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THE LITTLE BOOK OF PLAGIARISM.

THE LITTLE BOOK OF PLAGIARISM.

By Richard A. Posner. Pantheon.
116 pp. $10.95

Reviewed by Wendy ­Kaminer

Plagiarism, like infidelity, is a habit that few defend but many indulge. You can discern its frequency and covert acceptability in the ready excuses offered by and on behalf of eminent writers and professors periodically caught copying the work of less eminent writers or research assistants. Consider the group of famous novelists who rushed to defend British writer Ian McEwan for borrowing sentences from a memoir by the late Lucilla Andrews in his ­best-­selling novel Atonement. McEwan and his advo­cates stressed that he had acknowl­edged a general debt to Andrews, and they asserted that fiction writers have creative license to borrow and embellish, especially when writing historical fiction. That principle is not terribly controversial, but it may not apply in this case. As Slate media columnist Jack Schafer suggested, while McEwan said he creatively embellished, others might fairly say he ­copied.

Nonfiction writers and scholars charged with plagiarism are less likely to claim a license to copy than to cop to a lesser offense, such as disorganization. They acknowledge the inadvertent omission of footnotes and quotation marks, or blame their own inade­quate notes for leading them to mistake other people’s words for their own, while vigorously denying that any of these “mistakes” might constitute plagiarism. This effectively defines plagiarism to exclude even gross or implausible acts of negligence, especially when committed by established writers or scholars presumed by their friends to have no need to plagiarize. As Harvard constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe asserted in defense of historian Doris Kearns Goodwin after the first revelation of her borrowings in 2002 (others followed), Goodwin had merely been “slop­py with her sources in a minuscule part of her truly extraordinary body of work a dec­ade and a half ago.” A few years later, Tribe himself was exposed as a borrower; he apologized, blaming his ­“well-­meaning effort” to write a book for a lay audience that was free of ­footnotes.

In The Little Book of Plagiarism, Richard Posner observes that plagiarism is not “especially heinous” but “embarrassingly second rate,” which partly explains why officially ­first-­rate writers caught copying seem to regard plagiarism as a crime that other people commit. Posner, a federal appellate court judge, lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School, and author of an impressive array of big books as well as little ones, offers an idiosyncratic primer on plagiarism and intellectual property, combining bytes of history, law, and cultural analysis in an essay of about 100 pages. The book’s conclusion seems rushed and perfunctory, but this is an otherwise enjoyable “Cook’s tour.”

Posner locates the modern concept of plagiarism at least partly in the development of a market for “expressive works,” which supplanted the private patronage of writers and other artists, and carefully distinguishes plagiarism from allusion and “creative imitation,” as practiced by Shakespeare, claimed by McEwan, and increasingly limited by copyright law. (As Posner explains, copyright infringement, unlike plagiarism, can include borrowings that are openly acknowledged: If you reprinted this book review in its entirety, with attribution but without my permission, you would not be guilty of plagiar­ism, but you would violate my copyright.)

Posner’s approach is typically dispassionate. He notes that his analysis reflects his long-standing interest in intellectual property, as a judge and an academic, conspicuously omitting any reference to his interests or experiences as a writer. (Have they had no effect on his views?) He acknowledges that victims of plagiarism sometimes suffer significant “competitive harm,” and observes that “attribution is important to creators of intellectual work even when there is no direct financial benefit.” But he centers his definition of plagiarism on harm to the con­sumer, not the creator, asserting that copying becomes plagiarism when the reader relies on the plagiarist’s deceit: “The reader has to care about being deceived about authorial identity in order for the deceit to cross the line to fraud and thus constitute plagiarism.”

This rather narrow definition of ­plagiarism—­which some creators of intellectual property might well ­contest—­exempts the many judges who sign their names to opinions written by law clerks. Most readers of judicial opinions, says Posner, realize that they are written by clerks, who understand that they are hired to draft opinions. Laypeople who believe falsely that judges write their own opinions do not rely on that belief and would not “change their behavior” if it were dispelled. Besides, law values predictability, not originality. So while there may be “an element of deceit” in ghostwritten legal opinions, Posner suggests that there’s no real harm in ­them.

