L I T E R A R Y
BORROWING
..
.
AND
STEALING
:
PLAGIARISM
,
SOURCES
,
INFLUE
N
CES
,
AND
INTERTEXTS
LI
NDA
H
UT
CHEON
Mc
Master
University
Th
e entire corpus of exi
sting
lit
eratur
e
should
be rega
rded
as a
limbo
from
whic h disc
ern
ing au thors could
dr
aw th eir c
ha
rac
ters as r
equ
ired , creating only
when they f
ailed
to find a sui table exi
sting
puppet
.
The
m
odern
novel should
be largely a work of referen ce. Fl
ann
O
'Br
ien , At
Swim
-T
wa-Birds
Recently we
witn
essed what
happ
ens today in
the
literary "int erp retive
community" when a
modern
novel -
The
W hite
Hot
el - is even in
part
a
"work of refer
en
ce." D. M .
Th
omas
's sin, however, seems to have been th
at
of enlarging the corpus f
rom
whi
ch a novelist draws to include non-
fictional , historical texts, in this case
the
testimony of Di
na
Pronicheva, the
sole survivor of Babi Yar.
Altho
ugh
Thomas
acknowledged his debt openly
on the copyright page of
the
novel, his more or less verbatim borrowing
launched an int ense,
but
perhaps
ultimately fruitless, debate in th e pages of
the
Tim
es
Lit
erary S
uppl
ement in M arch and
Apr
il of 1982.
Thom
as's reply' to accusations of
opport
unistic, exploitive plagiarism is
an
inter
esting one.
After
po
inti
ng
out
that
his novelistic account of Babi Yar
is three times the length of
Din
a's, the novelist remarks
that
at this
point
in
the novel his
hero
ine changes
from
being an individual (whose single
uni
que
life is of interest to "Sigmund
Freud
" ) to being only one of
man
y
anon
y-
mous victims of history.
The
text,
Thom
as felt,
had
to reflect this change
from individual self-expression to
common
fate, an d it did so in the
modu
-
lation of the
narrat
ive voice
from
an authorial
one
(because, as he writ es,
at the
start
"
there
is still r
oom
for fiction") to
that
of
the
recor ding of
one
who
had
been there --- the only
appropri
at
e and
truthf
ul voice possible,
given the circumstances.
The
novel's mu ch misread
epigraph
from Yeats
underlines this
progr
ession
from
the
pr
i
vate
to the public :
We
had
fed the h
eart
on fa ntas ies,
Th
e H
eart'
s gro wn
brutal
from
the
fa
re;
M
or
e sub sta nce in our enm ities
T han in our love
..
. .
EN
G
LISH
STUDI
ES
IN
CA
NADA
,
XII,
2 ,
Jun
e 1986
In
addition,
the
text of
the
novel itself acknowledges
the
debt - o
r the
pla
gi
arism:
"Di
na
survived to be the
onl
y
witne
ss, the sole
authority
for
what Lisa [the novel 's heroine] saw
and
felt .
Yet
it had
hap
pened
thirty
thou
sand
tim
es; always in the
same
way
and
alwa
ys differently."
2
It
is
int
eresting th
at
few
have
att
acked
Thomas
f
or
pla
giarizing Freud
though
he has
produced
a fine,
thou
gh invented, e
xample
of a
Freud
ian case
history in his novel, complete
with
lines
straight
out
of Bey
ond
the Pleasure
Principle .
Perh
aps
the
"Author's
Note
" ab
out
his fictionalizing of
what
he
calls the "discoverer of the gr
eat
and
beautifu
l
mod
ern
m
yth
of psycho-
anal
ysis" h
ad
forestalled
the
critics. Or is it a m
atter
less of the manner in
which
one
uses
anoth
er te
xt
tha
n of th e
kin
d of
text
from
which one
borr
ows -- or steals?
3
Is it now illi
cit
for a
writer
to
draw
on
what
Jonathan
Culler
has
called
"th
e discursive s
pac
e of a culture"?
4
Is
psychoana
lysis
more
overtly discursive
than
history?
The
se
are
the
obvious
que
stions raised
by this c
ontrovers
y.
But
there
are
man y
others
as well .
