The Ecstasy of Influence

by Jonathan Lethem

  GIVE ALL

  A few years ago, the Film Society of Lincoln Center announced a retrospective of the works of Dariush Mehrjui, then a fresh enthusiasm of mine. Mehrjui is one of Iran’s finest filmmakers, and the only one whose subject was personal relationships among the upper-middle-class intelligentsia. Needless to say, opportunities to view his films were—and remain—rare indeed. I headed uptown for one, an adaptation of J. D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey, titled Pari, only to discover at the door of the Walter Reade Theater that the screening had been canceled: Its announcement had brought threat of a lawsuit down on the Film Society. True, these were Salinger’s rights under the law. Yet why would he care that some obscure Iranian filmmaker had paid him homage with a meditation on his heroine? Would it have damaged his book or robbed him of some crucial remuneration had the screening been permitted? The fertile spirit of stray connection—one stretching across what is presently seen as the direst of international breaches—had in this case been snuffed out. The cold, undead hand of one of my childhood literary heroes had reached out from its New Hampshire redoubt to arrest my present-day curiosity.

  A few assertions, then:

  Any text that has infiltrated the common mind to the extent of Gone With the Wind or Lolita or Ulysses inexorably joins the language of culture. A map-turned-to-landscape, it has moved to a place beyond enclosure or control. The authors and their heirs should consider the subsequent parodies, refractions, quotations, and revisions an honor, or at least the price of a rare success.

  A corporation that has imposed an inescapable notion—Mickey Mouse, Band-Aid—on the cultural language should pay a similar price.

  The primary objective of copyright is not to reward the labor of authors but “to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts.” To this end, copyright assures authors the right to their original expression but encourages others to build freely upon the ideas and information conveyed by a work. This result is neither unfair nor unfortunate.

  Copyright, trademark, and patent law is presently corrupted. The case for perpetual copyright is a denial of the essential gift-aspect of the creative act. Arguments in its favor are as un-American as those for the repeal of the estate tax.

  Art is sourced. Apprentices graze in the field of culture.

  Digital sampling is an art method like any other, neutral in itself.

  Despite hand-wringing at each technological turn—radio, the Internet—the future will be much like the past. Artists will sell some things but also give some things away. Change may be troubling for those who crave less ambiguity, but the life of an artist has never been filled with certainty.

  The dream of a perfect systematic remuneration is nonsense. I pay rent with the price my words bring when published in glossy magazines and at the same moment offer them for almost nothing to impoverished literary quarterlies, or speak them for free into the air in a radio interview. So what are they worth? What would they be worth if some future Dylan worked them into a song? Should I care to make such a thing impossible?

  Any text is woven entirely with citations, references, echoes, cultural languages, which cut across it through and through in a vast stereophony. The citations that go to make up a text are anonymous, untraceable, and yet already read; they are quotations without inverted commas. The kernel, the soul—let us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterances—is plagiarism. For substantially all ideas are secondhand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources, and daily used by the garnerer with a pride and satisfaction born of the superstition that he originated them; whereas there is not a rag of originality about them anywhere except the little discoloration they get from his mental and moral caliber and his temperament, and which is revealed in characteristics of phrasing. Old and new make the warp and woof of every moment. There is no thread that is not a twist of these two strands. By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote. Neurological study has lately shown that memory, imagination, and consciousness itself are stitched, quilted, pastiched. If we cut-and-paste our selves, might we not forgive it of our artworks?

  Artists and writers—and our advocates, our guilds and agents—too often subscribe to implicit claims of originality that do injury to these truths. And we too often, as hucksters and bean counters in the tiny enterprises of our selves, act to spite the gift portion of our privileged roles. People live differently who treat a portion of their wealth as a gift. If we devalue and obscure the gift-economy function of our art practices, we turn our works into nothing more than advertisements for themselves. We may console ourselves that our lust for subsidiary rights in virtual perpetuity is some heroic counter to rapacious corporate interests. But the truth is that with artists pulling on one side and corporations pulling on the other, the loser is the collective public imagination from which we were nourished in the first place, and whose existence as the ultimate repository of our offerings makes the work worth doing in the first place.

