THE OSCHOLARS LIBRARY

Is Oscar Wilde a Plagiarist? Four Answers and a Biased Opinion

Florina Tufescu

This is Chapter I of Florina Tufescu: Oscar Wilde’s Plagiarism. The Triumph of Art over Ego. Irish Academic Press: Dublin / Portland, Oregon, 2008. It is here reproduced by kind permission of author and publisher.

It is only about things that do not interest one, that one can give a really unbiased opinion; and this is no doubt the reason why an unbiased opinion is always absolutely valueless. (Wilde, ‘Mr Pater’s Last Volume’, in The Soul of Man, p.24)

This study aims to settle the last remaining dispute in the field of Wilde studies, to remove the last objections to Wilde’s canonization. To most readers it might seem that the canonization has been completed this year, with the inclusion of his aphorisms in the book compiled by Father Leonardo Sapienza, the Vatican head of protocol and editor of Pope John Paul II’s writings. Many of the Wildean maxims, distilled from a thousand sources and still downplayed by some scholars as expressive of his limited, magpie-like imagination, are included in Provocations: Aphorisms for an Anti-Conformist Christianity, and deemed poignant enough to turn modernity-loving Christians to their faith.1

However doubtful the originality of Wilde’s writings in the light of past and current academic standards, they have been at the core of European literature from the time of their creation. The Picture of Dorian Gray has been criticized for its plagiarisms and its mixture of genres, as ‘a mosaic hurriedly made by a man who reached out in all directions and […] used in his book whatever scraps of jasper or porphyry or broken flint, were put into his hand’.2 Yet it remains one of the most poignant re-tellings of the Faust myth since Goethe and one of the few non-realist novels to retain the attention of the reading elite prior to magical realism. Salomé, which derives its inspiration from the entire wealth of decadent art and literature, was dismissed in a once influential study – Mario Praz’s The Romantic Agony – as ‘childish prattle’ and as an unsuccessful imitation of Maeterlinck and Flaubert,3 yet it is now acknowledged as a turning-point in Irish and indeed European symbolist drama. The blatant appropriations of his first volume of Poems scandalized some of his contemporaries, who voted against its inclusion in the library of the Oxford Union, yet Wildean practice and theory have created a precedent for some of the most interesting experiments of the twentieth century: T.S. Eliot’s Wasteland, Ezra Pound’s Cantos and Marianne Moore’s poetry, which is often built around properly sourced quotations and textual fragments. The Wildean comedies, created from the odds and ends of the well-made plays, have been criticized from the opening night reviews to the present for their repetitiveness and excessive reliance on old-fashioned stage tricks, yet they have inspired writers as different as George Bernard Shaw, Tom Stoppard and Joe Orton, just as they continue to provide the financial sustenance of avant-garde Irish theatre.4

Oscar Wilde’s theory of creativity has been downplayed as merely a witty re-packaging of the ideas of Matthew Arnold and Walter Pater or as an apology for ‘the particular nature (and limitations) of his own writing talent’,5 yet its influence can be perceived in some of the most innovative critical writing of the twentieth-century, namely that of Jorge Luis Borges, Northrop Frye, Susan Sontag, Roland Barthes, Gérard Genette and – with a Freudian twist – Harold Bloom (see Chapter 7).

Within this context of international appreciation, the publication in 2000 of the first volume of the Oxford edition of the Complete Works under the general editorship of Ian Small seemed to strike a disconcertingly anachronistic note. The introduction essentially reproduces the denunciation of Wilde as an opportunistic and unimaginative plagiarist which is fully articulated by Ian Small and Josephine Guy in Oscar Wilde’s Profession:

Wilde was a writer who did not have an abundance of either intellectual resources or material. There is little sense of the fecund creativity which we associate with the works of Dickens and Balzac. Equally significantly, it appears that Wilde’s creative imagination worked best in what was a fairly narrow area, that of the aphorism or the polished one-liner.

These conclusions may seem to justify some of the judgments of Wilde made by his contemporaries and by critics in the first half of the twentieth century, that he was a writer of relatively slender talents, whose work was derivative, and who would not stand the test of time. It certainly is true that Wilde was not a writer who possessed the same seriousness and range of Arnold or Shaw, nor the protean inventiveness of Joyce.6 (emphasis added)

In fairness to the academic community, it should be pointed out that the general editor’s views are at odds with those of most Wildean scholars and with his own earlier interpretations. In fairness to Ian Small, it should be emphasized that his views would find greater support amongst the general public if only Oscar Wilde were a contemporary author and the evidence of his verbatim copying were advertised on the first page of the Times Literary Supplement.

In Flaubert’s Parrot, Julian Barnes writes eloquently on the dangers of specializing in a single author, who may thus become as tedious as family – to paraphrase Wilde and Barnes, a relation who annoyingly postpones dying. Yet in the same novel, Barnes writes as persuasively of the scholars’ love for their subject, the love which seeks to know ‘the worst’. In Wilde’s case, that ‘worst’ is plagiarism. The majority of Wildean scholars have preferred to concentrate on other topics. Those who have approached it have changed either their interpretation of Wilde’s oeuvre and of its place within the canon or their views on plagiarism, originality and creativity. The scholarly disagreement on Wilde’s textual strategies has broad cultural significance as it illuminates the ongoing struggles over the definitions and re-inventions of originality, creativity and authorship. Oscar Wilde himself stated that ‘the public is wonderfully tolerant: it forgives everything except genius’.7 This book pays tribute to Oscar Wilde’s plagiaristic, androgynous genius and sets it in its meaningful literary context.

IS OSCAR WILDE A PLAGIARIST?

