No Fences Make Good Neighbors
I had a wonderful discussion with my “Literary Interpretation” students last week, about the detritus that is T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. My friend Paul Saint-Amour has written about the “Oxen of the Sun” chapter of James Joyce’s Ulysses as a kind of test case for fair use, testing the boundaries of copyright; many of the texts that Joyce plunders in that chapter still have their labels on them.
The same is true, to some degree, of The Waste Land. The poem begins with a quotation—an epigraph from Petronius; and throughout, I’d guess that perhaps 30% of the lines are lifted from somewhere or another. It is, to steal a phrase from Finnegans Wake, a mess of “quashed quotatoes.”
For my students, this way of working sounds familiar; its great contemporary practitioner is Girl Talk, whose 2008 album Feed the Animals mashes-up familiar and not-so-familiar tunes for its full 50+ minutes. Indeed, GT (Gregg Gillis) “admits” to 344 discrete thefts in the liner notes.
Another exemplar of these plunderphonics is now, for my students and me, closer to home: my new faculty colleague Jonathan Lethem published an influential essay in Harper’s in February 2007, called “The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism.” The essay consists almost entirely of “lifts” from other writers which, though unmarked in the reading text, are called out in extensive endnotes; I was honored to count myself among the plundered.
What Girl Talk and Lethem are doing quite self-consciously, however, Eliot approaches with a good deal less self-awareness—or, some might say, less cynicism. The Waste Land is, famously, the poem with footnotes; and though it would be helpful to have glosses to the multilingual quotations and allusions with which the poem is built up, the notes are mostly there to give sources for Eliot’s allusions. (So that, in any good contemporary student edition of the poem, Eliot’s footnotes themselves have footnotes.) Seemingly embarrassed at this gesture of erudition, Eliot later wrote, “The notes to The Waste Land! I had intended at first only to put down all the references for my quotations, with a view to spiking the guns of critics of my earlier poems who had accused me of plagiarism.”
The trouble is, once an author starts acknowledging his borrowings, he sets in motion a mousetrap that will always in the end catch his own tail. If I tag the passage from the Satyricon in a note, no one will accuse me of plagiarism. I wasn’t trying to “get away with” anything, after all: I acknowledged myself that it was from Petronius. But what, then, if a reader detects a suspiciously Conrad-sounding passage in Pt. III? Plagiarism? Echo? Or, since all of Joseph Conrad’s writing would still have enjoyed copyright protection when The Waste Land was published in 1922 (and if the Walt Disney Corporation had its way, would so enjoy in perpetuity), would this be a case of copyright violation?
Roland Barthes, famously, described the text as “a tissue of quotations,” without source, without origin—and escaping any attempts to brand, quote, or copyright. Does this mean that “information wants to be free,” in that fatuous formulation? Call me unfeeling, but I don’t think “information” wants anything. What I want, though, is for information to move freely enough to create new constellations, new unexpected juxtapositions: call it car-crash creativity. I love Girl Talk driving Aaliyah and Timbaland right over the top of Rage Against the Machine. I love that Lethem sandwiches a wee bit o’ me right between Mary Shelley’s introduction to Frankenstein and Christian Keathley’s Cinephilia and History.
No fences make good neighbors.
You shoulda been a medievalist, dude.
Why’s that: because everything is (potentially) public domain?
(Sorry about the slow reply. I plead breakdown caused by cooking for 12.)
Because medieval writers exemplified Barthes’ tissue of quotations. They knew it, and their readers knew it; no need to cite. It was the first rule of the game. That whole whose-idea-is-this business came later (as PSA documented so well).
I don’t care for the anthropomorphization of “Information wants to be free” either, but Stewart Brand’s point is far from fatuous. He could just as well have said, “Anyone trying to control the flow of information is on a doomed mission by virtue of the very nature of information.” That’s a big old duh for thee and me, but every day’s news shows us anew that some folks haven’t figured it out. Not that Brand was your target here, but I still felt called to defend the motto — for that’s what it is.
I read somewhere that Eliot included the footnotes mainly to pad out the poem to a length that allowed it to be sold as a stand-alone volume. Probably apocryphal, but believable. Eliot was a banker, after all.
Not at all apochryphal: it’s the next sentence in the quotation I provided! It doesn’t, however, explain why TWL needed to appear as a stand-alone volume; his first book of poems was Prufrock and Other Observations.
No, I think it had everything to do with marketing: but that’s a different, and rather long, story.
Thanks for pulling in Girl Talk! I’ve been trying to defend his latest work to some ardent skeptics here, and it’s nice to be able to ground that in a more extensive literary tradition. I’ll have to check out this Eliot badass…
This was very interesting, but reads alot like a paper I had written.
Plagiarism or just déjà vu ?
Give credit to get cash?
Glad to learn about Girl Talk – which somehow led me to Kate Perry. Oh, the Francine Prose piece in the latest “Food and Wine.” Or, is that popular culture not popular enuf. I don’t know the rules.
And, Garry Wills is not at all dyspeptic in revu of the Trudeau book in NYBR. Anyone know more about that “Hitler Moves East” graphic narrative? I ordered it.