“The originals are not original,” Ralph Waldo Emerson writes in an essay in which he argues that the idea of originality is not only elusive but ultimately illusory. For there is a sense in which everything comes after something; that everything is always-already part of history and tradition; and that there is no pure beginning. Texts, thoughts, speeches ― even personal identities ― all seem to have precursors, antecedents, forerunners. 

That the concept of originality is a fairly recent invention suggests that the experience of living in the aftermath of something is a distinctly modern sentiment. During the age of modernity, that is to say, we become acutely aware of the fact that attaining originality ― being the first to do something ― is an increasingly impossible accomplishment, at least in an absolute sense. In an age that has seen and experienced everything, how do we claim originality, and, conversely, how do we avoid imitating or copying our precursors?

One of the world’s first novelists, Miguel de Cervantes, provides an answer to these questions in the work “Don Quixote.” Considered as one of the most original works ever written in the history of literature, Cervantes’ famous novel about the crazy knight is essentially a story about originality, how to attain originality in a world saturated with reproductions, imitations, and duplications.

Fascinated by the medieval ideals of noble chivalry, Don Quixote ― a retired country gentleman living in the 16th century in La Mancha ― spends all his time devouring colorful stories of knights, dragons, and castles, until one day he sets out to save a profane world that seems to have forgotten all about virtues and honors. In Don Quixote’s worldview, reality no longer corresponds to the truth of things. Reading adventure stories encourages Don Quixote to identify with ― or imitate ― bygone chivalrous characters who reigned in a more ideal, truthful world. Thus, he chooses to live his life not according to how things appear but rather to how things ought to be.

To others, of course, Don Quixote is nothing but a madman whose helmet is really a barber’s basin; his esquire a day laborer; and his princess a milkmaid. The novel’s great comic effect derives from Don Quixote’s hilarious ability to misinterpret everything around him; the castle is in fact a decrepit inn; the dragon is actually a peaceful windmill; and the army turns out to be a flock of sheep. In all these cases, Don Quixote faithfully adheres to his ideal of how things ought to be; from a tragicomic perspective, he fiercely rebels against the profane tyranny of a disfigured world.

Michel Foucault observes that Don Quixote reads so many fictive stories that he eventually turns into a linguistic sign. However, “between the first and the second parts of the novel,” Foucault goes on, “in the narrow gap between those two volumes, and by their power alone, Don Quixote has achieved his reality.” One could also say that in between the two volumes of Cervantes’ novel, Don Quixote achieves his originality.

When Cervantes published the first installment of the novel in 1605, “Don Quixote” became so popular that readers demanded more stories about the mad knight. Other writers soon started to publish unauthorized sequels in which the knight merrily continued his mad crusade. Somewhat ironically, these unauthorized stories become the focal point in the second installment of “Don Quixote,” published in 1615. In the second installment, Don Quixote still imitates the noble knight in a debased world, although this time he does more than that; he imitates the Don Quixote character that appears in the first part of novel. Thus, in the second part, that is, Don Quixote impersonates an “original” impersonation because he wants to expose the false impersonations, the unauthorized Don Quixotes that emerge in between the first and the second volume of “Don Quixote.” Through a contradictory and circuitous route, Don Quixote ultimately becomes an original individual.

It is in this ironic way that Cervantes suggests originality can be attained in the modern world; only within a carefully demarcated domain is it possible to reach originality. On the other hand, precisely because the notion of originality is only possible within a demarcated space (e.g. the textual framework of a novel), a certain context ― that is, because it is conditional, and not absolute ― one might ask whether this is really originality at all, or whether it rather illustrates the illusion of originality. For when are we ever able to demarcate or isolate something entirely from its surroundings?

A text, for example, consists of signs always-already in existence elsewhere; it relies on a shared system of language, or languages. Roland Barthes writes that the “text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centers of culture … the writer can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original. His only power is to mix writings, to counter the ones with the others, in such a way as never to rest on any one of them. Did he wish to express himself, he ought at least to know that the inner ‘thing’ he thinks to ‘translate’ is itself only a ready-formed dictionary, its words only explainable through other words, and so on indefinitely.” The same goes for life itself, Barthes adds: “life never does more than imitate the book, and the book itself is only a tissue of signs, an imitation that is lost, infinitely deferred.” Selfhood, Barthes seems to suggest, is merely the sum of the words or languages that we’ve ever encountered.

If this is a somewhat disturbing philosophy of the self ― the self as a simulacrum ― it may explain why we still desperately cling to a notion of originality, an original, authentic self; the alternative, one is tempted to say, would be the quixotic protagonist of the first volume of “Don Quixote” who finds a peculiar virtue in misinterpreting the world. In the final analysis, the notion of originality may be nothing but a misunderstanding, an illusion; but if Cervantes’ book teaches us anything about the concept of originality it is that misunderstanding is always its faithful esquire. Harold Bloom argues that “Every poem is a misinterpretation of a parent poem … There are no interpretations but only misinterpretations.” Bloom defines originality as a writer’s “strong misreading” of precursors. Whereas plagiarism in fact is a rather pious activity, Bloom observes, which “involves so great a reverence for a text that even its previous copyists’ errors become sacred to us,” the original poet “corrects” the errors ― by misreading it. A strong misreading, that is to say, completes or perfects the precursor, whereas plagiarism merely reproduces it.

When we encounter a text whose complexity is too great, a text impossible to improve, plagiarism is our only way to avoid desecrating it. In “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” (1939), Jorge Luis Borges narrates the story of a writer who wants to perfect Cervantes’ “Don Quixote,” but ends up writing chapters that are entirely identical ― word for word and line for line ― with the original text. Borges’ text may not be a strong misreading, in Bloom’s sense, but it is a hilarious misinterpretation of the notion of originality. In that sense, one might say, it remains faithful to the original text’s hilariously mad notion of originality. 

By Eli Park Sorensen

Eli Park Sorensen is an assistant professor in the College of Liberal Studies at Seoul National University. He specializes in comparative literature, postcolonial thought and cultural studies. ― Ed.