The Ecstasy of Influence

C R T S MC

THE ECSTASY OFINFLUENCE

All mankind is of one author, and isone volume; when one man dies, onechapter is not torn out of the book, buttranslated into a better language; andevery chapter must be so translated....

-John Donne

LOVE AND THEFT

A plagiarismBy Jonathan Lethem

adopt Lichberg's tale consciously? Ordid the earlier tale exist for Nabokov asa hidden, unacknowledged memory?The history of literature is not withoutexamples of this phenomenon, calledcryptomnesia. Another hypothesis is

Still: did Nabokov consciously borrowand quote?

"When you live outside the law, youhave to eliminate dishonesty." Theline comes from Don Siegel's 1958 filmnoir, The Lineup, written by Stirling

Silliphant. The film stillhaunts revival houses, likelythanks to Eli Wallach's blaz-ing portrayal of a sociopath-ic hit man and to Siegel'slong, sturdy auteurist career.Yet what were those wordsworth-to Siegel, or Sil-liphant, or their audience-in 1958? And again: whatwas the line worth when BobDylan heard it (presumablyin some Greenwich Villagerepertory cinema), cleanedit up a little, and inserted itinto "Absolutely SweetMarie"? What are they worthnow, to the culture at large?

Appropriation has alwaysplayed a key role in Dylan'smusic. The songwriter hasgrabbed not only from apanoply of vintage Holly-wood films but from Shake-

speare and F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ju-nichi Saga's Confessions of a Yakuza.He also nabbed the title of Eric Lott'sstudy of minstrelsy for his 2001 albumLove and Theft. One imagines Dylanliked the general resonance of the title,in which emotional misdemeanors stalkthe sweetness of love, as they do so of-ten in Dylan's songs. Lott's title is, ofcourse, itself a riff on Leslie Fiedler's

Consider this tale: a cul-tivated man of middle agelooks back on the story ofan amour [ou, one beginningwhen, traveling abroad, hetakes a room as a lodger. Themoment he sees the daugh-ter of the house, he is lost.She is a preteen, whosecharms instantly enslavehim. Heedless of her age, hebecomes intimate with her.In the end she dies, and thenarrator-marked by herforever-remains alone. Thename of the girl supplies thetitle of the story: Lolita.

The author of the storyI've described, Heinz vonLichberg, published his taleof Lolita in 1916, forty yearsbefore Vladimir Nabokov's novel. Lich-berg later became a prominent jour-nalist in the Nazi era, and his youthfulworks faded from view. Did Nabokov,who remained in Berlin until 1937,

Jonathan Lethem is the author of seven nov-els, including Motherless Brooklyn andYou Don't Love Me Yet, which will bepublished in March.

that Nabokov, knowing Lichberg's taleperfectly well, had set himself to that artof quotation that Thomas Mann, him-self a master of it, called "higher crib-

. bing." Literature has always been a cru-cible in which familiar themes arecontinually recast. Little of what weadmire in Nabokov's Lolita is to befound in its predecessor; the former isin no way deducible from the latter.

"Nijinskv Series: Queen," a Polaroid montage by John O'Reilly.Courtesy Julie Saul Gallery, New York City CRITICISM 59

Love and Death in the American Novel,which famously identifies the literarymotif of the interdependence of a whiteman and a dark man, like Huck andJim or Ishmael and Queequeg-a se-ries of nested references to Dylan's ownappropriating, minstrel-boy self. Dy-lan's art offers a paradox: while it fa-mously urges us not to look back, italsoencodes a knowledgeofpast sourcesthat might otherwise have little homein contemporary culture, like the Civ-il War poetry of the Confederate bardHenry Timrod, resuscitated in lyricsonDylan's newest record, Modem Times.Dylan's originality and his appropria-tions are as one.

The same might be said of all art.I realized this forcefully when oneday I went looking for the JohnDonne passage quoted above. Iknow the lines, I confess, not from acollege course but from the movieversion of 84, Charing Cross Roadwith Anthony Hopkins and AnneBancroft. I checked out 84, CharingCross Road from the library in thehope of finding the Donne passage,but it wasn't in the book. It's allud-ed to in the play that was adaptedfrom the book, but it isn't reprinted.So I rented the movie again, andthere was the passage, read in voice-over by Anthony Hopkins but with-out attribution. Unfortunately, theline was also abridged so that, whenI finally turned to the Web, I foundmyself searching for the line "allmankind is of one volume" insteadof "all mankind is of one author,and is one volume."

My Internet search was initially nomore successful than my librarysearch. I had thought that summon-ing books from the vasty deep was amatter of a few keystrokes, but whenI visited the website of the Yale li-brary, I found that most of its booksdon't yet exist as computer text. As alast-ditch effort I searched the seem-ingly more obscure phrase "everychapter must be so translated." Thepassage I wanted finally came to me,as it turns out, not as part of a schol-arly library collection but simply be-cause someone who loves Donne hadposted it on his homepage. The linesI sought were from Meditation 17 inDevotions upon Emergent Occasions,which happens to be the most fa-

60 HARPER'S MAGAZINE / FEBRUARY 2007

mous thing Donne ever wrote, con-taining as it does the line "never sendto know for whom the bell tolls; ittolls for thee." My search had led mefrom a movie to a book to a play to awebsite and back to a book. Thenagain, those words may be as famousas they are only because Hemingwaylifted them for his book title.

Literature has been in a plundered,fragmentary state for a long time.When I was thirteen I purchased ananthology of Beat writing. Immedi-ately, and to my very great excite-ment, I discovered one William S.Burroughs, author of somethingcalled Naked Lunch, excerpted therein all its coruscating brilliance. Bur-roughs was then as radical a literaryman as the world had to offer. Noth-ing, in all my experience of literaturesince, has ever had as strong an effecton my sense of the sheer possibilitiesof writing. Later, attempting to un-derstand this impact, I discoveredthat Burroughs had incorporatedsnippets of other writers' texts intohis work, an action I knew my teach-ers would have called plagiarism.Some of these borrowings had beenlifted from American science fictionof the Forties and Fifties, adding asecondary shock of recognition forme. By then I knew that this "cut-upmethod," as Burroughs called it, wascentral to whatever he thought hewas doing, and that he quite literallybelieved it to be akin to magic.When he wrote about his process,the hairs on my neck stood up, sopalpable was the excitement. Bur-roughs was interrogating the universewith scissors and a paste pot, and theleast imitative of authors was no pla-giarist at all.

CONTAMINATION ANXIETY

In 1941, on his front porch, Mud-dy Waters recorded a song for thefolklorist Alan Lomax. After singingthe song, which he told Lomax wasentitled "Country Blues," Waters de-scribed how he came to write it. "Imade it on about the eighth of Octo-ber '38," Waters said. "I was fixin' apuncture on a car. I had been mis-treated by a girl. I just felt blue, andthe song fell into my mind and itcome to me just like that and I start-

ed singing." Then Lomax, who knewof the Robert Johnson recordingcalled "Walkin' Blues," asked Watersif there were any other songs thatused the same tune. "There's beensome blues played like that," Watersreplied. "This song comes from thecotton field and a boy once put arecord out-Robert Johnson. He putit out as named 'Walkin' Blues.' Iheard the tune before I heard it onthe record. I learned it from SonHouse." In nearly one breath, Wa-ters offers five accounts: his own ac-tive authorship: he "made it" on aspecific date. Then the "passive" ex-planation: "it come to me just likethat." After Lomax raises the ques-tion of influence, Waters, withoutshame, misgivings, or trepidation,says that he heard a version by John-son, but that his mentor, Son House,taught it to him. In the middle ofthat complex genealogy, Waters de-clares that "this song comes from thecotton field."

