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| Hearsay: |
Apparently when it’s “mixing” and matching. Like when I mixed and matched that story about the boy wizard who screwed Mary Magdelene and then went for a walk down a post-apocalyptic trail pushing a shopping cart with his dad? Yeah, like that.
For the obviously gifted Ms. Hegemann, who already had a play (written and staged) and a movie (written, directed and released in theaters) to her credit, it was an early ascension to the ranks of artistic stardom. That is, until a blogger last week uncovered material in the novel taken from the less-well-known novel “Strobo,” by an author writing under the nom de plume Airen. In one case, an entire page was lifted with few changes.
As other unattributed sources came to light, outsize praise quickly turned to a torrent of outrage, reminiscent of the uproar in 2006 over a Harvard sophomore, Kaavya Viswanathan, who was caught plagiarizing numerous passages in her much praised debut novel. But Ms. Hegemann’s story took a very different turn.
On Thursday, Ms. Hegemann’s book was announced as one of the finalists for the $20,000 prize of the Leipzig Book Fair in the fiction category. And a member of the jury said Thursday that the panel had been aware of the plagiarism charges before they made their final selection.
Ms. Hegemann finds herself in the middle of a collision — if not road kill exactly — between the staid, literary establishment in a country that venerates writers from Goethe to Mann to Grass, and the Berlin youth culture of D.J.’s and artists that sample freely and thereby breathe creativity into old forms. Or as one character, Edmond, puts it in the book, “Berlin is here to mix everything with everything.”
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February 15th, 2010 at 12:33 pm
Collage, remix, assemblage, mash-up, cento. It is artistically valid to make new works from the component parts of older works, but there should be no deception. If the cobbled-together nature of the new composition is not inherently obvious, then the new work must, in some way, declare itself as such.
February 15th, 2010 at 11:45 pm
I’m inclined to agree with you, Paul, but what about something like Eliot’s The Waste Land? Some of the borrowings are obvious, some not, but by no means does the work declare that it is an assemblage/mashup. It’s interesting to look at Umberto Eco’s The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana: some of the citations are acknowledged, while others are not. How do we decide whether a work ought to be cited?
February 17th, 2010 at 10:47 am
Am I wrong?…I remember a painful number of endnotes attached to The Wasteland.
Nothing new to this debate, of course, but I think the volume of unattributed “intertextuality” is the issue with this German writer.
When does a quotation become the text itself?
February 17th, 2010 at 11:55 am
The notes for The Waste Land were actually only there because the publisher felt that the poem itself was too small to market as a book, and asked Eliot to add the notes in order to beef the book up a little. Interestingly, most of the references that are in the notes are thematic, and do not indicate the specific works/passages lifted. Furthermore, the popular works he ’stole’ from, such as “The Shakespearian Rag” go unattributed (although they’d likely be immediately recognisable to much of the public at the time).
I would argue that the amount of unattributed quotes isn’t the issue: the copyright is. If she were to have used only works in the public domain, no one would have been upset about it (indeed, they’d probably market it as a feature, a la Pride and Prejudice and Zombies). I agree with Paul that she probably should have cited her borrowings. Of course, I can also imagine a number of situations (such as Eco’s book, which I mention in my first comment) in which it would take away from the art of the text if the borrowings were mentioned. What’s the fun in playing literary games with your readers (if that was indeed the case) if you go and give them the answer in the back of the book? I’m not saying that this was this particular author’s intent, but rather that intertextuality is a tricky and nuanced topic, made more so by the strict language of current copyright laws.
By the way, as a matter of full disclosure, this was the topic of my MA thesis. If you’re interested in reading my thoughts in greater depth and checking out my own attempt at a literary mashup, feel free to check it out in the link in my name.
As for the question of when a quotation becomes the text itself, the cheeky academic response is to say that Roland Barthes would say that everything is already a quotation, as a “text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the ‘message’ of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.” I am sure, too, that Marcel Duchamp would have something to say on this topic.
February 17th, 2010 at 12:50 pm
Interesting points on mash-ups.
I think there’s a fine line with all of this. Does the artist try and create something, or is the person taking bits to bump up their work because without it there would be nothing, sort of like a hollow man, a shape without form, a shade without colour (credit Eliot and Dante ;) ). In something like this your millage will of course vary.
There was an article on the matter in Spiegel on-line (link via Bookslut), and I think one of the quotes from the book captures her approach:
“I help myself wherever I find inspiration and ideas: Films, music, books, paintings, poetry about sausages, photos, conversations, dreams … Light and shadow, precisely because my work and my theft become authentic the moment something touches my soul. Who cares where I get things from? All that matters is what I do with them.” “So it’s not by you, then?” someone asks him. “No. It’s by some blogger.”
This bugs me. Why? The lack of respect she gives the original source — love the idea, but it’s just from “some blogger.” The fact that she doesn’t appear to do anything with this idea she takes except to repeat it.
Oh well, probably cranky from having read “You Are Not A Gadget” by Jaron Lanier, which has some interesting points about the lack of respect towards copyright and creativity.