Boundless textual promiscuity - Plagiarism in the day of the search engine

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Love and Theft

Mark Ford

One of the most eloquent denunciations of plagiarism is delivered by Tristram Shandy. ‘Shall we forever make new books, as apothecaries make new mixtures, by pouring only out of one vessel into another?’ he asks. ‘Are we forever to be twisting and untwisting the same rope?’ It was not noticed until some time after Laurence Sterne’s death in 1768 that this passage was itself plagiarised from Robert Burton’s attack on literary imitators in his introduction to The Anatomy of Melancholy. ‘As apothecaries,’ Burton observed, ‘we make new mixtures every day, pour out of one vessel into another … Again, we weave the same web still, twist the same rope again and again.’ Sterne acknowledged his borrowings from writers such as Cervantes and Montaigne, but was curiously silent about his many thefts from Burton. They were first spotted by John Ferriar, a Manchester physician, who in 1793 published a sympathetic but puzzled essay on Sterne’s indebtedness to the Anatomy: ‘I do not mean to treat him as a Plagiarist,’ he writes. ‘I wish to illustrate’ – to celebrate – ‘not to degrade him. If some instances of copying be proved against him, they will detract nothing from his genius, and will only lessen that imposing appearance he sometimes assumed, of erudition which he really wanted.’ Five years later Ferriar issued an expanded discussion of the matter, Illustrations of Sterne (1798), in which he adopted a less lenient attitude towards his author’s habit of making ‘prize of all the good thoughts that came in his way’. This book

promoted a lively debate in various magazines about the ethics of Sterne’s ‘borrowed plumes’: was he ‘a literary pilferer’, ‘a servile imitator’, or should one, rather, admire the ‘ingenuity’ with which he incorporated the works of other writers into the patchwork tapestry of his all-accommodating masterpiece?

In The Savage Mind (1962) Lévi-Strauss distinguished between the ‘bricoleur’ who happily assembles constructions from a heterogeneous array of materials, and the more scientifically minded ‘ingénieur’, who is driven by the search for abstract concepts. The dividing line between bricolage and plagiarism is a fine one, and the case of Sterne – and of De Quincey and Coleridge after him – is still in many ways unresolved. Sterne aficionados tend to see the joke as being on Ferriar, especially since Sterne obliquely signalled his debt by choosing as epigraphs for Volumes V and VI of Tristram Shandy, in which the majority of his borrowings from Burton occur, two Latin quotations, one from Horace and one from Erasmus. Both were lifted from a passage in Burton’s Anatomy, and the Erasmus ‘quotation’ includes a reference added by Burton himself to Democritus, the persona he adopts in the Anatomy. Did Sterne intend his readers to pick up on this? The gist of the quotation is: ‘If anyone should complain that I am speaking in a tone that is too frivolous for a divine or too biting for a Christian’ – and here Erasmus ends and Burton begins – ‘not I, but Democritus said it.’ Sterne was himself a divine who had been accused of speaking too lightly, of indulging in extravagant praise of folly, and his Burton-inspired defence is that he, Sterne, was simply adopting a persona. The hybrid allusion links him with two earlier masters of satirical comedy, with the further twist that certain passages in the volumes that follow were indeed first spoken by Democritus.

In his 1989 book on plagiarism, Stolen Words,  Thomas Mallon excoriated the academic special pleading that elevated Sterne and Coleridge from literary shoplifters into masters of bricolage and intertextuality. Their cases are analysed along with that of the Victorian novelist Charles Reade, and the American writer Jacob Epstein, whose first novel, Wild Oats (1979), included a number of sentences taken straight from The Rachel Papers by Martin Amis. These plagiarists, he found, nearly always used the notebook defence: they’d copied out passages by authors they admired into their notebooks, but forgot to add quotation marks and attributions; this material then somehow got mixed up with their own. Mallon showed himself a staunch advocate of a no-nonsense approach to the issue, but conceded in an afterword to a new edition of the book, published in 2001, that the internet had blurred still further the demarcations between legitimate and illegitimate appropriation. Virtual information that appears on your own screen tends to seem, viscerally, less someone else’s than when it’s printed in a book with the author’s name on the cover. The ‘boundless textual promiscuity’
(Mallon) of the web has also decisively altered the way we think about information; the point is not so much to be good at remembering things, as to be good at finding them quickly. Already web skills are playing an important role in the evolutionary struggle for survival. Will future historians turn first to the wrist and clicking finger in assessing a corpse from our era? Will those who develop RSI be the information revolution’s lepers? How soon before our relatively recently acquired skills become as obsolete as the ability to kill a mammoth with a spear or write shorthand or programme a VCR?

Found or collage poems underline the truism that all writing depends on other writing: a poem may aspire to stand alone, but any piece of writing presented as a poem inevitably triggers the reader’s assumptions about what kinds of thing a poem should be or do, which it confirms or modifies or challenges or refutes. And no poet can be for long unaware that however new a ‘mixture’ may at first seem, to return to Sterne borrowing from Burton, it is also a pouring ‘out of one vessel into another’, the result of love and theft, to quote the title of a book by Eric Lott on the origins of blackface minstrelsy in 1820s and 1830s America, a title itself stolen – as he acknowledges by the use of quotation marks – by Bob Dylan for his latest album, ‘Love and Theft’. At a 1965 press conference in San Francisco, Dylan was surprised to find himself asked not if he was still a folk singer or a protest singer or the voice of his generation, but if he thought he might ever be hung as a thief. The questioner was Allen Ginsberg, and Dylan, whose loving thefts from a vast and eclectic array of musical and literary sources have kept armies of Dylan researchers busy, could only reply, giggling: ‘You weren’t supposed to say that.’

 

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