Blues and jazzmusicians have longbeen enabled by a kind of "open source"culture, in which pre-existing melodicfragments and larger musical frame-works are freely reworked. Technologyhas only multiplied the possibilities;musicians have gained the power toduplicate sounds literally rather thansimply approximate them through al-lusion. In Seventies Jamaica, KingTubby and Lee "Scratch" Perry de-constructed recorded music, using as-tonishingly primitive pre-digital hard-ware, creating what they called"versions." The recombinant nature oftheir means of production quicklyspread to D]s in New Yorkand London.Today an endless, gloriously impure,and fundamentally social process gen-erates countless hours of music.

Visual, sound, and text collage-which for many centuries were rela-tively fugitive traditions (a centohere, a folk pastiche there)-becameexplosively central to a series ofmovements in the twentieth centu-ry: futurism, cubism, Dada, musiqueconcrete, situationism, pop art, andappropriationism. In fact, collage,the common denominator in thatlist, might be called the art form ofthe twentieth century, never mindthe twenty-first. But forget, for themoment, chronologies, schools, or

even centuries. As examples accu-mulate-Igor Stravinsky's music andDaniel Johnston's, Francis Bacon'spaintings and Henry Darger's, thenovels of the Oulipo group and ofHannah Crafts (the author who pil-laged Dickens's Bleak House to writeThe Bondwoman's Narrative), as wellas cherished texts that become trou-bling to their admirers after the dis-covery of their "plagiarized" ele-ments, like Richard Condon's novelsor Martin Luther King Jr.'s ser-mons-it becomes apparent that ap-propriation, mimicry, quotation, al-

lusion, and sublimated collaborationconsist of a kind of sine qua non ofthe creative act, cutting across allforms and genres in the realm of cul-tural production.

In a courtroom scene from TheSimpsons that has since entered intothe television canon, an argumentover the ownership of the animatedcharacters Itchy and Scratchy rapidlyescalates into an existential debateon the very nature of cartoons. "Ani-mation is built on plagiarism!" de-clares the show's hot-temperedcartoon -producer -within-a -cartoon,

The Mouse's Tale, by Jess © The Jess Collins Trust, Berkeley, Calif. andSan Francisco Museum of Modem Art, Calif. Gift of Frederic P. Snowden

Roger Meyers Jr. "You take away ourright to steal ideas, where are theygoing to come from?" If nostalgic car-toonists had never borrowed fromFritz the Cat, there would be noRen & Stimpy Show; without theRankin/Bass and Charlie BrownChristmas specials, there would beno South Park; and without The Flint-stones-more or less The Honeymoon-ers in cartoon loincloths-The Simp-sons would cease to exist. If thosedon't strike you as essential losses,then consider the remarkable seriesof "plagiarisms" that links Ovid's"Pyramus and Thisbe" with Shake-speare's Romeo and Juliet and LeonardBernstein's West Side Story, orShakespeare's description of Cleopa-tra, copied nearly verbatim fromPlutarch's life of Mark Antony andalso later nicked by T. S. Eliot forThe Waste Land. If these are exam-ples of plagiarism, then we wantmore plagiarism.

Most artists are brought to theirvocation when their own nascentgifts are awakened by the work of amaster. That is to say, most artists areconverted to art by art itself. Findingone's voice isn't just an emptying andpurifying oneself of the words of oth-ers but an adopting and embracing offiliations, communities, and discours-es. Inspiration could be called inhal-ing the memory of an act never expe-rienced. Invention, it must behumbly admitted, does not consist increating out of void but out of chaos.Any artist knows these truths, nomatter how deeply he or she sub-merges that knowing.

What happens when an allusiongoes unrecognized? A closer look atThe Waste Land may help make thispoint. The body of Eliot's poem is avertiginous melange of quotation, al-lusion, and "original" writing. WhenEliot alludes to Edmund Spenser's"Prothalamion" with the line "SweetThames, run softly, till I end mysong," what of readers to whom thepoem, never one of Spenser's mostpopular, is unfamiliar? (Indeed, theSpenser is now known largely be-cause of Eliot's use of it.) Two re-sponses are possible: grant the line toEliot, or. later discover the sourceand understand the line as plagia-rism. Eliot evidenced no small anxi-

CRITICISM 61

ety about these matters; the notes heso carefully added to The Waste Landcan be read as a symptom of mod-ernism's contamination anxiety.Taken from this angle, what exactlyis postmodernism, except modernismwithout the anxiety?

SURROUNDED BY SIGNS

The surrealists believed that ob-jects in the world possess a certainbut unspecitiable intensity that hadbeen dulled by everyday use andutility. They meant to reanimatethis dormant intensity, to bring

This tendency encourages us to seethe objects in our world only interms of how they can serve us or beused by us. The task he identified wasto find ways to resituate ourselves vis-a-vis these "objects," so that we maysee them as "things" pulled into reliefagainst the ground of their function-ality. Heidegger believed that art hadthe great potential to reveal the"thingness" of objects.

The surrealists understood thatphotography and cinema could carryout this reanimating process auto-matically; the process of framing ob-jects in a lens was often enough to

their minds once again into closecontact with the matter that madeup their world. Andre Breton's max-im "Beautiful as the chance en-counter of a sewing machine and anumbrella on an operating table" isan expression of the belief that sim-ply placing objects in an unexpectedcontext reinvigorates their mysteri-ous qualities.

This "crisis" the surrealists identi-fied was being simultaneously diag-nosed by others. Martin Heideggerheld that the essence of modernitywas found in a certain technologicalorientation he called "enframing."


create the charge they sought. De-scribing the effect, Walter Benjamindrew a comparison between the pho-tographic apparatus and Freud's psy-choanalytic methods. Just as Freud'stheories "isolated and made analyz-able things which had heretoforefloated along unnoticed in the broadstream of perception," the photo-graphic apparatus focuses on "hiddendetails of familiar objects," revealing"entirely new structural formationsof the subject."

It's worth noting, then, that earlyin the history of photography a series ofjudicial decisions could well have

changed the course of that art: courtswere asked whether the photographer,amateur or professional, required per-mission before he could capture andprint an image. Was the photograph-er stealing from the person or buildingwhose photograph he shot, piratingsomething of private and certifiablevalue? Those early decisions went in fa-vor of the pirates. Just as Walt Disneycould take inspiration from BusterKeaton's Steamboat Bill, lr.. the Broth-ers Grimm, or the existence of realmice, the photographer should be freeto capture an image without compen-sating the source. The world that meets

our eye through the lens of acamera was judged to be, withminor exceptions, a sort of pub-lic commons, where a cat maylook at a king.

Novelists may glance at thestuff of the world too, but wesometimes get called to task forit. For those whose ganglia wereformed pre-TV, the mimeticdeployment of pop-cultureicons seems at best an annoyingtic and at worst a dangerous va-pidity that compromises fic-tion's seriousness by dating itout of the Platonic Always,where it ought to reside. In agraduate workshop I brieflypassed through, a certain grayeminence tried to convince usthat a literary story should al-ways eschew "any feature whichserves to date it" because "seri-ous fiction must be Timeless."When we protested that, in hisown well-known work, char-acters moved about electrical-ly lit rooms, drove cars, and

spoke not Anglo-Saxon but postwarEnglish-and further, that fiction he'dhimself ratified as great, such as Dick-ens, was liberally strewn with innatelytopical, commercial, and time boundreferences-he impatiently amendedhis proscription to those explicit refer-ences that would date a story in the"frivolous Now." When pressed, he saidof course he meant the "trendy mass-popular-media" reference. Here, trans-generational discourse broke down.

