Understanding ‘Intertextuality,’ ‘Appropriation’, and ‘Truth Claims’

In the next few paragraphs (again, I’m being as transparent as possible), I plan to zero in on three broad ‘debates’ with which creative writers should — indeed, I think, must — be familiar. These have to do with whether or not originality is ever (really, truly, completely) attainable; questions about our right to write about anything we choose; and the vexed business of “telling the truth” (How is ‘truth’ defined? Who decides? What are the possible repercussions when we play “fast and loose” with it?).

Before I address the three ‘debates,’ though, it’s important to consider the commonly held (and not entirely unreasonable) assumption that creative writers should never have to worry about making mistakes. One could say that we’re supposed to follow rules to do with grammar, spelling, and punctuation. Depending on our chosen forms, we’re also expected to follow certain established conventions. If I’m a poet who sets out to write a sonnet, or a sestina, or a haiku, for instance, I commit to adhering to the regulations that govern my chosen genre. As a playwright, the work that I produce is expected to include acts and scenes.

Oh, but creative writing is a discipline like no other. Our ‘rules’ can be bent, if not broken. We’re allowed, if not encouraged, to be experimental. no capital letters? no problem. One-word sentences? Fine. Good. A novel in verse, a book-length poem, or a play without acts or scenes? All of these radical moves are entirely acceptable. Is it not true that ‘artistic license’ makes it possible for us to do whatever we please? “Anything goes,” in creative writing, because telling a creative writer what they can or can’t do is tantamount to censorship. We don’t have to follow a style guide (MLA, for example, APA, the Chicago Manual) to cite our sources. Except for practitioners of non-fiction (those who write memoirs, autobiographies, biographies, travelogues, and so on), creative writers are not expected or required to acknowledge their sources. When was the last time you read a poem or a play, a short story, novella, or novel that included footnotes or end-notes, in-text citations, or lists of references? Answer: never. The stories, poems, and plays that we produce are assumed to be entirely our own. New, fresh, and original. That, at least, is one, fairly widespread, perspective.

Intertextuality. Some, however, adopt a polar opposite philosophy, arguing that virtually nothing we write can be described as new, fresh, or original.

Here, for example, I think about a passage from a private letter, sent by Mark Twain to Helen Keller (two very famous American writers) in 1903, some years after Keller was charged with plagiarism (she was eventually acquitted). “All ideas are second-hand,” wrote Twain, in defense of his friend. The expanded extract from Twain’s letter reads as follows:

Oh, dear me, how unspeakably funny and owlishly idiotic and grotesque was that ‘plagiarism’ farce! As if there was much of anything in any human utterance, oral or written, except plagiarism! 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 second-hand, 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 calibre and his temperament, and which is revealed in characteristics of phrasing. When a great orator makes a great speech you are listening to ten centuries and ten thousand men — but we call it his speech, and really some exceedingly small portion of it is his. But not enough to signify.

In a nutshell, Twain writes, “ninety-nine parts of all things that proceed from the intellect are plagiarisms, pure and simple”.

I can’t say that I disagree. I doubt that Carl Jung or Julia Kristeva would disagree either, two thinkers for whom, like Twain, originality is a myth. If you’ve encountered, before, the terms “archetype” (or “archetypal”) and “intertextuality” (or “intertext”), then you’re already acquainted with Jung and Kristeva. Jung (1875-1961), psychologist, psychiatrist, and psychoanalyst, came up with the term “archetype” in the early 20th century as part of his work on the “collective unconscious” — the notion, essentially, that certain “residues of ancestral memory” are shared by all people in every culture (Baldick, 2015). These “residues” (“archetypes”), according to Jung, constitute “symbol[s], theme[s], setting[s], or character-type[s]” which recur in “different times and places in myth, literature, folklore, dreams, and rituals so frequently or prominently as to suggest . . . that [they] embod[y] some essential element of ‘universal’ human experience” (Baldick). “Intertextuality,” a term coined by Kristeva, feminist philosopher, literary critic, and psychoanalyst, “designates the various relationships that a given text may have with other texts” (Baldick). These “intertextual relationships” take various forms, including “anagram, allusion, adaptation, translation, parody, pastiche, imitation, and other kinds of transformation” (Baldick). It’s a lot to take in, I know. For Kristeva, whether we admire or critique other texts, make relatively brief references to them or incorporate them substantially in our writing, we take part in an active, ongoing “conversation” with the work of others, one that fundamentally renders our work less original than we might believe or want it to be.

