Inspiration and Attribution

Is rehashing and derivation of creative work plagiarism?

 

“Old words in the service of a new idea aren’t the problem. What inhibits creativity is new words in the service of an old idea.”
--Malcolm Gladwell, Something Borrowed: Should a charge of plagiarism ruin your life”

Caesar van Everdingen, Four Muses
Wikimedia Commons

   Have you ever known a co-worker, friend or other associate who seems to make a habit of consuming facts, research, written content, or an eloquently spoken ideology, and then shamelessly regurgitating it as his or her own?

They don’t seem to be intentionally claiming others work and results as their own; instead, they seem to have lost sight of where they heard these memorable turns of phrase, or read those statistics, disregarding their authorship and instead proudly spouting what they see as true and correct “common knowledge.” Sometimes it seems that we are so moved and inspired by the arrangement of someone else’s words, we assimilate it so closely with our own emotions and thought process, that we find it difficult to separate that arrangement from the resultant idea we agree with so strongly.

Surely, we all do this to some extent, as we hear concepts repeated, some throughout our entire lives. This type of general knowledge acquisition obviously makes attribution very murky, and it also makes serious arguments, debates or journalistic attempts foundation-less. Here we see the importance of getting our facts straight, and knowing where our viewpoints and opinions come from.

When in Greece... 

The Greeks and Romans were already grappling with sources of inspiration and how layers upon layers of gathered knowledge, swept into our brains as by a great whisk broom swishing through the clouds above us, challenging our senses and emotions, settle within us to make memories.

In Greek and Roman mythology, there are nine muses, embodied by women, who excite the senses and sensibilities of artist, poets, and scientists to create works of art. N.S. Gill, Ancient/Classical History Expert, quotes a source who quotes a passage from Hesiod’s Theogony, relating that the nine muses were a product of nine evening trysts between Zeus and Mnemosyne (Memory), and her nine daughters were born after a full year had passed, and each season had run its course…and they were “all of one mind”

Felix-Nicolas Frillie, The Kiss of the Muse,
Wikimedia Commons

For the infinitesimally confounding subject of inspiration vs. derivation vs. plagiarism and all the wispy cumulous and dark strata in between, I will refer to several New Yorker articles who manage to creatively make some sense of the madness.

First, Robert Mankoff’s 2013 article We Are All Plagiarists touches upon another element of the strange, instantaneous presentation of others work that only the digital age can bring us, through search engines; see his screen grabs of just what googling “we are all plagiarists” brings up…or try it yourself.

In the same article, Mankoff shows two cartoons submitted to the magazine, one published in 1987. The issue his assistant faces nearly every week, Mankoff says, is comparing new submissions to every cartoon every printed, and deciding if any are “too close for comfort,” meaning too similar in theme. Considering the volume of little anecdotal cartoons the New Yorker includes in each issue, the likelihood of inspiration here, nearly thirty years distant, is unlikely, but Mankoff still says no go.

In another brilliant article by Malcolm Gladwell in 2004 entitled Something Borrowed: Should a charge of plagiarism ruin your life?, Gladwell navigates the realization that an article of his has been “plagiarized” and relied upon in part to create a successful Broadway play, all without his initial knowledge. Gladwell’s journey through this maze of strange emotions and possible reactions is captivating, even as he comes face to face with the person who is either his nemesis or flatterer. Gladwell is obviously no stranger to the miasma of influences we all accumulate:

“And, by the time ideas pass into their third and fourth lives, we lose track of where they came from, and we lose control of where they are going.”

Seated Muse, from the Palatine Stadium, Wikimedia Commons

 In the end, Gladwell leaves us with the sense that the golden rule of anti-plagiarism is tarnished. Maybe he’s leaning towards the Muses when he says:

“The final dishonesty of the plagiarism fundamentalists is to encourage us to pretend that these chains of influence and evolution do not exist, and that a writer’s words have a virgin birth and an eternal life. I suppose that I could get upset about what happened to my words. I could also simply acknowledge that I had a good, long ride with that line—and let it go.”

Edmond Aman-Jean, Hesiod Listening to the Inspiration of the Muse,

Wikimedia Commons