It’s hard to argue with this proposition, unless perhaps you’re Richard Posner. In his astute 1988 New Republic article “The Culture of Plagiarism,” Ari Posner (reportedly no relation) revealed that Judge Posner, “who says he writes his own opinions, believes that overreliance on clerks is insidious. The process of writing itself, he argues, ‘often brings to light mis­takes, omissions, inconsistencies that in spoken language one doesn’t notice’ and might actually lead a judge to change his mind. And law clerks are ‘young and timid writers who write in a very bureaucratic style, who downplay policy considerations and tend to rely very heavily on footnotes, citations, and appeals to authority.’ ”

As Posner’s shifting perspective on the authorship of judicial opinions shows, plagiarism is a slippery subject, partly because it’s difficult to quantify the underlying harm of appropriation. Today, thanks in part to tech­nology, appropri­ation is apt to be seen as a virtue as much as a vice: In the music world, sampling is considered an art (though in court it may be deemed a copyright violation). Technology facilitates the detection of plagiarism with new software programs, Posner notes, but it also facilitates plagiarism, obviously. You can appropriate someone else’s sentences without even bothering to retype ­them.

As plagiarism becomes easier to commit and more common, it is likely to become more re­spectable, or at least less embarrassing. The mantra that information, including the individualized expression of ideas, should be free and universally accessible partly reflects the fact that so much material on the Internet is free and universally accessible. Appropriating it doesn’t neces­sarily feel like stealing, especially to members of the digital generation. Posner correctly regards digitization as a threat to plagiarists, but the culture it helps shape may also prove to be their best defense. Plagiarism is still regarded as “the capital intellectual crime” by most writers, teachers, and scholars, Posner writes, but you have to wonder if plagiarism’s severest critics tend to be of a certain ­age.

Its defenders may share an ideology, Posner suggests, characterizing “the Left” as “soft on plagiarism” because its theorists are hard on individualist notions of authorship. But the musings of the obscure postmodernists whom Posner cites dont support generalizations about the appropriative proclivities of the Left, which is hardly monolithic. Ethics are not generally functions of particular political ideol­ogies anyway. Left and right, people lie, steal, and cheat with varying degrees of guilt or self-­righteousness.

Apolitical popular culture nurtures plagiarism much more than any political theory. The market­place often rewards imitation more than originality, as the proliferation of movie sequels attests. The desire to be original and the desire to be successful are not wholly compatible, Posner acknowledges. High school students whose college application essays are edited or partly drafted by writing coaches, as well as authors who assemble rather than write their own books, might agree. But Posner also asserts, Ours is a time and place in which market forces favor originality and in which a robust concept of plag­iarism backs up the market valuation.

In other words, the market favors originality, except when it doesnt. Posner favors creativity. In his view, an original work has no inherent aes­thetic value; it might simply be unimagin­ative hack work. But the effort to create, or to imag­ine, an original work has value, regardless of the result. Creativity, imagination, and the quest for originality are not so easily divorced. Students are apt to learn more from D papers they struggle to write than any A paper they purchase, or ­steal.

They might also learn to appreciate the in­timate proprietary relationship between writers and their own carefully chosen words. Plagiarism is a parasitic offense, whether or not its inten­tionally or even tangibly harmful. Unlike imitation (properly acknowledged), it is not a form of flattery, any more than stalking is an expression of respectful admiration. Why does plagiarism generate such hostility? It is essentially a hostile actof impersonation, not homage.

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The Mystique of Genetic Correctness

The Mystique of Genetic Correctness

by
Kurt Jacobsen

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The democracy of Don Quixote

The democracy of Don Quixote

Novelists have always turned their hands to essays, and the essay-writing novelist remains a literary force to be reckoned with. The two forms share an inherent pluralism and scepticism that makes them natural allies of democracy

Jonathan Rée
Jonathan Rée is a freelance historian and philosopher
In or around 1605, European literature changed. No one realised it at the time, but when Don Quixote set off to save the world, a new kind of writing was born. The old forms of storytellingthe epic, the romance, the oral talewould from now on be pitted against a boisterous young rival. Before long it would be universally acknowledged that a reader hoping to enjoy a good story must be in search of a novel.

