Charges of plagiarism have become common in recent years, and not only in South Africa. They reflect the ascendance of a legalistic discourse rooted in the English-speaking tradition.
Efforts to explain the seeming increase in literary theft have focused on the market demands pushing publishers to rush books into production, the pressures of the academic environment and its “publish or perish” ethos, and sloppy editorial practice. Indeed, these are significant forces in the economy of letters.
But if students’ term papers are increasingly likely to be pastiches of essays grabbed from the Internet, and if the instant books produced by entertainment companies are rarely original in conception or art, it is also true that the accusation of plagiarism now circulates as a substitute for both criticism and the recognition that literature itself is an institution of influence and collective citation.
Why? Why are matters of cultural influence and intellectual tradition now thought of in terms of exclusive title, as matters of intellectual property and its infringement?
Anthropologists suggest that new economic orders are invariably the scenes of new kinds of commodity fetishism. In such contexts, people often misrecognise the nature and source of value. But the emergence of a regime of intellectual property that confuses influence with theft is a culturally and historically specific phenomenon.
You only have to pick up a French philosophy text to recognise that the anxiety over citation is a peculiarly Anglo-American one. It is rare to find a bibliography, let alone an index, in, for example, a Galilée publication. Even footnotes are few. It is assumed that the readers of those texts will recognise the references. The French educational system aims to produce such readers.
Nonetheless, French Caribbean writers often express their sense of having been excluded from that tradition. Some, including the great novelist Maryse Condé, have advocated a strategy of even more aggressive borrowing and appropriation, which goes under the term “cannibal literature”. English Caribbean writers, such as Derek Walcott, have deployed similar tactics.
In southeast Asia, the tradition of copying was barely distinguishable from authorship until the end of the last century, and dense citation continues to be a major force.
These cultural traditions have come under pressure as the idea and the value of intellectual property has come to dominate international trade agreements and local cultural discourses. Accusations of plagiarism are rife in these transitional spaces, but tend to be most intense in small communities, where celebrity and renown are perceived to be limited goods.
Significantly, many artists continue to resist the conflation of citation with plagiarism, and reject the confusion of influence with theft. And they must, for citation and influence lie at the core of culture itself. We would be mute and alone without them.
Yet the force and logic of the new information economies make this an increasingly difficult project. Occasionally, an author can make a simple turn of phrase that has been used myriad times appear to be his or her own by asserting a proprietary right before anyone else claims theirs. Language has become the terrain of a veritable gold rush. Recently, a novelist I know was told that she could not use the expression “tomorrow is another day” because it had appeared in Gone With the Wind.
Accusations of plagiarism are likely to proliferate, both legitimately and illegitimately, for as long as publishers treat literature as an industry that is driven by the need to supply a constant desire for the same story. But they are often an inadequate and destructive response to the new economy — nor should they go unchecked, for they quickly become the means of maintaining the aesthetic and social status quo.
What one needs is criticism, and a commitment to knowing the literatures of the past, that without endorsing plagiarism one might recognise citation and embrace it as a central part of language-based art in its fully social dimension.
Rosalind Morris is professor of anthropology and associate director of the Centre for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University