  As a novelist, I’m a cork on the ocean of story, a leaf on a windy day. Pretty soon I’ll be blown away. For the moment I’m grateful to be making a living, and so must ask that for a limited time (in the Thomas Jefferson sense) you please respect my small, treasured usemonopolies. Don’t pirate my editions; do plunder my visions. The name of the game is Give All. You, reader, are welcome to my stories. They were never mine in the first place, but I gave them to you. If you have the inclination to pick them up, take them with my blessing.

  KEY: I IS ANOTHER

  This key to the preceding essay names the source of every line I stole, warped, and cobbled together as I “wrote” (except, alas, those sources I forgot along the way). First uses of a given author or speaker are highlighted in bold. Nearly every sentence I culled I also revised, at least slightly—for necessities of space, in order to produce a more consistent tone, or simply because I felt like it.

  TITLE

  The phrase “the ecstasy of influence,” which embeds a rebuking play on Harold Bloom’s “anxiety of influence,” is lifted from spoken remarks by Professor Richard Dienst of Rutgers.

  LOVE AND THEFT

  “A cultivated man of middle age …” to “… hidden, unacknowledged memory?” These lines, with some adjustments for tone, belong to the anonymous editor or assistant who wrote the jacket-flap copy of Michael Maar’s The Two Lolitas. Of course, in my own experience, jacket-flap copy is often a collaboration between author and editor. Perhaps this was also true for Maar.

  “The history of literature …” to “… borrow and quote?” comes from Maar’s book itself.

  “Appropriation has always …” to “… Ishmael and Queequeg …” This paragraph makes a hash of remarks from an interview with Eric Lott conducted by David McNair and Jayson Whitehead, and incorporates both interviewers’ and interviewee’s observations. (The text-interview form can be seen as a commonly accepted form of multivocal writing. Most interviewers prime their subjects with remarks of their own—leading the witness, so to speak—and gently refine their subjects’ statements in the final printed transcript.)

  “I realized this …” to “… for a long time.” The anecdote is cribbed, with an elision to avoid appropriating a dead grandmother, from Jonathan Rosen’s The Talmud and the Internet. I’ve never seen 84 Charing Cross Road, nor searched the Web for a Donne quote. For me it was through Rosen to Donne, Hemingway, website, et al.

  “When I was thirteen …” to “… no plagiarist at all.” This is from William Gibson’s “God’s Little Toys,” in Wired magazine. My own first encounter with William Burroughs, also at age thirteen, was less epiphanic. Having grown up with a painter father who, during family visits to galleries or museums, approvingly noted collage and appropriation techniques in the visual arts (Picasso, Claes Oldenburg, Stuart Davis), I was gratified, but not surprised, to learn that literature could encompass the same methods.

  CONTAMINATION ANXIETY

  “In 1941, on hi
s front porch …” to “… declares: ‘This song comes from the cotton field.’ ” Siva Vaidhyanathan, Copyrights and Copywrongs.

  “… enabled by an ‘open source’ … freely reworked.” Kembrew McLeod, Freedom of Expression®. In Owning Culture, McLeod notes that, as he was writing, he

  happened to be listening to a lot of old country music, and in my casual listening I noticed that six country songs shared exactly the same vocal melody, including Hank Thompson’s “Wild Side of Life,” the Carter Family’s “I’m Thinking Tonight of My Blue Eyes,” Roy Acuff’s “Great Speckled Bird,” Kitty Wells’s “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels,” Reno & Smiley’s “I’m Using My Bible for a Roadmap,” and Townes Van Zandt’s “Heavenly Houseboat Blues.” … In his extensively researched book, Country: The Twisted Roots of Rock ’n’ Roll, Nick Tosches documents that the melody these songs share is both “ancient and British.” There were no recorded lawsuits stemming from these appropriations …

  “… musicians have gained … through allusion.” Joanna Demers, Steal This Music.