The Romantic, Classical, Minimalist and Post-Modernist Definitions

The answer depends on one’s chosen perspective. In his address to the British Academy, Christopher Ricks, the Oxford Professor of Poetry, insisted that the only plausible definition of plagiarism is unacknowledged and deliberate borrowing of any significant element of a previous work. This definition, which only gained credibility during the romantic period, has been contested almost from the time of its first enunciation by influential critics such as Samuel Johnson and Sir Joshua Reynolds and it bears demonstrably little connection to the reality of the writing process. Yet it remains the official definition in academic circles, upheld in the 2003 handbook issued by the Modern Language Association, self-advertised with only slight exaggeration on its back cover as ‘the style bible for most college students’:

Derived from the Latin word plagiarius (‘kidnapper’), plagiarism refers to a form of cheating that has been defined as ‘the false assumption of authorship: the wrongful act of taking the product of another person’s mind, and presenting it as one’s own’ (Alexander Lindey, Plagiarism and Originality…). Using another person’s ideas, information, or expressions without acknowledging that person’s work constitutes intellectual theft.

Passing off another person’s ideas, information, or expressions as your own to get a better grade or gain some other advantage constitutes fraud. Plagiarism is sometimes a moral and ethical offence rather than a legal one since some instances of plagiarism fall outside the scope of copyright infringement, a legal offense.8

It may seem surprising, given the increasing centrality of plagiarism to academic concerns, that the prestigious Modern Language Association should be content with a definition within brackets – however properly attributed. And that this definition should be taken from a nearly sixty-year-old survey of plagiarizing practices in the arts, largely based on second-hand information and conducted by a lawyer intrigued by the absence of recent studies on the subject. The situation has in the meantime been rectified and it seems odd that none of the recent specialist studies is cited, though less striking when it is noted that they have reached different conclusions from those officially supported by the MLA and by academic guidelines on plagiarism.

The romantic bias of the definition is clear, in its focus on authorial intentions and on individual authors as plagiarists and plagiarized rather than on texts and in its understanding of plagiarism as covering the theft of ideas, motifs, themes or potentially any element of a previous work. The assumption that all one’s ideas can be traced to their individual sources is at odds with contemporary critical theory, as indeed with the experience of most academic writers.

The ‘new’ chapter on plagiarism, advertised on the back cover as one of the attractions of the 2003 edition, brings no recent analysis or research findings. The incomplete etymology and the muddled discussion of copyright infringement versus plagiarism revealingly give way to metaphor and psychologization:

Plagiarism is almost always seen as a shameful act, and plagiarists are usually regarded with pity and scorn … We also recognize degrees of theft. These distinctions allow us to urge leniency for a person who steals a loaf of bread and to approve a substantial prison term for a wealthy CEO who steals from employees’ pension funds … Moreover, although many of us would agree that a starving person who steals a loaf of bread can be rehabilitated, plagiarists rarely recover the trust of those they try to deceive.9

The tentativeness of the defence for the starving man who steals a loaf of bread – a rather worn-out romantic example, lifted straight out of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables – is indicative of the unease and of the loss of nerve and imagination experienced by the defenders of the author-oriented definition.

While Christopher Ricks cited Martial to prove the literature-long revulsion to plagiarism, Stephen Orgel demonstrated that the epigrams on the subject reveal a very different perspective, hinging on aesthetic rather than ethical criteria. Whereas romantically-biased criticism condemns unacknowledged and deliberate appropriation, classical criticism condemns artistically unsuccessful appropriation. In Martial’s epigrams, the plagiarist is a shameless thief not because of the theft itself, but because of his incompetence in his chosen art. Thus, Fidentinus foolishly recites Martial’s published poems, which are already freed, i.e. in the public domain, in the manner of a ‘plagiarius’, of one who would try to kidnap free men and sell them into slavery.10 Martial helpfully offers to sell him some unpublished manuscripts instead, since ‘a well-known book cannot change masters’.11 In his recitation, Fidentinus can only spoil what he is artistically incapable of improving upon;12 his ludicrous attempts at artistry and at occupying the author position are compared to the attempts of a crow among Ledean swans, a magpie among nightingales, of a woman decking herself with false teeth and hair.13 In short, the plagiarist is a foolish impostor and ‘a clumsy thief’ – ‘voleur maladroit’ – the definition proposed by Voltaire in his Dictionnaire philosophique.14

The classical view of plagiarism is distinctly unethical, as acknowledged by T.S. Eliot’s often-quoted aphorism: ‘Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal’.15 What is criticized by classical readers is not the insufficient acknowledgment of sources, but rather the insufficient concealment of sources, as recommended in Seneca’s influential epistle: ‘This is what our mind should do: it should hide away all the materials by which it has been aided, and bring to light only what it has made of them’.16

In addition to the romantic, ethical definition and to the classical, primarily aesthetical definition, a third definition is currently proposed by The Concise Oxford Companion to the English Language:

Because most artists are affected by other artists, it is not always easy to decide where legitimate influence ends and plagiarism begins. The term is usually reserved, however, for the flagrant lifting of material in an unchanged or only slightly changed form and its dissemination as the plagiarist’s own work.17

The fact that nearly all recent academic, journalistic and literary scandals have hinged on verbatim copying, while those cases in which looser parallels had been alleged were for the most part immediately dismissed by readers, suggests that this is the preferred definition, albeit not the official one.18 It represents an uneasy and ultimately impossible compromise between the romantic and the classical view, for while it expands authorial freedom to any procedures short of verbatim or wholesale copying, it contrives to maintain the signifier plagiarism and the boundaries between texts and authors for the sake of what the classicists regard as the delusions of originality and of solitary authorship. It is also purely technical, that is, not literary, and quite as arbitrary as the tests anciently devised for identifying witches, insofar as it raises a criterion of no particular significance to either the romantic or the classical camp to the value of an essential distinction. For while romantic doctrine is averse to all borrowings, whether acknowledged or unacknowledged, wholesale or creative, and scarcely distinguishes between them, as in John Pinkerton’s definition of imitation as ‘only a decent and allowed plagiarism’ differing merely ‘in the degree of disrepute’, classical doctrine does not proscribe any type of appropriation, provided there is improvement of the source.19 In the case of successful authors, this could consist simply in re-contextualization of the source, justified by the metaphors of imperial conquest, used until the end of the nineteenth century, and of rescue and resurrection, applied to the rewritings of ancient or obscure works.20

