Plagiat. Eine unoriginelle Literaturgeschichte (review)

Citing an array of paradigmatic episodes and telling examples from ancient Greece to the present, Philipp Theisohn's erudite and witty book asks in what manner, under which circumstances, and with which consequences the notion of plagiarism has been conceived. In the process, the author sketches a "history of mentalities" [Mentalitätsgeschichte] (xii) that consists of a series of specific cultural patterns that define the concept.

As Theisohn demonstrates, the issue at the root of plagiarism runs deeper than the theft of textual passages. If contemporary literary theory in its post-Foucauldian guise and meta-literature such as Kathy Acker's are taken at their word, it becomes clear that within their discursive horizon "texts can neither be stolen nor even possessed, for they 'flow'" (13). Maneuvering between this "Charybdis of post-modern reflection on literature" and "the Skylla of copyright law" with its rather-too-literal understanding of textual identity (14), Theisohn fearlessly charts a course that avoids many of the simplistic and moralizing positions in current debates on plagiarism. Rather than insisting on an anti-copying purism that would prohibit even the most creative adaptations that are, to be sure, the bread and butter of literary history, and rather than, alternatively, celebrating the liberation of all "text" from any authoritative claims, Theisohn follows the thread of what he calls "the narrative of plagiarism" (15). After all, the accusation and acknowledgement of an act of plagiarism requires not only a perpetrator and a victim, but also a public that takes note of the story that attaches the accusation to an identifiable object and at the same time propagates a culturally and historically specific understanding of the relation between author and text.

Moreover, plagiarism requires minimal uncertainty regarding the claims of authorship. This is, as Theisohn observes in one of his many learned asides, the reason why no such concept exists within the cultural horizon of the Hebrew Tanach, within which all possessive claims lead back to the divine origin. By comparison, Greek polytheism all but asks for conflict and values agôn as a competitive principle. Vitruvius reports that on the occasion of a poetry competition, Aristophanes of Byzantium drew a distinction between those who presented plagiarized works [furta] and those whose works were originals [scripta] (50). As the last to proclaim his judgment, he insisted that the lone competitor who belonged to the latter deserved the prize, and convinced the king by producing abundant textual evidence. Subsequently, Aristophanes was appointed director of the famous library of Alexandria. The librarians of Alexandria were the first to begin the process of canonization. To this purpose, they developed compendia in which "originals" were juxtaposed to "copies" that contained borrowings and parallel passages. This so-called klopaì-literature (from klopé or theft) was based on a very narrow conception of plagiarism as literal textual agreement that has returned throughout the subsequent history—most recently as anti-plagiarism software.

However, it is entirely plausible, as Theisohn claims, that the primary issue of plagiarism has more to do with the "personality of the text" [Textpersönlichkeit] than verbatim copying. According to his reading, the "foundational scene of plagiarism" occurred in the first century A.D., when the Roman poet Martial called his fellow-poet Fidentius a "plagiarius" (19). By this time, the term no longer referred to a simple thief, as Theisohn is quick to explain, but to one who re-enslaved the slaves to whom another had granted freedom. Not unlike in the case of slaves, who qua freed still had a connection to their former masters, literary works continued to be tied to their authors when published—especially in Rome, where they generally drew from rich and unacknowledged Greek sources. Thus, the works were indeed like freed (Greek) slaves, and the adaptation of the former constituted, as much as the repossession of the latter, an attack on "the integrity of [the master's or the author's] person" (20). Authorship and work were thus conceived in mutual dependence from early on in western literary history...