  “In ’70s Jamaica …” to “… hours of music.” Gibson.

  “Visual, sound, and text collage …” to “… realm of cultural production.” This plunders, rewrites, and amplifies paragraphs from McLeod’s Owning Culture, except for the line about collage being the art form of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, which I heard filmmaker Craig Baldwin say, in defense of sampling, in the trailer for a forthcoming documentary, Copyright Criminals.

  “In a courtroom scene …” to “… would cease to exist.” Dave Itzkoff, the New York Times.

  “… the remarkable series of ‘plagiarisms’ …” to “… we want more plagiarism.” Richard Posner, combined from the Becker-Posner Blog and the Atlantic Monthly.

  “Most artists are brought …” to “… by art itself.” These words, and many more to follow, come from Lewis Hyde’s The Gift. Above any other book I’ve here plagiarized, I commend The Gift to your attention.

  “Finding one’s voice … filiations, communities, and discourses.” Semanticist George L. Dillon, quoted in Rebecca Moore Howard’s “The New Abolitionism Comes to Plagiarism.”

  “Inspiration could be … act never experienced.” Ned Rorem, found on several “great quotations” sites on the Internet.

  “Invention, it must be humbly admitted … out of chaos.” Mary Shelley, from her introduction to Frankenstein.

  “What happens …” to “… contamination anxiety.” Kevin J. H. Dettmar, from “The Illusion of Modernist Allusion and the Politics of Postmodern Plagiarism.”

  SURROUNDED BY SIGNS

  “The surrealists believed …” to the Walter Benjamin quote. Christian Keathley’s Cinephilia and History, or the Wind in the Trees, a book that treats fannish fetishism as the secret at the heart of film scholarship. Keathley notes, for instance, Joseph Cornell’s surrealist-influenced 1936 film Rose Hobart, which simply records “the way in which Cornell himself watched the 1931 Hollywood potboiler East of Borneo, fascinated and distracted as he was by its B-grade star”—the star, of course, being Rose Hobart herself. This, I suppose, makes Cornell a father to computer-enabled fan-creator reworkings of Hollywood product, like the version of George Lucas’s The Phantom Menace from which the noxious Jar Jar Binks character was purged; both incorporate a viewer’s subjective preferences into a revision of a filmmaker’s work.

  “… early in the history of photography” to “… without compensating the source.” From Free Culture, by Lawrence Lessig, the greatest of public advocates for copyright reform, and the best source if you want to get radicalized in a hurry.

  “For those whose ganglia …” to “… discourse broke down.” From David Foster Wallace’s essay “E Unibus Pluram,” reprinted in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again. I have no idea who Wallace’s “gray eminence” is or was. I inserted the example of Dickens into the paragraph; he struck me as overlooked in the lineage of authors of “brand-name” fiction.

  “I was born … Mary Tyler Moore Show.” These are the reminiscences of Mark Hosler from Negativland, a collaging musical collective that was sued by U2’s record label for their appropriation of “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For.” Although I had to adjust the birth date, Hosler’s cultural menu fits me like a glove.

  “The world is a home … pop-culture products …” McLeod.

  “Today, when we can eat …” to “… flat sights.” Wallace.

  “We’re surrounded by signs, ignore none of them.” This phrase, which I unfortunately rendered somewhat leaden with the word “imperative,” comes from Steve Erickson’s novel Our Ecstatic Days.

  USEMONOPOLY

  “… everything from attempts …” to “… defendants as young as twelve.” Robert Boynton, the New York Times Magazine, “The Tyranny of Copyright?”

  “A time is marked …” to “… what needs no defense.” Lessig, this time from The Future of Ideas.