The rules of imitatio, as formulated by Seneca, were meant to guide the less experienced authors – the only ones who might plagiarize or be overly influenced. For himself, Seneca had claimed the right to use all ‘common property’, by which he understood all extant writings.21 The same attitude would be struck by Montaigne22 and by Molière: ‘I take my property wherever I find it.’23 The classical view of plagiarism has been maintained by a significant number of artists to the present, some of whom are discussed in this study. Yet it has seldom been defended in academic writing, undoubtedly because literary scholars are usually also teachers, expected to maintain ethical as well as professional standards.

Given the amorality of the classical definition, the mere technicality of the verbatim copying definition and the implausibility of the romantic definition, recent studies have proposed the abolition of the concept of plagiarism or at least the dilution of the plagiarism taboo. In his 2003 study of the contemporary art world, Joost Smiers rejects the concept of plagiarism, linked to the excesses of romantically-inspired copyright legislation:

In all cultures it has always been quite normal to incorporate ideas and ‘quotations’ from the works of predecessors. Only the system of copyright hampered this self-evident process of ongoing creation. This freezes the on-going creation and pretends there is culturally an endpoint, i.e. a specific work that has been made at a specific moment in history and that should not be changed any more. Infringement on this static situation is what we call plagiarism.24

Marilyn Randall denies the usefulness of plagiarism as a term of literary criticism:

plagiarism can be defined purely as a matter of reception, where the actual textual determinants are relatively unimportant. In other words, plagiarism is what has been accused of being and condemned as plagiaristic; it is an institutional judgment which creates its own object as an expression of the limits of tolerance with respect to norms such as propriety, originality, and authenticity.25

In her book Pragmatic Plagiarism, Randall demonstrates that the plagiaristic text cannot be deciphered in the absence of a plagiarist – a point first made by Neil Hertz in relation to student plagiarism. This means that both the romantic and the classical definitions are implicitly reader-oriented since it is the reader’s role to distinguish between ‘condemnable, excusable, or in some instances praiseworthy’ borrowings.26

Christian Vandendorpe, editor of a collection of wide-ranging essays on Le plagiat, similarly argues for the instability of plagiarism as a term, stating – somewhat prematurely – that it has been replaced by intertextuality in literary criticism for all but polemical purposes.27

Laura J. Rosenthal’s study of Playwrights and Plagiarists in Early Modern England leads her to conclude that plagiarism cannot be meaningfully defined.28 The composition scholar Rebecca Moore Howard similarly argues on the basis of fourteen years’ research on academic writing practices that plagiarism should be abolished as a term of academic writing and replaced by more rigorously defined categories, since its meaning is not contaminated or complicated by, but constituted through, metaphors.29

K.K. Ruthven’s conclusion in Faking Literature, a wide-ranging survey of forging and plagiarizing practices from Romanticism to the present, is only slightly less provocative: ‘Seeing that plagiarism in the domain of literature does not create the problems caused by comparable practices in the sciences or even in literary studies, I see no harm in trying to think more positively about so ubiquitous a practice.’30 Depending, then, on one’s preferred textual or minimalist, romantic, classical or post-modernist definition, the answer to the seemingly straightforward question, ‘Is Oscar Wilde a plagiarist?’ will be a resounding affirmative, a qualified affirmative or a resolute negative. If the romantic definition is adopted, Wilde is indeed the arch-plagiarist, on account of the deliberateness and outrageousness of his borrowings.

This was the initial response to Wilde’s poems, perhaps also because lyrical poetry is the field most closely associated with the triumph of the romantic doctrine. If the minimalist or verbatim copying definition is adopted, Wilde is one of the minor plagiarists, on account of his verbatim borrowings in The Picture of Dorian Gray and in The Portrait of Mr. W.H. The more extensive borrowings in his American lectures and in the enlarged version of The Portrait can be defended since these were published posthumously and it may be argued that Wilde had intended to acknowledge his sources. If the classical definition is adopted, Wilde cannot be a plagiarist simply because he is a great artist. This is, of course, Wilde’s own view: ‘The true artist is known by the use he makes of what he annexes, and he annexes everything’.31 Finally, from the perspective of post-modernist scholarship, neither Wilde nor anyone else can be regarded as a plagiarist, yet his critical writing intriguingly anticipates contemporary thinking on authorship and creativity.

WHOM OR WHAT DID HE PLAGIARIZE? WITH A FEW REMARKS ON SELF-PLAGIARISM

Oscar Wilde plagiarized the authors that he paid tribute to in his criticism, such as Walter Pater, John Addington Symonds and Charles Baudelaire. He also drew on a wealth of now obscure texts, from museum catalogues and books on the history of embroidery and of precious stones in The Picture of Dorian Gray to nineteenth-century Shakespearean scholarship in The Portrait of Mr. W.H. In the judgment of Ian Small, Oscar Wilde’s favourite victim was … Mr O.W. himself. All three volumes so far published of the Oxford edition of the Complete Works dedicate considerable attention to this topic, a highly debatable decision since these self-plagiarisms may be easily noticed by any reader in possession of the Complete Works or of an online concordance, whereas most of us would need editorial assistance in becoming aware of the countless sources of his creativity, from the Greek and Latin literature which Wilde had mastered to the Irish folklore collected by his parents, to the wealth of modern European culture that Wilde – unlike most of his twenty-first century readers – could uninhibitedly draw upon in his work as a truly cosmopolitan artist, versed in several languages.

