Is Pierre Menard a Plagiarist?
“Why don’t they try the same thefts? If they do they’ll find it's easier to steal Hercules’ club from him than to steal a line from Homer.”
– Virgil in response to critics of his thefts from Homer, according to Suetonius
“Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest.”
– T.S. Eliot, “Philip Massinger”
Determining what counts as plagiarism in art is notoriously tricky; the line between inspiration and ripping off is thin. No artist can create in a vacuum, nor can a work of art have meaning in one: all art exists in a lineage (or perhaps a web) of influence. Even Shakespeare based his plays on previous stories, and Proust wrote pastiches before composing his masterpiece. But we must draw the line between influence and stealing somewhere. As lawsuits like Katy Perry’s have shown, the potential for monetary penalties for getting it wrong is steep. And we clearly have an intuitive sense of when an artist has gone too far, as in the case of Led Zeppelin. Plagiarism also does not always align with copyright, so the law cannot be our guide here. We must find a way to demarcate plagiarism from inspiration without relying solely on copyright.
Of course, for plagiarism to be a meaningful concept, a certain notion of authorship is presupposed which does not hold for all artistic pursuits. In folk music, for example, songs – even ones for which a single author is known – are commonly considered communal material; it is a faux pas to claim individual ownership of a song. Borrowing lyrics and melodies from earlier songs was commonplace, and some even disdained writers of original material. Bob Dylan’s Greenwich Village subscribed to this more diffuse notion of authorship, and Dylan’s branding as a phony even before his “electric” moment was in part due to his insistence on writing original material (while generously borrowing old melodies, of course). Indeed, for forms which are not often considered “art” to Western audiences, such as many oral traditions, the notion of authorship which plagiarism presupposes is inconceivable. Stories or songs are passed down from one performer to another, with changes made according to the vagaries of memory and personal style. Some “postmodern” works of art, furthermore, challenge the relationship of spectator to artist, such that the work of the spectator is constitutive of the art itself; engaging with the piece is an active part of the creation of the art. They thus break down our ordinary ideas of authorship, making plagiarism harder to pin down. What we need is a conception of authorship which attributes an artistic work – and even what can be said to be art is up for questioning – to a distinct individual for plagiarism to make sense.
Still, even when working under this idea of authorship, not every instance of borrowing is rightfully considered plagiarism. Here is where “intertextuality” is usually invoked, usually defined as when a text references another, thereby appropriating its meaning for its own purposes. A prominent example is the photomontages of Hannah Hoch, which borrowed and combined magazine clippings, advertisements and paintings to create entirely new pieces. She often re-appropriated male images of the female form, as in her famous work “The Sweet One,” to satirize the monstrosity produced by the male gaze. Hoch, then, in Eliot’s words, “welds [her] theft into a whole of feeling which is unique,” makes “it into something better or at least different” than the originals she uses. In a word, she re-contextualizes the elements of previous artists, as Virgil did to Homer’s lines. The meaning of her work is understood through reference to the previous works she uses.
Hannah Höch: The Sweet One 1926
Although Eliot is suggesting a criterion for separating good poets from bad, perhaps we can use it to demarcate plagiarism from influence: if the stolen idea is put to different use, is re-contextualized in some way, it is not plagiarism. This would explain why Hoch does not plagiarize the images she uses and why Virgil and Dylan stole, but are not plagiarists. Richard F. Thomas, in his book Why Bob Dylan Matters, notes a further difference between the two:
intertextuality is as far as you can get from plagiarism, which is a practice meant to escape notice. Plagiarism is about passing off as your own what belongs to others. In contrast, the most powerful and evocative instances of intertextuality enrich a work precisely because, when the reader or listener notices the layered text and recognizes what the artist is reusing, that recognition activates the context of the stolen object, thereby deepening meaning in the new text.
We therefore seem to have a way of differentiating intertextuality from plagiarism. Plagiarism tries to disappear, while intertextuality calls attention to itself; plagiarism does not build on the meaning of the original, whereas intertextuality adds new layers of meaning. Intertextuality allows the artist to acknowledge and make reference to a particular tradition, while simultaneously adding something original to it. They can thus stand in a more complex relationship to their tradition, be it one of criticism, irony, reverence and so on. Plagiarism does none of this.
The two differences, then, might be summed up as follows. (I) Intention: plagiarism wants to be invisible; intertextuality, for its full purpose to be comprehended, must be noticed. (II) Meaning: plagiarism adds no new meaning to the plagiarized work; intertextuality does. Also note that here intention seems inseparable from meaning, but that we can distinguish them for clarity for now.
But there’s a potential problem with this attempt at a definition: it might not include much of anything as plagiarism. In his story “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” Jorge Luis Borges provides a reductio of sorts of this definition. The story consists of a monograph, written by one of Menard’s “true friends,” which seeks to justify the recently deceased author’s final project.
