Jonathan Lethem’s essay “the ecstasy of influence,” which first appeared in Harper’s magazine in 2007, is now the title of his 2011 collection of essays published by Doubleday books.  Interestingly, the subtitle has changed from “a plagiarism” to “nonfictions, etc.”  Perhaps Lethem, a New York-based novelist and essayist who has published over ten books and is a frequent contributor to periodicals such as Harper’s, the New Yorker, and Rolling Stone, considers his eponymous essay to be the most derivative of the collection.  But the table of contents of the new collection places the essay, along with several others, in a section called “Plagiarisms,” implying that Lethem is using the term plagiarism to mean, in addition to the practice of taking others’ words or ideas without proper attribution, a specific genre of essay writing that commits plagiarism.  His decision to designate one set of essays as “plagiarisms,” however, would seem to undermine his argument in the eponymous essay:

Any text is woven entirely with citations, references, echoes, cultural languages, which cut across it through and through in a vast stereophony. The citations that go to make up a text are anonymous, untraceable, and yet already read; they are quotations without inverted commas. The kernel, the soul—let us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterances—is plagiarism. For substantially all ideas are secondhand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources, and daily used by the garnerer with a pride and satisfaction born of the superstition that he originated them; whereas there is not a rag of originality about them anywhere except the little discoloration they get from his mental and moral caliber and his temperament, and which is revealed in characteristics of phrasing.

If every text commits intentional or unintentional plagiarism, which seems to be the main point of his essay, it seems that every text could be classified as a plagiarism.  But in the traditional sense of the term, does Lethem really commit plagiarism in the essay?  Not really, because he acknowledges his sources and reveals the exact words he took from them in the key at the end of the essay.  Thus he is committing a temporal plagiarism—at the moment of reading, each passage appears to be plagiarized and only at the end of the essay does Lethem free himself from this charge.  But especially in the Internet age, people rarely read entire documents, so waiting until the end to reveal your sources is not an ethically sound practice.  Given its length and the erudition displayed, it is clear that this essay was not composed for online publication but rather for a monthly print magazine like Harper’s, whose audience is highly literate, predisposed to reading long-form texts, and would recognize many of his pop-cultural and literary references, allusions, and thefts.  The essay would make a great hypertext, with all the possible links and connections, but Harper’s has instead chosen to publish it online as a simple e-text with facsimile images that are available only to subscribers.  Given his argument that art is both a gift and a commodity, Lethem might consider this system a good compromise separating the intellectual “property” (the text, which is inevitably plagiarized and therefore should be public domain) from the digitized pages of the physical magazine (which is a commodity for sale).  On the other hand, these images, like the text, are endlessly reproducible and therefore not a commodity in the same sense that the physical magazine is.