Notes from the Basement

The recent news coverage of Barack Obama’s supposed “plagiarism” stirred up once again the confused pot of ideas I have or seem to have about originality and the overselling of same in the form of “intellectual property rights.”

Due to the unprecedented way my cortical convolutions took shape in the latter stages of my embryonic life, the thought occurred that Obama might be using a passage he had delivered in the past (whether he personally wrote it or not) that his friend Patrick Duval had borrowed and used during his campaign in Massachusetts. So Obama might actually be “plagiarizing himself.”

I’m not saying that’s what happened. In fact, that probably did not happen. I’m just saying it can happen, and certainly has happened.

Richard A. Posner, in his informative and entertaining Little Book of Plagiarism, offers several amusing instances of “self-plagiarism.” Anyone who has read Tristram Shandy cannot fail to be impressed by the range of its author’s scholarship—until you learn that Laurence Sterne lifted most of the recondite passages virtually intact from secondary sources. So he was a bit of a copyist, to say the least. But did he go too far when he “sent letters to his mistress that he had copied years earlier from letters he’d written to his wife”? As Posner notes, “His plagiarism could do no harm to anybody; only the discovery of it could.” [pp. 41–42] Just as with modern American politicians.

The Roman poet Martial makes note of a cockeyed version of self-plagiarism. According to Posner, in the first century A.D. “[a] plagarius was someone who either stole someone else’s slave or enslaved a free person.” In one of his epigrams, “Martial applied the term metaphorically to another poet, whom Martial accused of having claimed authorship of verses Martial had written,” Posner says. “It is unclear, however, whether he meant that the other poet had passed off Martial’s verses as his own or had claimed sole ownership (the verses were his slaves), precluding Martial’s claiming authorship.” [p. 50]

In our theoretical modern example of Martial’s dilemma, Obama would be censured for stealing Patrick’s words, when in fact he was the author. Again, this was almost certainly not the case. Probably what made me think of this possibility was the not-at-all-theoretical problem faced by Ambrose Bierce when he collected his sarcastic definitions, written over many years and printed in the periodical press, and published them in book form as The Devil’s Dictionary. As Bierce writes in the preface to his book:

The Devil’s Dictionary was begun in a weekly paper in 1881, and was continued in a desultory way and at long intervals until 1906. In that year a large part of it was published in covers with the title The Cynic’s Word Book, a name which the author had not the power to reject nor the happiness to approve. To quote the publishers of the present work:

“This more reverent title had previously been forced upon him by the religious scruples of the last newspaper in which a part of the work had appeared, with the natural consequence that when it came out in covers the country already had been flooded by its imitators with a score of ‘cynic’ books—The Cynic’s This, The Cynic’s That, and The Cynic’s t’Other. Most of these books were merely stupid, though some of them added the distinction of silliness. Among them, the brought the word ‘cynic’ into disfavor so deep that any book bearing it was discredited in advance of publication.”

Meantime, too, some of the enterprising humorists of the country had helped themselves to such parts of the work as served their needs, and many of its definitions, anecdotes, phrases, and so forth, had become more or less current in popular speech. This explanation is made, not with any pride of priority in trifles, but in simple denial of possible charges of plagiarism, which is no trifle. In merely resuming his own the author hopes to be held guiltless by those to whom the work is addressed—enlightened souls who prefer dry wines to sweet, sense to sentiment, wit to humour and clean English to slang.

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