What does Pete Hegseth have in common with Mark Twain, Helen Keller and George Harrison?
On April 15, Hegseth, the secretary of defense, led a Pentagon worship service to depict the war in Iran as an act of divine justice against infidels. Remember the Crusades? He exhorted the troops to impose “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy” in attacks “against the enemies of righteousness.”
Hegseth then purported to cite the biblical verse in Ezekiel 25:17. The actual text: “And I set my face against them; they shall go out from one fire, and another fire shall devour them; and ye shall know that I am the Lord, when I set my face against them.” But that’s not what Hegseth said.
He actually quoted from a monologue actor Samuel L. Jackson delivered as hitman Jules Winnfield, just before executing a double-crossing Brett, a young man, in Quentin Tarantino’s movie “Pulp Fiction.” Thus, Hegseth used a prelude to murder as a blessing for the troops, in the context of his religious beliefs.
Was he aware of his plagiarism? Maybe not. But he wouldn’t be the first to engage in cryptomnesia, a word melding the Greek words “krypte,” meaning vault (as in cryptic and cryptography), and “mnem,” meaning memory (as an amnesia). Cryptomnesia occurs when a person unconsciously remembers something and believes they thought of it themselves, using it as their own. It’s based on a memory locked in a vault.
Several theories attempt to explain subconscious plagiarism. It could be the nature of memory, by which information from different sources is combined to form a new memory. Or it could be based on the way memories are stored and retrieved, sometimes disassociated from the original source. Or it could be a result of unconscious processing of information.
Whichever theory is accurate, cryptomnesia has subconsciously caused plagiarism by noted authors and songwriters.
If you copy and paste an article written by someone else and publish it as your own, that’s plagiarism. But what if you come up with an idea for an article apparently on your own and publish it, only to discover that you inadvertently recalled swaths of something you had read verbatim? That’s still plagiarism, because intent is irrelevant. All that is required is the opportunity to perceive the original and substantial similarity between the original and yours.
In the dedication to Mark Twain’s first book “Innocents Abroad,” published in 1869, he wrote: “To my most patient reader and most charitable critic, my aged mother, this volume is affectionately inscribed.” This is an almost verbatim dedication by Dr. Oliver Wendel Holmes in “Songs in Many Keys,” published seven years earlier. Twain had read Holmes’ book. When a friend pointed out the similarities, Twain concluded that he “unconsciously stole it.”
Helen Keller subconsciously plagiarized from an 1873 collection of stories by Margaret Canby, “Birdie and His Fairy Friends: A Book for Little Children” that included “The Frost Fairies.” Keller wrote “The Frost King,” a short story with uncanny similarities to that earlier work. When asked about them, Keller said that she had no memory of having read it. But Sophia Hopkins, a faculty member at the Perkins School where Keller studied, had read Canby’s book to Keller in 1888, three years before “The Frost King.”
Twain wrote Keller about this: “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.”
In Keller’s autobiography, she stated that she did “not recall a single circumstance connected with the reading of the [Canby] stories” but acknowledged that “the language was ineffaceably stamped upon my brain.”
In 1971, George Harrison was sued for copyright infringement a year after he released his hit “My Sweet Lord.” The claim was that he plagiarized the 1962 Chiffons’ hit “He’s So Fine.” Hum both and you’ll hear the similarities.
At the trial, Harrison testified he was inspired by the gospel song “Oh Happy Day,” an arrangement of an 18th-century hymn. U.S. District Judge Richard Owen analyzed both songs, focusing on the order of the motifs in each, finding substantial similarity in their patterns and identical harmonies.
Judge Owen’s decision: “Did Harrison deliberately use the music of ‘He’s So Fine?’ I do not believe he did so deliberately. Nevertheless, it is clear that ‘My Sweet Lord’ is the very same song as ‘He’s So Fine.’ This is, under the law, infringement of copyright, and is no less so even though subconsciously accomplished.” Judge Owen awarded the plaintiff the equivalent of $8.5 million in damages.
Did Hegseth subconsciously plagiarize Quentin Tarantino’s script in “Pulp Fiction?” Or did he intentionally invoke the personification of menace and murder in Samuel L. Jackson’s portrayal of an assassin to encourage the troops to smite the infidels? We may never know.
Stewart Edelstein, a Stockbridge resident, is author of several books, including “Dubious Doublets: A Delightful Compendium of Unlikely Word Pairs of Common Origin, from Aardvark/Porcelain to Zodiac/Whiskey.”