Lost & Found
In a great little article (well, little by the LRB’s standards), Mark Ford talks of conscious and unconscious plagiarism, and the use of borrowed experience in literature. He speaks briefly of how the internet opens up massive new possibilities for stealing material and making it your own, quoting author Thomas Mallon who
Showed himself a staunch advocate of a no nonsense approach to this issue, but conceded … that the internet had blurred still further the demarcations between legitimate and illegitimate appropriation.
Then goes on to say:
Virtual information that appears on your own screen tends to seem, viscerally, less someone else’s than when it’s printed in a book with the author’s name on the cover. The ‘boundless textual promiscuity’ of the web has also decisively altered the way we think about information.
Which is well put and true, and gives rise to a host of issues about the future reliability of information, if researchers are depending too heavily on the net, and to whether this increased meshing of ideas is a good thing. A thought is borrowed and makes its way from site to site, re-written and re-interpreted a little each time until its originator is likely lost, and the one who encapsulates it best is credited with the wisdom. As the web matures, I expect those using it as their platform will begin to guard their words more jealously.
But one of the most fascinating examples Ford gives of borrowed experience comes from Charles Reznikoff, author of Testimony: The United States (1885-1915): Recitative, which ‘consists of hundreds of stories taken from law reports’ and rendered as free flowing verse.
The Negro schoolmistress gave birth to a child –
her parents did not know and she did not want them to –
gave birth in the school’s water-closet
and left the child under the water-closet on the ground.
Three Negro girls who went to the school
at recess saw the baby under a hole in the seat.
One of the girls had jumped up and said,
‘Oh, there is a baby!’
It was raising its hands and kicking its feet
but its eyes were shut
and its mouth full of sand.
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Comment
- As my students/ pupils have learned, to their cost: anything they can find on the Internet, *I* can find on the Internet. That fact takes the fun out of misappropriating material.
— Simon Jan 13, 4:55pm # - Especially when Gail says:
“A thought is borrowed and makes its way from site to site, re-written and re-interpreted a little each time until its originator is likely lost, and the one who encapsulates it best is credited with the wisdom.”
it reminds me of notions of oral tradition & of the sort of oral mindset that is sometimes naively spoken of as if it were too only a form of naivété. But do ideas of originality and intellectual property change over time? Oh yes indeed. It makes me wonder where this is going.
— sterna Jan 13, 6:00pm # - It’s a platitude worth reiterating that many seek only to confirm what they already believe, and will therefore ignore any information that challenges their stance. The world is so marvellously vast and complex that absolutely any viewpoint, no matter how extreme, can be supported by carefully chosen “facts.” (The evidence that many cannot live without opposition, a simple reminder of our once prominent brows. Descent indeed.)
The mere availability of information implies neither that it will be consumed nor that, if consumed, it will be digested, analyzed and/or assimilated. Most likely, it will just sit in the mind like a Big Mac in the belly, like a rock, until it is passed — until something more appetizing comes to relieve it.
— Ajax Jan 14, 4:26am # - Ha ha. Cheeky.
— gail Jan 14, 10:25am # - It was love made me do it
— Ajax Bucky Jan 15, 3:34am # - I also wrote about Mark Ford’s piece (but rather less kindly). See: Flogging a dead pigeon
— Richard Carter Jan 15, 10:18am # - Just came across this item. If you’re interested enough, do check out Robert Macfarlane’s forthcoming monograph on C19th originality & plagiarism from OUP . . . It’s a little way off, but very good on this kind of literary recycling.
— JJP Jan 18, 4:36pm # - I once found a poem, literally. Walking on a beach, I saw a ball of crumpled paper on the sand, picked it up, uncrumpled it, and read:
Gold, bright.
Quite unlike the mother’s touch.
Midas found it quite unlike the tender flower’s fold.
The old men say
“Our island has not gold enough to last.
Statistics show our number increases,
Our resources sinking fast. You
Must sail away
To the mines of Aureus…”
Envious old men!
Down to the bright blue sea in ships,
The bowsprits painted red and waxed,
Amber forests brush against the keel…
And never sailor found his way back home.
— eric Jan 21, 4:04am #
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