I was born in 1964; I grew up watch-ing Captain Kangaroo, moon landings,zillions of TV ads, the Banana Splits,M*A*S*H, and The Mary Tyler Moore

"Double Mona Lisa (Peanut Butter + Jelly)," by Vik Muniz, from Reflex: A Vik Muniz Primer© 2005 Aperture. Artwork courtesy Aperture, New York City. Licensed by VAGA,

New York City. Muniz's work will be on view through May 7 at P.5.t, in New York City

Show. I was born with words in mymouth-s-t'Band-Aid," "Q-tip," -x-.rox"--object-names as fixed and eter-nal in my logosphere as "taxicab" and"toothbrush." The world is a home lit-tered with pop-culture products andtheir emblems. I also came of ageswamped by parodies that stood fororiginals yet mysterious to me-I knewMonkees before Beatles, Belmondobefore Bogart, and "remember" themovie Summer of '42 from a Madmagazine satire, though I've still nev-er seen the film itself. I'm not alone inhaving been born backward into anincoherent realm of texts, products,and images, the commercial and cul-tural environment with which we'veboth supplemented and blotted outour natural world. I can no more claimit as "mine" than the sidewalks andforests of the world, yet I do dwell init, and for me to stand a chance as ei-ther artist or citizen, I'd probably bet-ter be permitted to name it.

Consider Walker Percy's TheMoviegoer:

Other people, so I have read, treasurememorable moments in their lives:the time one climbed the Parthenonat sunrise, the summernight one meta lonely girl in Central Park andachievedwith her a sweetand naturalrelationship, as they say in books. Itoo once met a girl in Central Park,but it is not much to remember.WhatI remember is the time John Waynekilled three men with a carbine as hewasfallingto the dustystreet in Stage-coach, and the time the kitten foundOrson Welles in the doorway in TheThird Man.

Today, when we can eat Tex-Mexwith chopsticks while listening toreggae and watching a YouTube re-broadcast of the Berlin Wall's fall-i.e., when damn near everything pre-sents itself as familiar-it's not asurprise that some of today's mostambitious art is going about trying tomake the familiar strange. In so doing,in reimagining what human lifemight truly be like over there acrossthe chasms of illusion, mediation, de-mographics, marketing, imago, andappearance, artists are paradoxicallytrying to restore what's taken for"real" to three whole dimensions, toreconstruct a univocally round worldout of disparate streams of flat sights.

Whatever charge of tastelessnessor trademark violation may be at-tached to the artistic appropriationof the media environment in whichwe swim, the alternative-to flinch,or tiptoe away into some ivory towerof irrelevance-is far worse. We'resurrounded by signs; our imperativeis to ignore none of them.

USEMONOPOLY

The idea that culture can be prop-erty-intellectual property-is used tojustify everything from attempts toforce the Girl Scouts to pay royaltiesfor singing songs around campfires tothe infringement suit brought by theestate of Margaret Mitchell againstthe publishers of Alice Randall's TheWind Done Gone. Corporations likeCelera Genomics have filed forpatents for human genes, while theRecording Industry Association ofAmerica has sued music downloadersfor copyright infringement, reachingout-of-court settlements for thou-sands of dollars with defendants asyoung as twelve. ASCAP bleeds feesfrom shop owners who play back-ground music in their stores; stu-dents and scholars are shamed fromplacing texts facedown on photo-copy machines. At the same time,copyright is revered by most estab-lished writers and artists as abirthright and bulwark, the source ofnurture for their infinitely fragilepractices in a rapacious world. Pla-giarism and piracy, after all, are themonsters we working artists aretaught to dread, as they roam thewoods surrounding our tiny preservesof regard and remuneration.

A time is marked not so much byideas that are argued about as byideas that are taken for granted. Thecharacter of an era hangs upon whatneeds no defense. In this regard, fewof us question the contemporaryconstruction of copyright. It is takenas a law, both in the sense of a uni-versally recognizable moral absolute,like the law against murder, and asnaturally inherent in our world, likethe law of gravity. In fact, it is nei-ther. Rather, copyright is an ongoingsocial negotiation, tenuously forged,endlessly revised, and imperfect inits every incarnation.

Thomas Jefferson, for one, consid-ered copyright a necessary evil: hefavored providing just enough incen-tive to create, nothing more, andthereafter allowing ideas to flowfreely, as nature intended. His con-ception of copyright was enshrinedin the Constitution, which givesCongress the authority to "promotethe Progress of Science and usefulArts, by securing for limited Timesto Authors and Inventors the exclu-sive Right to their respective Writ-ings and Discoveries." This was abalancing act between creators andsociety as a whole; second comersmight do a much better job than theoriginator with the original idea.

But Jefferson's vision has not faredwell, has in fact been steadily erodedby those who view the culture as amarket in which everything of valueshould be owned by someone or oth-er. The distinctive feature of modernAmerican copyright law is its almostlimitless bloating-its expansion inboth scope and duration. With noregistration requirement, every cre-ative act in a tangible medium isnow subject to copyright protection:your email to your child or yourchild's finger painting, both are auto-matically protected. The first Con-gress to grant copyright gave authorsan initial term of fourteen years,which could be renewed for anotherfourteen if the author still lived. Thecurrent term is the life of the authorplus seventy years. It's only a slightexaggeration to say that each timeMickey Mouse is about to fall intothe public domain, the mouse'scopyright term is extended.

Even as the law becomes more re-strictive, technology is exposingthose restrictions as bizarre and arbi-trary. When old laws fixed on repro-duction as the compensable (or ac-tionable) unit, it wasn't becausethere was anything fundamentallyinvasive of an author's rights in themaking of a copy. Rather it was be-cause copies were once easy to findand count, so they made a usefulbenchmark for deciding when anowner's rights had been invaded. Inthe contemporary world, though, theact of "copying" is in no meaningfulsense equivalent to an infringe-ment-we make a copy every time

CRITICISM 63

we accept an emailed text, or send orforward one-and is impossible any-more to regulate or even describe.

At the movies, my entertainmentis sometimes lately preceded by adire trailer, produced by the lobbyinggroup called the Motion Picture As-sociation of America, in which thepurchasing of a bootleg copy of aHollywood film is compared to thetheft of a car or a handbag-and, asthe bullying supertitles remind us,"You wouldn't steal a handbag!"This conflation forms an incitementto quit thinking. If I were to tell youthat pirating DVDs or downloadingmusic is in no way different fromloaning a friend a book, my own ar-guments would be as ethically bank-rupt as the MPAA's. The truth liessomewhere in the vast gray area be-tween these two overstated posi-tions. For a car or a handbag, oncestolen, no longer is available to itsowner, while the appropriation of anarticle of "intellectual property"leaves the original untouched. AsJefferson wrote, "He who receives anidea from me, receives instructionhimself without lessening mine; ashe who lights his taper at mine, re-ceives light without darkening me."

Yet industries of cultural capital,who profit not from creating butfrom distributing, see the sale of cul-ture as a zero-sum game. The piano-roll publishers fear the record com-panies, who fear the cassette-tapemanufacturers, who fear the onlinevendors, who fear whoever else isnext in line to profit most quicklyfrom the intangible and infinitely re-producible fruits of an artist's labor.It has been the same in every indus-try and with every technological in-novation. Jack Valenti, speaking forthe MPAA: "I say to you that theVCR is to the American film pro-ducer and the American public asthe Boston Strangler is to thewoman home alone."

