Is it possible to appropriate the words or ideas of others without realizing it? Some authors, such as Robert Louis Stevenson, accused themselves of committing plagiarism (he came to believe he had appropriated much of “Treasure Island” from other authors). But some who have been accused of plagiarism, including Helen Keller, have pushed back strongly against such a charge, offering up unconscious appropriation as an excuse. Musicians have also been accused of this, and the famous case of ex-Beatle George Harrison is described in detail. Relying on a previous ruling known as the subconscious copying doctrine, the judge in Harrison’s case ruled that his copying had been done without conscious awareness but that he was still culpable. Experimental psychologists have been able to induce research participants into appropriating the responses of other participants without conscious awareness, suggesting that this phenomenon is real and not just a defense offered up by those accused of plagiarism. This can be explained as a failure of source monitoring, in which ideas that originated in the minds of others become confused with the products of one’s own cognitive processes.

The third chapter shows that Vladimir Nabokov, seeking to replace the superannuated form of national allegory, constructs a figure of supranational metonymy through chess. Critics have explained that the Bildungsroman is a novel of socialization that displays how an individual finds his place in a social world and projects a trajectory of collective progress. Like Beckett, though, Nabokov was a post-revolutionary expatriate who made his career in another language. One of Nabokov’s targets was the notion that novels offer national allegories. Reading Nabokov’s early novels, which feature Russian exiles who rove across the continent as if across a chessboard, I reveal the writer’s interest in crafting a “personal world” that travels well across borders. The figure of metonymy presents advantages over metaphor. First, elastic in scale, metonymy represents spaces smaller or larger than the nation. Second, where national allegories had to install generic template protagonists at their narrative centers, supranational metonymies stress individual idiosyncrasy, accommodating abnormalities; they reject the premise that there can be such a thing as a generic national character.