the original problem
Tuesday, May 15, 2007, 11:59 AM - Copyfight
The Accidental Plagiarist: The Trouble with Originalityby Erik Campbell
Many a man fails as an original thinker simply because his memory is too good.
—Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human
That bit from Nietzsche quoted above (appropriately enough from Human, All Too Human) has sighed and moaned about in my mind like an insistent, unfortunate mantra for four years now, years during which, not coincidentally, I have had a modicum of small-press literary success. As a writer of poetry and the occasional essay (read anachronism and anathema to the God of Economic Utility or, simply, Secular Humanist), I am constantly trying to come up with, if not an original idea, then at least an original rendering of one. But this pursuit is a difficult and quixotic one, since poetry and essays (and, outside of certain genres, most fiction) now fall under the canopy of “specialist” reader- and authorship, and the hundreds of literary journals and magazines that publish such esoterica are read by a small, select few. And we few, we hapless few readers are also, more often than not, the authors. Thus, not only are we readers and writers oftentimes taking out one another’s laundry, but also we periodically end up, as it were, wearing one another’s pants. Sometimes we do this unconsciously (which we politely euphemize as Influence: a laudable thing denoting wide reading and artistic ecumenicalism), and sometimes calculatingly (which we call Plagiarism: the redheaded stepchild of literature, the specter that haunts high-school compositions, the cancer that parasites the bowels of literary veritas whilst making many an author’s—and virtually every rapper’s—career[2]). And then there’s the sticky phenomenon of “subconscious plagiarism,” of which we’re all guilty (by virtue of being human), and of which George Harrison is, in many ways, the poster boy.
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Read The Accidental Plagiarist by Erik Campbell at The Virginia Quatterly Review
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