Plagiarism

The recent news coverage of Barack Obama’s supposed “plagiarism” stirred up once again the confused pot of ideas I have or seem to have about originality and the overselling of same in the form of “intellectual property rights.”

Due to the unprecedented way my cortical convolutions took shape in the latter stages of my embryonic life, the thought occurred that Obama might be using a passage he had delivered in the past (whether he personally wrote it or not) that his friend Patrick Duval had borrowed and used during his campaign in Massachusetts. So Obama might actually be “plagiarizing himself.”

I’m not saying that’s what happened. In fact, that probably did not happen. I’m just saying it can happen, and certainly has happened.

Richard A. Posner, in his informative and entertaining Little Book of Plagiarism, offers several amusing instances of “self-plagiarism.” Anyone who has read Tristram Shandy cannot fail to be impressed by the range of its author’s scholarship—until you learn that Laurence Sterne lifted most of the recondite passages virtually intact from secondary sources. So he was a bit of a copyist, to say the least. But did he go too far when he “sent letters to his mistress that he had copied years earlier from letters he’d written to his wife”? As Posner notes, “His plagiarism could do no harm to anybody; only the discovery of it could.” [pp. 41--42] Just as with modern American politicians.

The Roman poet Martial makes note of a cockeyed version of self-plagiarism. According to Posner, in the first century A.D. “[a] plagarius was someone who either stole someone else’s slave or enslaved a free person.” In one of his epigrams, “Martial applied the term metaphorically to another poet, whom Martial accused of having claimed authorship of verses Martial had written,” Posner says. “It is unclear, however, whether he meant that the other poet had passed off Martial’s verses as his own or had claimed sole ownership (the verses were his slaves), precluding Martial’s claiming authorship.” [p. 50]

In our theoretical modern example of Martial’s dilemma, Obama would be censured for stealing Patrick’s words, when in fact he was the author. Again, this was almost certainly not the case. Probably what made me think of this possibility was the not-at-all-theoretical problem faced by Ambrose Bierce when he collected his sarcastic definitions, written over many years and printed in the periodical press, and published them in book form as The Devil’s Dictionary. As Bierce writes in the preface to his book:

The Devil’s Dictionary was begun in a weekly paper in 1881, and was continued in a desultory way and at long intervals until 1906. In that year a large part of it was published in covers with the title The Cynic’s Word Book, a name which the author had not the power to reject nor the happiness to approve. To quote the publishers of the present work:

“This more reverent title had previously been forced upon him by the religious scruples of the last newspaper in which a part of the work had appeared, with the natural consequence that when it came out in covers the country already had been flooded by its imitators with a score of ‘cynic’ books—The Cynic’s This, The Cynic’s That, and The Cynic’s t’Other. Most of these books were merely stupid, though some of them added the distinction of silliness. Among them, the brought the word ‘cynic’ into disfavor so deep that any book bearing it was discredited in advance of publication.”

Meantime, too, some of the enterprising humorists of the country had helped themselves to such parts of the work as served their needs, and many of its definitions, anecdotes, phrases, and so forth, had become more or less current in popular speech. This explanation is made, not with any pride of priority in trifles, but in simple denial of possible charges of plagiarism, which is no trifle. In merely resuming his own the author hopes to be held guiltless by those to whom the work is addressed—enlightened souls who prefer dry wines to sweet, sense to sentiment, wit to humour and clean English to slang.

Although it’s not relevant to the discussion at hand, I can’t help but quote his last paragraph as well:

A conspicuous, and it is hoped not unpleasing, feature of the book is its abundant illustrative quotations from eminent poets, chief of whom is that learned and ingenious cleric, Father Gassalasca Jape, S.J., whose lines bear his initials. To Father Jape’s kindly encouragement and assistance the author of the prose text is greatly indebted.

If the priest’s outrageous name isn’t enough to tip the reader off that he is a pure figment of Bierce’s imagination, the names of the other poets cited will certainly do the trick: Sadler Bupp, Bissell Gip, Marley Wottel, Armit Huff Bettle, Jex Wopley, Squatol Johnes, Porfer Poog, Theodore Roosevelt … oops: not a poet, and not a figment. His quotation: “Mr. Debs is a redundant citizen.”

To close, two definitions from Ambrose Bierce:

Plagiarism, n. A literary coincidence compounded of a discreditable priority and an honorable subsequence.

Plagiarize, v. To take the thought or style of another writer whom one has never, never read.

And finally, a small dose of antidote to the insane possessiveness engendered by the “marketplace of ideas,” courtesy of Alan Fletcher in The Art of Looking Sideways (London: Phaedon Press, 2001) [pp. 434--5]:

• T.S. Eliot: “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.”*
• Lionel Trilling: “Immature artists imitate; mature artists steal.”
• John Updike: “My purpose in reading has ever secretly been not to come and judge but to come and steal.”
• Igor Stravinsky: “A good composer does not imitate; he steals.”
• Philip Johnson: “… what makes Mies such a great influence is that he is so easy to copy.”
• Pablo Picasso: “Copy anyone but never copy yourself.”
• Milton Glaser: “If one’s work is not imitated, one’s work is not understood …”
• Michael Caine: “I only steal from the best people.”
• Sir Joshua Reynolds: “He who resolves never to ransack any mind but his own … will be obliged to imitate himself.”
• Louis Armstrong: “A lotta cats copy the Mona Lisa, but people still line up to see the original.”
• Frederic Goudy: “The old boys stole most of our good ideas.”
• Marcus Aurelius: “To refrain from imitation is the best revenge.”

__________
*This quote probably deserves to be expanded. Via Posner: “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest.” [p. 56]