Back in 2005, I published an essay in Granta, a prominent British literary journal, about my obsession with insomnia. I began by admitting that I’m not an authority about anything, except, perhaps, for this one thing: sleep and the lack thereof. That was something I’d studied for years, an experience I knew as well as anyone. “I’m a connoisseur of sleep”, I wrote, “it’s my only area of expertise”, and then I went on from there
Three years later, a British woman named Jenny Diski, well-known there but not so well-known here, published an essay in the London Review of Books about her obsession with insomnia. She began by admitting that she wasn’t an authority about anything, except, perhaps, for this one thing: sleep and the lack thereof. That was something she’d studied for years, an experience she knew as well as anyone. “Inexpert though I am in all other fields, I am a connoisseur of sleep”, she wrote, and then she went on from there.
Well. I can’t say I wasn’t irritated, but I can’t say I was outraged, either. For one thing, I don’t know whether it was deliberate or not, and since she died a few years ago, I can’t ask her, even if I thought she would tell me. Granta is well enough known to British literary types that I assumed she’d read my piece, but perhaps not. If she had, she may have brought it up from the depths of her unconscious without realizing it. That happens. In principle, it bothers me, but in practice, I find it hard to get worked up about it. The only part that bothered me was that she was more famous than I am, had a bigger audience, and probably made more money; but then, so do a lot of writers.
Indeed, I’d forgotten about the entire episode, until the Times reviewed a new collection of her work this morning, and quoted that very line as an example of her way with words (the reviewer, I should note, couldn’t possibly have known that I’d written it first). But it got me thinking, about plagiarism, and quasi-plagiarism, and near-plagiarism, and their status in art.
I steal stuff all the time, and make no bones about it. The consequences are sometimes comic. In my first novel, Sister, I reproduced, from memory but as close to word for word as I could, a sentence from Proust. Not a famous sentence, it occurs somewhere in Volume Two, a description of a church bell ringing on a summer evening, which sounds to the narrator as if the spire had pressed against the sky until bronze droplets appeared. I took it because I liked it, because it was a private homage to a book I loved, it was one sentence among about 10,000 in the book and in the exceedingly unlikely event that anyone noticed, I would have simply said, “Yes, I stole that. What about it?” Then I received a review of the book which praised me for my style and reproduced that very sentence as an example.
In my new one, there’s a description of snow falling on a street in Chelsea, for which I reproduced, again from memory though probably not very accurately, a line from the last paragraph from Joyce’s story “The Dead”. I took it for the same reason I took the Proust, and sure enough, I’ve just received a review which singles out and quotes that same sentence. I suppose that’s what you get, and again, I don’t blame the reviewers, who are generous towards me and can’t be expected to spot this sort of thing anyway.
Otherwise, it’s a fine and venerable tradition. Eliot famously said, “immature poets imitate; mature poets steal”. Jasper Johns gave as his credo, “Take an object. Do something to it. Do something else to it.” Aside from the two sentences mentioned above, I’ve never knowingly copied anybody, but I walk around with a steady stream of snippets in my head: lines, lyrics, movie characters, plot pivots, verses, bits of dialog, a blooming and buzzing confusion; most of them are mine, but some of them are borrowed, and left to marinate, to change, to be discarded, rescued, rewritten, flipped over, mined for the unexpected vein of meaning, scratched, and so on. I feel like I should state, for the record, just in case my publisher is reading along, that every sentence in my book is my own, including the Joyce paraphrase, but my first advice to young writers who are blocked is to steal: whatever you need, from wherever you can. By the times it makes it into print under your name, you’ll have changed it so much it’s unrecognizable anyway, and anything someone spots will be considered an intertext, a path not taken, a possible world, a debt repaid, and by the way the phrase “a blooming and buzzing confusion” comes from William James.
As for more literal forms of plagiarism, it’s common in visual art, and not just because of Richard Prince and Sherrie Levine, or Elaine Sturtevant: one thinks of Renaissance copies, mass-market etchings of famous paintings, Schwitter’s collages, and yes Duchamp – that snow shovel and toilet may not have been works of art, but someone designed them, and didn’t share in the proceeds. And of course, musicians have cover versions and samples.
Why can’t writers have cover versions and samples? In literature it’s harder to pull off: Pierre Menard remains a ghost, a wish, proof of concept with a little bravado. Levine did a word for word republication of Flaubert’s “A Simple Heart” (I have a copy here: it’s lovely), and Prince did the same with Catcher in the Rye, but those are art objects, not reading material. Jonathan Lethem wrote a piece on thievery for Harper’s back in 2007, which consisted entirely of stitched together excerpts from other peoples’ essays on the same topic. It was very good: it would have been great if he hadn’t admitted to the ruse at the end of the piece, and carefully credited every work he had pillaged. If he’d stolen from me, I would have encouraged him not to tell anyone. I once had a conversation with William Gibson (a lovely and brilliant man) in which he mentioned how delighted he was that Kathy Acker plagiarized passages from Neuromancer for her own book, Empire of the Senseless, but it’s worth pointing out that almost no one read the Acker (I wonder if he would have been quite so sanguine if their status was reversed and she outsold him), and besides, it was only passages.
No, the field remains wide open. I daren’t do it myself. I’m too old, it would come across as a gimmick, a bid for attention, and perhaps an injustice, but I’d love to see it done by someone just starting out, someone who can make it clear that this is what they do. Copy Updike’s “A&P” or Jackson’s “The Lottery” and submit it to the New Yorker. If they don’t take it, submit it to another magazine or journal. Someone will go for it. Steal, you bairns, steal from anyone, steal from everyone. Steal from me.