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 final part of a three part essay by one of our readers and frequent commentors, poet/writer Dan Schneider.
Plagiarism, Clichés, Influence, And Google
By Dan Schneider
© 2006 by Dan Schneider
I have often outright encouraged young poets and writers to imitate great writers, for only through imitation can you slip into the skin of a great thought and its process- if the artist is able to at all, and understand it immanently. Then, once you write and master the imitative styles of assorted artists, that thing unique within every writer of potential will likely surface, and an amalgam of originality plus the best ways to deploy the best techniques of the best writers will emerge.
When there is a need for profundity a word choice in a Wallace Stevens vein may pop up. When hysteria is needed a modifier in a Sylvia Plath vein might evince itself. Or a Whitmanian rhythm, or a Hart Cranean airy, or a Rilkean vision, etc. But, it will all be the unique intellectual property of the burgeoning greatness within the new artist. This will be something that just happens without being forced, and this is properly termed ‘influence,’ not plagiarism. Better to learn by imitating a master than withering away in a hack professor’s classroom.
But influence does not just run from A to B. It can ophidianly coil through many generations of artists, so that A influences B who influences C who influences D who influences E who influences F, and so on until W is left with a phrase or stanza, or paragraph quite similar to A’s or B’s, even though W honestly never even read A’s nor B’s work, and may not have even heard of them.
In short, influence’s breeze sways randomly though the minds of many, and in no way is an homage. In short, the willful intent behind negative plagiarism and positive homage is not present in their unintentional equivalents: negative clichés and positive influence.
The effect of this is similar to that which occurs when the repetition of facts is called ‘plagiarism’, such with my descriptions of characters from The Odd Couple, or Ann Coulter’s having some similar lines in her pieces that merely describe factual things, and do not express unique opinions; although some may insist Coulter has never had a unique thought in her life anyway. Let me use another example of my own. Some years ago I had a sonnet published in a newspaper. It was called Jenny, At Five, At Her Telescope, and its last two lines read:
even as the gardens of her white eyes
echo the stars collapsing into death.
My wife, Jessica, liked the imagery so much that, a few years later, she reworked the imagery into a fictive essay of hers called Legends. The piece was in no way, shape, nor form similar to my sonnet in content nor structure, but as she willfully reworked an image from my piece someone might say she ‘plagiarized’ me.
I’ll leave aside the marital issues of joint possession that might mitigate either of us actually plagiarizing each other, since they are minutia. The phrase she used in her piece was ‘white tumuli’ of eyes. I would never have even thought anything of her phrase’s source had she not mentioned it was derived from mine. Then, one day, Jessica was rereading the Sylvia Plath poem
The Colossus, whose third stanza ends with the lines:
To mend the immense skull-plates and clearThe bald, white tumuli of your eyes.
Since it is a poem as famous as Bishop’s The Man-Moth, Jess decided to revise her phrasing to something else- ‘bleached tumuli’. Of course, since the Plath poem is well known, both of us have read it on many occasions.
Was there a secondhand form of plagiarism going on? I did not willfully think of Plath’s poem when I wrote mine. They are far too different in tone and subject. So, was I merely influenced? Perhaps, but at a very long distance. And, did Jessica’s willful rework of my vaguely similar imagery result in her plagiarizing Plath?
No. Why? Because any run of two words has only a limited number of pairings. But, the idea behind those words’ meaning and concatenation is often repeated when lesser writers stumble upon longer runs of words. This is because lesser creativity will necessarily result in less unique phrasings and imagery. Clichés, it should be noted, are not only the order of words, but the tropes a narrative follows, or the deployment of certain sorts of images in predictable works of art. Having run a poetry group, almost every week there would be a poem by someone that had a phrase or image that reminded someone of a famous poet’s poem. I recall Jessica being told that a phrase of hers reminded them of a line from a Wordsworth poem that she had never read. Was Jessica a W, influenced by a down the line breeze, was it just an accidental similarity, or was she a plagiarist? Here are the two lines:
William Wordsworth’s The World Is Too Much With Us:
The world is too much with us; late and soon….
Jessica Schneider’s Remanent Theory Of Asteroids:
A world is myth and too much….
Similarly, I recall a poem of mine that opened with a phrase that I deliberately was playing off a Shakespeare sonnet. Another poet said it sounded like a line from a Dylan Thomas poem. That night, I looked up the poem and there was a three or four word run of similarity. Had I plagiarized Thomas? Did Thomas and I both ‘steal’ from Shakespeare, and mitigate our thefts in the same way? Was it homage, or influence?
The fact is that, to beg the cliché, great minds think alike, whether it was Thomas’s and my reworking of a Shakespeare image, or Jessica’s rework of my image which resulted in the Plathian phrase. But, as most writers will be far less original, their influences, homages, and reworkings will go on much longer- meaning whole sentences, paragraphs, and even multiple instances of such will be nearly identical- as in the cases of Vice and Viswanathan, if we are to grant them the benefit of the doubt they apparently are not willing to fight for.
In short, lesser minds think alike, unfortunately, far more often than even great minds, because one of the requisites for a thing being great is its uniqueness.
So the sorting out of willful plagiarism from redundant clichés, and homage from influence will take alot of effort. I guarantee you this because the Google, Yahoo, and other like efforts, will show a great similarity between works considered classic, and even those that are barely known.