Thinking clearly sometimes re-quires unbraiding our language. Theword "copyright" may eventuallyseem as dubious in its embedded pur-poses as "family values," "globaliza-tion," and, sure, "intellectual proper-ty." Copyright is a "right" in noabsolute sense; it is a government-granted monopoly on the use of ere-


ative results. So let's try calling itthat-not a right but a monopoly onuse, a "usemonopoly"-and thenconsider how the rapacious expan-sion of monopoly rights has alwaysbeen counter to the public interest,no matter if it is Andrew Carnegiecontrolling the price of steel or WaltDisney managing the fate of hismouse. Whether the monopolizingbeneficiary is a living artist or someartist's heirs or some corporation'sshareholders, the loser is the com-munity, including living artists whomight make splendid use of a healthypublic domain.

THE BEAUTY OF SECOND USE

A few years ago someone broughtme a strange gift, purchased atMoMA's downtown design store: acopy of my own first novel, Gun,With Occasional Music, expertly cutinto the contours of a pistol. The ob-ject was the work of Robert The, anartist whose specialty is the reincar-nation of everyday materials. I regardmy first book as an old friend, onewho never fails to remind me of thespirit with which I entered into thisgame of art and commerce-that tobe allowed to insert the materials ofmy imagination onto the shelves ofbookstores and into the minds ofreaders (if only a handful) was a wildprivilege. I was paid $6,000 for threeyears of writing, but at the time I'dhave happily published the resultsfor nothing. Now my old friend hadcome home in a new form, one I wasunlikely to have imagined for it my-self. The gun-book wasn't readable,exactly, but I couldn't take offense atthat. The fertile spirit of stray con-nection this appropriated objectconveyed back to me-the strangebeauty of its second use-was a re-ward for being a published writer Icould never have fathomed in ad-vance. And the world makes roomfor both my novel and Robert The'sgun-book. There's no need to choosebetween the two.

In the first life of creative proper-ty, if the creator is lucky, the con-tent is sold. After the commerciallife has ended, our tradition supportsa second life as well. A newspaper isdelivered to a doorstep, and the next

day wraps fish or builds an archive.Most books fall out of print afterone year, yet even within that periodthey can be sold in used bookstoresand stored in libraries, quoted in re-views, parodied in magazines, de-scribed in conversations, and plun-dered for costumes for kids to wearon Halloween. The demarcation be-tween various possible uses is beauti-fully graded and hard to define, themore so as artifacts distill into andrepercuss through the realm of cul-ture into which they've been en-tered, the more so as they engage thereceptive minds for whom they werepresumably intended.

Active reading is an impertinentraid on the literary preserve. Readersare like nomads, poaching their wayacross fields they do not own-artistsare no more able to control theimaginations of their audiences thanthe culture industry is able to controlsecond uses of its artifacts. In thechildren's classic The Velveteen Rab-bit, the old Skin Horse offers theRabbit a lecture on the practice oftextual poaching. The value of anew toy lies not it its material quali-ties (not "having things that buzz in-side you and a stick-out handle"),the Skin Horse explains, but ratherin how the toy is used. "Real isn'thow you are made .... It's a thingthat happens to you. When a childloves you for a long, long time, notjust to play with, but REALLY lovesyou, then you become Real." TheRabbit is fearful, recognizing thatconsumer goods don't become "real"without being actively reworked:"Does it hurt?" Reassuring him, theSkin Horse says: "It doesn't happenall at once You become. It takesa long time Generally, by thetime you are Real, most of your hairhas been loved off, and your eyesdrop out and you get loose in thejoints and very shabby." Seen fromthe perspective of the toymaker, theVelveteen Rabbit's loose joints andmissing eyes represent vandalism,signs of misuse and rough treatment;for others, these are marks of its lov-ing use.

Artists and their surrogates whofall into the trap of seeking recom-pense for every possible second useend up attacking their own best au-

dience members for the crime of ex-alting and enshrining their work.The Recording Industry Associationof America prosecuting their ownrecord-buying public makes as littlesense as the novelists who bristle atautographing used copies of their

the work of others: Snow White and theSeven Dwarfs, Fantasia, Pinocchio, Dum-bo, Bambi, Song of the South, Cinderel-la, Alice in Wonderland, Robin Hood,Peter Pan, Lady and the Tramp, Mulan,Sleeping Beauty, The Sword in the Stone,The Jungle Book, and, alas, Treasure

books for collectors. And artists, ortheir heirs, who fall into the trap ofattacking the collagists and satiristsand digital samplers of their work areattacking the next generation of cre-ators for the crime of being influ-enced, for the crime of respondingwith the same mixture of intoxica-tion, resentment, lust, and glee thatcharacterizes all artistic successors.By doing so they make the worldsmaller, betraying what seems to methe primary motivation for partici-pating in the world of culture in thefirst place: to make the world larger.

SOURCE HYPOCRISY, OR, DISNIAL

The Walt Disney Company hasdrawn an astonishing catalogue from

Planet, a legacy of cultural samplingthat Shakespeare, or De La Soul, couldget behind. Yet Disney'sprotectorate oflobbyistshas policed the resultingcacheof cultural materials as vigilantly as ifit were Fort Knox-threatening legalaction, for instance, against the artistDennis Oppenheim for the use of Dis-ney characters in a sculpture, and pro-hibiting the scholar Holly Crawfordfrom usingany Disney-relatedimages-including artwork by Lichtenstein,Warhol, Oldenburg, and others-inher monograph Attached to the Mouse:Disney and Contemporary Art.

This peculiar and specific act-theenclosure of commonwealth culturefor the benefit of a sole or corporateowner-is close kin to what could becalled imperial plagiarism, the free use

When Paradise Arrived, by Enrique Chagoya. Courtesy di Rosa Preserve,Napa, Calif. Phorograph by Srefan Kirkeby

of Third World or "primitive" art-works and styles by more privileged(and better-paid) artists. Think of Pi-casso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, orsome of the albums of Paul Simon orDavid Byrne: even without violatingcopyright, those creators have some-times come in for a certain skepti-cism when the extent of their out-sourcing became evident. And, aswhen Led Zeppelin found them-selves sued for back royalties by thebluesman Willie Dixon, the act canoccasionally be an expensive one. Tolive outside the law, you must behonest: perhaps it was this, in part,that spurred David Byrne and BrianEno to recently launch a "remix"website, where anyone can down-load easily disassembled versions oftwo songs from My Life in the Bush ofGhosts, an album reliant on vernacu-lar speech sampled from a host ofsources. Perhaps it also explains whyBob Dylan has never refused a re-quest for a sample.

Kenneth Koch once said, "I'm awriter who likes to be influenced." Itwas a charming confession, and arare one. For so many artists, the actof creativity is intended as aNapoleonic imposition of one'suniqueness upon the universe-i-cpresmoi Ie deluge of copycats! And forevery James Joyce or Woody Guthrieor Martin Luther King [r., or WaltDisney, who gathered a constellationof voices in his work, there mayseem to be some corporation or liter-ary estate eager to stopper the bottle:cultural debts flow in, but they don'tflow out. We might call this tenden-cy "source hypocrisy." Or we couldname it after the most pernicioussource hypocrites of all time: Disnial.