As
the
sub
sequent
symposium on
pla
giarism in
the
Tim
es L iterary
Suppl
e-
m ent
5
m
ade
clear, novelists
toda
y
- and
perh
aps
alwa
ys - feel
that
books
ar
e as l
egitimat
e a
part
of their e
xperience
as
eatin
g a
meal
,
or
visiting a
place
about
whi
ch they then write.
Cert
ainly
Dante
and
Cervantes
thought
so.
Ev
en critics t
oda
y s
eem
to agree
- whether
the
experienc
e of
reading
be
deemed
consciously or
uncons
ciously
influent
ial on the
writer
.
6
But
the key
word
here
is writer, for in this deb
ate
on
Th
e
Wh
ite H otel I believe we
are
viewing onl y an
overt
version of a contemporary critical
mudd
le
regardin
g
the
status
and
,
mor
e significan tly,
the
locus of te
xtua
l
approp
ria-
tion.
On
the
one
hand,
we
are
dealin
g
with
au thor ial
intent
and
with the
historical issue of
sour
ces and influences; on
the
oth
er,
it
is a question of
reader
interpret
ation
whereby
visible sources become signs of plagiarism,
and
influences yield to
"intertextual"
echoes.
I
str
ess this seemingly obvious, if overlooked, po
int
of
crit
ical focus
be
cause
it seems to be
the
p
arti
cular
source of
much
confu
sion between
new
and
old
theoreti
cal t
erms
that
sound
fami
liar
but,
in
fact
, may prove
to be very different. I
am
thinking
of
con
cepts such as "sub
ject"
and
charact
er,
or
as is the case here,
intertextuality
and
influence.
Depending
on
our
critical
temperament,
we
are
likely to be all too quick to
want
to
reject
either
the recent
term
, as an obvious
contin
ental
barbar
ism, or the
traditional one, as
an
out-of-da
te
redundan
cy.
Th
ese knee-je rk dismissals
require e
xam
inin
g, however.
Crit
ical fashion
being
what
it is
today
, it is
natu
ra
l that
some
of us will
wa
nt
to be post-stru
ctur
ally a la
mod
e, while
oth
ers of us will
wan
t, no less fiercely, to keep to the
familiar
and
comfortable
theoreti
cal garb of
humanist
discourse. Yet, p
erhaps
we
need
to
stan
d back
for a
moment
in o
rder
to investigate
the
very
need
for
the
emperor
's new-
and
old -
clothes.
Mayb
e
the
two
apparels
are
not ne
gation
s
or
even dupli-
230
cations of each
ot
her ; maybe each dre sses
and
addre
sses a
nothe
r
part
of the
"emperor of signs" (with apologies to Ro
land
B
ar
thes). T his,
I'd
like to
arg
ue, is often precisely w
hat
happens,
and
cer tainly th is is so in the case of
in
ter
textua lity and influ ence.
It
is not a m
att
er of new
Fr
ench and A
mer
i-
can
formalism or post-
stru
ctur
alism versus solid, tr
adit
ional,
hum
anist
scholarship. T he relationship is, instead , a complementary, not oppositio
na
l,
one
.
Wh
en J ulia
Kri
steva
7
coined the t
erm
"intertextuality,' she
not
ed th
at
there were th ree ele
men
ts involved besides the text
und
er consi
dera
tion :
the au thor, the reader, and th e other exteri
or
te
xt
s. T hese elements she
a
rranged
along two axes : a horizontal one of the dia logue of the a
ut
hor
with
his
/her
poten
tial rea der,
and
a vertical one between the
text
itself
and
ot
her
texts. T his set-up is very ne
at;
it is possibly too
neat
, however, too
schematic to be true to the actual
exper
ience of reading. Is the in
tert
e
xtua
l
dialogue
not
rather one betw een
the
reader
a
nd
his
/h
er
memory
of other
texts, as provoked by
the
wor
k in question?
Certai
nly the role of the author
in con te
mpo
rary discussions of
intertextuality
has
pro
ved to be
minimal;
in
fact, it is only even posited
when
intentionalit
y is required - as in the case
of
paro
dy - to define a
particular
kind of literary borrowin g. As the work
of M ichael Riffaterre
8
has
made
clear, from the perspective of a theory of
inte
rt
extuality,
the
experience of
literature
consists only of a text, a
rea
der,
and his or her reactions
that
take
the
form of systems of words, whi ch are
grouped associatively in
the
reader's mind.