The novelty of the novel is of course connected with the rise of printing, and the growth of a literate public with time and money to spare. Beyond that, the sheer scale of the form allows storylines to be extended and multiplied as never before, crossing and re-crossing each other with ample scope for coincidence, surprise and contingency, and hence for the depiction of characters with whom, as William Hazlitt put it, the reader can “identify.” But the most momentous way in which novels distinguish themselves from other kinds of storytelling is that they give a central role to a supernumerary characterthe narratorwhose task is to transmit the story to us. All kinds of stories invite us to imagine the characters they portray, and involve ourselves in their fortunes and their follies; but to engage with novels we need to go one step further and imagine the people telling the story, or even identify with them.

The art of reading a novel involves a dash of experiment, conjecture, even risk. It requires readers to try out different narrative perspectives, styles, even personalities, and so to explore the inherent variousness of experience, and to recognise the vein of arbitrariness that runs through any possible version of events. Novels, in short, are implicitly pluralistic. In this respect they resemble essays, which, as it happens, came into existence at more or less the same time (Montaigne launched the form in 1580, with Bacon following in 1597). Essays tend to be classier, more learned and more demandingthere is no essayistic equivalent of the “popular novel”and even when written in a perfectly casual style, they are likely to be strewn with half-concealed quotations or allusions to flatter or perhaps annoy the smarter class of reader. As exercises in hesitation, exploration and experimental self-multiplication, they are like novels, only more so. You might even say that the novel aspires to the condition of the essay, and there is certainly no shortage of novelists who have aspired to be essayists too. Think of Eliot or Henry James, Woolf, Forster or Orwell, or Mann, Sartre, De Beauvoir, Camus and Mary McCarthy. And as the four recently published books now lying open on my kitchen table demonstrate, the essay-writing novelist is sill a literary force to be reckoned with.

In his luminous new collection, The Curtain (Faber & Faber), Milan Kundera argues that the special virtue of the novel lies in its ability to part the “magic curtain, woven of legends” that hangs between us and the ordinary world. The curtain has been put there to cover up the trivia of our lives, the forgotten old boxes and bags where “an enigma remains an enigma” while ugliness flirts with beauty, and reason courts the absurd. These neglected spaces were redeemed for literature, according to Kundera, at the moment when Cervantes got his readers to imagine Don Quixote as he lay dying while his niece went on eating, the housekeeper went on drinking and Sancho Panza went on being “of good cheer.” By inventing a narrator through whose consciousness such dumb events could be worked up into an affecting “scene,” Cervantes created a form of literature that could do justice to “modest sentiments”; and so a new kind of beautyKundera calls it “prosaic beauty”was born. Henry Fielding took the technique further when he created a narrator who could charm his readers with benign loquacity, and Laurence Sterne completed the development by blithely allowing the story of Tristram Shandy to be ruined by the character trying to recount it.

If Cervantes rent the curtain that separates us from the prose of ordinary life, Kafka tore it down completely. After Kafka, according to Kundera, the novel entered a realm where reality could never “correspond to people’s idea of it”; from now on the novel would be a constant witness to the “unavoidable relativism of human truths.”

Kundera suggests that no one can become a novelist who has not passed through a long night of lyrical self-absorption to emerge on the other side in a state of bewildered, uncertain enlightenment. Novelists are specialists in the kind of moral wisdom which knows “that nobody is the person he thinks he is, that this misapprehension is universal, elementary, and that it casts on people& the soft gleam of the comical.” And this gentle scepticism has political implications too, as Kundera notes when he recalls the “Manicheism” that deformed his native Czechoslovakia when he was a student in Prague after the second world war. Politics at that time was not a forum where perplexed citizens could engage in a collective search for freedom and happiness, or truth and reconciliation, but a battlefield where militant partisans would try to vindicate their correct views about everything and punish anyone who saw things differently. Kundera joined the Communist party, where he was taught that art must take sides in a historic “battle between good and evil,” but he was never quite convinced. (In 1950 he was expelled from the party for his obtuseness, but eventually gained readmission, only to be expelled a second time in 1970, after which he escaped to France and set about rebuilding his literary life in a second language.) “Art is not a village band marching dutifully at History’s heels,” Kundera now says, and politics itself will suffocate without access to the forgiving fluidity of the novel. “The novel alone,” as he puts it, “could reveal the immense, mysterious power of the pointless.”

