Reading “The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism” is a bit disorienting: Lethem seems to jump around quite a bit, and his prose isn’t always smooth. Sometimes the setup—that nearly every sentence is cribbed directly from another source—works against him, so that bits of text don’t cohere as they ought. Despite these limitations, however, the essay makes a powerful argument about the nature of art, culture, and the interaction between the two. Specifically, Lethem argues that all art—but literature in particular—should be able to use all aspects of culture in its creation, including both predecessor works and elements of pop culture.

A counterargument must immediately be addressed: that text doesn’t generally have this problem. There are instances where legitimate fair use in text form has been crushed by the long arm of the content industry. Lethem cites two such examples, Alice Randall’s The Wind Done Gone and Holly Crawford’s Attached to the Mouse: Disney and Contemporary Art. Both of these books survived infringement lawsuits and are still in print; even so, other abuses are available to us (for example, why haven’t Gone with the Wind and Mickey Mouse entered the public domain yet?). But how often, realistically, does Coca-Cola or Johnson & Johnson sue for a reference in a novel to one of their products (eg, “He spilled his Coke all over Band-Aid”)? And isn’t textual collage now an accepted practice in poetry and prose? Lawrence Lessig acknowledges as much when he describes one of his college friends, an English major, who created collage essays. While the essays always followed ethical guidelines about citation, Lessig’s friend did not feel it necessary or appropriate to ask permission of his sources.

Had Ben written the estate of Ernest Hemingway to ask for permission to quote For Whom the Bell Tolls in his college essays, lawyers at the estate would have been annoyed more than anything else. What weirdo, they would have wondered, thinks you need permission to quote in an essay? (52).*

There is a similar lattitude given to fiction, especially where satire is involved. Text collage continues, albeit not at the pace that some of us would desire.

But Lethem’s essay is more about attitudes toward text than toward legal issues. Lessig and others do the legal arguments much better than him, and I think he recognized, in the composition of “Ecstasy,” that he had to advance the argument in some significant way. His contribution is the seemingly simplistic belief that appropriation, broadly construed to include works of literature and signifiers of pop culture, is essential not only to making relevant art but to making good art. Or, rather more accurately, good art can be made from collage. The thesis statement for the essay, if there is one, must be the following:

Whatever charge of tastelessness or trademark violation may be attached to the artistic appropriation of the media environment in which we swim, the alternative—to flinch, or tiptoe away into some ivory tower of irrelevance—is far worse. We’re surrounded by signs; our imperative is to ignore none of them. (63)

The word “imperative” opens Lethem up to a charge of hipster elitism—only collage art captures the beauty of the human soul, or something like that. I don’t read his thesis that way, though; I read him as dreadfully concerned that the argument for original art will leave us unequipped to understand the world we live in. He later clarifies his position,

Honoring the commons is not a matter of moral exhortation. It is a practical necessity. We in Western society are going through a period of intensifying belief in private ownership, to the deteriment of the public good. (67)

“Private ownership,” as Lethem makes clear, includes an increasingly unreasonable belief in intellectual property as equivalent to real-world property. He quotes, for the general amusement of his readers, Jack Valenti’s infamous yelp of terror, “I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston Strangler is to the woman home alone” (64). Such a claim could only be based on the absurd notion that music and film piracy is equivalent to stealing a handbag—the stated position of the MPAA, which Lethem describes as “ethically bankrupt” (64). Handbags, like DVDs but not like the film itself, disappear from the owner when taken. If we go to the level of appropriation, further down the scale from piracy, we can emphatically state that “the appropriation of an article of ‘intellectual property’ leaves the original untouched” (64). If I photocopied all of Lethem’s novels and emailed them to my two million best friends, that would be possibly lead to fewer physical copies being sold; it would be wrong, but it wouldn’t diminish the presence of the artistic work in the world. And if I quote Lethem extensively but not completely in this blog post, I take even less from him. The words, the complete essay and all the works that he quotes, exist outside of my written interpretation.

This simple fact leads us first back to Lethem’s concern over private ownership and finally to his enshrinement of appropriation as essential to understanding our world. If we perceive all texts and trademarked pop culture elements as wholly owned by their copyright holders, then we are forced to come up with completely original ideas and stories that are divorced from the environment that birthed them. Lethem pushes this point further, arguing that it’s ridiculous when asserted and impossible when tried. He appropriates an anecdote from David Foster Wallace, whose professor exhorted the class to write fiction that avoids “any feature which serves to date it” because “serious fiction must be Timeless.” The class shot back that the professors own books feature electricity, cars, and modern English, and the “gray eminence” shot back that stories should not include “those explicit references that would date a story in the frivolous Now,” and amended himself further by stating that he meant the “trendy mass-popular-media” reference (62). The extent to which this professor was talked down from his lofty, initial sentiment is instructive, and one wonders if his fiction ever mentions a Ford car or an Edison lightbulb. Even if he avoided such “trendy mass-popular-media” references, it’s doubtful that he could if he were born later, in the post-boomer era. These generations, including mine,*** were “born backward into an incoherent realm of texts, products, and images, the commercial and cultural environment with which we’ve blotted out our natural world” (63). There were branded products before 1960, but people weren’t awash in them; now, the brands we choose say as much about our selves as anything else (if I say that my favorite brands are Apple, Google, and WeightWatchers, then you know practically everything about me). If I am to understand my world and help others understand it through artistic expression, I’d better not be forced to pay a royalty fee every time these bits of my media language make an intrusion into my prose. Indeed, I have a responsibility to myself and to my readers—who face the same world that I do—to use language we all understand.

This sense of responsibility does not necessarily mean that we have to take an antagonistic position toward the culture we live in, even if we criticize many of its elements. Lethem asks,

[D]oes our appetite for creative vitality require the violence and exasperation of another avant-garde, with its wearisome killing-the-father imperatives, or might we be better off ratifying the ecstasy of influence—and deepening our willingness to understand the commonality and timelessness of the methods and motifs available to artists? (67)

When I reread this sentence last night, I found it so refreshing. I slogged through Kembrew McLeod’s Freedom of Expression®, and by the halfway point, I was sick of paragraphs in praise of Public Enemy, Negativland, and theatre of the absurd. Lethem’s lovely phrase, the ecstasy of influence, contains an imperative (there’s that word again) to participate in the cultural environment that produce collaged texts. That’s why Lethem incorporates comic books into his novel, The Fortress of Solitude. That’s also why Douglas Coupland and Dave Eggers and Chuck Klosterman have made careers out of both participating in and forming the zeitgeist. Down with Dada, Lethem suggests, and up with ecstasy.

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*It’s worth noting that had it been the estate of Martin Luther King, Jr. or James Joyce, the lawyers would have likely asked for payment.

**Lethem, ever the postmodern smartass, remarks in the “key” to the essay, “Now fill in the blank: Jack Valenti is to the public domain as _____ is to _____” (70).

***For the record, I consider myself part of Generation X, though one of its last members. Depending on who is doing the dating, I was either born in GenX’s last year or the first year of GenY. I have too much trouble relating to GenY, so I don’t claim them as my own.

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Lessig, Lawrence. Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy. New York: Penguin, 2008.

Lethem, Jonathan. “The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism.” Harpers 314.1881 (2007): 59-71.