Two
texts, then, cou ld sha re
these systems without it being a question of influence - or pla
giarism-
because the locus of te
xtual
appropriation
is the
reader
, and
not
the
aut
hor:
intert
extua
lity is
not
just a
perception
of ho
molog
ues or
the
cu
ltivated
read
er
's
apprehension
of
same
ness or
difference
. Int ertextu ality is
not
a felic itous
su rplus,
the
privi
lege of a
good
mem
ory or a classical
education.
Th
e
term
indeed ref
er
s to an o
per
at
ion of the read er's
mind,
but
it
is an
obligat
ory
one,
nece
s
sary
to any
textual
decod
ing. In ter textuality
necessar
ily
complements
ou r
expe
rience
of te
xtu
alit
y. I t is
the
pe
rception
that
our
reading of th e
text
cannot
be com plete or sa tisfactory wi
thou
t
going
through
the
interte
xt, t
ha
t the
text
does no t signify
unl
ess as a fun cti on of a
comp
lemen
tary
or con t
radic
tory
inter
tex t
ua
l
homo
logue .
9
Lately there seems to have been a sort of eclipse in critical studies of
the
influences
upon
writers.
Th
ere are many literary hist
or
ical reasons for this,
and n
ot
the least significant of these is thi s refocusing of critical attention
upon the
reade
r. But th is c
ha
nge in criticism has come
abo
ut, I would
argue, the way m
ost
crit
ical changes do -- th
at
is, primarily because of a
change in th e literature itself. Like
arc
hi
tectural
"po
stmodern
ism"
which
sees itself as being derived from, yet challenging,
the
tradition
of modernism
231
in architecture, a tradition
that
it inverts and subverts,
what
we call "post.
mod
er
n" l
iter
a
ture
toda
y -
esp
eciall y auto-re
pr
esenta tional fiction
I O
_
would also seem to be the direct hei r to the
mode
rnist alte
rat
ion of sensi,
bility and taste.
What
Joyce, Eliot,
Pound
,
and
other
s brou
ght
to their
art
was an
awa
reness both of the imp ortance of their literary heritage and of
the power of th e assimilating reader : the only person who can revivify the
"waste l
and
" is the reader wh o brings tog
ether
the
fragm
ent
s of civilization
which Eliot has shored against his ruins. C
ont
emporary
self-reflexive fiction
- or rnetafiction, f
or
short - also si
tua
tes itself overtl y in the context of the
literary tr
adit
ion, and
writ
ers like
Jo
hn Fowles,
John
B
art
h, an d Vladimir
Nab
okov, while parodying earli er f
orm
s, also
put
into question the usual
hierarchy of w
ha
t is being m ocked. As well, however, th ey openly
turn
to
their readers as the active co-creators of the text.
In
oth
er
word
s, in the
very st
ra
tegies and structures of these texts lie the seeds of that critical
confusion we witnessed in the
W hite H otel de
bat
e:
meta
fiction has to posit
au
tho
rial
int
ent - even if only
infe
rred - to account for its p
ar
odic form,
but its overt pointing to
the
act of re
adin
g and to the role of th e reader
places it sq
uare
ly in the
int
ert
ext ual domain.
F
ailur
e to make
the
important
distinction between an au tho r- and a
read er-c
ent
red ori
ent
ation can lead to biz
arr
e critical situ ations. Although,
in a very f
orm
alist phase, Kristeva had made it clear
that
, to h
er
, the mean-
ing of a text is onl y
dependent
on other texts which it absorbs and trans-
form s, wh en she illustrates her theory using the work of a par ticular writer,
what
we find is more of a traditional influ ence study - to th e point where
she
cla
ims we mu st even know the
pa
rticu
lar
editions of the texts the author
re
ad
.
!'
At least Harold Bloom (in
Th
e A
nx
iety of
Influ
en ce ) is more overt
in his a ttribution of the significan ce of influence to
the
encoding
author
-
albeit to his un conscious. Wh
at
has usually ha
ppened
, however, is th
at
most
discussions of intertex
tua
lity proper have ultim
at
ely
ended
up centering upon
the
rea
der, no matter how formalist they
have
attemp ted to sound. We
witness, for instance, such typical f
orm
al s
tat
ement
s as that of Gerard
Gen
ett
e, for whom
int
ertexuality is simply a relationship of co-presence
b
etw
een two texts, the "effective" presence of one text within another.