Jm Coetzee approaches politics with a similar combination of irony, seriousness and principled reticence. His political attitudes may be connected with the difficulties of being a liberal white South African, but they have their intellectual origins in his prodigious work as a novelist. His latest collection of essays, Inner Workings (Harvill Secker), keeps returning to the question of “the novel form,” and how Cervantes created it in order to demonstrate the power of the imagination. One of the great virtues of the novel, according to Coetzee, is to teach us that there is no perfect way of carving up the world or ecounting its stories. This is a lesson that bears on politics as well, counting against any political aspiration that arises from nationality, identity or tribal loyalty.

But Coetzee does not confine his attention to novelists, and an outstanding essay on Walt Whitman allows him to explore a conception of democracy that he himself would evidently endorse: democratic politics, he suggests, is “not one of the superficial inventions of human reason but an aspect of the ever-developing human spirit, rooted in eros.” Those who make a fetish out of politics, he implies, are in danger of foreclosing on democracy. Take Walter Benjamin, for example. Coetzee, refusing to treat him with the awed indulgence that has become customary, contends that when Benjamin decided to become a good communist, it was not through an imaginative appraisal of political options, but was simply “an act of choosing sides, morally and historically, against the bourgeoisie and his own bourgeois origins.” And if there was something silly and unconvincing about Benjamin’s Marxism”something forced about it, something merely reactive”it could perhaps be attributed to a certain literary narcissism. “As a writer, Benjamin had no gift for evoking other people,” Coetzee says; he had “no talent as a storyteller,” and no capacity for the kind of compassionate intelligence implicit in the art of the novel. In a perverse attempt t
o opt for political realism rather than literary imagination, Benjamin managed to cut himself off from both.

Susan Sontag would have agreed with Coetzee about the political significance of literature. The novel, as she remarks in her last, posthumous collection At the Same Time (Hamish Hamilton), exists to recall us to a sense of the interminable diversity that is the basis of what she calls “politics, the politics of democracy.” In a substantial essay on Victor Serge, she praises him for having combined political militancy with a serious engagement with the art of writing. As a mature novelist, she says, Serge was able to deploy “several different conceptions of how to narrate,” elaborating a capacious “I” as a device for “giving voice to others.” It was through his narratorial doubles that he liberated himself from what he called the “former beautiful simplicity” of the fight between capitalism and socialism, so as to produce books that were “better, wiser, more important than the person who wrote them.”

Sontag herself never found it easy to reconcile the languorous pleasures of imaginative writing with her impulse to political plain speaking. “The wisdom of literature is quite antithetical to having opinions,” she said, and “a writer ought not to be an opinion-machine.” But she remained an irrepressible opinionator, and in At the Same Timewhich contains much that she might have revised if death had not intervenedshe sometimes lurches into monologues, adopting an unappealing tone of dogmatism, petulance, hyperbole and egocentricity. She finds it hard to talk about writers without telling us who is or is not “great” or “supremely great,” as if world literature were a competitive sport, and she the ultimate umpire. And her fury at the condition of the USshe speaks of a “culture of shamelessness,” marked by an “increasing acceptance of brutality” in which politics has been obliterated and “replaced by psychotherapy”seems to have made her forget her own better self, and her neat summation of the wisdom of the novel: the generous knowledge that whatever may be happening, “something else is always going on.”

