(2 of 2)
Plagiarism at least proclaims that some written words are valuable enough to steal. If the language is magnificent, the sin is comprehensible: the plagiarist could not resist. But what if the borrowed stuff is a flat, lifeless mess -- the road kill of passing ideas? In that case there is less risk, but surely no joy at all. (Does the plagiarist ever feel joy?) Safer to steal the duller stones. None but the dreariest specialists will remember them or sift for them in the muck.
The Commandments warn against stealing, against bearing false witness, against coveting. Plagiarius is kidnapper in Latin. The plagiarist snatches the writer's brainchildren, pieces of his soul. Plagiarism gives off a shabby metaphysic. Delaware's Senator Joseph Biden, during the 1988 presidential primaries, expanded the conceptual frontier by appropriating not just the language of British Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock but also of his poignant Welsh coal-mining ancestors. Biden transplanted the mythic forebears to northeastern Pennsylvania. He conjured them coming up out of the mines to play football. "They read poetry and wrote poetry and taught me how to sing verse." A fascinating avenue: the romantic plagiarist reinvented himself and his heritage entirely. He jumped out of his own skin and evicted his ancestors from theirs as well.
Why plagiarize? Out of some clammy hope for fame, for a grade, for a forlorn fix of approbation. Out of dread of a deadline, or out of sheer neurotic compulsion. Plagiarism is a specialized mystery. Or the mystery may be writing itself. Many people cannot manage it. They borrow. Or they call up a term- paper service.
The only charming plagiarism belongs to the young. Schoolchildren shovel information out of an encyclopedia. Gradually they complicate the burglary, taking from two or three reference books instead of one. The mind (still on the wrong side of the law) then deviously begins to intermingle passages, reshuffle sentences, disguise raw chunks from the Britannica, find synonyms, reshape information until it becomes something like the student's own. A writer, as Saul Bellow has said, "is a reader moved to emulation." Knowledge transforms theft. An autonomous mind emerges from the sloughed skin of the plagiarist.
There is a certain symmetry of the childish in the King case. Something childish in King's student mind was still copying out of encyclopedias, just as something immature in his sexual development had him going obsessively after women. And something childish in every mind rejects imperfection in heroes. King's greatness came from somewhere else entirely, a deeper part of the forest. No character is flawless, and if it were flawless, that would be its flaw. Everything in nature, Emerson wrote, is cracked.