One might speculate that the very concept of self-plagiarism originates in the anxieties of romantically-minded critics, since one of the most familiar arguments against creation ex nihilo is the poverty to which art would be reduced:

The greatest natural genius cannot subsist on its own stock; he who resolves never to ransack any mind but his own, will be soon reduced, from mere barrenness, to the poorest of all imitations; he will be obliged to imitate himself, and to repeat what he has before often repeated. When we know the subject designed by such men, it will never be difficult to guess what kind of work is to be produced.32

The term has recently gained a degree of plausibility in academic writing since the system of evaluating research in terms of quantitative as well as qualitative output has unsurprisingly led to the multiplication of publications as well as to diminished research time and thus to increased impatience towards seemingly recycled material which artificially increases one’s reading load. Patrick M. Scanlon notes that the duplication of results can even be dangerous in the field of medicine, as it inflates the importance of the research and findings on a particular topic. The problem is perceived to be significant in other fields as well, for example computer science, having led Christian Collberg and other members of the Arizona University team to create SPLAT, a self-plagiarism detection tool.

While academic anxieties over the value and integrity of scholarly research might explain the emergence and current prominence of the term, they fail to justify it. In light of its metaphorical and etymological meaning, self-plagiarism is as illogical a concept as self-kidnapping, or the stealing of credit from oneself. Anya Clayworth’s edition of Selected Journalism, which pays tribute to Ian Small and Josephine Guy’s ‘groundbreaking’ study, formulates an opportunistic interpretation of Wilde’s self-plagiarism:

the idea of reusing materials in different forums probably originated as a result of Wilde’s work in the periodical market place. The pressure to produce material in order to earn money may well have inclined him to take shortcuts and recycle good material where he could.33

Yet it is not at all obvious why plagiarism would not have served as well as self-plagiarism. If Oscar Wilde, who treated the whole of European literature as the raw material for his creativity, chose to repeat his own words, it is far more plausible to regard this as authoritative self-quotation, as Anne Varty has argued in A Preface to Oscar Wilde (London: Longman, 1998). If imitation is paying homage to the master, self-quotation would have appealed to Wilde as an extravagant strategy of anticipating his classical status. Such repetition is polemical, implying that one’s best lines bear repetition, that the writer can be his own best critic. It also puts literature on the same level as other art forms such as music or painting, by asserting that all the artists’ variations upon the same theme are valuable and illuminating, in proportion to his ultimate achievement – that they should be thought of as subtly different originals and not as recycled texts.

WHY DID HE PLAGIARIZE I.E. WHY DID OSCAR WILDE RESORT EVEN TO THE VERBATIM COPYING THAT IS STILL REGARDED AS PLAGIARISTIC TODAY?

In Idylls of the Market Place: Oscar Wilde and the Victorian Public, Regenia Gagnier emphasized the elaborate provocation of Wildean derivativeness, relating it to Situationist diversion as practiced and theorised in the 1950s by Guy Debord and others.34 Sos Eltis has patiently read through the well-made drama of Wilde’s day and demonstrated Wilde’s scintillating originality. His use of hackneyed plots and motifs in the comedies is a strategy of defeating censorship by concealing subversive (anarchist, feminist and socialist) suggestions underneath a deceptively familiar surface.35 Declan Kiberd has read Wilde’s plagiarism as a deliberate identification with Irish and Catholic values at the expense of Protestant culture,36 an interpretation also pursued by Deirdre Toomey.37 Paul Saint-Amour has understood Wilde’s plagiarism in the Chatterton lecture and in The Portrait of Mr. W.H. as a deliberate critique of the romantic ideal of creativity and of the commodification of art works as intellectual property. Finally, Ian Small’s earlier research viewed Oscar Wilde’s plagiarism and ‘self-plagiarism’ as ‘deeply subversive’ of the emergent, academic criticism of art and literature.38

All these interpretations, which attribute political and cultural meaning to Wilde’s textual transgressions rather than pathologizing them, have enriched my understanding of his work. The answer given in this book stresses the literary context of Wilde’s transgressions: he plagiarized because, like many of the writers he admired, he refused to accept the romantic redefinitions of authorship and creativity and constantly opposed them in his theory and practice.

HISTORICAL USES OF PLAGIARISM

Plagiarism is a legitimizing function. During the pre-romantic period, accusations of plagiarism served to differentiate the justified from the inappropriate uses of the canon, thereby asserting one’s superiority to fellow-authors, or one’s authority as a critic in the unveiling of obscure, ancient or foreign sources. Although the criteria were primarily aesthetic, Laura Rosenthal has shown that judgment could be influenced by non-aesthetic considerations: women writers, for instance, were far more likely to be cast as plagiarists since they were deemed to have no legitimate access to the canon – a tendency which is not absent from the 2003 MLA Handbook.39 The female authors sometimes responded by downplaying the value of tradition and of the imitation of ancient models and by emphasizing the merits of novelty and originality.

These earlier paeans to originality were, however, essentially a rhetorical trick, a means of carving a space for oneself on a lower plane of the canon and were not employed consistently and with full conviction. Laura Rosenthal notes that the playwright Susanna Centlivre employed imperialist topoi in defending her use of French sources for works published anonymously such as Love’s Contrivance and The Gamester, yet pleaded the minor merits of novelty and originality when writing in her own name, as in A Bold Stroke for a Wife.40 Margaret Cavendish sometimes presented herself as a poetess in her own right, superior to the male imitators of the ancients, for example in the dedicatory poem to the Playes (1662) while in other texts, such as ‘A Poet I am Neither Born Nor Bred’ (Poems and Phancies) she was content to pose as a modest gatherer of flowers in her poet-husband’s garden.41

It was only with the advent of romanticism that originality, itself reinterpreted as a break with tradition and not as the critical/masterful use of tradition, became the most important criterion of literary achievement and indeed the unmistakable sign of genius. Because originality itself was elusive and indefinable, plagiarism acquired far greater importance as the supremely undesirable illuminating the ultimately unattainable.

