Note: this essay includes material previously published in “Don’t Share Your Book Proposal.”
This essay is part of “The Plagiarism Papers.” For a fuller discussion of plagiarism, see “On Plagiarism.” 1Added Feb. 26,2024
Recently, I wrote about ghosts and writing: that if I couldn’t write, I would wander around like a ghost trying to find the body it had been forced to leave.
Only days later, the writer Jayaprakash Satyamurthy wrote a short essay, “A late 20th Century Life, with Ghosts,” exploring themes that echoed my own but in the context of living in a city of ghosts that was gradually morphing : “The new century loomed. My city restructured itself around computers. But ghosts had touched my heart. I was, and am haunted. So I write.”
Had Satyamurthy stolen my idea?
In fact, I hadn’t actually written my words anywhere. We writers, if you’ll forgive that rather grand phrase, tend to do a lot of work in our heads, sometimes remembering to write things down, often not. Before I read Satyamurthy’s essay, I had been organising my notes for an update to subscribers that included my—entirely unexpressed—thoughts on why I need to write. What is the world if not a universe of thoughts, drifting around and mingling with one another?
The concept of originality—and its twin, brilliance—is revered in academia and in the world of publishing; it serves to define plagiarism. Plagiarism, as generally defined, is when Person A inserts words and concepts that originated with Person B into a work without proper attribution, thus implying that Person A was the originator. That’s putting it in a very tiny nutshell, and there are of course several questions that arise, chief among them: Is there such a thing as truly original work?
Well, yes. And, also, well, no.
Within academia, the idea of originality is at odds with the foundational concept of higher education, where a student is expected to understand that learning happens amongst others, and that ideas are born within dense and sometimes interlacing networks of thought and traditions. By the time a graduate student reaches the dissertation proposal stage, it should be evident that there is no such thing as completely original knowledge or research given how much of the process so far has been about scholarly interactions with others that require sharing and bouncing ideas off each other. A dissertation doesn’t have to be a collaboratively written text for it to reflect a multitude of influences, and citations and acknowledgements are formal ways of recording them.
In mainstream publishing, a writer has to pitch editors about stories or books that they swear up and down are wholly original. In actual fact, even news outlets poach stories from other sources, often without even a link to the original (the practice is also known as “matching”). When the website Messenger imploded recently, it turned out that despite the shockingly large amounts of money thrown around on lunches, office buildings, and at least some salaries (the editor in chief is said to have been paid $900,000), it failed to make sure that experienced reporters were doing their job, and instead pressured them to poach content in order to maintain an unreal pace of new posts every minute. Former Messenger reporter Eli Walsh tweeted, “I wrote 630+ stories in that time, most of them were just copying and pasting work that other reporters put time and effort into, just for us to swoop in and, essentially, steal it.” (The Bleeding Heart blog details the ethical problems with such tactics).
So, originality is a fraught concept but it’s not simply a construct and it—or the appearance of it—comes with material advantages. In the case of a newspaper, scooping without attribution is outright theft and it can mean money from subscribers while an (often) smaller outlet from whom the work is stolen struggles to survive. But what does it mean to take an original idea in an academic context, or in a book, say, intended for a wide audience? This is where we encounter the difference between “original” and unique.
I’ll repeat what I wrote in “Don’t Share Your Book Proposal:” that even if the base material of the work is not “original,” the approach can make it unique. The point is not the subject matter, but the perspective one brings to bear upon it. Two writers could write about the same set of murders in a small town, for instance, but each might approach it differently. One might write about how the events highlighted the inevitable hidden sexual tensions of a conservative, insular world. Another might discover a story about a small town struggling to fit into an idealised vision of “America” and posit that the murders were linked to a quest to fit into that. Each book is in effect an original translation of the same story.
Originality and brilliance exist, but they are overdetermined and sometimes defined by factors like race, gender, like class and access to platforms where one might produce “original” and “brilliant” work (for more, see my forthcoming “On Genius and Gender”). When entering academia is now prohibitively expensive, and no one can become a professional writer without spousal support or family wealth to fall back on—who even gets to decide what counts as brilliant and original work? On Twitter, “An,” @madame_noworry, complicates the notion of originality in a January 28 post by asking,
Are we all convinced conscientiously that whatever we produce is indeed that innovative? I am not talking about impostor’s syndrome here. This is far more specific — how do we reconcile with the smallness of our own projects, the lack of ‘impact’ it has in a larger non-academic world that is largely indifferent to learning and scholarship (especially if it is about ‘trivialities’ like literature), and the tall claims we are forced to make? I had felt this for a long time, but found the words for it only recently when someone astutely remarked that a field where every other dissertation or book is field changing can simply have no coherence as an actual field.
It is very rare for an academic and especially a graduate student (I take An’s profile at face value) to express such thoughts, and in public. Terms like “cutting edge” and “radical” and “groundbreaking” are sprinkled throughout job application letters and letters of recommendation, in fields where there are often hundreds of applicants for a single (and often ill-paid and overworked) position. In that context, An’s words highlight the actual tensions and stress under which most academics are compelled to justify their work and very existence to a world that keeps demanding to know why they deserve any funding at all.
Brilliance and original visions do exist—a particular reading of Jane Austen could, for instance, compel the field to look anew at her work and, consequently, the ways in which we think of “women writers” and their place in history, and even history itself (and there is in fact a vast body of work on this, after years of Austen being read as a romance writer). An goes on to say, “I like learning more than I like my own research.” Ideally, academia and the world in general should sustain and support scholars and researchers whose work can either be about continuing to learn and teaching others how to learn, or doing research that seeks original insights, or some combination of both. We forget that research, even in cold archives, is a mode of learning. Culture tends to fetishise one or the other: the learner/teacher engaged with large numbers of people in classrooms, or the solitary genius grappling with huge intellectual problems in silence. The truth about knowledge is that it is produced in an untidy and unruly tumble, a messy intersection between learning and teaching.
We also forget that teaching requires brilliance to be effective. What, then, makes for a brilliant teacher? There’s a cultural tendency, fostered by countless reductive media representations, to think of such as charismatic (and as men)—but those can be the worst, aiming their perceived brilliance only at the students who are somewhat ahead of their peers and who spread the gospel of brilliance among their fellows. Some of the most brilliant teaching happens unseen and outside the classroom when, for instance, a professor spends hours in the office helping a nervous student grapple with new concepts. Or when they make a point of looking out for funding and research opportunities for students who are not as plugged into scholarly and social networks. None of this can be separated from that continent of thought and scholarly work that goes into the many separate projects that constitute a field of inquiry.
What makes an original vision is the extent to which it expresses something new even as we recognise and acknowledge its pasts: the ghosts of prior work, if you will. There is nothing new to be said, and there is always something new to be said. This regard for the past without a needless deference to it is, after all, why we care about plagiarism: an act that commits the violence of erasure.
You can read/support Jayaprakash Satyamurthy’s work here.
For more of my work on writing and publishing, see:
“Don’t Share Your Book Proposal.”
“I’m a Freelance Writer. I Refuse to Work for Free.”
“The Corruption of Influence: On Dimes Square, Byline, and the New York Times.”
And more here.
Many thanks to Hena Mehta.