Cryptomnesia, plagiarism, metafiction

Today, in my reading, I came across the word "cryptomnesia."

"In a much discussed 2004 article in the Times Literary Supplement, Michael Maar announced his discovery that there was an earlier fictional nymphet named Lolita, who had appeared in a 1916 German short story by Heinz von Lichberg, and argued that Nabokov had probably read but subsequently forgotten the story during his years in Berlin. Thus, his later coupling of name and theme was a case of 'cryptomnesia.' With regard to Pale Fire and a particular short poem by Frost — which is not 'Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening' — I claim neither 'cryptomnesia' nor, certainly, plagiarism, but rather a delicate but demonstrable network of inspiration and allusion. This discovery is both less surprising (every reader of Pale Fire knows that John Shade resembles Robert Frost) and more revealing, for it shows Nabokov in the act of conscious composition and similarly conscious camouflage."
— "Shades of Frost: A Hidden Source for Nabokov's Pale Fire." Abraham Socher, in Liberal and Illiberal Arts: Essays (Mostly Jewish), Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2022. p. 123.

I knew I'd seen this word before, but where? I searched my computer for it. Ah, there it is, in a novel I published two months ago and which I'd edited and reread several dozen times.

In Most Famous Short Film of All Time, in a section called "Fog — Nothing," I quoted Heriberto Yépez:

"Memory is 'paratactic reordering' of images, says Heriberto Yépez, 'folkloric cryptomnesia,' 'an ars combinatoria of arbitrary signs.'"

In other sections in this novel, I'd discussed plagiarism. For example:

That word was my own insertion in my reexplication of what she said. Such paraphrasing avoids plagiarism but also leads to misrepresentation.

and

A Torah scroll is a copy. It is a painstaking hand-copy of another scroll which is itself a copy of another scroll. Across this lineage, not a single serif may change. The perfection of its plagiarism is what makes it valid.
But here is how it differs from other plagiarism: Copying isn’t enough. You are supposed to study and understand it. The two words at the exact center of the Torah are “darosh darash,” thoroughly investigated. Do your research. When you research, it’s not plagiarism.

and

Truth itself depends on plagiar-cism, yes? A common philosophical definition of truth is “correspondence theory,” meaning that a statement is true if it matches the world. And what is it to match, if not to be cis? Let’s give a better name to “correspondence theory”: plagiar-cism theory.

and

I do not plagiar-cise myself, except insofar as we are all plagiar-cisms of our parents, and perhaps we are plagiar-cisms of other concealed givens and revealed expectations. Do I plagiar-cise myself? Very well, then, I plagiar-cise myself.

and

I think to myself: “Todo lo que no es autobiografía es plagio,” said Pío Baroja. Apart from autobiography, everything is a plagiarism.

My novel also discusses metafiction: fiction that deliberately draws attention to how it is constructed as fiction, i.e., its frame and its content.

A word like "cryptomnesia" is exactly the sort of word one knows but forgets that one knows until one is reminded that one used it in one's own metafictional novel. In underperforming itself in memory, then breaking out of the memory cage, the word performs its meaning.