Will the future hold debates over the influence of one great poet on another, or Jane Austen on dozens of other female writers? Or Edgar Rice Burroughs on dozens of other pulp science fiction writers? Or will we see clear evidence of Austen’s possibly having been a plagiarist of a little known female writer whose work is all but lost, but whose stories were to be found in the Austen family library of two centuries ago? Will Burroughs’ phrases and paragraphs pop up again and again in writers never thought to have had any relation to his work or genre?
Of course, even today most readers could recognize the influence or homage of works containing phrases or sentences like ‘Call me Ishmael,’ or ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.’ But, bad writers, as in the cases of Brown, Vice, Viswanathan, Coulter, etc. will always fall prey to using more than just a few good lines. They will use bad lines and phrases and sentences and paragraphs to the limit. Determining the willfulness and extent of the usage is what will remain unknown, because the actual extent of the borrowing, willful or not, will be manifested by the remorseless algorithms of silicon.
The fact is that of all the general arts, writing comes the closest to pure abstraction, therefore is the highest of the arts. This is because it does the most with the least. Words are just squiggles on a medium. They do not exist without referents. The visual and aural arts can far more easily affect their audiences emotionally and even intellectually because they are reliant upon hundreds of millions of years old sensory organs. Both go back at least 600 million years in the fossil record. Written language goes back about 6000 years. Those arts have quite an advantage over literature. You do the math.
Because writing is the highest art, that makes plagiarism all the more defiling, so evokes the strongest visceral reactions. And, here is the rub. This visceral reaction leads to emotions overcoming reason, thus all the accusations that are so easily tossed about. Smearing one with a name like plagiarist is far more easy to do than exposing the alleged misdeed with facts.
The blogosphere thrives on this lowest common denominator ‘blood in the water’ approach. Perhaps Brown, Vice, Viswanathan, Coulter, and company are all plagiarists, and the fact that Brown and Coulter seem to have weathered their storms only points up another unfairness- the rich and famous can get away with things the poor and unknown cannot.
This is why the cool detachment of a system like Google and Yahoo are employing will be a boon, because I guarantee you, in the coming years, all that we think we know about the ‘creativity’ of the masters- at least of the written arts (although eventually music and the visual arts will similarly be quantifiable), will be turned upside down.
Many of those writers in the pantheon will be revealed to have been ‘influenced’ to a far greater extent than previously thought, and quite a good percentage will doubtlessly be shown to have such similarities to other ‘lesser’ works and writers that rival or surpass those of the above named accused, that plagiarism will be the Occam’s Razor answer.
As well read as I am, I have only read a fraction of even English language literature, and much less those of other tongues, but my own inner pattern detection system is as close to flawless in sniffing out clichés as anything could be. But even I cannot discern the literal word by word similarity of whole paragraphs in books, articles, or poems I’ve read months or years apart, much less the percentage of actual ‘replication.’
What I will say, however, is that any writer who claims that they have not found themselves in a position where they have shown a piece- be it poem, story, novel excerpt, article, essay, review, etc. to someone, and had that person say, ‘That reminds me of so and so’s piece on this and that,’ is either lying, does not show their work around, or has not written nor read enough. Likely, the similarity will be the very triteness of the piece- its worst aspects, for clichés evince themselves like gnats, through countless known and unknown repetition processes.
Why? Because writers are people, and people are lazy. The best metaphors, phrases, ideas, may usually come from experience, not wordplay, because most are simply not good enough to have fun with words, and push them to their ends. But, an ability to craft words in such a manner is essential to lift the work above the Ginsbergian ‘first thought, best thought’ model which rendered most Beatnik poetry among the most banal in literature.
In short, people like unoriginality, because it comforts. Just read online reviews of books and movies on Amazon to see how hungry for the banal most people are. Clichés comfort because they are numerically used so often, and humans are creatures of habit. A quantifiable index of all the works of mankind will prove definitively that clichés are clichés, but it will also show that far more many writers and works of literature are far more intimately tied to each other than previously thought. Will some of this be due to plagiarism? Doubtless.
But, I suspect far more will be revealed, through a greater and more detailed analysis algorithm, that writers who write on similar topics simply fall more easily into similar tropes, word choices, and narrative dead ends. I also suspect that the truly greater the writer is the less similarity there will be shown between his and others’ works.
To end, the striving for excellence in writing, or any art form, necessarily entails hard work and individuation. By themselves, these qualities do not guarantee excellence, but they do increase the odds of it while simultaneously reducing the chances of conscious theft or of unconscious literal, not general, influence. All works are part of a continuum, in art or not.
How many times have you heard a song on the radio whose tune you recall having hummed months or years before? That deja vu feeling is no aberration, it’s just that you may not have had the skill to let that pattern come forth, while the songwriter on the radio did. Works of art and artists that are the greatest are bottlenecks that are the sum of all or many prior great works of art, and the garden from which future greatness grows.
Creativity is like carbonated drinks, whose bubbles of ideas fizz, rise to the top, and will burst soon if not seized. That some, if not most, bubbles are communal in nature will be shown as reality in the near future, and when that happens the very nature of what are considered acts of influence or plagiarism will shift dramatically. Let’s hope that its ‘pop’ will signal a new and better era for published literature.
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.