It has been plausibly suggested that the romantic ideology of authorship is ‘less a nineteenth-century actuality than a twentieth-century construct designed for polemical and anti-Romantic purposes’.42 The fantasy of solitary authorship failed to persuade most of the authors now labelled as romantic: some, like Shelley, Byron and Keats explicitly rejected it in the name of classical values, while others, like Goethe, came to parody their own romantic excesses in their later writing (see Chapter 6). All failed to live up to it to some extent, most spectacularly and perhaps purposefully Coleridge in his extensive plagiarisms. Even its staunchest defenders abandoned it on occasion: William Wordsworth in defending Coleridge’s thefts on the classical grounds that ‘he gave to Schiller 50 times more than he took’ and in admitting to Henry Crabb Robinson that ‘We are all in spite of ourselves a parcel of thieves’.43

The romantics, like the neo-classicists, oscillated between the fantasy of self-creation and the desire to create great art by relying on the rich literary tradition, the texts of their contemporaries, and on the collaboration of fellow-artists. Some of the best poems in the Lyrical Ballads are least original in the romantic sense of the term: ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ is clearly reminiscent of previous ballads, while ‘Lines Written A Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey’ has been criticized by Christopher Ricks for the reluctant acknowledgement of its debt to Edward Young’s ‘Night-Thoughts’.44 The ideal of solitary authorship is paradoxically denied even to the seminal texts of this tradition, not only the Lyrical Ballads, but also the Conjectures on Original Composition, penned as a letter to the novelist Samuel Richardson and indebted to his collaboration.45 Even Coleridge’s definition of the work of art as an organic, autonomous whole seems to contradict its apparent meaning, being plagiarized from A.W. Schlegel (see Chapter 4).

My references throughout this book to a romantic and a counter-romantic or neo-classical tradition emphasize the fact that it was during the romantic period and in the writings of a few romantic poets and theorists that the fantasy of solitary authorship, dimly present from the beginning of written literature, acquired its most seductive form. The romantic presentation of the work of art as the expression or flowering of the artist’s personality captivated the public imagination and replaced the lesser evils of short-sighted criticism, bound to classical rules and conventions, by the crudity of biographical – and indeed indulgently autobiographical – readings, a trend greatly strengthened by the emergence of psychoanalysis in the late nineteenth century.

Although the best of psychoanalytical and author-oriented criticism may be said to approach the ideal posited by Oscar Wilde for independent criticism, consisting of scarcely plausible fictions which take literary texts as a mere starting point, much of it is self-indulgent writing, either relying on the author-function to restrict the meaning of the text, as Roland Barthes noted,46 or else complaining of the inability to do so and censuring the artist for insincerity, artificiality and lack of spontaneity – in the view of Baudelaire, for the unwillingness to mirror the reader’s own feelings and ideas.47

Most regrettably, the romantic concept of absolute originality, absolute ownership of artistic forms, provided an emotionally powerful – if deeply flawed – basis for the legislation that has come to privilege individual creators and copyright holders masquerading as authors over communities of readers and solvent estates over new creators. Paul K. Saint-Amour remarks that Thomas Noon Talfourd’s Copyright Bill (1837) deliberately echoed Wordsworth’s critical theory in its plea for copyright extension and that William Wordsworth as well as Robert Southey were active participants in the copyright debates – debates which must have provided a delightfully objective reflection of their individual fantasies of authorship.48 In her incisive chapter ‘Wearing the Parisian Hat: Constructing the International Author’, Eva Wirtén Hemmungs has shown that the French national genius and perhaps most widely-acknowledged representative of the romantic movement, Victor Hugo, played a major role in the debates that led to the European agreement on the copyright of literary and artistic works, as to the consolidation of the French notion of the author’s moral rights – rights that are deemed to be perpetual, like the work of the romantic artists.

In discussing the counter-romantic movement from Edgar Allan Poe to Peter Ackroyd, which included Wilde among its flamboyant practitioners and theorists, it is not implied that these writers failed to appreciate the aesthetic suggestiveness or indeed the sensationalism of romantic theory, but rather that they have sought to resist its crude application and often disastrous effects upon literary criticism, copyright legislation and litigation and ultimately upon creativity itself. They objected to the shift of critical attention from the text to the author and from aesthetics to ethics, and to the devaluation of tradition, knowledge and craft. Recognizing the centrality of plagiarism as originality’s dark double, the counter-romantics adopted it as a provocative banner for what was essentially a return to the classical principles of text production and reception. For them as for the romantic theorists of authorship, plagiarism designated both the previously legitimate imitations and allusions and the covert, sometimes verbatim, annexation of other people’s texts. They preached and practiced both, regarding them as useful correctives to the expectations of originality, sincerity and spontaneity of a romantically-biased public and as a reassertion of the authors’ right to use all that is valuable in extant literature.

BEYOND PSYCHOLOGICAL SPECULATION: THE NEO-CLASSICAL, PLAGIARIZING MOVEMENT. WILDE’S THEORY AND PRACTICE OF PLAGIARISM IN THE CHATTERTON LECTURE

The question of whether plagiarism, as practiced by the counter-romantics, may be distinguished from merely opportunistic or ‘pathological’ plagiarism, can be answered in the affirmative. First, many of the counter-romantics penned explicit apologies of plagiarism and of artistic deception. Individual examples have long been dismissed either as mere jokes or as rationalizations of personal flaws, but in the light of the accumulating evidence, this seems extremely unlikely. It is scarcely conceivable that Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Baudelaire, Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, Andrew Lang, Anatole France, James Joyce and T.S. Eliot should all have suffered from pathological symptoms which had the same outcome of determining them to plagiarize and to write persuasively in defence of plagiarism, or that all these influential authors were simultaneously afflicted with a sterility of the imagination.