  “Thomas Jefferson, for one …” to “ ‘ … respective Writings and Discoveries.’ ” Boynton.

  “… second comers might do a much better job than the originator …” I found this phrase in Lessig, who is quoting Vaidhyanathan, who himself is characterizing a judgment written by Learned Hand.

  “But Jefferson’s vision … owned by someone or other.” Boynton.

  “The distinctive feature …” to “… term is extended.” Lessig, again from The Future of Ideas.

  “When old laws …” to “… had been invaded.” Jessica Litman, Digital Copyright.

  “ ‘I say to you … woman home alone.’ ” I found the Valenti quote in McLeod. Now fill in the blank: Jack Valenti is to the public domain as ______ is to ________.

  THE BEAUTY OF SECOND USE

  “In the first …” to “… builds an archive.” Lessig.

  “Most books … one year …” Lessig.

  “Active reading is …” to “… they do not own …” This is a mashup of Henry Jenkins, from his Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, and Michel de Certeau, whom Jenkins quotes.

  “In the children’s classic …” to “… its loving use.” Jenkins. (Incidentally, have the holders of the copyright to The Velveteen Rabbit had a close look at Toy Story? Could be a lawsuit there.)

  SOURCE HYPOCRISY, OR, DISNIAL

  “The Walt Disney Company … alas, Treasure Planet …” Lessig.

  “Imperial Plagiarism” is the title of an essay by Marilyn Randall.

  “… spurred David Byrne … My Life in the Bush of Ghosts …” Chris Dahlen, Pitchfork—though in truth by the time I’d finished, his words were so utterly dissolved within my own that had I been an ordinary cutting-and-pasting journalist it never would have occurred to me to give Dahlen a citation. The effort of preserving another’s distinctive phrases as I worked on this essay was sometimes beyond my capacities; this form of plagiarism was oddly hard work.

  “Kenneth Koch …” to “… déluge of copycats!” Emily Nussbaum, the New York Times Book Review.

  YOU CAN’T STEAL A GIFT

  “You can’t steal a gift.” Dizzy Gillespie, defending another player who’d been accused of poaching Charlie Parker’s style: “You can’t steal a gift. Bird gave the world his music, and if you can hear it you can have it.”

  “A large, diverse society … intellectual property.” Lessig.

  “And works of art …” to “… marriage, parenthood, mentorship.” Hyde.

  “Yet one … so naturally with the market.” David Bollier, Silent Theft.

  “Art that matters …” to “… bought and sold.” Hyde.

  “We consider it unacceptable …” to “ ‘ … certain unalienable Rights.’ ” Bollier, paraphrasing Margaret Jane Radin’s Contested Commodities.

  “A work of art …” to “… constraint upon our merchandising.” Hyde.

  “This is the reason … person it’s directed at.” Wallace.

  “The power of a gift …”
to “… certain extra-market values.” Bollier, and also the sociologist Warren O. Hagstrom, whom Bollier is paraphrasing.

  THE COMMONS

  “Einstein’s theory …” to “… public domain are a commons.” Lessig.

  “That a language is a commons … society as a whole.” Michael Newton, in the London Review of Books, reviewing a book called Echolalias: On the Forgetting of Language by Daniel Heller-Roazen. The paraphrases of book reviewers are another covert form of collaborative culture; as an avid reader of reviews, I know much about books I’ve never read. To quote Yann Martel on how he came to be accused of imperial plagiarism in his Booker-winning novel, Life of Pi,

  Ten or so years ago, I read a review by John Updike in the New York Times Review of Books [sic]. It was of a novel by a Brazilian writer, Moacyr Scliar. I forget the title, and John Updike did worse: he clearly thought the book as a whole was forgettable. His review—one of those that makes you suspicious by being mostly descriptive … oozed indifference. But one thing about it struck me: the premise … Oh, the wondrous things I could do with this premise.