Kundera, Coetzee and Sontag are, one feels, the kind of writers who might have steered clear of politics if they had not had it thrust upon them; but Mario Vargas Llosa has, on at least one occasion, gone out of his way to achieve political power. He won literary fame in the early 1960s and pursued a charmed career as a writer not only in his native Peru, but also in Britain, Spain and the US. But in 1990 he took a vacation fro literature in order to campaign for the presidency of Peru. He came quite close to winningsome say he would have done if his work as a novelist had not been held against himand if he had done, Peru might have enjoyed an experiment in pluralistic centre-right liberalism instead of the disastrous ten-year kleptocracy of Alberto Fujimori. After his defeat, Vargas Llosa returned with relief to his old preoccupations, and in Touchstones (Faber & Faber), his new collection of miscellaneous writings, he elaborates on the case for the political relevance of the novel.

The longest item in Touchstones is a piece of reportage rather than an essay: an account by Vargas Llosa of an extended visit to Iraq in 2003, chronicling his reluctant conversion from visceral opposition to the western invasion to firm if wary support. He was well aware that thousands of Iraqis were dying, and many coalition soldiers as well, and that the deaths were bound to continue for years; but politics is about comparisons, and he is persuaded that the death rate under the occupation is considerably lower than under the old regime. Beyond that, apart from a scary encounter with an enraged imam, he kept encountering an elated sense of freedom that was more than merely political. “As novelists know very well,” he says, “fantasies generate realities,” and in Iraq he sensed a gradual awakening from the paranoid fictions that flourish under a dictatorship.

Vargas Llosa’s optimism about Iraq may seem excessive, but it is bound up with a subtle understanding of the political responsibility of the novelist. He writes admiringly, for example, about Isak Dinesen; she claimed that she had no interest at all in “social questions,” but Vargas Llosa finds more political vitality on every page of her Gothic Tales than in any old-fashioned “literature of commitment,” which, as he puts it, “revolved maniacally around realist descriptions.” He traces the same kind of practical fertility in a vast range of 20th-century novelists, from Conrad, Mann, Woolf, Orwell and Hemingway to Henry Miller, Camus, Grass, Nabokov and Borges. A society that ignores imaginative literature, he argues, is liable to succumb to the bovine complacencies and populist idiocies of nationalism, and so to degenerate into “something like a sectarian cult.”

Vargas Llosa’s prose is sometimes slow-paced, but it speeds up when he reflects on the “collectivist ideology” of nationality. “There are no nations,” he says, at least not in a way that could “define individuals through their belonging to a human conglomerate marked out as different from others by certain characteristics such as race, language and religion.” For Vargas Llosa, nationalism is always “a lie,” but its rebuttal is to be found not so much in high-toned internationalist universalism as in the dissociative particularities of literature, and especially in a well-narrated novel. The novel, he thinks, articulates a basic human desirethe desire to be “many people, as many as it would take to assuage the burning desires that possess us.” Alternatively, it stands for a basic human rightthe right not to be the same as oneself, let alone the same as other people. And the defiant history of democracy began not in politics but in literature, when Cervantes first tackled “the problem of the narrator,” or the question of who gets to tell the story. No doubt about it: Don Quixote is “a 21st-century novel.”
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Continental Drift

Continental Drift

Europe shows signs of life, but Walter Laqueur argues that it’s still dying.

BY GERARD BAKER

If you’ve heard the celebratory noises coming out of European capitals of late, you could be forgiven for thinking that, as with Mark Twain’s prematurely recorded demise, reports of Europe’s death may have been greatly exaggerated. For a continent in the supposed grip of demographic implosion, economic stagnation, political paralysis and existential anomie, the news has been oddly cheerful recently.

In the past year, the rate of economic growth in the eurozone has actually overtaken that of the U.S. The market capitalization of companies quoted on European stock exchanges has surpassed American corporate worth for the first time ever. London has edged ahead of New York in most categories as global financial capital. The euro, closely watched in Europe as a barometer of continental self-respect, is close to its highest level ever against the dollar.

Even Europe’s infamous political stasis may be giving way to a hint of dynamism. In Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel’s coalition government has defied the odds and pulled off small but important economic reforms. In Nicolas Sarkozy, the French have elected a man so committed to recasting the country’s economy that he is widely viewed among the liberal elites as a dangerous radical.