Secondly, the meaningfulness of plagiarism as deployed by the counter-romantics may be differentiated from the practice of their contemporaries. Many of their plagiarisms were clearly designed to be discovered by some readers, for whom various clues were provided, while simultaneously deceiving the Philistine. This intertextual use, halfway between classical imitation and plagiarism, is a decadent innovation leading to the creation of double texts. The works in which the most innovative ideas are inextricably woven with other people’s texts, changed, in conformity with classical economy principles, only as much as was necessary to fit the author’s purpose, are an implicit rejection of the romantic doctrine supplementing the explicit refusal in the critical works, yet the possibility that plagiarism, rather than a pathological tendency, was a shared strategy of the counter-romantic authors, has scarcely been acknowledged.

Wilde’s awareness of this transgressive tradition emerges in the notes for his Chatterton lecture of 1886.49 The manuscript formulates the classical commonplace that all of literature is plagiarized. This is exemplified by Wilde with reference to the romantic poets, transforming, as Saint-Amour has noted, ‘the English Romantic tradition from a patrilineage into a litany of theft: Scott stole from Coleridge, who stole from Chatterton; their thefts, in turn, begot Keats and Tennyson and Morris’.50 Wilde’s examples are scrupulously and ironically correct, since Walter Scott’s imitation of the meter of ‘Christabel’ was regarded as ‘plagiarism’ by Dorothy and William Wordsworth, albeit of the ‘unconscious’ variety, and the other parallels discussed by Wilde in his lecture would have been treated in that manner by the romantics.51

His argument is that the romantics themselves are classicists at heart, insofar as they engage in artistic acts of deception. The interpretation culminates with the presentation of Thomas Chatterton, the archetypal romantic hero, as a self-effacing artist and thus implicitly a classicist. The difference between the romantics and the counter-romantics or the neoclassicists consists only in the image they choose to project, i.e. their intentions, rather than in their actual practice, since all artistic works depend for their achievement on the art of lying. The guilt-ridden, ambivalent forgeries and plagiarisms perpetrated by the romantics are implicitly compared with the perfectly self-conscious plagiarism of the counter-romantic authors, since underlying the litany of romantic thefts, there is a different genealogy which might be described thus:

Pater stole from Baudelaire who stole from Poe who stole from Coleridge; and their thefts begot Wilde.

This very technique of concealment had been learnt by Wilde from Pater. In his unfinished novel Gaston de Latour, Pater had paid tribute to Baudelaire under the guise of the Renaissance poet Pierre de Ronsard in a manner which, as Patricia Clements has demonstrated in her wonderfully illuminating Baudelaire and the English Tradition, was meant to be deciphered by the elect and to remain opaque to the Philistine majority. Wilde was certainly aware of Pater’s knowledge of Baudelaire, which scholars were unable to prove until the 1960s, and he would show this awareness, in ‘The English Renaissance of Art’ lecture, in Intentions and in Dorian Gray, by plagiarizing the same passages from Baudelaire which Pater had already rewritten.52 It is certain that he would have discovered at least some of Baudelaire’s plagiarisms from Poe, in the ‘Théophile Gautier’ essay, for instance, which inspired some of his own critical theory, just as he would have noted the echoes of Poe and other French and English authors in Baudelaire’s poetry (see Chapter 2). As for the plagiarisms of Poe and Coleridge, they were common knowledge at the time. Wilde recognized the pervasiveness of plagiarism and its subversive potential as a means of undermining the authority of romantically-biased criticism.

Allegiance to the classical camp is marked by the structure of his lecture, a visible collage of his own ideas with sentences clipped from biographies of Chatterton by Daniel Wilson (1869) and David Masson (1874), modified only as far as necessary to create the overall effect of modern, Wildean style. It is a perfect example of the double work of art: presumably received by most of the audience as a homogenous artefact, expressing the romantic enthusiasm of the speaker-author, it appeared to the few, i.e. the scholars who consulted the manuscript, still buried in the archives, as an elaborate collage. It was thus an implicit and powerful refutation of the romantic expectations of originality and individuality. Nor was such implicit collage unprecedented: Baudelaire’s elegy ‘Le guignon’ as well as his critical essays, Pater’s The Renaissance, Poe’s poetic manifesto titled ‘Letter to B–’, had all used patch-writing and implicit collage techniques (see Chapter 2).

Lawrence Danson was dismayed by the lecture, regarding it as ‘unimaginative and earnest’.53 Merlin Holland, tentatively suggesting a political interpretation for its method of composition, nevertheless confessed himself troubled by Wilde’s literal destruction of the previous biographies in the creation of his cut-and-paste lecture. The most illuminating interpretation to date is Paul Saint-Amour’s article, published as late as the year 2000. The following chapter considers the literary context within which Wilde’s transgressions become meaningful: the plagiarizing theory and practice of his immediate predecessors.

NOTES

1. Father Leonardo Sapienza, Provocations. Aphorisms for an Anti-Conformist Christianity (Rome: Rogate, 2007).

2. Arthur Ransome, Oscar Wilde: A Critical Study (London: Secker, 1912), p.84.

3. Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony, 2nd edn trans. Angus Davidson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954), p.298.

4. See William Tydeman and Steven Price’s Salome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) for the performance history of the play and of the Strauss opera it inspired, and Katharine Worth’s The Irish Drama of Europe from Yeats to Beckett (London: Athlone Press, 1978) for the European context and significance of Wilde’s symbolist drama. The history of the reception of the other Wildean texts mentioned here is discussed in subsequent chapters.

5. Josephine Guy and Ian Small, Oscar Wilde’s Profession: Writing and the Culture Industry in the Late Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p.272. 6. Ibid., p.280.

7. Oscar Wilde, ‘The Critic As Artist’, in The Soul of Man Under Socialism and Selected Critical Prose, ed. Linda Dowling (London: Penguin, 2001), I, p.213.

8. MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers, ed. Joseph Gibaldi (New York: Modern Language Association, 2003), p.66.

9. Ibid., p.67.

10. Martial, A Commentary on Book I of the Epigrams, trans. Peter Howell (London: Athlone, 1980), ep.52.

11. Ibid., ep. 66.

12. Ibid., ep. 38.

13. Ibid., ep. 53, 72.

14. Voltaire, ‘Plagiat’. Dictionnaire philosophique, ed. Louis Moland (Paris: Garnier, 1878–79).

15. ‘Philip Massinger’, in T.S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism. 1920 (London: Methuen, 1934), p.125.

16. Seneca, LIV, ‘On Gathering Ideas’, in Moral Epistles, Vol.2, trans. Richard M. Gummere (London: Heinemann; New York: Putnam, 1920), p.281.

17. ‘Plagiarism’, The Concise Oxford Companion to the English Language, ed. Tom McArthur (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).

18. In literature, the winner of the Goncourt Prize Calixthe Beyalla was found guilty of copyright infringement on account of the verbatim copying in her novel, Le Petit Prince de Belleville (1992) from Howard Buten’s When I Was Five, I Killed Myself (1981) (Hélène Maurel-Indart, Le plagiat. http://www.leplagiat.net.). D.M. Thomas was criticized by some readers for his verbatim incorporation of material in The White Hotel from A. Anatoli’s Babi Yar (see Chap.7). Jacob Epstein was accused of plagiarism on account of the verbatim copying in his debut novel Wild Oats (1979) from Martin Amis’s The Rachel Papers (1973) (Thomas Mallon, Stolen Words: Forays into the Origins and Ravages of Plagiarism (New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1989, pp.105 ff). In politics, the publication by the UK government of the war-justifying dossier on ‘Iraq – Its Infrastructure of Concealment, Detection and Intimidation’ (January 2003) and of the scholarly edition of Martin Luther King’s writings were rendered problematic by the discovery of extensive verbatim copying. On Martin Luther King, see Clayborne Carson, ‘Editing Martin Luther King, Jr: Political and Scholarly Issues’. In George Bornstein and Ralph G. Williams (eds), Palimpsest: Editorial Theory in the Humanities (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), pp.305–16. The Martin Luther King Jr. Papers Projects. Stanford University http://www.stanford.edu./group/king/.

On the Iraq dossier see Glen Rangwalla, ‘Intelligence: The British Dossier on Iraq’s Security Infrastructure’. Online posting 5 February 2003. Casi Discussion List Archive. http://www.casi.org.uk/discuss. index.html.

In academia, the plagiarism scandals involving historians Doris Kearns Goodwin (Doris Kearns Goodwin, ‘How I Caused That Story’. Time Online Edition, 27 January 2002. http://www.time.com/) and Stephen Ambrose (Fred Barnes, ‘Stephen Ambrose, Copycat’. The Daily Standard, 14 January 2002. Online version 1 April 2002. htttp://www.weeklystandard.com/) hinged on verbatim copying, while in the corporate world, William Swanson, the chief executive of Raytheon, was sanctioned by the board of directors once it emerged that his book The Unwritten Laws of Management (2006), distributed to company employees, was found to copy, often verbatim, W.J. King’s The Unwritten Laws of Engineering (1944).

By contrast, the accusations made by John Frow (who nevertheless refrained from using the word plagiarism) against Graham Swift were dismissed by most readers, on account of the looseness and explicitness of the imitations of William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying in Last Orders (London: Picador, 1996) (Stina Teilmann, ‘Proprietærer og Plagiarister. En indføring i nyere litteraturtyveri’. Kritik, 34, 150 (2001), pp.4–12). The accusations against Yann Martel, based on a similarity of plot rather than of treatment and phrasing were dismissed once his Life of Pi (2002) was compared to the alleged source, Moacyr Scliar’s Max and the Cats (1981; first English trans. 1990) (Yann Martel, ‘How I Wrote Life of Pi’. http://www.powells.com/fromthe author/martel.html).

19. John Pinkerton [Robert Heron], Letter XLI in Letters Of Literature (1785), quoted in Richard Terry, ‘“In pleasing memory of all he stole”: Plagiarism and Literary Detraction, 1747–1785’. In Paulina Kewes (ed.), Plagiarism in Early Modern England (London: Macmillan, 2003), pp.197–8.

20. For a detailed account of the use of the imperial conquest metaphor in English literary criticism, see Marilyn Randall’s ‘Imperial Plagiarism’ chapter in Pragmatic Plagiarism: Authorship, Profit and Power (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001). The rescue and resurrection metaphors are employed, for example, in Macrobius’s Saturnalia in reference to Virgil’s borrowings from obscure poets (Macrobius, Saturnalia, trans. and ed. by Percival Vaughan Davis [New York: Columbia University Press, 1969], Bk. 6); by the Romantic poet and critic Walter Savage Landor and by Ralph Waldo Emerson in defence of Shakespeare (Landor ‘Quotation and Originality’, quoted in Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays and Lectures [New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1983]); and by the critic and poet John Addington Symonds in defence of the Elizabethan playwrights (Shakespeare’s Predecessors, p.31 see Appendix).

21. Seneca, LXXIX, ‘On the Rewards of Scientific Discovery’, in Moral Epistles, p.205.

22. Michel de Montaigne, II, 10, ‘Of Books’, in Essays (1595), trans. Charles Cotton and ed. William Carew Hazzlitt (1877). Project Gutenberg, ed. David Widger. http://www.gutenberg.org.

