Jean-Marie Blas De Robles - Where Tigers Are at Home

“True, my friend, true. But why do you go on about it? If you pick out that failure, it’s simply to provide grist for another mill: you want to prove that Father Kircher was a forger. That’s where you move into a fantasy world, in this relentless determination to show that his reputation is based on fraud. You quoted Ranke, I have another for you. Read Duby again: the historian, he says, is a dreamer forced—”

“Forced by the facts not to dream, despite his propensity to do so!”

“No, my friend: forced to dream in the face of the facts, to plaster over the gaps, to replace of his own accord the missing arm of a statue that only exists in his head. You’re dreaming up Kircher at least as much as he dreamed himself up, as much as we all dream ourselves up, each in his own way …”

“Perhaps,” Eléazard said, refilling their glasses in a state of agitation, “but when my imagination copies out the best pages of Nobili or Boym without quoting them, as he does in his China Monumentis , it is still downright plagiarism and it is not to his credit. What do you make of that? Surely you’re not going to justify this regular pillage?”

Dr. Euclides took a sip of cognac before replying. “His plagiarism is unworthy of him, I agree. My initial reaction is the same as yours, but I am aware that in that I am following contemporary convention … The crux of the problem is the creative act itself, the fact that one cannot conceive of it without having recourse to imitation.”

“But imitation is not, nor has it ever been simply copying a text, it —”

“Please, let me try to explain. Voltaire and Musset were extremely scathing about plagiarism — I seem to recall that you have a certain admiration for the first of those, haven’t you?”

“That is true,” Eléazard confessed, without having the least idea where his old friend’s argument was leading.

“Voltaire gave out complete poems by Maynard as his own; as for Musset, you remember his ‘I loathe plagiarism as much as I loathe death; my glass is not big, but I drink out of my own glass’? He borrowed scenes from Carmontelle! Whole scenes, apart from the odd comma! Compare his Le Distrait with Musset’s On ne saurait penser à tout and you’ll see what I mean. You want more examples? Take Aretino: the whole of his History of the Goths is translated from Procopius, using a manuscript of which he thought he owned the only copy … Machiavelli? The same scenario with his Life of Castruccio Castracani where he puts the Apothegms of Plutarch in the mouth of his hero … Ignatius Loyola? Have a look at Cisneros’s Spiritual Exercises and you’ll be surprised …”

“Ignatius Loyola!” Eléazard exclaimed.

“Not word for word, but very much ‘inspired by,’ which wouldn’t have been so bad if he’d acknowledged his debt, as La Fontaine did with Aesop, for example.”

“In that last case it’s a reworking. And I’m sure you’ll agree that La Fontaine is somewhat superior to the original as far as the form is concerned.”

“Got you there!” Euclides said, wagging his finger at him with a mischievous look. “It’s exactly the same whether you’re plagiarizing someone’s words or ideas. The whole history of art, and even of knowledge, consists of this assimilation, taken to greater or lesser lengths, of what others have tried out before us. No one has been able to avoid it since the beginning of time. It’s not worth commenting on, except to say that our imagination is limited, which we’ve always known, and that books are only made with other books. Pictures with other pictures. We’ve been going round and round in circles since the very beginning, round the same pot, the same mess tin.”

“I’m not that sure … But anyway, what’s to stop some people from putting quotation marks when they use other people’s work? Apart from the desire for fame, the aspiration to pass for something they aren’t?”

“Just think about it a bit. When Virgil uses a line from Quintus Ennius as if it were one of his own, and he did it several times, whether you like it or not … No, sorry, it’s not going to work with that example. Let’s take that sentence from Ranke you quoted just now instead: History is what really happened . You had the good grace to make a pause and to indicate by your intonation that it wasn’t something of your own. Right. Now I could interpret your tone because we’ve been friends for years, but someone else could have assumed that you had just produced that definition yourself. And yet you don’t consider yourself a plagiarist.”

“That’s unfair, I knew that you were familiar with it!”

“Agreed, but that’s not the point. How often do we go down that slippery slope? My own quotation from Duby, for example. I’ve never read the book it’s taken from. I don’t even know if I’ve seen it quoted somewhere or just heard it said as coming from him. Perhaps he never even wrote it; that often happens with the kind of maxim that’s on everybody’s lips without anyone bothering to check the source. A rumor, when it comes down to it, nothing but a rumor. Just think, no conversation would be possible at all if we had to justify every one of our words. History is what really happened … Can you be sure no one wrote or spoke that banal little formulation before Ranke? To be able to use a single sentence without quotes, our memory would have to contain everything that’s been said since back in the mists of time! The search for whoever originally coined a phrase would be infinite, it would simply result in silence. To get back to Kircher: why should one not have one’s doubts about the authors he plagiarizes as well? Who can guarantee that Mersenne himself didn’t rob some student of his discoveries? Where do the quotation marks stop? If I write: History is what really disappeared, have I the right to claim it as my own property, or should I write: History is what really disappeared, with a footnote to render unto Ranke that which is Ranke’s? We might as well put every word in the dictionary in quotes, every one of their possible combinations, for even when I produce them, I can’t be certain that they aren’t already there in billions of books I’ll never read. You see what I’m getting at, Eléazard: the important thing is the universal gray matter, not the individuals who, by chance or consciously, become owners of it.”

“Well, well,” said Eléazard in astonishment, “for someone who doesn’t feel in form … You must admit you’re going a bit far. I can’t believe you attach so little importance to literary or artistic property.”

“There’s the rub, my friend. There was a time when neither books nor products of the mind in general brought in anything at all for their authors. Court proceedings against pirated editions only start with industrial mercantilism. You don’t find that strange?”

“But fame and glory, Doctor? The glory enjoyed by a Virgil or a Cervantes, by an Athanasius Kircher, ‘the man of a hundred arts,’ the ‘genius’ revered by everyone?”

“ ‘Rome that I hate, and will ever so remain, Rome for whose sake my lover thou hast slain!’ Perhaps you know who wrote that?”

“Corneille, of course,” Eléazard replied, feeling such an elementary question was almost an insult.

“No he didn’t, my friend, he didn’t. It was Jean Mairet, a poor fellow who ought to have been grateful to Corneille for having plagiarized him; it’s only thanks to this that he’s still mentioned in a few learned commentaries. Even if he had taken action against the thief, it would have done nothing to change the unfortunate truth: his tragedy was poor, Corneille’s a success. Two or three borrowings are not enough to bring glory; it’s clear that certain garments are far too large for the scribblers who fashion them. Let’s be serious, shall we? Plagiarism is necessary! And even that simple assertion isn’t by me, it’s from Lautréamont: we follow an author’s words closely, we use his expressions, we delete a mistaken idea and replace it with a sound one … Which he put into practice himself by shamelessly correcting the maxims of Pascal or Vauvenargues. Poetry should be made by all , he writes a bit further on. It’s not the words themselves that are important, it’s the things they modify around them, the things they set off in the mind that receives them. And the same for all the rest, Eléazard. Beethoven plagiarizes Mozart before becoming himself, as Mozart had done with Gluck, Gluck with Rameau, et cetera. Inspiration is just a nice word for imitation, which is itself just a variant of the word plagiarism. ‘Stealer of slaves’ as the Greek has it but also stealer of fire, a springboard to the stars.”