CBS Sunday Morning had a piece on plagiarism today that was kind of interesting. One guy they profiled, Quentin Rowan, apparently used to write entire books from clips of text from other works. Now, without attribution, that’s extremely dishonest and reprehensible, but with attribution, that’s a whole new literary art form! (Isn’t it?) It’s essentially making a collage with prose, creating an entire new work out of bits of other authors’ work, with context shifted to fit a new purpose. And it’s essentially using concepts from modern (visual) art, and applying it to literature. (Some modern artists made works out of collages of newspaper photographs or consumer packaging.) And in doing so, it’s basically plagiarizing that type of modern art style, so it’s double plagiarism.
But this is really a new type of art form when you think about it. Because every bit of text is taken out of context from somewhere else and repurposed for another plotline. And isn’t that really just a form of recycling? So it’s environmentally friendly: a sort of “green” writing. In fact, maybe this could be called “Green Fiction”, and have that little recycle logo graphic of the arrows in a triangle shape on the cover. And perhaps original writing could come to be called “Organic Writing”, since it’s created new and organically and is healthier, and a whole new kind of writing can simply be taking extant prose and putting it together like a jigsaw puzzle or like Lego to create something entirely new and different. And the most respected authors in this type of genre will be the ones who take their pilfered text from sources that are as different and opposite as possible for the new work: like prose from romance novels being used for gritty and graphic crime novels, children’s book prose being repurposed for graphic horror, racy sex novel prose becoming the building blocks for a spiritual book, boring statistical textbook stuff being shoehorned into edge-of-your-seat science fiction action, etc.
Yes, this could be an entire new form of literature! And now that books are more available in digital file format for e-readers, as opposed to in printed paper books, it makes much more sense to start this type of fiction now, since the bibliography section will have to be twice as long as the text itself! And when this form of writing truly takes off into its new successful standalone genre, guys like Quentin Rowan will not only be maligned as plagiarists, they’ll be hailed as creators and trailblazers of a whole new art from: plagiarism fiction!
And maybe this form of fiction could even serve as a challenging puzzle game, like a crossword puzzle. Here’s how it would work: Literature fans would read the new book, and they’d have to guess the book each pilfered bit of prose came from (the answers would be printed upside-down in the back of the book in the form of endnote attribution and a bibliography). Then, the answers, when correctly listed, would form the answer of some overarching question asked in the title of the book, like perhaps by all the first letters of all the answers spelling out some word, name, term, sentence, etc. It would be hours of fun for those who want an even more frustrating challenge than even the most difficult crossword puzzle could provide. And English Lit. professors would probably love this new kind of puzzle book, and they’d probably do well at this type of thing, too.
So maybe plagiarism could provide hours of fun for the intellectual set too (through literary puzzles, as suggested above), rather than just generating scorn and outrage, or simply being a cheater’s way of writing with intellectual theft. And for people with writer’s block, perhaps this could be a whole new literary frontier to explore and tame! Plus, if someone could design an automatic bibliography program that works from a complete database of published text on the Internet, perhaps simply writing down the plagiarized prose could create an automatic endnote and bibliographic reference at the end of the document, and writers would never have to worry about plagiarism anymore ever again (so long as they were writing over the Internet with this program. Oh, but then people might get lazy and forget that they have to provide references to the borrowed text! Oh, well, never mind: because that would provide them with the perfect excuse for their plagiarism: they forgot to attribute the source, because they got so used to the automatic attribution program doing it for them!).
