Panza's Pants

We grapple in my Digital Economy class with notions of authority and copyright. In the October 9 issue of The New Yorker (no, the article's not online, and I'm not going to link to the main page because it changes every week), Milan Kundera asks "What Is a Novelist?" He answers this question in a few thousand graceful words. The question has been answered before and answered at length, and there's a sort of Great Answer beginning to take shape now, right at the end of a literary era, from the effects, so many chisel-strokes, of the essays and feuilletons and letters and annotated editions; but when you deal with a novelist from outside the Anglo-American tradition you often get a little fillip of insight--that the novel is actually a headstone for lyricism, for instance. If you're lucky you might get two:

Before Cervantes had completed the second volume of his novel, another writer, still unknown, preceded him by publishing, under a pseudonym, his own sequel to the adventures of Don Quixote. Cervantes reacted at the time the way a novelist would react today: with rage. He attacked the plagiarist violently and proclaimed "Don Quixote was born for me alone, and I for him. He knew about action, I about writing. He and I are simply one single entity."
Since Cervantes, this has been the primary, fundamental, mark of a novel: it is a unique, inimitable creation, inseparable from the imagination of a single author. Before he was written, no one could have imagined a Don Quixote; he was the unexpected itself, and, without the charm of the unexpected, no great novel character (and no great novel) would ever be conceivable again.
The birth of the art of the novel was linked to the consciousness of an author's rights and to their fierce defense. The novelist is the sole master of his work; he is his work. It was not always thus, and it will not always be thus. But when that day comes, the art of the novel, Cervantes's legacy, will cease to exist. (Kundera,45)

I find this fairly wonderful: it captures something of the Quixote (which Nabokov famously called "a cruel and crude old book"): its leathery temper and sudden tears, characteristics of de Saavedra himself, who, in the Preface to the second volume, manages to threaten his plagiarizers with a beautiful and extended paralipsis; paint an affecting if somewhat self-interested picture of An Old Veteran Now Robbed of His Last Crumbs (the Turks had shot off most of his hand at Lepanto); and flatter his wealthy patrons. With the same apoplectic brilliance that leads him to compare authorship to a dog inflated a posteriori, he goes on to incorporate the "unauthorized" material into his own book.

To identify a work so totally with its creator: the idea is attractive, and so is the line of argument, at least in the case of Cervantes and Kundera. (Less so in the case of unlettered trash, sop for kine, and hominid hootings : in theory, yes, I'm all for the unique rights of authors, but I wonder if perhaps we ought to look at what "unique" actually means.)