Plagiarism R us

The following is my response to this program:
http://www.radioopensource.org/david-shields-reality-hunger-kicking-ass-and-dropping-names/


A man named Robert Ross was speaking with Oscar Wilde one day and Wilde was complaining that a well-known novel had been borrowed from an idea of his, Ross countered that Wilde was himself a ‘fearless literary thief.’ ‘My dear Robbie,” Wilde drawled in answer, ‘when I see a monstrous tulip with four petals in someone else’s garden, I am impelled to grow a monstrous tulip with five wonderful petals, but that is no reason why someone should grow a tulip with only three petals.’

A similar sentiment was voiced by Mark Twain in a letter to Helen Keller after she had been accused of plagiarism as a child (I have a feeling I will appropriate these words myself someday if accused):

“It takes a thousand men to invent a telegraph, or a steam engine, or a phonograph, or a photograph, or a telephone, or any other important thing—and the last man gets the credit and we forget the others. He added his little mite—that is all he did.”

“To think of these solemn donkeys breaking a little child’s heart with their ignorant damned rubbish about plagiarism! I couldn’t sleep for blaspheming about it last night. Why, their whole histories, their whole lives, all their learning, all their thoughts, all their opinions were one solid rock of plagiarism, and they don’t know it and never suspected it. A gang of dull and hoary pirates piously setting themselves the task of disciplining and purifying a kitten that they think they’ve caught filching a chop! Oh, dam—

But you finish it dear, I am running short of vocabulary today.”

GO TWAIN!

Aristotle begins his “Poetics:”

“Epic poetry and Tragedy, Comedy also and Dithyrambic poetry, and the music of the flute and of the lyre in most of their forms, are all in their general conception modes of imitation.”

So, I think we can all agree that imitation is good. I push back however in another respect. I fear that in Mr. Shield’s zeal to “dissolve genres” he’s gonna throw the baby out with the bathwater. And by baby I mean, Plot.

I imagine that Aristotle might respond to Mr. Shield with a passage from Poetics:

“Again, if you string together a set of speeches expressive of character, and well finished in point of diction and thought, you will not produce the essential tragic effect nearly so well as with a play which, however deficient in these respects, yet has a plot and artistically constructed incidents.”

“The Plot, then, is the first principle, and, as it were, the soul of a tragedy: Character holds the second place. A similar fact is seen in painting. The most beautiful colours, laid on confusedly, will not give as much pleasure as the chalk outline of a portrait. Thus Tragedy is the imitation of an action, and of agents mainly with a view to the action.”

Grandmaster Flash collected samples of catchy hooks from multiple songs and made it into one song, and Hip Hop was born. I applaud Mr. Shields for embracing that essence. At the end of this interview when talking about the future of writing he even says, “Bring the Pain” – which is the title to a song by Method Man.

Methinks Aristotle would gently remind Mr. Shields to bring the plot first.