I recognize that I’m over-simplifying the complex, nuanced theories of Jung and Kristeva; in broad strokes, however, the point to be taken from both is that every text we produce is affected by written texts that we have read, films we have viewed, television series that we have binge-watched. Sometimes, as Kristeva observes, we deliberately set out to engage with those texts that have “come before.” As frequently, we enter “conversations” with other texts without being fully aware of the fact that we’re doing so: as Twain says, all ideas are “consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources” (Twain, my emphasis). Jung’s perspectives on “archetypes” and the “collective unconscious” invite skepticism, insofar as they disregard the specific ways in which our identities, and hence the pieces we produce, are shaped by our unique, varied, and often unequal experiences of class, gender, ethnicity, and race. Still, it’s tough to disagree with a Jungian literary scholar like Christopher Booker who argues that every story we tell follows one of seven set patterns: “Overcoming the Monster”; “Rags to Riches”; “The Quest”; “Voyage and Return”; “Comedy”; “Tragedy”; and “Rebirth” (Booker). Tellingly, when I went to my bookshelves to put Booker’s argument to the test, trying to find titles which don’t adhere to any of the patterns he identifies, I came up dry. (Give it a whirl, yourself.) It is likely the case that all writing incorporates both originality and mimicry or imitation, to varying degrees. But even if we embrace the idea that all creative writing is original or agree with such folks as Twain, Jung, and Kristeva, who believe that the opposite is true, the result is the same: citation has no place in creative writing. It is either unnecessary (if we view our work as 100% our own) or a practical impossibility (if we recognize the “million” influences on what we produce). In the latter case, providing in-text citations and lists of references would be a Herculean task, neither doable nor desirable.

Appropriation. I think that we can agree on this: theories related to originality (or the lack thereof) make sense in the arenas of intellectual conversation and debate. Significant problems, however, can arise when the “abstract” rubs up against “reality.” It’s all fine and well to philosophize about intertextuality — the ways in which myriad texts inform our writing and the impracticality of citing them, but the fact is, living writers own their work. Our writing is our intellectual property, protected by copyright laws (sometimes literary texts become part of the public domain after their authors die; sometimes copyright is retained by estates or family members of the deceased). Because publishing is an industry — books are big business! — when revenues and royalties are at stake, the borrowing of someone else’s ideas can get a writer entangled in serious controversy or, worse, a courtroom battle, where “intertextuality” is not guaranteed to succeed as a defense for accusations of plagiarism.

Ownership of intellectual property, moreover, isn’t only entrenched in law. Take, for example, stories which belong to Indigenous communities via tradition. Even if such ownership isn’t formally protected by the (imposed, colonial, non-Indigenous) legal system, the “borrowing” of sacred legends and myths nonetheless amounts to a form of theft, and a particularly egregious one at that, since it replicates the stealing of Indigenous people’s land.

Such theft is referred to as “cultural appropriation”: “the use of a people’s traditional dress, music, cuisine, knowledge and other aspects of their culture, without their approval, by members of a different culture” (“Cultural Appropriation of Indigenous Peoples in Canada”). Instances of cultural appropriation abound in Canada and elsewhere, in the past and the ongoing present, in literary as well as non-literary settings. “For Indigenous peoples in Canada, cultural appropriation is rooted in colonization and ongoing oppression. Indigenous peoples have seen culturally significant symbols and motifs used in non-Indigenous goods, marketing and art. They have also seen stereotypical images of ‘Indians’ used in sports logos and the sale of various products” (“Cultural Appropriation of Indigenous Peoples in Canada”). Like me, you might be thinking about the Edmonton Eskimos football team (renamed the Edmonton Elks in 2020), the Atlanta Braves (whose fans perform the “tomahawk chop” in support of their baseball team), or the Chicago Blackhawks (the hockey players’ jerseys feature an Indigenous man in feathered headdress). Maybe you are thinking about other groups who have been subjected to similarly damaging acts of appropriation: the racist practices, for example, of blackface or brownface, whereby white people turn the identities of BIPOC (Biracial, Indigenous, People of Colour) into costumes. Or non-black people’s adoption of dreadlocks or cornrow braids, culturally unique and specific to diasporic African communities.

No less common or contentious are instances of appropriation in literary circles, which take a variety of forms: white authors writing in the voices of BIPOC characters, incorporating the cultural traditions of oppressed peoples; exploiting (often exoticizing) the experiences of such groups; and/or, in most extreme cases, making claims to identities not their own, in order (it would seem) to further their careers. In “The Disappearing Debate; or, How the Discussion of Racism Has Been Taken Over by the Censorship Issue” (a chapter in her 1996 collection of essays titled Frontiers), Marlene Nourbese Philip notes that arguments against appropriation have been construed as support for censorship. As the arguments go, no restrictions should be placed on any writer, filmmaker, or artist. No one’s imagination should be stifled, no voice silenced. Appropriation, however, does just that: it takes self-representation away from those who have endured and continue to experience the pain and trauma of colonialism’s ongoing legacies. Nourbese Philip’s point is that when white readers are urged to stop engaging in acts of appropriation, they aren’t being asked to muzzle themselves; rather, they are called upon to respect and make space for the voices of those who have been silenced for too long.

