To Strive, To Seek, To Find

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.