YOU CAN'T STEAL A GIFT

My reader may, understandably, beon the verge of crying, "Communist!"A large, diverse society cannot survivewithout property; a large, diverse, andmodern societycannot flourishwithoutsome form of intellectual property. Butit takes little reflection to grasp thatthere is ample value that the term"property" doesn't capture. And worksof art exist simultaneously in twoeconomies, a market economy and agift economy.

CRlTICISM65

The cardinal difference betweengift and commodity exchange is thata gift establishes a feeling-bond be-tween two people, whereas the saleof a commodity leaves no necessaryconnection. I go into a hardwarestore, pay the man for a hacksawblade, and walk out. I may never seehim again. The disconnectedness is,in fact, a virtue of the commoditymode. We don't want to be both-ered, and if the clerk always wants tochat about the family, I'll shop else-where. I just want a hacksaw blade.But a gift makes a connection. Thereare many examples, the candy or cig-arette offered to a stranger whoshares a seat on the plane, the fewwords that indicate goodwill be-tween passengers on the late-nightbus. These tokens establish the sim-plest bonds of social life, but themodel they offer may be extended tothe most complicated of unions-marriage, parenthood, mentorship. Ifa value is placed on these (often es-sentially unequal) exchanges, theydegenerate into something else.

Yet one of the more difficultthings to comprehend is that the gifteconomies-like those that sustainopen-source software-coexist sonaturally with the market. It is pre-cisely this doubleness in art practicesthat we must identify, ratify, and en-shrine in our lives as participants inculture, either as "producers" or"consumers." Art that matters tous-which moves the heart, or re-vives the soul, or delights the senses,or offers courage for living, howeverwe choose to describe the experi-ence-is received as a gift is re-ceived. Even if we've paid a fee atthe door of the museum or concerthall, when we are touched by a workof art something comes to us thathas nothing to do with the price.The daily commerce of our lives pro-ceeds at its own constant level, but agift conveys an uncomrnodifiablesurplus of inspiration.

The waywe treat a thing can changeits nature, though. Religions often pro-hibit the sale of sacred objects, the im-plication being that their sanctity islost if they are bought and sold. Weconsider it unacceptable to sell sex,babies, body organs, legal rights, andvotes. The idea that something should


never be commodified is generallyknown as inalienability or unalienabili-ty-a concept most famouslyexpressedbyThomas Jefferson in the phrase "en-dowed by their Creator with certainunalienable Rights ... "A work of artseems to be a hardier breed; it can besold in the market and still emerge awork of art. But if it is true that in theessential commerce of art a gift is car-ried by the work from the artist to hisaudience, if I am right to say that wherethere is no gift there is no art, then itmay be possible to destroy a work of artby converting it into a pure commod-ity. I don't maintain that art can't bebought and sold, but that the gift por-tion of the work places a constraintupon our merchandising. This is thereason why even a really beautiful, in-genious, powerful ad (of which thereare a lot) can never be any kind ofreal art: an ad has no status as gift; i.e.,it's never really for the person it's di-rected at.

The power of a gift economy re-mains difficult for the empiricists ofour market culture to understand. Inour times, the rhetoric of the marketpresumes that everything should beand can be appropriately bought,sold, and owned-a tide of alienationlapping daily at the dwindling re-doubt of the unalienable. In free-market theory, an intervention tohalt propertization is considered "pa-ternalistic," because it inhibits thefree action of the citizen, nowreposited as a "potential entrepre-neur." Of course, in the real world,we know that child-rearing, familylife, education, socialization, sexuali-ty, political life, and many other ba-sic human activities require insula-tion from market forces. In fact,paying for many of these things canruin them. We may be willing topeek at Who Wants to Marry a Multi-millionaire or an eBay auction of theova of fashion models, but only to re-assure ourselves that some things arestill beneath our standards of dignity.

What's remarkable about gifteconomies is that they can flourishin the most unlikely places-in run-down neighborhoods, on the Inter-net, in scientific communities, andamong members of AlcoholicsAnonymous. A classic example iscommercial blood systems, which

generally produce blood supplies oflower safety, purity, and potencythan volunteer systems. A gift econ-omy may be superior when it comesto maintaining a group's commit-ment to certain extra-market values.

THE COMMONS

Another way of understanding thepresence of gift economies-whichdwell like ghosts in the commercialmachine-is in the sense of a publiccommons. A commons, of course, isanything like the streets over whichwe drive, the skies through which wepilot airplanes, or the public parks orbeaches on which we dally. A com-mons belongs to everyone and no one,and its use is controlled only by com-mon consent. A commons describesresources like the body of ancient mu-sic drawn on by composers and folkmusicians alike, rather than the com-modities, like "Happy Birthday to You,"for which ASCAP, 114 years after itwaswritten, continues to collect a fee.Einstein's theory of relativity is a com-mons. Writings in the public domainare a commons. Gossip about celebri-ties is a commons. The silence in amovie theater is a transitory commons,impossibly ftagile, treasured by thosewho crave it, and constructed as a mu-tual gift by those who compose it.

The world of art and culture is avast commons, one that is saltedthrough with zones of utter com-merce yet remains gloriously immuneto any overall commodification. Theclosest resemblance is to the com-mons of a language: altered by everycontributor, expanded by even themost passive user. That a language isa commons doesn't mean that thecommunity owns it; rather it belongsbetween people, possessed by no one,not even by society as a whole.

Nearly any commons, though, canbe encroached upon, partitioned, en-closed. The American commons in-clude tangible assets such as publicforests and minerals, intangible wealthsuch as copyrights and patents, criticalinfrastructures such as the Internet andgovernment research, and cultural re-sources such as the broadcast airwavesand public spaces. They include re-sources we've paid for as taxpayers andinherited from previous generations.

They're not just an inventory o{mar-ketable assets; they're social institu-tions and cultural traditions that defineus as Americans and enliven us as hu-man beings. Some invasions of thecommons are sanctioned because wecan no longer muster a spirited com-mitment to the public sector.The abusegoesunnoticed because the theft of thecommons is seen in glimpses, not inpanorama. We may occasionally see aformer wetland paved; we may hearabout the breakthrough cancer drugthat tax dollars helped develop, therights to which pharmaceutical com-panies acquired for a song. The largermovement goes too much unremarked.The notion of a commons of culturalmaterials goes more or less unnamed.

Honoring the commons is not amatter of moral exhortation. It is apractical necessity. We in Western so-ciety are going through a period of in-tensifying belief in private ownership,to the detriment of the public good.We have to remain constantly vigi-lant to prevent raids by those whowould selfishly exploit our commonheritage for their private gain. Suchraids on our natural resources are notexamples of enterprise and initiative.They are attempts to take from all thepeople just for the benefit of a few.

UNDISCOVERED PUBLIC KNOWLEDGE

Artists and intellectuals despon-dent over the prospects for originali-ty can take heart from a phenome-non identified about twenty yearsago by Don Swanson, a library scien-tist at the University of Chicago. Hecalled it "undiscovered publicknowledge." Swanson showed thatstanding problems in medical re-search may be significantly ad-dressed, perhaps even solved, simplyby systematically surveying the sci-entific literature. Left to its own de-vices, research tends to become morespecialized and abstracted from thereal-world problems that motivatedit and to which it remains relevant.This suggests that such a problemmay be tackled effectively not bycommissioning more research but byassuming that most or all of the solu-tion can already be found in variousscientific journals, waiting to be as-sembled by someone willing to read

across specialties. Swanson himselfdid this in the case of Raynaud's syn-drome, a disease that causes the fin-gers of young women to becomenumb. His finding is especially strik-ing-perhaps even scandalous-be-cause it happened in the ever-expanding biomedical sciences.

