So don’t shade your eyes…

Not Plagiarism but Mixing and Matching, Says Best-Selling German Author, 17

Anyone out there seen this article about Helene Hegemann, the possibly postmodern teen author?   So this girl gets famous for, among other things, publishing a wildly popular and critically acclaimed novel about the Berlin club scene, only to suffer scandal when it turns out many passages from her novel were lifted from other sources.  But wait:

Ms. Hegemann finds herself in the middle of a collision — if not road kill exactly — between the staid, literary establishment in a country that venerates writers from Goethe to Mann to Grass, and the Berlin youth culture of D.J.’s and artists that sample freely and thereby breathe creativity into old forms. Or as one character, Edmond, puts it in the book, “Berlin is here to mix everything with everything.”

A powerful statement, but the line originally was written by Airen, on his blog. The plot thickens, however, and shows that perhaps more than simple cribbing is at work. When another character asks Edmond if he came up with that line himself, he replies, “I help myself everywhere I find inspiration.”

Hmm.  What do we think of this?  Can she reasonably claim this was all a postmodern stunt?

In principle, I am on the side of postmodern stunts.  And I’m generally not as horrified by so-called “remix culture” as some people.  But something in this story isn’t sitting right with me.  For example, the Times quotes her as saying, “There’s no such thing as originality anyway, just authenticity.”  Really?  Those don’t sound like the words of someone who is rigorously engaged with the discourse on “originality” and the iterability of graphemes.  I mean, I can buy that there’s no such thing as originality, but what the hell is authenticity?  If she were really serious about making this semiotic statement, wouldn’t she be just as interested in problematizing the latter term?

But I don’t know.  Maybe it’s not fair to expect a 17 year old German girl, no matter how celebrated, to be versed in Derrida.  Can’t anyone participate in the new rhetorical model, regardless of philosophical background?  Maybe I should be thrilled to see theory in use like this, and all the more if the user has no idea where her ideas come from.

Anyway, she obviously makes up in chutzpah what she lacks in originality or intellectual rigor, and that should count for something.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 11th, 2010 at 11:26 pm and is filed under books. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.