The Moderate Voice occasionally runs Guest Voice posts by readers who don’t have a weblog or have one and have something special to say here. Guest Voice posts do not necessarily reflect the opinion of TMV or its co-bloggers — but they do add to our free-wheeling debate.
This is the second part of a three part essay by one of our readers and frequent commentors, poet/writer Dan Schneider. The final part will be run tomorrow.
Plagiarism, Clichés, Influence, And Google
By Dan Schneider
© 2006 by Dan Schneider
But, just what is ‘homage’, as Vice describes it? Let me give you a blatant show of ‘true homage’, which makes some of Vice’s claims a bit lazy. One of the most famous American poems of last century was Elizabeth Bishop’s The Man-Moth, which was a dream-like poem conceived after she read a newspaper typo for mammoth- the prehistoric hairy elephant cousin. It has a unique structural format, and child-like rhythm that is unmistakable. Here is its first stanza:
Here, above,
cracks in the buildings are filled with battered moonlight.The whole shadow of Man is only as big as his hat.
It lies at his feet like a circle for a doll to stand on,
and he makes an inverted pin, the point magnetized to the moon.
He does not see the moon; he observes only her vast properties,
feeling the queer light on his hands, neither warm nor cold,of a temperature impossible to record in thermometers.
Some years ago I wrote and published a poem called The Mothman, based upon the supposed sighting of a supernatural creature in the 1970s. It is a famous incident, and was detailed in a recent Hollywood film called The Mothman Prophecies, with Richard Gere.
I mimicked the style and number of stanzas from Bishop’s poem because of the manifest similarity in the poems’ titles, and to subvert its conceits with a rawer edge. Whereas Bishop’s poem was light and dreamy, and mine was darker, more political, the titles and stanzas are so blatantly similar that no serious reader of poetry could deny its status as homage, and for me to have noted it as such would be condescending. Here is its first stanza:
Here, above,
where fearsome angels cower, the Mothman
glides soundlessly above illusion. The moon
is something that cannot fly, and you cannot see
the moon, below him, as he spreads his terrible wings
his red eyes become the billion-year bloat
of giant stars dying into the useless night of eyes,
yours, folding in to the unremarked of realms.
What saves me from being called a plagiarist and lifts the poem into ‘homage’ is that I manifestly am playing off a very well known work, and the resultant poem equals or surpasses its forebear in literary quality. Individuation is a marker of excellence, and rarely does one hear of plagiarism claims being directed against great works of art. By contrast, Vice’s story is from an obscure, mediocre work, and even the title of his tale does not signify it as an homage, even if the publishers did screw up, as he claims.
However, not all similarities of word choice are conscious, and when people unconsciously plagiarize it is called cliché. How many bad poems, novels, stories, films, plays, and even blog posts use the same tropes and, literally, the same run of words, to the point of eight, ten, fifteen words being similar or exact? Clichés are execrable, and trackable, for they are numerically present more than other novel series of words.
Of course, the difference is that bad writers employ clichés, or ideas used before by others, because they are comforting and require little effort. The numerical possibilities of all possible sentences and phrases may approach infinity, but assuredly, the human capacity to exploit this possibility is manifold magnitudes of degrees less. Also, most clichés are not employed intentionally, and the bad writer is likely unaware of the cliché.
So, is intent the real crime? This relates back to the Frey mess, because the moral hypocrites of the Left have disdained him for intentionally lying, where they feel he did not have to, whereas they accept the lies of name, date, and place changes as needed concessions to a litigious society.
Yet, if that litigiousness is borne on others’ deceits, and a necessity, is not Frey merely lying more successfully than others- at least from a sales perspective? After all, when one looks at some of the other bestselling memoirs of the last decade or so- Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes, Elizabeth Wurtzel’s Prozac Nation, Dave Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius, or Brad Land’s Goat; all have come under scrutiny for their veracity by people claiming to be characters in the work. And only McCourt’s work can even be considered a well written book, yet even his brother, writer Malachy McCourt, has said that the book is loaded with ‘blarney’.
Even worse opprobrium has been unleashed against people whose very professions are supposed to be citadels of ‘truth’. The cases against historians Stephen Ambrose and Doris Kearns Goodwin have gotten much ink, and both weakly blamed their lapses on the work of their ‘research staffs’ who forgot to ‘attribute properly.’ It makes one wonder, though, if, like Viswanathan, either historian ever wrote an actual word their name claims, or were merely ‘fronts’ for their own little historical book mills. This year, shock news jock Ann Coulter has also been charged with plagiarism, and like Viswanathan, Brown, and Vice, the side by side comparisons look damaging.
So much has been made of these supposed ‘close readings’ of the above accused that a whole website is devoted to such pursuits. It is called Famous Plagiarists, and it does detail many of the above named cases, as well as that of political and social figures like Senator Joseph Biden and Civil Rights icon Martin Luther King, Jr. Having read over many of the accusations, more than a few ring stale, and stink of a Boy Who Cried Wolf quality, for lumping the clearly ‘influenced’ work of a Hart Crane with the clearly stolen passages of a Viswanathan is disingenuous, in the least, despite the site’s disclaimer of ‘allegedness’ to avoid lawsuits. No doubt it is a valuable resource, but as my greatest talent is for pattern recognition- thus my great critical eye for clichés, I find some of the charges against Coulter, Viswanathan, and Brown to be very debatable, for- again, the cited passages are so banal, as to be laughable.
