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I almost, but not quite, had an argument the other day with Lee-the-Lady-Friend (who she insists should never be confused with Conan-the-Barbarian, which is probably why the argument wasn't quite). This almost disagreeable occasion occurred, during a reading of my most recent essay to her over the phone, when she recognised one of the many un-attributed quotations I lard my texts with. She accused me of plagiarism and just couldn't be convinced that it wasn't bad, evil and rather shady (lady friends can be like that).
I tried to explain: Bad plagiarism is when, say, a student spends five minutes mindlessly searching on the internet for some topic and copies it in toto, and then changes a few bits and generally messes up the spelling (to add authenticity) and then submits it in the hope of credit ("Hey Dude it's worth at least a B-minus").
But then there is good plagiarism: which is what I do.
Good plagiarism is literary name-dropping without the names.
Indeed it's a sport!---A highly-skilled, demanding and quite often dangerous sport.
It's also a way of separating the literary men from the boys, though I fear of late it's become a way of literarily separating the men from the Americans.
You see Plagiarophobia is beyond a doubt the defining Literary American Disease, but more of that later.
Why I consider this essay-worthy is that by coincidence right after getting off the phone with Lee-the-Lady-Friend I happened to pick up the book of lectures and essays by J R R Tolkien that I'm currently re-reading and even more happenedingly started the last one--his Valedictory address at Oxford. By the time I was onto the second page I had spotted JRR slipping in, and right out of the blue, "if the ranks of Tuscany should feel inclined to cheer"¹ which seems an odd thing to say to people from Oxfordshire till you remember (as would most educated Britons of a certain age) "And even the ranks of Tuscany / Could scarce forbear to cheer " from Macaulay's Horatio-pontic lay of Ancient Rome and you realise Mr T pinched it; and then, right after it on the same page there were several others (the exposing of which time forces me to leave as an exercise for the listener); and I'm sure there were even more that no doubt I missed not being as much of a real literary man as Tolkien. But...
But...
Though time was (by the way I pinched that from Alistair Cooke), time was, even here; when taking bits out of other peoples works, preferably without attribution was not looked upon as evil, but as a good thing---a bit of plagiarism was a lovesome thing God wot, and if you weren’t up to the challenge of spotting the stolen bits then you shouldn’t be reading the literature2 .
But now-a-days and here-abouts in those profound dull tunnels which titanic bores have groyned, nobody seems to read anything worth learning; and so we have lost those more athletic parts of the study of literature, so that many a literate American is perhaps less familiar with absolutely everything than one might, under ideal circumstances, desire, so that in America today, apart from some of the more gaudy forms of murder, plagiarism is the ne plus ultra of evil, and the plagiarist is to the modern literary American mind at least as bad as Vlad the Impaler.3
Now that I’ve mentioned murder, and in the same breath as plagiarism too, I think that at last we’ve hit our target because in its earlier Anglo-Saxon and Germanic history murder wasn’t just wilful bumping off it was bumping off done secretly, and especially bumping off done at night, when, in those days before electric lighting, the poor sap couldn’t see what was coming. The relative enormity of night killing (as distinct from, say, afternoon killing which was usually OK in the early Middle Ages) lay in this blindside-ly character.
“‘Then’ said Arinbjorn: ‘The king should not yield to be urged to this shameful deed. He should not let Egil be killed at night, because killing by night is murder and not attributing this quote would be plagiarism.’”
Cheerio for now
from Richard Howland-Bolton.4
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Notes:
1 Perfectly illustrative of what this essay is about, be aware that I wrote all the quotations in it from memory, not looking at either the Tolkien or the originals: that wouldn't have been sporting---QED.
2 In those brave days of yore literary education largely consisted in learning large chunks of poetry and prose, and skilled writing (in part) in being able to regurgitate and manipulate them at will and skilled reading in spotting the buggers at sight.
Then, in that golden age, if putative student had handed in work which was not entirely unoriginal the knowing, wise professor (who would most certainly be familiar with the unacknowledged attributions of the good bits) would kindly suggest work on your own bad bits. But now-a-days, now-a-days the poor fellow is more likely to feel blindsided.
3 always assuming that unworthy has ever entered such mind.
4 As you might have expected I heavily plagiarised myself* for this essay (since I’ve dealt with the Big P before) and so I've of course lazily and larcenously and freely ripped off all sorts of words and even some phrases and paragraphs from my earlier piece.
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*Though, come to think of it, CAN one plagiarise oneself even here and now?
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