Undiscovered public knowledgeemboldens us to question the ex-treme claims to originality made inpress releases and publishers' notices:Is an intellectual or creative offeringtruly novel, or have we just forgottena worthy precursor? Does solvingcertain scientific problems really re-quire massive additional funding, orcould a computerized search engine,creatively deployed, do the same jobmore quickly and cheaply? Lastly,does our appetite for creative vitalityrequire the violence and exaspera-tion of another avant-garde, with itswearisome killing-the-father impera-tives, or might we be better off rati-fying the ecstasy of influence-anddeepening our willingness to under-stand the commonality and timeless-ness of the methods and motifs avail-able to artists?

GIVE ALL

A few years ago, the Film Societyof Lincoln Center announced a ret-rospective of the works of DariushMehrjui, then a fresh enthusiasm ofmine. Mehrjui is one of Iran's finestfilmmakers, and the only one whosesubject was personal relationshipsamong the upper-middle-class intel-ligentsia. Needless to say, opportu-nities to view his films were-andremain-rare indeed. I headed up-town for one, an adaptation of]. D.Salinger's Franny and Zooey, titledPari, only to discover at the door ofthe Walter Reade Theater that thescreening had been canceled: its an-nouncement had brought threat of alawsuit down on the Film Society.True, these were Salinger's rightsunder the law. Yet why would hecare that some obscure Iranian film-maker had paid him homage with ameditation on his heroine? Would ithave damaged his book or robbedhim of some crucial remunerationhad the screening been permitted?The fertile spirit of stray connec-

CRITICISM 67

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tion-one stretching across what ispresently seen as the direst of inter-national breaches-had in this casebeen snuffed out. The cold, undeadhand of one of my childhood liter-ary heroes had reached out from itsNew Hampshire redoubt to arrestmy present-day curiosity.

A few assertions, then:Any text that has infiltrated the

common mind to the extent of GoneWith the Wind or Lolita or Ulysses in-exorably joins the language of cul-ture. A map-turned-to-landscape, ithas moved to a place beyond enclo-sure or control. The authors andtheir heirs should consider the subse-quent parodies, refractions, quota-tions, and revisions an honor, or atleast the price of a rare success.

A corporation that has imposedan inescapable notion-MickeyMouse, Band-Aid-on the culturallanguage should pay a similar price.

The primaryobjective of copyright isnot to reward the labor of authors but"to promote the Progress of Scienceand usefulArts." To this end, copyrightassures authors the right to their origi-nal expression,but encouragesothers tobuild freely upon the ideas and infor-mation conveyed by a work. This resultis neither unfair nor unfortunate.

Contemporary copyright, trademark,and patent law is presently corrupted.The case for perpetual copyright is adenial of the essential gift-aspect ofthe creative act. Arguments in its fa-vor are as uri-American as those forthe repeal of the estate tax.

Art is sourced. Apprentices graze inthe field of culture.

Digital sampling is an art methodlike any other, neutral in itself.

Despite hand-wringing at each tech-nological tum-radio, the Intemet-the future will be much like the past.Artists will sell some things but alsogive some things away.Change may betroubling for those who crave less am-biguity, but the life of an artist hasnever been filled with certainty.

The dream of a perfect systematicremuneration is nonsense. I pay rentwith the price my words bring whenpublished in glossy magazines and atthe same moment offer them for al-most nothing to impoverished literaryquarterlies, or speak them for free intothe air in a radio interview. So what are


they worth?What would they be worthif some future Dylan worked theminto a song?Should I care to make sucha thing impossible?

Any text is woven entirely with ci-tations, references, echoes, culturallanguages, which cut across it throughand through in a vast stereophony.The citations that go to make up atext are anonymous, untraceable, andyet already read; they are quotationswithout inverted commas. The ker-nel, the soul-let us go further and saythe substance, the bulk, the actual andvaluable material of all human utter-ances-is plagiarism. For substantial-ly all ideas are secondhand, consciouslyand unconsciously drawn from a mil-lion outside sources, and daily used bythe gamerer with a pride and satisfac-tion born of the superstition that heoriginated them; whereas there is nota rag of originality about them any-where except the little discolorationthey get from his mental and moralcaliber and his temperament, andwhich is revealed in characteristics ofphrasing. Old and new make the warpand woofof everymoment. There isnothread that is not a twist of these twostrands. By necessity, by proclivity,and by delight, we all quote. Neuro-logical study has lately shown thatmemory, imagination, and conscious-ness itself isstitched, quilted, pastiched.If we cut-and-paste our selves, mightwe not forgive it of our artworks?

Artists and writers-and our ad-vocates, our guilds and agents-toooften subscribe to implicit claims oforiginality that do injury to thesetruths. And we too often, as huck-sters and bean counters in the tinyenterprises of our selves, act to spitethe gift portion of our privilegedroles. People live differently whotreat a portion of their wealth as agift. If we devalue and obscure thegift-economy function of our artpractices, we turn our works intonothing more than advertisementsfor themselves. We may console our-selves that our lust for subsidiaryrights in virtual perpetuity is someheroic counter to rapacious corpo-rate interests. But the truth is thatwith artists pulling on one side andcorporations pulling on the other,the loser is the collective publicimagination from which we were

nourished in the first place, andwhose existence as the ultimaterepository of our offerings makes thework worth doing in the first place.

As a novelist, I'm a cork on theocean of story, a leaf on a windy day.Pretty soon I'll be blown away. Forthe moment I'm grateful to be makinga living, and so must ask that for alimited time (in the Thomas Jeffer-son sense) you please respect my small,treasured usemonopolies. Don't piratemy editions; do plunder my visions.The name of the game is Give All.You, reader, are welcome to my stories.They were never mine in the firstplace, but I gave them to you. If youhave the inclination to pick them up,take them with my blessing.

KEY: I IS ANOTHER

This key to the preceding essaynames the source of every line Istole, warped, and cobbled togetheras I "wrote" (except, alas, thosesources I forgot along the way). Firstuses of a given author or speaker arehighlighted in red. Nearly every sen-tence I culled I also revised, at leastslightly-for necessities of space, inorder to produce a more consistenttone, or simply because I felt like it.

TITLE

The phrase "the ecstasyof influence,"which embeds a rebuking play onHarold Bloom's "anxiety of influence,"is lifted from spoken remarks by Pro-fessor Richard Dienst of Rutgers.

LOVEAND THEFT

"... a cultivated man of middle age... " to "... hidden, unacknowledgedmemory?" These lines, with some ad-justments for tone, belong to theanonymous editor or assistant whowrote the dust-flap copy of MichaelMaar's The Two Lolitas. Of course, inmy own experience, dust-flap copy isoften a collaboration between authorand editor. Perhaps this was also truefor Maar.

"The history of literature ... " to"... borrow and quote?" comes fromMaar's book itself.

"Appropriation has always " to"... Ishmael and Queequeg " This

paragraph makes a hash of remarksfrom an interview with Eric Lottconducted by David McNair andJayson Whitehead, and incorporatesboth interviewers' and interviewee'sobservations. (The text-interviewform can be seen as a commonly ac-cepted form of multivocal writing.Most interviewers prime their sub-jects with remarks of their own-leading the witness, so to speak-andgently refine their subjects' state-ments in the final printed transcript.)

