Lethem

I have waited for someone to say something intelligent about Jonathan Lethem's article on plagiarism. I wrote a blog post below that asks if Lethem's article might be a hymn to plagiarism. No one seems to have taken issue with this.

I have returned to Lethem's long article and I here jot down some of his comments (I say 'his' but if you read the article you will understand that he does not claim ownership of any of the ideas or words or thoughts in his article).

"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; whereas there is not a rag of originality about them anywhere except the little discoloration they get from his mental and moral caliber and his temperament, and which is revealed in characteristics of phrasing. Old and new make the warp and woof of every moment. There is no thread that is not a twist of these two strands. By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote. Neurological study has lately shown that memory, imagination, and consciousness itself is stitched, quilted, pastiched. If we cut-and-paste our selves, might we not forgive it of our artworks?"

This goes against those who think that writers just make things up. Clearly they don't. They respond to the stimulation that the world and the world of ideas provides. That writers think they make things up, think that their ideas belong to them and are in some Platonic sense, original, is patently the thinking of a person of limited understanding.

Look at just a few of the names of the great, the people we esteem in our culture for the art that they produced... and yet their art owes a great or greater debt to some other work that came before them:

Shakespeare, James Joyce, Nabakov, Bob Dylan, William S Burroughs, Francis Bacon, Muddy Waters, Igor Stravinsky, Martin Luther King Jr., Leonard Bernstein, Thomas Mann, Walt Disney, Paul Simon, David Byrne... the list goes on precisely because it should include every artist that ever lived.

Lethem says in his article that 'thinking clearly sometimes requires unbraiding our language'... those who have trouble with concepts of influence in art denounce it as plagiarism, but all 'art is sourced. Apprentices graze in the fields of culture' and all art owes a debt to something outside the artist who created it. 'Plagiarism' is a word that has a lot of mud woven into its fabric... the word 'influence' is less dirty... but actually the idea behind each word is the same.

To cry 'plagiarism' and to denounce all such creative borrowings is not only counter intuitive to the proper growth of art, but is also a call to accept the second rate when it has been produced, for the second rate is then protected by a fear of plagiarism... it thus becomes a barrier to all artists, preventing them from seeking to produce the best. As Lethem says: 'Second comers might do a much better job than the originator with the original idea'. (Of course the terms 'originator' and 'original' lose their true meaning when you accept that such concepts have a certain redundancy when applied to the realm of ideas.)

I hope to read an intelligent response to this somewhere. I am, of course, thinking out loud... even if these thoughts can never really be said to be entirely my own.