A few years ago I was accused of plagiarizing my descriptions of characters from the 1970s The Odd Couple tv sitcom in an essay. I responded and showed that my writing was both different and superior, but, of course, there are only so many ways to say that the character of Oscar Madison was a slob, or sloppy, in just a few words. And here is where a great caveat exists: MERE FACTS ARE NOT COPYRIGHTABLE NOR PLAGIARIZABLE! If this was not true this essay would not exist, and encyclopediae and dictionaries would constantly be suing each other. One of the great, of many, flaws of the online encyclopedia Wikipedia is that they do not allow fully researched material to be reprinted on their site, even though it is just a collection of facts, and not a creative work.
It’s also important to note that I fought back and won. The same could be said of Dan Brown. But, what of Vice or Viswanathan, who did not, or chose not to? Are these tacit admissions of guilt? And, in looking over the Coulter case, it seems that the bulk of her ‘plagiarism’ consists not of any ‘creative writing’, but of the re-recitation of news facts that are commonly disseminated on blogs, which have also been accused of plagiarism and the appropriation of intellectual property without recompense.
Does this mean that the wire services- AP and Reuters, or blogs, themselves, are daily pilfering each others’ work? Despite what one may think of Coulter’s politics and Howard Stern-like tactics to sell books, the charges of plagiarism against her seem very weak, for the side by side analyses almost always leave out context, and are selectively quoted. And, like a brief description of a tv character, one can only dryly recite the facts of a dam break or an earthquake in a limited amount of ways, so her culpability seems to be in a different realm than that of the supposedly ‘creative writing’ of the others named.
Now, let me broach the final point of this essay, Google. It was last summer when the search engine powerhouse announced its plans to scan all the books they could get a hold of; not only those in the public domain, but those that are under current copyright protection, from the libraries of three American universities- Harvard, Michigan, and Stanford, as well as the New York Public Library, and Oxford University. The last two would only allow the scanning of public domain works. This attempt, called Google Print, at circumventing the law stirred a great cry from still living authors, as well it should, for the mega-billion dollar behemoth never even offered just financial compensation for the copyright holders. A few months later its plans were delayed, but not totally scrapped, as a result.
Similar plans by Google’s web portal rival, Yahoo, called the Open Content Alliance, were announced a few months later, with differences. Yahoo was willing to only scan public domain works- a noble effort. Google Print, however, is still being sued by The Author’s Guild, which represents thousands of writers, in a class action lawsuit. Google’s argument is that while they will scan the entire work, only snippets will be available online. It’s a version of the ‘fair use’ clause of the copyright code, but it’s a very weak argument since they will be merely presenting the text itself, with no mitigation of enlightenment by essay nor entertainment by parody.
The whole idea that written works, fictive or not, can be appropriated has even led to a semi-serious effort on the part of some to not copyright nor trademark basic plot ideas for stories, but to actual patent them, as if an invention, and therefore charge fees to someone using a certain plot device. The whole effort inspired a website by an attorney named Andrew Knight, of Knight & Associates, to claim that if an author comes up with a whole new plot idea, it is as patentable as the light bulb.
Of course, the whole things reeks of Postmodern absurdity, for even the most unique stories and novels are heavily influenced by other works, and no plot could be totally original, and all possible plots would have their grounding in plot devices that would have to be ‘grandfathered’ in as public domain entities. This is not the silly notion of the ‘Anxiety Of Influence’ propagated by bad critics as Harold Bloom, merely an acknowledgement of reality.
But, it still does not deal with the reality that human beings far more often than not rely on similar patterns of thought and speech. Having read voluminously, classics and pop culture crap, newspapers and online, fiction and nonfiction, poetry and prose, I have developed an almost flawless detector for clichés, which are largely provable numerically, and is an outcome of my great pattern detection ability, which thankfully allows me to drive somewhere by sight without having to memorize street names.
Phrases get worn out with overuse. But, as I have no real way of conveying my ‘proof’ without spending a lifetime doing nothing but cataloging clichés, I do look forward to the inevitable, when efforts like Google’s and Yahoo’s do bear statistical fruit. All public domain works will eventually be scanned and accessible, and many older books, still in protection will be available as well. What will be most protected are their adaptations.
But, a computer- even if not yet sentient nor quantum-based, will still be able to be programmed to find groupings of words that are identical and/or similar to each other, and we will really get a glimpse into the nature of creativity. Because words are far more standardizable than the choice of hue or brushstroke, or the inflection of a musical note, it will reveal something startling. Just recall that you read it here first. What analyses will reveal are a far greater rate of similarities between all published texts than anyone has ever before imagined. It will show that the only difference between triteness and plagiarism- be it Haley’s ‘outright theft’, Vice’s ‘homage’, or Viswanathan’s ‘internalization’, is that people do randomly stumble upon the same tired words and ideas over and again, and also are party to the workings of Carl Gustav Jung’s idea of the Collective Unconscious. Willfulness and degree will become keys to discerning the difference. Most people, even in the arts, are not that creative nor original.
Of course, originality is vastly overrated. There are original works of so-called ‘art’ that evidence clear schizophrenia and mental illness, and great works of art that are Classical- meaning they use familiar ideas, but in newer or higher ways. Perhaps the most unoriginal artist of all time was William Shakespeare. Virtually all of his plays are based upon earlier works. But, a third of them are simply better than what came before or after. And, his sonnets are hardly original, but again, the best dozen or so are better than the ill wrought poetastry of lovestruck swains since. What is original is the precise phrasing, not the general thrust, of his greatest works. The same is true with every great artist.
The final part will be posted tomorrow.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.