"I realized this ... " to «•.. for a longtime." The anecdote is cribbed, with anelision to avoid appropriating a deadgrandmother, from Jonathan Rosen'sThe Talmud and the Internet. I've nev-er seen 84, Charing Cross Road, norsearched the Web for a Donne quote.For me it was through Rosen to Donne,Hemingway, website, et al.

"When I was thirteen ... " to u ...

no plagiarist at all." This is fromWilliam Gibson's "God's LittleToys," in Wired magazine. My ownfirst encounter with William Bur-roughs, also at age thirteen, was lessepiphanic. Having grown up with apainter father who, during familyvisits to galleries or museums, ap-provingly noted collage and appro-priation techniques in the visual arts(Picasso, Claes Oldenburg, StuartDavis), I was gratified, but not sur-prised, to learn that literature couldencompass the same methods.

CONTAMINATION ANXIETY

"In 1941, on his front porch ... "to «••• 'this song comes from the cot-ton field.'" Siva Vaidhvanathan,Copyrights and Copywrongs.

"... enabled by a kind ... freelyreworked." Kembrew McLeod, Free-dom of Expression. In Owning Cul-ture, McLeod notes that, as he waswriting, he

happened to be listening to a lot of oldcountry music, and in my casual listen-ing I noticed that six country songsshared exacdy the same vocal melody,including Hank Thompson's "WildSide of Life," the Carter Family's "I'mThinking Tonight of My Blue Eyes,"Roy Acuff's "Great Speckled Bird,"Kitty Wells's "It Wasn't God WhoMade Honkv Tonk Angels," Reno &Smiley's "I'm Using My Bible for a

Roadmap," and Townes Van Zandt's"Heavenly Houseboat Blues."... In hisextensively researched book, Country:The Twisted Roots of Rock 'n' Roll,Nick Tosches documents that themelody these songs share is both "an-cient and British." There were norecorded lawsuitsstemming from theseappropriations....

" ... musicians have gained ...through allusion." Joanna Demers,Steal This Music.

"In Seventies Jamaica ... " to "...hours of music." Gibson.

"Visual, sound, and text collage ... "to "... realm of cultural production."This plunders, rewrites, and amplifiesparagraphs from McLeod's OwningCulture, except for the line aboutcollage being the art form of thetwentieth and twenty-first centuries,which I heard filmmaker Craig Bald-win say, in defense of sampling, inthe trailer for a forthcoming docu-mentary, Copyright Criminals.

"In a courtroom scene ... " to "...would cease to exist." Dave Itzkoff,New York Times.

"... the remarkable series of 'pla-giarisms' ... " to "... we want more pla-giarism." Richard Posner, combinedfrom The Becker-Posner Blog andThe Atlantic Monthly.

"Most artists are brought ... " to «...

by art itself." These words, and manymore to follow, come from LewisHyde's The Gift. Above any otherbook I've here plagiarized, I com-mend The Gift to your attention.

"Finding one's voice ... filiations,communities, and discourses." Se-manticist George L. Dillon, quoted inRebecca Moore Howard's "The NewAbolitionism Comes to Plagiarism."

"Inspiration could be ... act neverexperienced." Ned Rorem, found onseveral "great quotations" sites on theInternet.

"Invention, it must be humbly ad-mitted ... out of chaos." Mary Shelley,from her introduction to Frankenstein.

"What happens ... " to "... conta-mination anxiety." Kevin J .H.Dettmar, from "The Illusion of Mod-ernist Allusion and the Politics ofPostmodern Plagiarism."

SURROUNDED BY SIGNS

"The surrealists believed ... " to

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the Walter Benjamin quote. Christ-ian Keathley's Cinephilia and History,or the Wind in the Trees, a book thattreats fannish fetishism as the secretat the heart of film scholarship.Keathley notes, for instance, JosephCornell's surrealist-influenced 1936film Rose Hobart, which simplyrecords "the way in which Cornellhimself watched the 1931 Hollywoodpotboiler East of Borneo, fascinatedand distracted as he was by its B-grade star"-the star, of course, beingRose Hobart herself. This, I suppose,makes Cornell a sort of father tocomputer-enabled fan-creator re-workings of Hollywood product, likethe version of George Lucas's ThePhantom Menace from which thenoxious Jar Jar Binks character waspurged; both incorporate a viewer'ssubjective preferences into a revisionof a filmmaker's work.

"... early in the history of photog-raphy" to "... without compensatingthe source." From Free Culture, byLawrence Lessig, the greatest of pub-lic advocates for copyright reform, andthe best source if you want to get rad-icalized in a hurry.

"For those whose ganglia ... " to"... discourse broke down." From DavidFoster Wallace's essay "E Unibus Plu-ram," reprinted in A Supposedly FunThing I'll Never Do Again. I have noidea who' Wallace's "gray eminence" isor was. I inserted the example of Dick-ens into the paragraph; he strikes meas overlooked in the lineage of authorsof "brand-name" fiction.

"I was born ... Mary Tyler MooreShow." These are the reminiscencesof Mark Hosler from Negativland, acollaging musical collective that wassued by U2's record label for theirappropriation of "I Still Haven'tFound What I'm Looking For." Al-though I had to adjust the birthdate, Hosler's cultural menu fits melike a glove.

"The world is a home ... pop-culture products ... " McLeod.

"Today, when we can eat ... " to"... flat sights." Wallace.

"We're surrounded by signs, ignorenone of them." This phrase, which Iunfortunately rendered somewhat lead-en with the word "imperative," comesfrom Steve Erickson's novel Our Ec-static Days.


USEMONOPOLY

"... everything from attempts ... "to "defendants as young as twelve."Robert Boynton, The New YorkTimes Magazine, "The Tyrannyof Copyright?"

"A time is marked ... " to "... whatneeds no defense." Lessig, this timefrom The Future of Ideas.

"Thomas Jefferson, for one ... " to''' ... respective Writings and Discov-eries.''' Boynton.

"... second comers might do a muchbetter job than the originator... " I found this phrase in Lessig, whois quoting Vaidhyanathan, who him-self is characterizing a judgment writ-ten by Learned Hand.

"But Jefferson's vision ... ownedby someone or other." Boynton.

"The distinctive feature ... " to "...term is extended." Lessig, again fromThe Future of Ideas.

"When old laws ... " to " ... hadbeen invaded." Jessica Litman, Digi-tal Copyright.

"'I say to you ... woman homealone.''' I found the Valenti quote inMcl.eod. Now fill in the blank: JackValenti is to the public domain as

is to _

THE BEAUTY OF SECOND USE

"In the first ... " to "... builds anarchive." Lessig.

"Most books ... one year " Lessig."Active reading is ... " to " do not

own ... " This is a mashup of HenryJenkins, from his Textual Poachers:Television Fans and Participatory Cul-ture, and Michel de Certeau, whomJenkins quotes.

"In the children's classic ... " to"... its loving use." Jenkins. (Inci-dentally, have the holders of the copy-right to The Velveteen Rabbit had aclose look at Toy Story? There couldbe a lawsuit there.)

SOURCE HYPOCRISY, OR, DISNIAL

"The Walt Disney Company ... alas,Treasure Planet ... " Lessig.

"Imperial Plagiarism" is the title ofan essay by Marilyn Randall.

"... spurred David Byrne ... My Lifein the Bush of Ghosts ... " Chris Dahlen,Pitchfork-though in truth by the time

I'd finished, his words were so utterlydissolved within my own that had Ibeen an ordinary cutting-and-pastingjournalist it never would have oc-curred to me to give Dahlen a citation.The effort of preserving another's dis-tinctive phrases as I worked on thisessay was sometimes beyond my ca-pacities; this form of plagiarism wasoddly hard work.