Alongside Nourbese Philip, many other writers, speaking from marginalized positions, rightfully identify cultural appropriation as a racist practice that perpetuates colonial power structures. As Dionne Brand writes, in “Who Can Speak for Whom?” (1993), “[t]here can be no question that Canadian culture has marauded the cultural production of First Nations peoples not to speak of their spiritual myths and icons and their land” (18). In “Stop Stealing Native Stories” (1997), Lenore Keeshig-Tobias refers to non-Indigenous authors’ interest in Indigenous stories as “cultural theft” and the “theft of voice”: “The Canadian cultural industry,” she says, “is stealing — unconsciously, perhaps, but with the same devastating results — native stories as surely as the missionaries stole our religion and the politicians stole our land and the residential schools stole our language”: why, she asks, “are Canadians so obsessed with native stories anyway? Why the urge to ‘write Indian’? Have Canadians run out of stories of their own? Or are their renderings just nostalgia for a simpler, more ‘at one with nature’ stage of human development?” (Keeshig-Tobias). The anger expressed by Nourbese Philip, Brand, and Keeshig-Tobias speaks to the political and personal ramifications of appropriation. Joshua Whitehead, using powerful, pointed language, explains that “[a]ppropriation hurts”:

it’s the machine that reiterates settler colonial ideologies. Appropriation is the iconoclasm of colonialism; the image that you see when you think of ‘Indian’ is how you’ve been programmed to see me, feel me, hear me, hate me. Appropriation is the stamp of approval that acknowledges and allows the rape of our women, the destruction of our land, the invisibility/inaudibility of our stories.

Clearly, the notion that “anything goes” in creative writing — the assumption that we have the right to write about anything we like, borrowing from whichever sources we choose — needs to be rigorously questioned, if not summarily dismissed.

Truth claims. Just as debates about cultural appropriation require creative writers to rethink the notion that “anything goes,” so too do our responsibilities vis-à-vis telling the “truth” challenge assumptions about “artistic freedom.” Are authors at liberty to meddle with what is known, or generally accepted, to be “true”? One may well ask, why not? Again, if we have carte blanche to produce work that is new, fresh, and original, surely no one can demand that we be fully faithful to “facts” — historical, geographical, scientific, or otherwise.

In some cases (not all), contingent on our chosen genres, we absolutely can disregard facts. If, let’s say, I set out to write a fantasy or science fiction novel, or a work of speculative fiction, it’s pretty well understood that the worlds I create and the characters who inhabit them will not be entirely realistic. Perhaps my characters would be able to time travel, defy gravity, shape-shift. I can invent species, catastrophic events, and/or superheroes with superpowers with no grounding in reality. Similarly, however, if I decide to generate a work categorized as “realism,” then every detail must be accurate — faithful to “reality.” Events or discoveries that actually happened must follow their actual, historical timelines. The Second World War must span the period of 1939 to 1945. A phonograph or photograph can’t appear in my story before either technology came into existence. If my characters live in the 17th century, they likely don’t have flushing toilets, penicillin, or a familiarity with famous figures who were not yet born.

When it comes to minor mistakes or unintended anachronisms, in works of realist fiction, readers might be forgiving, but aficionados of non-fiction are decidedly less flexible. “Truth claims” are the backbone of non-fictional genres. Every detail should be meticulously researched. There’s no room for error. Or is there?

Works of life writing and creative non-fiction, despite falling under the umbrella of “non-fiction,” often rely on their authors’ personal perspectives and memories. Consequently, objectivity can be — in fact, must be — called into question. “Truth” is in the eye of the beholder. Each time I explain this to my students, I share a simple, yet instructive, autobiographical anecdote. Many years ago, my sister, Jana, and I (we would have been no more than five and seven) got in trouble with our parents: one of us took a hoe out of the garden shed and proceeded to break it by hoeing the lawn and possibly a sidewalk or two. Who broke the hoe? I swear that it was my sister. She, as vehemently, insists that it was me. Even though one of us is wrong, the “truth” of the incident doesn’t really matter because little is at stake. We playfully argue about our different recollections of who broke the hoe. We’ve been known to give each other a hoe on birthdays or Christmases.

Still, my anecdote throws into sharp relief whether or not the writer of non-fiction, who draws in part on memory, is always right, or consistently truthful. Doubtless, they aim to be. They certainly should aim to be. Their work, however, is vulnerable to scrutiny by those who may disagree — who may remember differently — because memory is notoriously fallible. And, with regard to what is true or not/perceived to be true or not, the consequences can be far more serious than lighthearted squabbles between siblings about a garden tool.