Plagiat et créativité (treize enquêtes sur l'auteur et son autre) (review)

Isolating a practice he considers to be particularly French, that of writing based upon what one has read (rather than the allegedly "anglo-saxon" manner of writing based upon life), Jean-Louis Cornille states that his aim in this book is to unearth the ghostly subterranean dialogue, the chain of authors, hidden behind each of the texts he will discuss. Leaving aside his unsubstantiated claim about the difference between "anglo-saxon" and French writing, the links he identifies are often nothing more than "pure hypothèse ou géniale intuition," and his admission at one point that "il se peut même que rien de tel ne se soit produit, et que ce rapprochement se soit fait dans notre tête de chercheur, seulement" holds true for most of his analyses (62).

Despite the title, very little of the book is devoted to plagiarism. Instead, Cornille focuses on intertextual concepts related to but distinct from plagiarism, such as "pastiche," "écho," and "hommage," which lend themselves better to the tenuous connections he uncovers. Nonetheless, he does put forth a concept of plagiarism or "imitation" in which Marx appears to be one of the ghostly presences within Cornille's own text. In his Introduction, he writes: "Le mot 'imitation' est un très mauvais concept, choisi par commodité: disons plutôt qu'il y a capture de code et production de plus-value. Proust, lorsqu'il capte un bout de code flaubertien, y ajoute aussitôt quelque chose, une valeur, une valence qui n'appartient qu'à lui; il 'proustifie'" (11, my emphasis). By discarding the term "imitation" in favor of the "production de plus-value," involving an addition of "valeur" that belongs only to the one who appropriates the writing, Cornille presents a theory of plagiarism that bears a striking resemblance to Karl Marx's famous general formula for capital, which describes "the transformation of money into commodities, and the re-conversion of commodities into money." The end-product, the value of which includes a surplus-value, belongs to the capitalist, not to the worker, just as, in Cornille's theory of imitation, the end-product and "plus-value" belong not to Gustave Flaubert but to Marcel Proust.

Thus Cornille's idea of value-creation and owner-transfer and his use of the term "plus-value" are altogether Marxist. If this is more than simply "pure hypothèse ou géniale intuition" on my part, then Cornille, by fusing his theory of plagiarism to Marxism, opens up an interesting line of inquiry into the alienation and exploitation inherent in plagiarism and suggests the possibility that capitalism is a form of economic plagiarism or plagiarism is a form of literary capitalism.

The book has four parts, Réalismes, Surréalismes, Populismes, and Post-modernismes, each of which includes two to four of the book's thirteen enquêtes. Additionally, there is a short passage that functions as a preface, followed by the Introduction, "Proust à l'heure du pastiche," in which Cornille discusses borrowings from Honoré de Balzac and from Flaubert to argue that pastiche is central to Proust's writing, accounting, for example, for the particular musicality of À la recherche du temps perdu.

Réalismes begins with an enquête, "Le Manuel d'Emma," that connects the first scene of Flaubert's Madame Bovary to an obscure textbook released in numerous editions during Flaubert's childhood and then to more recent works by Louis-Ferdinand Céline and by Patrick Chamoiseau. The second enquête, "Décharge Flaubert (la Bible en argot)," focuses on Flaubert's Hérodias, the final tale in the Trois Contes about the beheading of John the Baptist, to discuss Flaubert's attempt to eliminate from his writing any trace of literary inheritance, such as the "purulences stylistiques" of other authors (46). Functioning as the obverse of the second enquête, the third, "L'Hospitalité du texte (Flaubert et...