Date: 2008-01-23 09:42 Subject: Conversation with the genre -- plagiarism, allusion, and intertextuality Security: Public Tags: allusion, essay, intertextuality, plagiarism, writing

Conversation with the genre -- plagiarism, allusion, and intertextuality


An extensive discussion about plagiarism has been going on in some of the romance blogs over the last few weeks. One thread in the discussion has been about the difference between allusion and plagiarism. Why is one acceptable and the other not, and what is the difference between them? After all, both involve the use of someone else's work, even to the extent of word-for-word copying.

For me, the difference between the two is very simple in theory, even if in practice it's not always possible for a reader to be certain what an author had in mind. If your intent as an author is that your audience should recognise the work you're quoting, or at the very least realise that it's intended as a reference to someone else's work, you're making an allusion. If you are hoping that they won't notice that it's not your own words, that's plagiarism. For this is the key part of what plagiarism is -- that you are taking the credit for work that was in fact done by someone else.

Writers use allusion because they don't write in a vacuum. They are embedded in a culture, and a history. They can achieve interesting effects by evoking the reader's memories of other things within that culture and history. Thus, the many, many references to Shakespeare. At some level this becomes intertextuality -- work that relies on reader familiarity with other works. It becomes a conversation with those works, and about those works. Genres develop ongoing conversations within themselves, one writer responding to what another has written, addressing the questions raised and the problems they see within earlier work. All this within what to the outside looks like just another novel, independent of other work.

I've played the intertextuality game. One of my short stories is very much an exercise of intertextuality, playing with the interface between science fiction, fantasy and mythology, in the expectation that my readers would play along. A page or two in, I used the line "Dark they were, and golden-eyed". It's a beautiful piece of prose, and it's not mine. I didn't use it because I liked the sound of it and wanted my readers to think I'd come up with something that good. I used it because I expected my intended audience to recognise it. It's the title of one of Ray Bradbury's short stories set on Mars, and I used it as a way of indicating to my readers that my protagonist is seeing the alien being in front of him in science fiction terms -- that he thinks at first that this is another sf fan in costume as an sf character, and then sees him as a visitor from another planet. Not necessarily Mars, but definitely a visitor from Out There. Even if a reader doesn't recognise the quote, it's clear from context that Jack is thinking of a quote from the sf genre (or at least, I hope it is).

Within a few paragraphs, Jack realises how wrong he is. And I expect the reader to recognise it along with Jack, before Jack even puts it into words, because I'm drawing on an old mythology, and the very setting of the story has been a hint from the first page.

There's another quote towards the end of the story. "And I awoke and found me here on the cold hillside." The original source is explicitly referenced in the story, with a comment about Keats and tuberculosis, but I also expected my intended audience to recognise an allusion to one of James Tiptree Jr's short stories, which itself referred to "La Belle Dame Sans Merci".

And need I explain to the connoisseur of fairy tales why my protagonist is called Jack? That wasn't a conscious choice as I was writing it, but it was a conscious choice to leave it when I realised.

This is the sort of thing that the Teach Me Tonight discussion is referring to with the idea that intertextuality is an on-going conversation. I have used these things in part as a way of putting my story in context as one small thread in a great tapestry of story-telling. It's a pretty enough colour and sheen when you see it just as a thread, but it means more when you see it as the audience I intended it for would see it; as my contribution to speculative fiction's ongoing conversation with itself.

This cuts two ways, of course. Even if I'm deliberately speaking to an audience where I can assume that most people will understand the reference I'm making, I can't assume that every reader will. And thus I must make sure that understanding the reference isn't essential to understanding the story as a whole. The reader who sees only the story in isolation may get less out of it than the reader who sees it as part of a conversation, but they must still be able to get something worthwhile out of it, or I have cheated them of the time invested in reading it. Which means I can't point at it and say, "Look, it doesn't even work if you don't get the in-joke" as proof that I intended allusion, not plagiarism.

If you're still confused by why allusion does not need to be attributed, while verbatim quoting of research materials does, the answer is that deliberate allusion carries within it an implicit attribution by its very nature. That expectation that the reader will recognise the reference and enjoy the recognition, that is an attribution in itself. So where do we draw the line? What is reasonably understood as allusion, as another part of the conversation of a genre, and what is theft of someone else's work? I don't think it's possible to draw a clear line, though we may be able to say which side of the line a text is more likely to fall. One problem is simply that what is a clear allusion to one audience may not be to another. I wrote my story as a piece of speculative fiction. It's rooted in the sf sub-culture, and there are sub-culture references beyond those quotes. I think it's reasonable for me to expect that my intended audience for the piece would understand it as intertextuality. But if I put it before the readership I've developed from my cross-genre novels that are published by a romance house, can I then expect all of that readership to understand the references, to hear the other voices in the unspoken conversation? Perhaps not. The readers who are familiar with sf as a genre, yes, but not the readers who came to cross-genre from the romance side.

As I said earlier, it's not always possible for a reader looking at the text from outside to be sure what was in an author's mind. But as readers, we can make a reasonable judgement from context. A clumsy rephrasing of lines from the poem "Hiawatha" may be an allusion, an attempt to create a particular effect by deliberately invoking the images a reader associates with that poem. Or it may be the callous theft of someone else's work to save the writer the trouble of writing a beautiful-sounding description, in the belief that nobody will notice, or care if they do notice. In the specific example I'm thinking of, it's just not possible to tell from that passage alone which was intended. Had it been only that passage, I would have assumed allusion. But when it's part of an extended pattern of unacknowledged use of the words of others, not just a phrase here and there but whole paragraphs and passages lifted word for word from works the audience couldn't be expected to be familiar with -- my assumption is that this too was not allusion, but plagiarism.

Perhaps the simplest test of all, if you're a writer wondering whether what you want to do is on the wrong side of the line: ask yourself how you would feel about someone doing to your work what you're proposing to do to someone else's. And be honest with your answer.


My thanks to the people who looked over the draft of this post and made helpful comments.