On Dylan's 'Plagiarism'

As some of you may have heard, Bob Dylan has been charged with plagiarizing from a Japanese novelist. If you haven't, info can be found here and here.

I'm not sure how much to make of any of this, partly because the links are pretty tenuous (the phrases I've seen compared are not especially 'unique'), and because I have some doubt about whether or not Dylan was actualyl exposed to the works of the novelist in question, Junichi Saga. But even if the lyrics are 'lifted' in one form of another, I'm reminded of these words from a little-read article on Van Morrison, here talking about the song Real Real Gone:

The song, perhaps more than saying anything per se, functions as [a] textbook example of how Morrison uses allusions in his songs: sometimes they are clear, even quoted (as with the closing roll-call that begins with "Wilson Pickett said..."); others are at once obvious and sublime. Consider, for example, how lyrics from Leon Russell's A Song For You ("You're a friend of mine") and The Beatles' Help ("Don't you know I need your help") climb almost seamlessly into the text of the song, and without emphasis being placed on their original source. Even the song's title, from a John Lee Hooker song of the same name, is embroidered into the lyric in such a way as to be patently obvious to the careful listened but almost oblivious to the careless one. It is as if Van Morrison has stolen a brick from every house in the neighbourhood and built his own home from the profits.

This kind of lyrical thievery is not necessarily to be dismissed: T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land probably commits more thievery than any poem of the twentieth century. Instead, an awareness of how a work takes from other works can add depth and texture to an understanding of what a song (or poem) can mean.

Artistic 'lifting'-- if that is indeed the case-- is always a difficult notion to assess, and it can become bloody impossible to tell if the artist in question is stealing, alluding, or using another form, often called 'collage.' Lines, for example, can become what are called objets trouvees, 'found objects,' that are put together in new forms and fashions, as, say images and logos from magazines can be pieced together in a collage. The trick is understanding the reshaping and the remaking of their surrounding context.

This is always an interesting issue. Is Marianne Moore plagiarizing when she includes fragments from newspapers in her poems? Is Eliot? And, even more interesting, is the scenario of the infamous Ern Malley scandal, for which I'd recommend people consult Michael Heyward's book The Ern Malley Affair, one of the more hilarious examples of Theivery For A Purpose.

So, as for Dylan, I'll have to reserve judgment and wait for more-- including my own listening of Dylan's album, and my own reading of Saga's novel. But, even in Dylan's own canon, this is nothing particularly new, so I have to wonder what the fuss is really all about. I'm at least pleased to see Saga is not contemplating suing.

The quote, by the way (so I won't be charged with plagiarism) is from "Beautiful Revision: The Fearful Symmetries of Van Morrison and William Blake," an article in Wavelength 10 (December 1996), by Jeremy Sharp. I assure you, Mr. Sharp will have no problem with my quoting him here; he and I are very familiar with one another.