All this could not have come at a more opportune moment. The European Union’s leaders are in the midst of lengthy celebrations to mark the 50th anniversary of the founding of the European Communities. At the same time, the gloom that enveloped the EU after the French and Dutch rejected its beloved constitutional treaty two years ago has been replaced by a restrained optimism that the show might just be put back on the road this summer.

Is it possible, then, that the writers who have spent the past few years predicting Europe’s collapse could be wrong? The short answer is: no. Even a corpse has been known to twitch once or twice before the rigor mortis sets in. The longer answer is provided by Walter Laqueur in “The Last Days of Europe,” one of the more persuasive in a long line of volumes by authors on both sides of the Atlantic chronicling Europe’s decline and foretelling its collapse.

Unlike the Euro-bashing polemics of a few of those authors, Mr. Laqueur’s short book is measured, even sympathetic. It is mercifully free of references to cheese-eating surrender monkeys and misplaced historical analogies to appeasement. The tone is one of resigned dismay rather than grave-stomping glee. This temperate quality makes the book’s theme–that Europe now faces potentially mortal challenges–all the more compelling.
The demographic problem is by now so familiar that it hardly bears restating. Mr. Laqueur notes that the average European family had five children in the 19th century; today it has fewer than two, a trend that will shrink the continent’s population in the next century on a scale unprecedented in modern history.

The failure of Europeans to reproduce makes it vulnerable to internal schism. Too often Europe has reacted to the growing threat posed by extremists among its minorities with a tolerance and self-criticism that has bordered on capitulation. Meanwhile, social tensions increase, not least because of high emigration to Europe from Muslim countries and high birth rates among Muslim populations. No one has yet found a good way of integrating those populations into mainstream European society.

Even as te challenge from fanatical Islam has intensified, at home and abroad, Europeans have found new ways to abase themselves before it. Two years ago it was the Danish cartoons affair, in which too few politicians and opinion leaders defended the rights of the Danish newspaper that published them; last year it was the collective European cringe in the wake of the pope’s mildly assertive remarks about the disconnect between Islam and reason; this year it has been the embarrassing spectacle of humiliated British servicemen fawning in front of their Iranian captors.

In the economic field, Europe is celebrating a growth rate of 2.5% annually; in the U.S. a similar pace is regarded as a crisis. Meanwhile unemployment remains brutally high and productivity stagnant. Mr. Laqueur notes that Europeans sometimes embrace their economic sluggishness as part of their “soft power” appeal: all those 35-hour weeks, long vacations and generous social benefits. But the long-term cost of their welfare states–and their confiscatory tax rates–may eventually make such luxuries unaffordable.

Mr. Laqueur ponders whether Europe will really surrender to these adverse trends or finally resist. He is not optimistic. Perhaps Europeans will find ways to bolster their birth rates. Perhaps they will stiffen in the face of an escalating terrorist threat. Perhaps Muslims will assimilate better into Europe’s democratic and tolerant societies. Perhaps the pro-American sensibilities and the pro-growth nimbleness of Eastern European countries will drive the rest of the Continent out of the ditch of stagnation and pacifism. Perhaps.
But then again, as Mr. Laqueur observes, museums are filled with the remnants of vanished civilizations. Abroad, the U.S. has long surpassed Europe in power, influence and economic dynamism; Asia may do so before long. At home, a profound demoralization has set in, induced in part by the continent’s ruinous past century.

It was a century in which unimaginable violence sapped the regenerative energies of a wearied people; in which the seductive falsehoods of twin totalitarian ideologies undermined moral self-confidence; in which a flaccid relativism replaced the firm ethical boundaries of religious belief. It was also a century, we now see, in which the luxuries of rapid economic growth produced a false sense of security that cannot be sustained in a global age.

Not dead yet, maybe. But even Mark Twain succumbed eventually to the obituary writers.

Mr. Baker is U.S. editor and an assistant editor of the Times of London. You can buy “The Last Days of Europe” from the OpinionJournal bookstore.