Plagiat et créativité (treize enquêtes sur l'auteur et son autre) (review)

Abstract

Cornille, Jean-Louis. Plagiat et creativite (treize enquetes sur l'auteur e t son autre). Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008. Faux Titre. Pp. 217. ISBN: 978-90-420-2455-7 Isolating a practice he considers to be particularly French, that of writing based upon what one has read (rather than allegedly anglo-saxon manner of writing based upon life), Jean-Louis Cornille states that his aim in this book is to unearth ghostly subterranean dialogue, chain of authors, hidden behind each of texts he will discuss. Leaving aside his unsubstantiated claim about difference between anglo-saxon and French writing, links he identifies are often nothing more than pure hypothese ou geniale intuition, and his admission at one point that se peut meme que rien de tel ne se soit produit, et que ce rapprochement se soit fait dans notre tete de chercheur, seulement holds true for most of his analyses (62). Despite title, very little of book is devoted to plagiarism. Instead, Cornille focuses on intertextual concepts related to but distinct from plagiarism, such as echo, and hommage, which lend themselves better to tenuous connections he uncovers. Nonetheless, he does put forth a concept of plagiarism or imitation in which Marx appears to be one of ghostly presences within Cornille's own text. In his Introduction, he writes: Le mor 'imitation' est un tres mauvais concept, choisi par commodite: disons plutot qu'il y a capture de code et de plus-value. Proust, lorsqu'il capte un bout de code flaubertien, y ajoute aussitot quelque chose, une valeur, une valence qui n'appartient qu'a lui; il 'proustifie' (11, my emphasis). By discarding term imitation in favor of production de plus-value, involving an addition of valeur that belongs only to one who appropriates writing, Cornille presents a theory of plagiarism that bears a striking resemblance to Karl Marx's famous general formula for capital, which describes the transformation of money into commodities, and re-conversion of commodities into money. The end-product, value of which includes a surplus-value, belongs to capitalist, not to worker, just as, in Cornille's theory of imitation, end-product and plus-value belong not to Gustave Flaubert but to Marcel Proust. Thus Cornille's idea of value-creation and owner-transfer and his use of term plus-value are altogether Marxist. If this is more than simply pure hypothese ou geniale intuition on my part, then Cornille, by fusing his theory of plagiarism to Marxism, opens up an interesting line of inquiry into alienation and exploitation inherent in plagiarism and suggests possibility that capitalism is a form of economic plagiarism or plagiarism is a form of literary capitalism. The book has four parts, Realismes, Surrealismes, Populismes, and Post-modernismes, each of which includes two to four of book's thirteen enquetes. Additionally, there is a short passage that functions as a preface, followed by Introduction, Proust a l'heure du pastiche, in which Cornille discusses borrowings from Honore de Balzac and from Flaubert to argue that pastiche is central to Proust's writing, accounting, for example, for particular musicality of A la recherche du temps perdu. Realismes begins with an enquete, Le Manuel d'Emma, that connects first scene of Flaubert's Madame Bovary to an obscure textbook released in numerous editions during Flaubert's childhood and then to more recent works by Louis-Ferdinand Celine and by Patrick Chamoiseau. The second enquete, Decharge Flaubert (la Bible en argot), focuses on Flaubert's Herodias, final tale in Trois Contes about beheading of John Baptist, to discuss Flaubert's attempt to eliminate from his writing any trace of literary inheritance, such as purulences stylistiques of other authors (46). …