On Paraphrasing Primates and Platonic Plagiarism

Image courtesy of Queensland State Archives.

It’s often said that history repeats itself, but literature’s repetitive nature wasn’t addressed until a mathematician put a monkey in front of a typewriter.

Émile Borel, a Frenchman most frequently remembered for his contributions to probability, introduced a thought experiment known to modern audiences as the Infinite Monkey Theorem. If one were to place a monkey in front of a typewriter for an infinite amount of time, it would surely type out any given English text verbatim.1 Albeit, for a single work to be replicated, it’s been calculated to take thousands of times longer than the universe itself has been around for.

Attempts to test this theorem have failed, such as an experiment conducted in 2002 by the University of Plymouth, which resulted in the aforementioned monkeys soiling their keyboards.2 Despite the experiment’s failure to prove the theorem in practice, one can’t help but to think of the theoretical value of Borel’s work.

At its most fundamental, the English language relies on the repetition of letter combinations to form words. Moreover, if literature is made of language, which is composed of words to create grammar, and words are nothing more than a combination of letters, it would follow that the nature of literature, too, is to be repetitive…

Read the full essay on The University of Chicago Philosophy Review