Copy+Paste=Best-seller
This may be old news by now, but I’ve been thinking about the irony surrounding 17-year-old Helene Hegemann’s best-selling book, Axolotl Roadkill, in which she lifted as much as a whole page from another book called Strobo. She responded to the ensuing scuffle by saying (and I’m sure this sounds better in German): “There’s no such thing as originality anyway, just authenticity.”
I would love (not sarcastic) if a composition student would say that to me.
So while you may be tempted to yell and point at the cheater until she gets knocked out of the running for her book prize, there does seem to be a clear self-referential quality to her use of words. One of the lines she lifted from the author of Strobo was: “Berlin is here to mix everything with everything.” Metafiction?
Then I remembered I have a character in a recent story I wrote riding around on a bicycle singing lines from Rimbaud’s “The Drunken Boat.” Plagiarism?
As writers we often find something fresh by taking “found” words out of context, and, to use Hegemann’s club-scene terminology, remixing them. I wonder if this only becomes a problem if the work that results feels like a gimmick. If it works, then it feels fresh, and people are happy. One German book critic and supporter of Hegemann’s work agreed “I believe it’s part of the concept of the book.”
In any case, I have to say: all this media attention makes me (and many German readers, apparently) want to jump on the bandwagon and check out Hegemann’s book.
Read the full New York Times article here.
David Shields spends a great deal of time with some of these issues of authenticity and plagiarism in his new book, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto. In the appendix to that book, he writes, “A major focus of Reality Hunger is appropriation and plagiarism and what those terms mean. I can hardly treat the topic deeply without engaging in it.”
And he does engage in it.
He goes on in the appendix to ask, “Who owns the words? Who owns the music and the rest of our culture? We do–all of us–though not all of us know it yet.”
The book is fascinating, and has something to piss everyone off, probably. It’s also a great meditation on art and ownership, and is totally engaging.
Here’s an excerpt from the book that appeared in Willow Springs.
Here’s an interview with Shields, primarily about the book, also from Willow Springs.
One of my profs in college once told us that the great thing about creative writing is that you can steal from other works. While I’m not sure stealing entire pages is what my teacher had in mind (similes, spiffy alliteration, things relating to language, is what I figured she meant), I’m not mad at Hegemann. Had it been an essay, in which she bald-faced her way through a crucial plot point in desperation, then yeah – fuck her, but that’s not the case.
I don’t know. If the alleged victim of plagiarism wants to fight situations like this, then they have every right to do so, but it’s not like she’s Puff Daddying her way to success through multiple works. It sounds to me like critics are just jealous of how well a young woman is doing for herself.
This book sounds like the literary equivalent to Vanilla Ice’s hit song, “Ice Ice Baby,” which borrowed the piano riff from Queen’s “Under Pressure.” His career fell apart and he attempted suicide.
If Hegemann copied an entire page, it makes me wonder what else she’s gotten away with in the book. Is it still even a work of art, or is it a hastily written term paper? I hope that unlike some comp 101 students, she at least changed the original font.
T.S. Eliot, or Picasso said that good artists borrow, great artists steal. Hegemann got caught, so she’s obviously relegated to just being good. The subject, as Shields points out, is too nuanced for the space in a blog. Do we require an artist to be genuine for the art to have merit? No artist works in a vacuum, but don’t we at least try to delude ourselves into thinking that we’re creating something? Is this the future? Are writers going to turn into literary DJ’s, splicing Pedro Paramo with Dr. Seuss, but in the vernacular of a Jamaican? (No offense to Wells Tower) Maybe Hegemann should–like James Frey, who at least made some shit up–apologize to Oprah. Are the paint-by-numbers pictures, barns and horses and fruit baskets, I made as a kid, art?
This sounds similar to the debacle over /How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life/. Kaavya Viswanathan wrote that right after her high school graduation and was named the new literary wizkid by Little, Brown and Company. Once it was proven that she’d plagiarized Megan McCafferty’s first two “Jessica Darling” novels, all copies of Viswanathan’s book was recalled and destroyed by the publishers and they terminated her second book deal. Not sure what happened to her fairly large advance or the sold movie rights.
I often have a hard time getting my student’s to understand what plagiarism is. They seem to think that if they just change a few words in a large chunk of copied and pasted text then it’s okay because now they’re paraphrasing and that’s not plagiarism. Maybe the electronic age and easy use of copy & paste is to blame. We blame most other literary declines on the internet so let it take this one too.
I think that there’s a problem comparing literature to music here. Copyright laws were written for the Western printed word, not for music. Sure, music can be transcribed into sheet paper or tabs, but that’s not the original medium for music. Paul Simon’s Graceland album works as fairly good example. Simon liked a kind of sound that he heard in South African music, went to South Africa (breaking a cultural boycott that protested the apartheid, by the way), hired musicians who played music while he wrote lyrics. When Graceland first came out, the copyright read: “All words and music by Paul Simon,” even though Simon hadn’t written the music (and with Los Lobos, had taken a previously recorded/copyrighted song “Josephine”).
As a part of material culture, music falls under “intellectual property” better than copyright legislation. The moonwalk can’t be a copyrighted dance move; Chinese factories can churn out thousands of those Mexican textile/truckstop blankets. These things aren’t written down first or transmitted through the printing press, so copyright laws have a harder time nailing them down.
Some time ago, Moby came out with this album (Play) where he re-sampled the Alan Lomax blues recordings. Because of their age (and some questionable copyright issues not directly relevant), these were in the public domain. Free sample that public domain.
If I were a student, writing a term paper, I could, theoretically, sample (or remix) whole pages from the Odyssey, Moby Dick, etc. Right? I doubt it.
That’s really interesting Amaris. I’ve never thought of the copy & paste from the public domain as a “remix.” Hmm, need to spend some more time mulling that over.
BTW, I think mixing the Oddyssey and Moby Dick would make for a killer track.
I didn’t know any of that, Amaris–totally good to know. But I have been thinking about that difference. I guess it’s the intangibility of music that lets it morph and get remixed like that. I still think the “okay-ness” of Hegemann’s move depends on how smart and fresh it seems–because if it does, I’d rather read her pseudo-plagiarized book then some of the “totally original” work that gets published.
David Shields’ stuff seems really interesting, by the way.
I think it’s also a matter of intent. If you set out to create a weave from all these different sources, that’s one thing. If your intent is to present someone’s work as your own, that’s something else.
Absolutely. I guess I just assume that it has to be intentionally woven for it to be good. Things that are just a sloppy “hopefully no one will notice” usually don’t feel well-crafted.
[...] in February, Melina started a great discussion about plagiarism. This month, the original Copyright Act, The Statue of Anne (named after the queen who reigned when [...]