"Kenneth Koch ... " to "... deluge ofcopycats!" Emily Nussbaum, The NewYork Times Book Review.

YOU CAN'T STEAL A GIFT

"You can't steal a gift." DizzyGillespie, defending another playerwho'd been accused of poachingCharlie Parker's style: "You can'tsteal a gift. Bird gave the world hismusic, and if you can hear it you canhave it."

"A large, diverse society ... intel-lectual property." Lessig.

"And works of art ... " to " ...marriage, parenthood, mentorship."Hyde.

"Yet one ... so naturally with themarket." David Bollier, Silent Theft.

"Art that matters ... " to "... boughtand sold." Hyde.

"We consider it unacceptable ... " to"' ... certain unalienable Rights .. .'''Bollier, paraphrasing Margaret JaneRadin's Contested Commodities.

"A work of art .. ." to "... constraintupon our merchandising." Hyde.

"This is the reason ... person it's di-rected at." Wallace.

"The power of a gift ... " to "... cer-tain extra-market values." Bollier, andalso the sociologist Warren O.Hagstrom, whom Bollier is para-phrasing.

THE COMMONS

"Einstein's theory ... " to "... publicdomain are a commons." Lessig.

"That a language is a commons ...society as a whole." Michael Newton,in the London Review of Books, re-viewing a book called Echolalias: On theForgetting of Language by Daniel Heller-Roazen. The paraphrases of book re-viewers are another covert form of col-laborative culture; as an avid readerof reviews, I know much about booksI've never read. To quote Yann Mar-

tel on how he came to be accusedof imperial plagiarism in his Booker-winning novel Life of Pi,

Ten or so years ago, I read a review byJohn Updike in the New York TimesReview of Books [sic]. It was of a novelby a Brazilian writer, Moacyr Scliar. Iforget the title, and John Updike didworse: he clearly thought the book asa whole was forgettable. His review-one of those that makes you suspiciousby being mostly descriptive ... oozedindifference. But one thing aboutit struck me: the premise.... Oh, thewondrous things I could do withthis premise.

Unfortunately, no one was ever able tolocate the Updike review in question.

"The American commons ... " to"... for a song." Bollier.

"Honoring the commons ... " to"... practical necessity." Bollier.

"We in Western ... public good."John Sulston, Nobel Prize-winner andco-mapper of the human genome.

"We have to remain ... " to "... ben-efit 'of a few." Harry S Truman, at theopening of the EvergladesNational Park.Although it may seem the height of pre-sumption to rip off a president-I foundclaiming Truman's stolid advocacy asmy own embarrassing in the extreme-I didn't rewrite him at all. As the poetMarianne Moore said, "If a thing hadbeen said in the best way, how can yousay it better?" Moore confessed her pen-chant for incorporating lines from oth-ers' work, explaining, "I have not yetbeen able to outgrow this hybrid methodof composition."

UNDISCOVERED PUBLIC KNOWLEDGE

"... intellectuals despondent ... "to u ••• quickly and cheaply?" SteveFuller, The Intellectual. There's some-thing of Borges in Fuller's insighthere; the notion of a storehouse ofknowledge waiting passively to beassembled by future users is sugges-tive of both "The Library of Babel"and "Kafka and his Precursors."

GIVE ALL

"... one of Iran's finest ... " to "... med-itation on his heroine?" Amy Taubin,Village Voice, although it was me whowas disappointed at the door of theWalter Reade Theater.

"The primary objective ... " to "...unfair nor unfortunate." Sandra DayO'Connor, 1991.

"... the future will be much like thepast" to "... give some things away."Open-source film archivist RickPrelinger, quoted in McLeod.

"Change may be troubling ... withcertainty." McLeod.

"... woven entirely .. ." to "... with-out inverted commas." Roland Barthes.

"The kernel, the soul ... " to "...characteristics of phrasing." MarkTwain, from a consoling letter toHelen Keller, who had suffered dis-tressing accusations of plagiarism (!).In fact, her work included uncon-sciously memorized phrases; underKeller's particular circumstances, herwriting could be understood as akind of allegory of the "constructed"nature of artistic perception. I foundthe Twain quote in the aforemen-tioned Copyrights and Copywrongs,by Siva Vaidhyanathan.

"Old and new ... " to "... we allquote." Ralph Waldo Emerson. Theseguys all sound alike!

"People live differently ... wealthas a gift." Hyde.

«... I'm a cork .. ." to "... blownaway." This is adapted from TheBeach Boys song "Til I Die," writtenby Brian Wilson. My own first ad-venture with song-lyric permissionscame when I tried to have a charac-ter in my second novel quote thelyrics "There's a world where I cango and/Tell my secrets to/In myroom/In my room." After learningthe likely expense, at my editor'ssuggestion I replaced those with"You take the high road/I'll take thelow road/I'll be in Scotland beforeyou," a lyric in the public domain.This capitulation always bugged me,and in the subsequent British publi-cation of the same book I restoredthe Brian Wilson lyric, without per-mission. Ocean of Story is the title ofa collection of Christina Stead'sshort fiction.

Saul Bellow, writing to a friendwho'd taken offense at Bellow's fic-tional use of certain personal facts,said: "The name of the game is GiveAll. You are welcome to all my facts.You know them, I give them to you. Ifyou have the strength to pick themup, take them with my blessing." I

couldn't bring myself to retain Bel-low's "strength," which seemed pre-sumptuous in my new context, thoughit is surely the more elegant phrase.On the other hand, I was pleased to in-vite the suggestion that the gifts inquestion may actually be light and eas-ily lifted.

KEY TO THE KEY

The notion of a collage text is, ofcourse, not original to me. Walter Ben-jamin's incomplete Arcades Projectseemingly would have featured exten-sive interlaced quotations. Otherprecedents include Graham Rawle'snovel Diary of an Amateur Photogra-pher, its text harvested from photog-raphy magazines, and EduardoPaolozzi's collage-novel Kex, cobbledfrom crime novels and newspaper clip-pings. Closer to home, my efforts owea great deal to the recent essays ofDavid Shields, in which diverse quotesare made to closely intertwine and re-verberate, and to conversations witheditor Sean Howe and archivistPamela Jackson. Last year David Edel-stein, in New York magazine, satirizedthe Kaavya Viswanathan plagiarismcase by creating an almost complete-ly plagiarized column denouncing heractions. Edelstein intended to demon-strate, through ironic example, howbricolage such as his own was ipsofacto facile and unworthy. AlthoughViswanathan's version of "creativecopying" was a pitiable one, I differwith Edelstein's conclusions.

The phrase [e est un autre, with itsdeliberately awkward syntax, belongsto Arthur Rimbaud. It has been trans-lated both as "I is another" and "I issomeone else," as in this excerpt fromRimbaud's letters:

For I is someone else. If brass wakesup a trumpet, it is not its fault. Tomethis is obvious: I witness the unfoldingof my own thought: I watch it, I listento it: I make a stroke of the bow: the

. symphony begins to stir in the depths,or springson to the stage.

If the old fools had not discoveredonly the false significance of the Ego,we should not now be having tosweep away those millions of skele-tons which, since time immemorial,have been piling up the fruits of theirone-eyed intellects, and claiming tobe, themselves, the authors! _

CRITICISM 71

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The Ecstasy of Influence