Literary Borrowing … and Stealing: Plagiarism, Sources, Influences, and Intertexts

Abstract

L I T E R A R Y B O R R O W I N G . . . A N D S T E A L I N G : P L A G I A R I S M , S O U R C E S , I N F L U E N C E S , A N D I N T E R T E X T S LINDA H U TG H EO N McMaster University The entire corpus of existing literature should be regarded as a limbo from which discerning authors could draw their characters as required, creating only when they failed to find a suitable existing puppet. The modern novel should be largely a work of reference. Flann O’Brien, At Swim-Two-Birds !R.ecently we witnessed what happens today in the literary “interpretive community” when a modern novel — The White Hotel — is even in part a “work of reference.” D. M. Thomas’s sin, however, seems to have been that of enlarging the corpus from which a novelist draws to include nonfictional , historical texts, in this case the testimony of Dina Pronicheva, the sole survivor of Babi Yar. Although Thomas acknowledged his debt openly on the copyright page of the novel, his more or less verbatim borrowing launched an intense, but perhaps ultimately fruitless, debate in the pages of the Times Literary Supplement in March and April of 1982. Thomas’s reply1 to accusations of opportunistic, exploitive plagiarism is an interesting one. After pointing out that his novelistic account of Babi Yar is three times the length of Dina’s, the novelist remarks that at this point in the novel his heroine changes from being an individual (whose single unique life is of interest to “Sigmund Freud” ) to being only one of many anony­ mous victims of history. The text, Thomas felt, had to reflect this change from individual self-expression to common fate, and it did so in the modu­ lation of the narrative voice from an authorial one (because, as he writes, at the start “there is still room for fiction” ) to that of the recording of one who had been there — the only appropriate and truthful voice possible, given the circumstances. The novel’s much misread epigraph from Yeats underlines this progression from the private to the public: We had fed the heart on fantasies, The Heart’s grown brutal from the fare; More substance in our enmities Than in our love. . . . E n g l is h S t u d ie s in C a n a d a , x i i , 2, June 1986 In addition, the text of the novel itself acknowledges the debt — or the plagiarism: “Dina survived to be the only witness, the sole authority for what Lisa [the novel’s heroine] saw and felt. Yet it had happened thirty thousand times; always in the same way and always differently.” 2 It is interesting that few have attacked Thomas for plagiarizing Freud, though he has produced a fine, though invented, example of a Freudian case history in his novel, complete with lines straight out of Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Perhaps the “Author’s Note” about his fictionalizing of what he calls the “discoverer of the great and beautiful modern myth of psycho­ analysis” had forestalled the critics. Or is it a matter less of the manner in which one uses another text than of the kind of text from which one borrows — or steals?3 Is it now illicit for a writer to draw on what Jonathan Culler has called “ the discursive space of a culture” ?4 Is psychoanalysis more overtly discursive than history? These are the obvious questions raised by this controversy. But there are many others as well. As the subsequent symposium on plagiarism in the Times Literary Supple­ ment'1 5 made clear, novelists today — and perhaps always — feel that books are as legitimate a part of their experience as eating a meal, or visiting a place about which they then write. Certainly Dante and Cervantes thought so. Even critics today seem to agree — whether the experience of reading be deemed consciously or unconsciously influential on the writer.6 But the key word...