Mixing and matching, or outright plagiarism?

 

Another young novelist has been outed for plagiarism--but this time, she's not only copping to it, she's embracing it, telling reporters she took the other author's work and put it "into a completely different and unique context." Her name is Helene Hegemann. She's seventeen years old, and already a produced playwright, produced screenwriter, and bestselling novelist in Germany. The book in question is Axolotl Roadkill, and it was recently announced as one of the finalists for the $20,000 fiction prize at the Leipzig Book Fair.

The problem is, entire pages of it are lifted directly from the fiction and blog of another writer.

From The New York Times article:

The publication last month of her novel about a 16-year-old exploring Berlin’s drug and club scene after the death of her mother, called “Axolotl Roadkill,” was heralded far and wide in German newspapers and magazines as a tremendous debut, particularly for such a young author. The book shot to No. 5 this week on the magazine Spiegel’s hardcover best-seller list.

For the obviously gifted Ms. Hegemann, who already had a play (written and staged) and a movie (written, directed and released in theaters) to her credit, it was an early ascension to the ranks of artistic stardom. That is, until a blogger last week uncovered material in the novel taken from the less-well-known novel “Strobo,” by an author writing under the nom de plume Airen. In one case, an entire page was lifted with few changes...

Although Ms. Hegemann has apologized for not being more open about her sources, she has also defended herself as the representative of a different generation, one that freely mixes and matches from the whirring flood of information across new and old media, to create something new. “There’s no such thing as originality anyway, just authenticity,” said Ms. Hegemann in a statement released by her publisher after the scandal broke.

The Leipzig Book Fair seems to agree; they knew all about the plagiarism before they named her to the short list for the award. Again, from the Times:

“Obviously, it isn’t completely clean but, for me, it doesn’t change my appraisal of the text,” said Volker Weidermann, the jury member and a book critic for the Sunday edition of the newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine, a strong supporter. “I believe it’s part of the concept of the book.”

I love the idea of mixing and matching. I've written two novels based on Shakespeare plays, have a novel in the works about the early life of Jules Verne's Captain Nemo, and next year will publish a book that features just about every single children's lit character I could think of. (Treading the copyright line very carefully.) In that sense, I agree with Ms. Hegemann--like club DJs sampling centuries' worth of music, I think it is the particular province of my generation of writers to take what has come before and give it a new and funky spin.

But lifting entire passages from books and passing them off as your own? No. Plagiarism is taking another's words and passing them off as your own, and that's what this is. It isn't remixing, it's stealing. In later editions, she is apparently crediting the original author of those passages, but it doesn't change the fact that she tried to peddle it as her own to begin with. She's only contrite now that's she's been caught out.

That a major literary prize in Germany--and apparently thousands of book buyers--are legitimizing the theft is the most troublesome thing. Beyond whatever legal recourse the original author has at his or her disposal, the real punishment in most plagiarism cases is shame. The offending authors know very well they are lifting passages, and they are ashamed to get caught, and forever branded as plagiarists. If we lose that shame, if it becomes brazen and accepted, where will we be?