23. This bon mot is attributed to Molière, in defence against the accusations of having plagiarized Cyrano de Bergerac’s Le pedant joué in Les Fourberies de Scapin. According to one version of the anecdote, Molière was simply re-appropriating a scene which he had described to Cyrano prior to the completion of his own play and which the latter had stolen from him: ‘Je reprends mon bien où je le trouve’. Both Cyrano de Bergerac and Molière figure in Roland de Chaudenay, Dictionnaire des plagiaires (Paris: Perrin, 1990).

24. Joost Smiers, Arts Under Pressure: Promoting Cultural Diversity In The Age of Globalisation (London: Zed, 2003), p.70.

25. Marilyn Randall, ‘Appropriate(d) Discourse: Plagiarism and Decolonisation’. New Literary History, 22, 3 ‘Undermining Subjects’ (Summer 1991), p.535.

26. Randall, Pragmatic Plagiarism, pp.18–19.

27. Christian Vandendorpe, ‘Plagiat’. In Jean Marie Grassin (ed.), Dictionnaire International des Termes Littéraires (PPF Théorie et Terminologie Littéraire University of Limoges), http://www.ditl.info/.

28. Laura J. Rosenthal, Playwrights and Plagiarists in Early Modern England: Gender, Authorship, Literary Property (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996).

29. Rebecca Moore Howard, ‘Sexuality, Textuality: The Cultural Work of Plagiarism’. College English, 62, 4 (March 2000), pp.473–91.

30. Kenneth K. Ruthven, Faking Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p.144.

31. Oscar Wilde, ‘Olivia at the Lyceum’, in Selected Journalism, edited by Anya Clayworth (Oxford: Oxford University Press: Oxford’s World Classics, 2004), p.54. 32. Joshua Reynolds, Discourse VI. The Royal Academy, 10 December 1774, in The Complete Works (London: 1824), vol.1, pp.124–5.

33. Wilde, Selected Journalism, edited by Anya Clayworth, p.xxvi.

34. Regenia Gagnier, Idylls of the Market Place: Oscar Wilde and the Victorian Public (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1986), pp.41ff.

35. Sos Eltis, Revising Wilde: Society and Subversion in the Plays of Oscar Wilde (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), pp.61ff.

36. Declan Kiberd, Irish Classics, 2000 (London: Granta, 2001), pp.326ff.

37. Deirdre Toomey, ‘The Story Teller at Fault: Oscar Wilde and Irish Orality’, in Jerusha McCormack (ed.), Wilde the Irishman (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), pp.24–36.

38. Ian Small, Conditions for Criticism: Authority, Knowledge, and Literature in the Late Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), pp.116ff.

39. The MLA Handbook selects the stigmatization of a female historian as evidence that plagiarism is punished in academia: For example, a well-known historian charged with plagiarism was asked to resign from prominent public positions even though she admitted responsibility for the theft, compensated the author whose work she took, and announced her intention to issue a corrected edition of her book.(p.67) The decision not to name the ‘well-known historian’ effectively denies the reader’s right to reach his/her own verdict on the case. If this does refer to Doris Kearns Goodwin, it is worth noting that while she did apologize and offer to issue an amended version of her book, she has never admitted plagiarism, pleading a confusion in the note-books between paraphrased and quoted passages (Goodwin, ‘How I Caused That Story’). It is significant that a female historian was singled out, although the same year yielded the equally publicized scandal of historian Stephen Ambrose’s plagiarism (Barnes, ‘Stephen Ambrose, Copycat’).

40. Rosenthal, Playwrights and Plagiarists in Early Modern England, pp.208–11.

41. Ibid., pp.60; 71.

42. Ruthven, Faking Literature, p.91.

43. William Wordsworth, 10 March 1840, Letter 240, p.402 and December 1838, Letter 220, p.374 in Correspondence of Henry Crabb Robinson, vol. 1, edited by Edith J. Morley (Oxford: 1927), quoted in David McCracken, ‘Wordsworth on Human Wishes and Poetic Borrowing’. Modern Philology, 79, 4 (May 1982), pp.393–5.

44. Christopher Ricks, Allusion to the Poets (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p.110.

45. The collaborative nature of Young’s Conjectures has been analyzed by Joel Weinsheimer, ‘Conjectures on Unoriginal Composition’. The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, 22, 1 (Winter, 1981), pp.58–73. Collaborative practices in Romantic literature generally have been illuminatingly discussed by Jack Stillinger, Multiple Authorship and the Myth of Solitary Genius (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991) and Ruthven, Faking Literature.

46. Roland Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’. Image Music Text, trans. Stephen Heath (London: Fontana, 1977), p.147.

47. Charles Baudelaire, ‘Théophile Gautier’, iv, in Oeuvres complètes, ed. Marcel A. Ruff (Paris: Seuil, 1968), p.465. Baudelaire, Baudelaire As A Literary Critic, trans. Lois Boe Hyslop and Francis E. Hyslop, Jr. (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania University Press, 1964), p.169.

48. Paul K. Saint-Amour, Copywrights: Intellectual Property and the Literary Imagination (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), Chap.1.

49. [Essay on Chatterton] [1886] Ms. Wilde W6721M3E78, William Andrews Clarke Memorial Library UCLA. The information on the Chatterton manuscript is derived from Paul K. Saint-Amour, ‘Oscar Wilde: Orality, Literary Property and Crimes of Writing’. Nineteenth-Century Literature, 55, 1 (June 2000), pp.59–91.

50. Saint-Amour, ‘Oscar Wilde’, p.77.

51. Dorothy Wordsworth, ‘To Lady Beaumont’, 27 October 1805, letter 282 in The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, vol. 3, The Later Years 1821–1828, ed. Alan G. Hill (Oxford: 1978), p.633, quoted in McCracken, ‘Wordsworth on Human Wishes and Poetic Borrowing’, p.394.

52. ‘Wilde’, in Patricia Clements, Baudelaire and the English Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985).

53. Lawrence Danson, Wilde’s Intentions: The Artist in His Criticism (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), p.90.

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