I have a confession to make: I am a plagiarist. One time, when I was a freshman in high school, I had the youthful nerve to plagiarize Dante’s Inferno, which I checked out from an indulgent librarian at the Audubon community library along with a stack of Sweet Valley High books. The lyrical prose of Dante was beyond me at that point, but the language struck me, and I wrote down particular phrases and incorporated them into my own poems, padding Dante’s words with my own. I can’t give examples of any of this, so you just have to use your imagination. It was nonsensical and meaningless, but Dante’s words have inherent poetic resonance that not even I could destroy. I gave one of these poems and several of my own efforts to Mr. Ulrich, an English teacher who I wanted to impress. And he taped the Dante poem on his wall along with all the other student literary efforts that he found ground-breaking.
My plagiarized poem was on the wall for the rest of the year. The thought of getting caught didn’t worry me, but I found myself repugnant enough to never plagiarize again. Sure, I sloppily cited works in college a few times. And yeah, this blog? I cull everything from LiveJournal.com, carefully removing all of the emoticons and acronymspeak. And the software documentation, well, it’s taken from other manuals. It’s not like anyone reads it anyway.
Plagiarism makes the news a lot. The navel-gazing media loves to shame those who infringe on the proprietary rights to words and ideas. The latest scandal is Harvard sophomore Kaavya Viswanathan, who received a half-million dollar book contract when she was eighteen and wrote the chick-lit bestseller How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life during her freshman year. After over 40 similarities between her book and another chick-lit book emerged, Viswanathan admitted she unintentionally and unconsciously copied, but claims “It’s a genuine, genuine mistake” and blames her photographic memory (If her photographic memory of other people’s writing manifests when she writes, then why isn’t there a mish-mash of plagiarism from 40 writers? It seems like such a waste, to have a photographic memory and use it to implant chick lit in your brain…
From page 67 of McCafferty’s second novel: “…but in a truly sadomasochistic dieting gesture, they chose to buy their Diet Cokes at Cinnabon.” From page 46 of Viswanathan’s novel: “In a truly masochistic gesture, they had decided to buy Diet Cokes from Mrs. Fields…”
Viswanathan should’ve read the Inferno. She would have crafted the most harrowing coming-of-age youth adult fiction in recent memory and never would have gotten caught, although How Opal Mehta Committed Carnal Sin and Subordinated Reason to Desire does have a different ring to it.