Those who have insinuated that Menard devoted his life to writing a contemporary Quixote besmirch his illustrious memory. Pierre Menard did not want to compose another Quixote, which surely is easy enough – he wanted to compose the Quixote. Nor, surely, need one be obliged to note that his goal was never a mechanical transcription of the original; he had no intention of copying it. His admirable ambition was to produce a number of pages which coincided – word for word and line for line – with those of Miguel de Cervantes.
We will analyze his project in terms of our definition of plagiarism, in the stages through which his project evolves. Menard’s first method was to “be Miguel de Cervantes” – he learned Spanish, converted to Catholicism, and attempted to forget the history of Europe after Cervantes’ time. This was his intention in producing another Quixote. He eventually gives up this course, however, because “To be a popular novelist of the seventeenth century in the twentieth seemed to Menard to be a diminution.”
According to our definition, this stage of the project seems to be a clear case of plagiarism. His intention was to disappear, to be Miguel de Cervantes. His own identity – as an author writing in the twentieth century, whose first language is not Castilian but French etc. – had to be ignored for this attempt at composing the Quixote to succeed (or, rather, to fail in an interesting way). And the note’s reason for Menard to try a different tact shows why, according to our author, no new meaning would be added by this composition – it would be just as Cervantes wrote it. As Menard wrote to our author, “Composing the Quixote in the early seventeenth century was a reasonable, necessary, perhaps even inevitable undertaking; in the early twentieth, it is virtually impossible.” So he changes his course: he will continue being “Pierre Menard and [come] to the Quixote through the experiences of Pierre Menard.” Composing it thus is the more interesting attempt, and, as the author argues, will add meaning to the Quixote through the changed context of its composition.
“Menard’s fragmentary Quixote,” he notes, “is more subtle than Cervantes’.” Cervantes’ comedic juxtaposition of country life with Don Quixote’s fantasies is “crude”; Menard, “with perfect naturalness,” avoids such trivialities. When Cervantes’ Quixote comes down in favor of arms instead of letters, it is natural and understandable; when Menard’s does so, it seems a manifestation of Menard’s “resigned or ironic habit of putting forth ideas that were the exact opposite of those he actually held.” Our author sees those words from Menard’s Quixote – “a contemporary of La trahison des clercs and Bertrand Russel” – as more complex, precisely because of the changed context of its utterance.
Our author then recounts – with an apparent touch of irony from Borges – several “identical” passages from both Quixote’s, comparing their respective meanings. Cervantes’ passage is “mere rhetorical praise of history,” whereas Menard’s is praised loquaciously:
History, the mother of truth! – the idea is staggering. Menard, a contemporary of William James, defines history not as a delving into reality but as the very fount of reality. Historical truth, for Menard, is not “what happened”; it is what we believe happened. The final phrases… are brazenly pragmatic.
Again, it is the context of Menard’s composition which creates its meaning. This new attempt, then, satisfies our definition of intertextuality. Menard does not try to make the original disappear, nor does he try to erase his own identity from the composition. The meaning of the work also deepens, becoming more complex as layers of irony and ambiguity are added.
Is this not absurd? It begs the question of whether our definition is meaningful at all. Borges’ parodic style suggests that he senses the inanity of it all. But there is a serious point to be made. If context constitutes meaning, as the story seems to imply, then every new reading would generate additional layers of meaning – every new reading would be a different story. Like in many of Borges’ works, authorship in “Pierre Menard” isn’t stable. It is subject to tellings and retellings, filtered through memory and the inclinations of the particular author. The reader must also then make meaning from the text, not find it in the text. The reader, like the author, is a particular individual in a particular time and place, and relates to the text accordingly. They constitute the text and its meaning just as the author does. The story thus mirrors Barthes’ theory of reading in S/Z, where reading is equivalent to writing “by transforming the reading in re-writing.”
To return to our definition of plagiarism, on this reading of “Pierre Menard” it seems that our second condition, meaning, will always be satisfied. There is no possibility of creating identical meaning; there is, on this reading, no possibility of plagiarism. Even Menard’s first attempt at writing the Quixote – to become Cervantes – would add new layers of meaning, because meaning is unstable, constantly prone to being revised and amended.
to read the Odyssey as though it came after the Aeneid, to read Mme. Henri Bachelier’s Le Jardin du Centaure as though it were written by Mme Henri Bachelier. This technique fills the calmest books with adventure. Attributing the Imitatio Christi to Louis Ferdinand Céline or James Joyce – is that not sufficient renovation of those faint spiritual admonitions?
Menard rejects becoming Cervantes not just because it is impossible, but also because it is boring. Menard was right: we can only understand the text, to the extent that we can, through ourselves, and through its relevance to our time. It is the mark of great literature that it remains vital and relevant to new times, that it continues to speak to different experiences. When it no longer does so we are left with a stale alexandrianism, with Menard’s academic attempt to become Miguel de Cervantes. Borges is warning us to not let literature fall into this: to not let reading become boring.
Thumbnail via
