Opinion | The Hindu | May 4, 2006
http://www.hindu.com/2006/05/04/stories/2006050404571000.htm
Plagiarism is a nasty word and offence and literary plagiarists,
when caught, tend to be subjected to long-lasting shame. The Oxford
English Dictionary offers this working definition: "the wrongful
appropriation or purloining, and publication as one's own, of the
ideas or the _expression_ of the ideas ... of another ... a purloined
idea, design, passage, or work." Tom Lehrer wrote a wonderful
mathematician's song about it. The practice apparently being
widespread, especially in journalism, academia, and the professions,
some writers on the subject speak of degrees of plagiarism. The
worldwide spread of the Internet has made plagiarism easier to
commit than ever before and incomparably easier to detect. The
defences against the charge of plagiarism are predictable: a
photographic or computer-like memory, or the habit of taking notes
from many sources and then failing `inadvertently' to acknowledge
the sources. Over the past ten days, Kaavya Viswanathan, a Harvard
sophomore, has become the world's iconic plagiarist, caught
purloining from multiple sources just when she was knocking at the
door of quasi-literary fame in a genre known as `chick-lit.' She had
signed a phenomenal publishing deal at the age of 17; it looked like
the Great American Dream come true for the young woman born in
Chennai. Two years later, she is a writer in disgrace, her two-book
contract and movie deal off, the putative subject of a thousand and
one morality plays.
Following media revelations, Kaavya acknowledged taking material
from fellow-novelist Megan McCafferty for her debut `chick-lit'
novel, How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life.
Confronted with 40-plus instances of Ms. Viswanathan writing and
publishing passages that closely approximated those from Ms.
McCafferty, the publisher Little, Brown and Co. pulled the book off
the shelves worldwide, after many copies in the first printing of
100,000 copies had been sold. There have been further exposures: of
copying (at least three portions) from another chick-lit novel by
Madeleine Wickham, a British author who uses the pen name Sophie
Kinsella; and of borrowing inappropriately, although in a less
obvious manner, from Meg Cabot and, believe it or not, from the
great Salman Rushdie. Kaavya's somewhat original defence is that as
a fan of Ms. McCafferty's she had "internalised" some of her
passages in an "unintentional and unconscious" way. Thus the act of
purloining is sought to be passed off as some kind of ill-judged
tribute. Kaavya cannot, of course, escape individual accountability
for her intellectual dishonesty. But once this is noted, is there
any denying that her meteoric rise and fall was the product of a
high-pressure and cruel system of pushing, packaging, and
commercialising budding talent? In her particular case, the fast
track was counsellor (hired by well-meaning parents) to literary
agency to `book packager' to publisher. The `star-maker machinery'
is now striking back.
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