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  • Anticipatory Plagiarism
  • Pierre Bayard (bio)
    Translated by Jeffrey Mehlman

For an Autonomous Literary History

In which it is seen, harking back to antiquity and specifically to Sophocles, that it is the entirety of literary history that we must be prepared to rewrite once we agree to take into account the notion of anticipatory plagiarism.

The observation that writers are inspired not merely by those preceding them, but in equal measure by those succeeding them, cannot remain without repercussions for our sense of literary history. Independently of the purely moral question, the historian's method cannot be restricted for long to the classical identification of sources, and it will be obliged to take into account a number of discoveries showing how other more discreet (but more pertinent) affiliations secretly link works to one another.

Once the notion of anticipatory plagiarism is accepted, it is plausible that the entirety of our conception of literary history—as it is taught in schools and universities and presented in textbooks—will have to be modified. For it is, in fact, hostage to an overly rigid conception of time, and as a result it is unable to grasp the complexities of the various interferences between epochs (sometimes quite distant from each other) and between authors, some of whom succeed in exercising an influence on others, even though the former have not yet been born.

Let us hark back at this point to the quite distant past and take the example of Sophocles and one of the founding works of our culture, Oedipus Rex. In two respects, that play may be considered as a case of anticipatory plagiarism.

The first reason is the more familiar one. In constructing his plot, Sophocles drew his inspiration from the principal theme of psychoanalysis and invented a story whose hero was brought to kill his father and make love with his mother, thus offering a gripping dramatic illustration, more than two millennia before Freud, of the ambivalent tangle of relations binding a child to his two parents. The fact that the plagiarism, in this case, is exercised by a literary work at the expense of theoretical texts in no way changes matters. [End Page 231]

The most convincing index of plagiarism, above and beyond the overtly psychoanalytic nature of the plot, is that the Oedipus complex, contrary to what may have been claimed, is rather rare in Greek theater and mythology (unless one is prepared to coax it into existence through a strained interpretation of texts in symbolic terms).1 When one examines the relations between parents and children, it is rather infanticide that is the prime recurrent motif and major unconscious fantasy of the imagination of antiquity.2

Sophocles was thus not impelled as a matter of course by his epoch to treat this theme. He was far more plausibly drawn to it by his association with a later author whose existence he intuited, even as he may have been, following Valéry's model, reversing the stance of his contemporaries, who preferred the opposite theme. We are dealing here with a minor text, in the sense that we have defined it, not from an aesthetic perspective, but because it develops a marginal thematic in relation to future works of the culture in which the theme will take on its true dimension.

The notoriety of this initial case of plagiarism has relegated to the shadows a second case of borrowing of which Sophocles may be accused, and which concerns the detective novel. Like Voltaire, but in a manner far more pronounced, since it is the work in its entirety that possesses this structure, Sophocles used detective-like devices in his play that were unknown in his era, but are perfectively identifiable today.

He even went quite far in the use he made of the genre, since he did not hesitate to call on a criminal technique that came late to detective fiction (one that consists of making the murderer the detective himself), thus augmenting still further the reader's difficulty in finding a solution and identifying the culprit.

It is a technique that he even managed to perfect (compared to his successors), since the specific singularity of his innovative detective...

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