The Ecstasy of Influence

Jonathan Lethem has a brilliant article in this month's issue of Harper's, "The Ecstasy of Influence."  In a pastiche of quotations and anecdotes from other writers--what the churlish might call plagiarism--Lethem fashions a coherent defense of the idea that all of culture involves borrowing.  Art depends completely on what has come before, and there is "nothing new under the sun"....That's Banks, quoting Ecclesiastes.  If Romeo and Juliet, West Side Story, and The Waste Land are plagiarism, then "we want more plagiarism"....That's Banks, quoting Lethem, who is quoting Richard Posner (without quotes).

Plagiarism is disparaged because of a false premise: that completely new ideas are incubating in the heart and mind of the solitary artist, who will soon grace the world with a shattering new insight.  In fact, even the greatest art is but a variation on a few eternal themes (love, sex, death, and taxes.)  Since we are all creators, we are all plagiarists.  Lethem is a more thoroughgoing plagiarist than me, which is why he sheds the quotation marks in his article.

Since we're all plagiarists, and copying is easier than it has ever been before, what is the status of copyright law in our digital age?  Lethem reminds us that United States copyright law was designed to encourage a robust culture, by granting artists limited monopolies before their works entered the public domain.  But today the standard copyright term is  the life of the creator plus  70 years.  That's an incentive to create, I guess, but it's creation within an echo chamber that does not allow innovative borrowing from other artists.

There is a better way, as visionaries such as Lawrence Lessig and David Bollier (two of the people Lethem plagiarizes) can attest.  Through the Creative Commons, artists can simply forfeit the draconian copyright protections they are now granted, and allow others to utilize their work. 

For people who care  about these topics, Lethem's presentation may seem creative but  feel like "old news."  The Creative Commons is fairly established by now.  But the significance of Lethem's article is that seemingly fringe ideas--forgoing copyright protection and embracing our inner plagiarist--is penetrating deeper into American culture.  (On the policy front, something similar is happening with universal health care.)  It takes a while for good ideas to battle through inertia and hostile forces, but hopefully they win out in the end.

Comments

[Wevbo]

Marcus,

I agree 100% with Lethem. Either Picasso or Van Gogh said that good artists borrow and great artists steal. Pick up a guitar and strum D-G-C in varying rhythms, and you get about 90% of the song you know. Also, I think it's no coincidence that the more one studies, the better an artist s/he becomes. Not just learning how to steal, but developing a fuller appreciation for what is and is not out there. "Stealing" could also be another way of saying "canon," in that artists often consciously decide to pick up where a teacher/mentor/previous artist left off. Or, they write in competition with another artist, contemporary or past. Competition breeds ambition in all fields, no?

I have two problems with minor Lethem points. First, if you make the categories big enough, you can fit everything into them. Eternal themes could be further gathered together into a category as blah and unhelpful as "the human experience." I had this prof at FIU who started every class by saying that there was only one story, Joseph Campbell's mononmyth: a guy goes on a journey. Well, good to know. Second, uniqueness may be a valuable quality in a capitalist economy, in the sense that you can sell something independent of someone else if you protect your unique product. But art suggests quality as much as ingenuity, and quality is a tricky word to define. Further, even if something is an especially representative work that has come before--say, an exceptional sonnet--it nonetheless retains some undefinable (except for the lit majors) quality that keeps drawing us back to read it, read it again, take something from it, feel touched after reading it, recommend it to others OVER OTHER WORKS THAT, by the definition of "sonnet," it may be indistinguishable from. AND, to sit down and write a new sonnet (whether because you are a poet and want to make your mark on the form, or because you want to do something especially nice for your sweetie on Valentine's Day)!

Lethem does ignore SOME wiggle room re: copyright. Copyright laws are designed in such a way that you can often borrow small snippets from published words (up to seven consecutive words from a song, up to 3 lines of a poem) for your own work without citation. In poetry, after that, if any work is still copyrighted and you want to use more than the maximum uncited, you usually have to pay some multinational conglomerate an absurd amount of money relative to the potential profits of your book. Now, this may sound like a liberal rant, but examples abound: poems not included in anthologies, prologues abandoned, reprints denied, etc., because the permission fee made publishing a book financially impractical.

I think that considerations of copyright have more to do with our specific historical period. Yes, Shakespeare stole almost all of his major plays from previous source material--pick up a Cambridge Shakespeare, and it traces each of his plays to earlier works, usually from other languages. But he takes that material and makes it new, powerful, lasting. If a work of art was as exclusively precision-repeatable-effect-driven as, say, a pill, then we could quibble over who gets to sell it. But of the many film productions of Hamlet done in the 20th century, what makes Olivier's so unique, Mel Gibson's so passable, Branaugh's so much an imitation of Olivier, Ethan Hawke's so mediocre? Don't they all use the same source material? And why has no one yet produced the epic film adaptation of "Two Gentleman of Verona"? Art adapts poorly to the marketplace and has wildly fluxuating lasting power (see: 1980s NYC art scene) as investment in a way that pills do not. You can pop a Viagra and it will do the same thing every time (and eventually blind you), but it's hard to predict how you'll respond every time you encounter remarkable and powerful art.