Cut-and-Paste Novels?
Thanks to student writer Greg Gephart for contributing today’s article.
The New York Times ran a February 26, 2010, article entitled “The Free-Appropriation Writer,” by Randy Kennedy, in which he discusses the “Communal Creativity” movement in the world of literature. This was something new to me, but then this is Minnesota. We aren’t always privy to knowing about the latest movement of anything in the cold winter months. As Mr. Kennedy explains, Communal Creativity is code for blatant plagiarism. The writer responsible for this latest expose of the movement is a young German woman named Helene Hegemann who has written a novel that is a “finalist for a prestigious literary prize” to be awarded in Germany. Besides her youth, the unique thing about her novel is that much of it was plagiarized from another author. Ms. Hegemann stated that is had been her intention from the start to use someone else’s material, that it is her “birthright” to use anything available if it gets the job done. She added: “There’s no such thing as originality anyway, just authenticity.” Patrick Ross, executive director of the Copyright Alliance. counters her twisted semantics by pointing out “the expressions were original in those books, even if the ideas were not new” and that a “borrowing” culture will “quickly grow stale.”
Hegemann is supported in her argument by the writer David Shields in his Reality Hunger, “a feisty literary ‘manifesto’ built almost entirely of quotations from other writers and thinkers.” Shields argues that borrowing has been around forever and lists several prominent authors who have availed themselves of the practice—Sterne, Elliot, Emerson, Joyce—and he feels borrowing should be done more than it is.
Shield’s and Hegemann’s assertion that there is “no such thing as originality” is just a lazy writer’s way of getting something on paper. I’m not overly concerned that any writings by these two dolts will make a significant addition to the canon. What does concern me is the last statement in the essay. Louis Menand, a Harvard professor and author of The Market Place of Ideas, states, “If something is really successful, then the law tends to get changed and society changes to allow it to happen. ” There is no doubt in my mind that the “dumbing down” of America is a real phenomenon. People are becoming more reluctant to think for themselves. I recall a town hall meeting held in my hometown during the last presidential campaign. John McCain had to take the microphone away from a woman in the audience who was exclaiming that she knew, firsthand, that Obama was an Arab and a Muslim. I know these people. I grew up with them. To my horror, they are reproducing. They are the intended audience for the drivel spewed out by the likes of Hegemann and Shields.
Creative thought is a fundamental premise of our democratic way of life. The Declaration of Independence was written as an original, creatively inspired document based on ideas as old as humanity. If our founding fathers had followed Hegemann’s way of thinking they could have just as easily have inserted clauses from the Divine Right of Kings.
Hmmm. Tricky. Of course, appropriation has been a fascinating / wonderful / infuriating practice in the visual arts for about a century. Perhaps it all began when Marcel Duchamp first unveiled his sculpture, Fountain, at the important Armory Exhibition of 1917? ( I may be making up my dates here.) The sculpture turned out to be a porcelain urinal of industrial manufacture. Duchamp and other Dadaists called these found objects “ready-mades.” It doesn’t matter who made the objects, they argued, but how an artist chooses an object and makes us think differently about it, how the artist gives an object a new idea. Ready-mades and collages (another great appropriation genre the Modernists gave us) have gone on to have a major impact and significance for Modern and Postmodern artistic production and theories.
Appropriation is also evident in our continuing fascination with homage, collage, and montage: One of my favorite movies, Moulin Rouge, appropriates sound bites from a lot of pop music to quite wonderful effect. My favorite scene occurs when the manager/pimp tries to excuse the absence of the courtesan to the evil Duke by saying she’s gone to confession, so she’ll be “like a Virgin!” Hearing the two men sing Madonna’s pop song in this context, in an extravagant dance number invoking Disney’s “Be Our Guest” from Beauty and the Beast, is hilarious! The new context DOES change the meaning of the original: our enjoyment of Moulin Rouge is layered and complicated by our holding both contexts in mind simultaneously and the ironic interplay this allows between and among layers. It’s amazing that a musical without much original music could end up being so wildly and startlingly original.
If you want to totally freak out, look online at the work of Sherrie Levine, Richard Prince, and Barbara Kruger. They’re photographers…who photgraph famous photographs. So the conversations that novels are having now are the same kind of convulsions art has been going through forever.
But I do really and truly believe that a new aesthetic is at work here. Moulin Rouge represents a very popular and widespread new cultural practice: the party mix or fan movie. These days, if you fall in love with someone, you make them a special disk or playlist for their iPod: to the people who create them, these lists of other people’s music created for this special person, are very very significant and emotional and aesthetic. If you love Harry Potter, you splice scenes between Hermione and Malfoy (her enemy) to suggest what could’ve happened in an alternative world where these two loved each other…. So a new way of examining character, spliced out of bits.
