The Space Between

Plagiarism

Jonathan Lethem deals with intellectual trespassing, what those in the literary fields might call plagiarism, in his article “The Ecstasy of Influence.” The article, whose title is a clear play on Bloom’s seminal book, carried the subtitle “A Plagiarism.” For good reason. At the end of the article, Lethem provides a key where his readers can learn precisely where he “stole” his key lines and terms from. He says the history of literature is rife with examples of this phenomenon, known as “cryptomnesia” (59). When performed knowingly and lovingly, we call the phenomenon imitation or flattery. When it is done unknowingly we call it an accident or a shared cultural memory. When that sort of borrowing happens knowingly but surreptitiously, we call it plagiarism, a violation against authors’ “tiny preserves of regard and remuneration” (63).

Lethem looks at the same issues prevalent in the Molotov Man as they apply to writing. He criticizes the state of American copyrights, calling them bloated in “both scope and duration,” restrictions that he says technology shows to be “bizarre and arbitrary” (63). Copies, he writes, were once easy to locate and count; but as in the case of Garnet and Meiselas, technology has made “copies” so common we don’t even think about them unless we feel wronged in some way by them. Usually those wronged are the authors, who do see art and culture as a commons, which Lethem argues they are. Creations, like Molotov Man, easily cross into common usage and become a part of the transmission medium itself. Those creations left alone, counted as the “price of a rare success” (68). If an author or artist believes that she will receive perfect recompense for her work, she is deluded. Lethem goes on:

The dream of a perfect systematic remuneration is nonsense. I pay rent with the price my words bring when published in glossy magazines and at the same moment offer them for almost nothing to impoverished literary quartiles, or speak them for free into the air in a radio interview. So what are they worth? (68)

For Lethem, thoughtful reading is a violation of the sanctity of the text, an “impertinent raid on the literary preserve.” Like the ill-fated scientists in Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park, authors cannot hope to control the interaction between readers’ imaginations and the words set free in that literary preserve (64):

Any text is woven entirely with citations, references, echoes, cultural languages, which cut across it through and through in a vast stereophony. The citations that go to make up a text are anonymous, untraceable, and yet already read; they are quotations without inverted commas. The kernel, the soul—let us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterances—is plagiarism. For substantially all ideas are secondhand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources, and daily used by the garnerer with a pride and satisfaction born of the superstition that he originated them. (68)