12
For Laurent J enny, int erte
xtu
ality is a
matte
r of f
orm
al
inva
rian ts
or
arche-
types.
13
F
or
Michael
Riffat
err
e, intertextuality is
what
actua
lly defines the
form al and semiotic unit
that
constitutes th e literary text,
but
it is worth
stressing th
at
it is still, in the end, only the re
ader
who can activate the
"intertext," which is defined by Riffat
err
e as "the corpus of texts the reader
may legitimately connect with the one before his eyes, that is, the texts
brou
ght
to min d by what he is re
adin
g."
14
Yet even Riffat
erre
masks this implied
rea
der-focus in his formalist dis-
tinction between influence
and
int
ert
e
xtu
ality. Influence, he argues, is a
232
vertical relationship of text to text, a relationship of recurrence
and
same-
ness, while i
ntert
ext is
related
to text laterally
throu
gh simultaneity
and
otherness.
15
But the existence of metafictional
parod
y, of course, would
confuse this
nea
t solution thoroughly for , in the case of all literary
parod
y,
overt
influence obviously leads to inversi on, as well as sameness.
In
ot
her
words, this tid y formalist distinction ignores the real
problem
-
the
differ-
ence between a
reader-centred
and
an
author-centred
critical perspective.
Elsewhere, however,
when
not
bothered
by this pesky
que
stion of influence,
Riffate
rr
e, along
with
Roland
Barthes,
16
is careful to define
intertextualit
y
as a modality of perception, an act of "decoding" texts in
the
li
ght
of
other
texts.
For
Barthe
s, howe
ver
,
the
reader
is free to associate texts
more
.or less
at random, limited only by individual idiosyncrasies and
per
sonal
culture
.
Riffaterre, on the
other
hand
,
ar
gues
that
the
text in its "structured en-
tirety"
demands
a
more
conditioned and therefore more limited reading.
17
Perhaps the best illustration of the difference in criti cal orientation be-
tween influence and
intertextuality
st
udie
s is to be
found
in that off-quoted
Borges story ,
"Pi
err
e
Menard
, Au
thor
of the Q uixote."
Thi
s is
not
a tale
about the
writin
g or
the
rewriting of the
Qui
xot
e ; it is r
ather
about
the
reading of it by
that
peevish,
argum
entative snob who
na
rrates the story. It
is an allegory of the
power
and
of the limits of
interte
xtual
re
ading
,
not
of
the influences or s
our
ces available to a
writer
or rewriter. Borges makes this
evident in his conclusion :
"Men
ard
(perhaps
without
w
anting
to) has
enriched, by
means
of a new technique, the
halting
and
rudimentary
art
of
reading: this new tech
nique
is
that
of the deliberate a
na
chr
onism
and
the
erroneous
attribut
ion.
"
18
Whether we see such self-consciousness
about
the
reader
and
the
r
eadin
g
of this
and
other
te
xt
s as a sign of a curr ent cultural crisis or, as
I ha
ve
suggested earlier, as
the
logical
development
out
of m
cd
ernism.19" it has
certainly
had
its effect on
much
literary theory today in the general displace-
ment of
the
locus of
meaning
from the
author
and
the
text to the reader, at
least within the limits of
the
dominant
West
ern
"metaph
ysical" tradition.
Intertex
tualit
y is a fun ction of
readin
g, of
"decodin
g."
Formali
st insisting to
the
contr
ary, it is not onl y a
matter
of the text's somehow
partheno
genetic
or magical absor
pt
ion
and
transformation
of
other
texts."
20
Thi
s formalism,
however, is
perfe
ctly u
nderstandabl
e in terms of critical or intellectual
history, for it marks a conscious
and
, I would say,
thorou
ghly
predictable
reaction against the
Romantic
preo
c
cup
ation
with
the
author
and against
the
"Great
Traditi
on" of canonized a
uthors
that
has
dom
inated
much
English criticism to thi s
da
y.
In
the early work of
Roland
Barth
es, in the
criticism of
Fren
ch formalists like
Jean
Ri
cardou
,
and
in the even
more
influential theories of
Mi
chel
Foucault
, we find a rejection of the "ideology"
of the
author
as
the
unique, inspired,
and
original
sour
ce (and p
roprietor
)
233