Lit Buzz

Schadenfreude

By Anastasia ⋅ April 24, 2006 ⋅  Email this post ⋅  Print this post ⋅ Post a comment

A couple of weeks ago, I fiddled with Kaavya Viswanathan’s book in a store and thought it looked like it would make for fun lazy day reading. When the New York Times Book Review ran a profile on Miss Viswanathan, I was glad to see that the author is young, beautiful and going to Harvard. (School choice aside, seems like an all-around success story to me. But I’m not criticizing–we can’t all go to small liberal arts colleges).

One of the more thoughtful responses to plagiarism I have found comes from Hellen Keller’s description of her own response to her inadvertent copying of a story that impressed her a great deal:

Indeed, I have ever since been tortured by the fear that what I write is not my own. For a long time, when I wrote a letter, even to my mother, I was seized with a sudden feeling of terror, and I would spell the sentences over and over, to make sure that I had not read them in a book. Had it not been for the persistent encouragement of Miss Sullivan, I think I should have given up trying to write altogether.

My father believed that there was “nothing new under the Sun,” and that the best we could hope for was awareness of our ideas’ precedents. I am not quite as pessimistic as he was. Nonetheless, memory, impressions and our ability to recall our sources are mysterious at best, as many MF posters have pointed out time and again. My current day job for example involves me convincing my clients that my ideas are really theirs, giving them all the credit (particularly in front of their bosses), patting them on the back and extolling the virtues of their ingenuity until they feel compelled and proud to go and do exactly what I proposed, most of the time believing completely that the plan is their baby. This is surprisingly easy. And effective.

Memory works in funny ways. Any great idea is electrifying. It does not matter how old the thought is–the moment two previously unconnected neurons in my brain connect is the moment an idea becomes new to me. Most of the time, it will seem novel and original in the initial excitement of having thought of something. It is only after critical reflection and accurate recollection of the idea’s basis that I can at times become convinced that my improvement on the original is in fact at best a reinterpretation and at worst a neophyte’s rephrasing of the original in more common parlance. Given how many false flashes of brilliance I feel coming on a day, it’s sometimes surprising to see how few times I embarass myself by passing these half-baked ideas as my own. Without a doubt, there is a sifting process that must take place in a brain.

In other words, mate, the synapses have fired, the gun powder is in the air, but you’ve got to wait to see if you’ve punched a hole in the other ship’s bottom. (And yes, I am counting down the days to Dead Man’s Chest. Aren’t you?)

Getting back to the point, do the glitches in this sifting process really qualify as plagiarism? Take , for example, a few quotes from movies and books in current circulation.

“I coulda been a contender.”

“Make my day.”

“I think this is a beginning of a beautiful friendship.”

“I’m ready for my close-up.”

“There are three types of lies: lies, damn lies and statistics.” (Particularly fond of this one, since speakers will try to cite it–to Mark Twain or Disraeli usually, though occasionally to other luminaries)

How many of these do you think are used by people who are aware of whom they are quoting? How many are now thought of as just things people say?

And for the few of you still with me, where do we draw the line? If I hear a man on the street say something brilliant and then use it in a story, is that plagiarism? If I see a man in a chat room say something brilliant, and use it, is it plagiarism? If I use something from a blog?

If, oh, hypothetically, I carefully research a historical novel and conduct many interviews in the process, hearing something from a survivor that I then reuse, am I a plagiarist? What if I come across the same incident in a book of oral histories? An interview? A description based on an interview used by a journalist for a different book?

In film, replicating a past master’s exact shot and image is considered a tribute. In visual art, a painter can “quote” a tradition. Whether intentional or not, elements of prior works incorporated into new ones are used to trace a work’s lineage–my father’s idea again of awareness of precedents as best we can do. In literature, all this seems to get tagged as plagiarism. The constant fear, the ever-present navigation of the line between acceptable and unacceptable use of others’ thoughts, the stringency of the rules in particular case of literature and writing–to what an extent are they paralyzing writers, who, like Keller, are terrorized by the possibility they are overstepping the bounds?

Free-for-all reuse of other writers’ materials is ethically unsavory, surely, but do we at times turn readings into plagiarism witchhunts? Or perhaps, the more interesting question is:

Why?