Plagiarism as an academic dishonesty and theft is pretty cut and dried. In the art world, however, which is an important investigator of ideas and transgressor of ideas, appropriation is one of the interesting phenomenon of the last century. It certainly calls into question the Romantic love of virtuosity, genius, and originality.
I had a thought as I was reading Greg’s essay that I totally disagreed with this “Communal Creativity”. Then, I read Tammy’s comments and changed my mind. Then I thought, would I want to buy a novel that is the same as another novel? Well, at first my answer was “no”.
Then, I thought about all of the Pride and Prejudice “sequels”, take-offs and others that I have read and enjoyed.
So, finally, I think as long as it is not a true “copy and paste” (that would be boring) but the author would as Tammy said, be able to make the reader look at the book differently, then I am not against it. But, totally honesty would have to be in play as well. The author couldn’t just say that this was their own material. That way the reader could make up his or her own mind about what they want to read.
And Tammy – I didn’t like Moulin Rouge when I saw it the first time. Maybe I should take another look at it again.
Marcel Duchamp, visionary or rip off artist? I would place him in the former. Besides a visionary, he was something of a comedian. Presenting a urinal to those who professed to “know good art” when they see it was his way of saying, “You don’t know shit”. They fell for it, and Steiglitz photographed it! In addition, in 1991 the appropriation artist Sherrie Levine came up with her version, check out this site for some opinions on the subject and a copy of Levine’s image. http://artandperception.com/2007/10/page/2
I agree that appropriation is widespread and, especially in the visual arts, tacitly accepted. I am not familiar with the movie Moulin Rouge, but I have seen some video ads for it and it looks like a great film. There is a tremendous amount of good artistic material available that when put together with original or other appropriated work can make some very compelling works. I assume that the producers of Moulin Rouge gave proper credit to Madonna and other artists for their songs.
Your point of there being a new aesthetic at work is well taken. I think appropriation can be very useful to an artist as long as there is some honesty behind it. Copyright laws will have to be overhauled in the next few years. The proliferation of electronic media for playing and downloading just about anything has required it. However, that’s a separate matter to be hashed out in the courts.
I think there is, or should be a distinction drawn between appropriation and plagiarism. When a work of art or literature is falsely presented as an original product the public will force it into the trash heap. A well crafted work of appropriated items may have more artistic merit than the individual parts ever had. That fact is borne out by the continued existence of appropriation as a unique genre since the Dada folks decided to stick it to the critics.
I pretty much agree with Julie on this one. Upon first reading the post, I thought it was absurd. But like Julie has, I have listened to some adaptations of Jane Austen books and liked them very much. However, I would also need the ‘copy-artist’ to inform the audience of the ‘original’ owner/author.
Ah, yes. This topic has come up in every way imaginable lately (at least in my life). From photography to literature, every art form struggles with this question. I highly disagree with the sentiment that “there is no such thing as originality” and the subsequent thought that plagiarism should then not be of any consequence. Every individual has an entirely unique set of experiences, personality traits, viewpoints etc that make his or her interpretations one-of-kind. The same ideas are explored again and again in art and literature, but every approach unique. This of course, excepting a copy-and-paste approach. Maybe I’m old-fashioned, but a photograph of a photograph. Sorry, I don’t buy it.
The flippant attitude that you can “steal” from anything and everything is particularly irritating to me. I believe there is a very definite line between theft an inspiration. Of course we are all influenced by the writers, painters, philosophers etc that we study, but we do not copy their work verbatim and call it our own. At least, I didn’t think that was acceptable, but I hear these things change. The idea of a homage, a collage or even a parody does not offend me. All those forms are an interpretation of the original work. I also believe, as Greg said that there is a potential for a collage of appropriated items to have more meaning that the original. I tend to agree with what seems to be the general consensus, that there is a line between plagiarism and adaptation or inspiration, and that is a matter of accreditation.
Thanks Greg, for sharing this very thought-provoking article.
Upon reading others comments that came in after mine, I hadn’t given thought outside of books. So where does one stand on prints of original artwork? Would that be plagiarism? Music too; there are lawsuits all the time about how one musician is suing another for copying it. But, there you have covers of songs from other bands. Where is the line drawn? It seems murky to me. So, I guess I go back to my original thought that often times “copy and paste” are boring, except when it’s not; but out and out plagiarism where something is copied and credit not given is something that should not be condoned.