Plagiarism Is Obvious, Isn’t It

When Vladimir Nabokov was asked whether he had read Franz Kafka’s The Trial before writing Invitation to a Beheading, Nabokov insisted that he had not. Having read Invitation to a Beheading, the basic premise is so similar—a man awaits execution for a crime that is never made clear—it is difficult to take his word for it. It doesn’t help that Lolita may have been intentionally or subconsciously plagiarized from a short story.

If I hadn’t had my own (possibly Jungian collective) subconscious plagiarism or influence, I would think it was fairly obvious that Nabokov had first read the trial. (Perhaps you have your own example of cryptomnesia?)

In my case I wrote a story, “Gerald Freund” while in the undergraduate writing program at Old Dominion University. It had gone through a Workshop. In that version of the story I used both first person and third person POV for a single character, Gerald Freund. You see this technique is used quite a bit these days, particularly in film, most notably in Fight Club, which was based on 1996 novel by Chuck Palahniuk.

Unlike Fight Club, the story remained rather ambiguous about the dual POV being the same person. When I mentioned that was my intent, the instructor recommended that I read I Am Not Stiller by Max Frisch. I promptly read it, and several other Max Frisch novels. He used the same technique in another novel, Gantenbein.

After a few rewrites, I decided I would have time go backward from the present to the time when the narrator was a child being carried from East to West Germany before the Iron Curtain had descended. I discussed this change to the story with a fellow writer from class, He asked me if I had read Times Arrow by Martin Amis. I said that I hadn’t. In hindsight I wonder what he must have thought about my answer, including whether I was lying.

If you have read Time’s Arrow, then you can already see how my story sounds like a copy. Time’s Arrow uses both the first person/third person POV and the time going backward techniques. Like my story, the protagonist was German. The real odd synchronicity was the name of the characters in each story. In Time’s Arrow, the protagonist was named Todd Friendly. The surname of my main character, Freund, is German for Friend.
Some subconscious influence seems to me to be a more plausible reason for these apparent plagiarist episodes. I believe that synchronicity is more likely to be confirmation bias than a connection to the collective unconscious. However, before reading the story I did not know of any author named Martin Amis. Unless I have blocked out the memory—and I can’t think of any traumatic episode that would have caused me to block out reading a particular novel—I had not read any of Amis’s stories. To my mind, I had experienced a Nabokov event, which I can only chalk up to a bizarre coincidence.

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