.; my translation).8 A self-defensive paraphrasing of a postmodernist ‘anything goes,’ this reasoning sparked a medial backlash with Günter Grass, Christa Wolf and Sybille Lewitscharoff signing the “Leipzig Declaration for the Protection of Intellectual Property” protesting against Hegemann’s nomination for the Leipzig Book Award (see Bartels 2010).

Despite the fact that these examples derive from different writerly and professional contexts, they all share a gradual disclosure of plagiarist practices in the traditional sense: in a first step, the authors and respective texts were deemed original, praised for their both authentic and innovative scholarly, literary or political style and received conventional media labels and taglines like “one of the year’s biggest fiction titles” (on Opal; Nayar 2006: n.pag.), “politician of the year” 2009 (on zu Guttenberg; RP Online 2009: n.pag.), and ‘wunderkind.’ In a second step, the texts were dissected for similar phrases or passages copied verbatim to match identified pre-texts, and their ‘compilers’ were interrogated for motives and usually unconvincing defense strategies. Last, all three culprits subsequently withdrew from the public scene with their publishers or dissertation supervisors either denying any knowledge of the misappropriation or halfheartedly defending the accusations they and their protégés were faced with.9 In retrospect, the plagiarist narr...