Plagiarism and a book recommendation

[ivyfic]

And now, yet another plagiarism scandal, because clearly Cassie Edwards wasn't enough for one month. This time, New York Post sex columnist Claudia Lonow stole her questions for her very first column from Savage Love. Savage Love, the most widely read sex column. She was caught and fired in less than a day.

There's also news that the lawsuit over a joke book has finally been settled. In this case, the author compiled jokes from nineteen different books…and didn't ask permission of anyone.

There seem to be new plagiarism scandals every couple of months, with copyright infringement and fraudulent memoir cases to fill the time in between. I really don't think this is anything new, or a worse problem now than in the past, I just think it's so much easier to catch plagiarists now with the advent of Google and (especially) Google Book.

What strikes me about all these cases is the reactions of the accused—they always claim they did nothing wrong. Doesn't everyone copy sentences out of reference material? How else are you supposed to get questions for a column if not by stealing them? Isn't this how everyone writes? It's a bizarre mixture of defensiveness, entitlement and naiveté.

Which brings me to a fantastic book I read a few months ago (stay with me, here). When the Ground Turns in Its Sleep by Sylvia Sellers-Garcia is about a young man, raised in America, who returns to Guatemala, from which his parents fled during the revolution, to reconnect with his past. This sounds like so many other books that are tours around the human suffering happening all over the globe, but it's not.

What makes When the Ground Turns in Its Sleep unique is its narrator, Nitido Aman, who is a compulsive liar. The extent of his lies is slowly revealed throughout the book, but he never acknowledges that they are lies. To him, they are alternate truths. When he gets kicked out of grad school for plagiarism, it's not because he stole someone else's words to write his own memoir but because he imagined an alternate history for himself where this other person's words were his truth. When he allows villagers in Guatemala to treat him as their priest, he's not impersonating a priest, he's merely doing what's expected of him. When he preaches sermons stolen from his books, he's just sharing God's word the best way he can.

His fluid relationship with truth is fascinating. He doesn't lie for self-aggrandizement or greed. His lies are often transparently obvious and will inevitably be found out. So why does he do it? Most of us have had to deal with a compulsive liar at some point in our life, and there's always the question of why. Most fictional portrayals of liars I've seen have settled for either saying "we can never know" or "because they're bad." But not here.

Aman seems to be lying to protect himself, from even the smallest social embarrassments. He does it to protect his view of himself, to avoid admitting his own shortcomings. He's like the five-year-old who spills his milk and tells his parents the cat did it, but he's never developed the ability to shoulder that responsibility, so every time he's confronted, he lies, in both big and small ways. He doesn't even realize that he's doing it, and doesn't see that every time he lies it makes the embarrassment worse.

I can't emphasize enough how subtle and brilliant the depiction of Aman in this book is. The author explores the ways Aman edits and revises his own history, and ties it in with the ways that the villagers in Guatemala do it as well. Aman's parents never told him about his native country; his childhood is full of secrets and silences. So is it any surprise, that in the absence of a connection to his own history, he has made one up and mistaken it for truth? The book constantly confronts him with the discrepancies as he sees how Guatemala actually is, so you watch as he revises and revises himself to fit.

The villagers are guilty of the exact same behavior; in their cases, editing away and writing over the atrocities they witnessed during the revolution. In one of the most striking scenes in the book, Aman takes the confession of the villagers. Only they don't confess to sins—they tell him of their physical ailments. They have turned their guilt into illness, as if when they cure one, they'll cure the other.

So throughout the book you see how Aman has been scarred by these events that happened thousands of miles away from him. You see how far the echoes can extend.

There are parts of the book that didn't quite work for me, but I've never seen a more convincing and real portrayal of that mix of entitlement and naiveté I see in the protests of all these plagiarists.

It's the sort of book that you want to discuss, but is also, unfortunately, unlikely to be read by enough people for that to happen. Even so, I highly recommend it. And if anyone reads it, let me know what you think.

Comments

[svilleficrecs.livejournal.com]

I get that plagiarism is something the intellectually lazy do, but what always blows my mind is when they don't even bother with the most basic scrambling of words. I ADMIT that maybe once or twice, in middle school, I copied a line or two from a reference text (though my bullshit ability was finely honed even then that I usually didn't have to.) STILL, even as a 14 year old I knew to mix the clauses up, pull out a thesaurus and swap a word or two, and jumble up what I stole so as to make it less recognizable.

But the retard w/ the savage love questions (and the retard with the Savage Thunder) were doing whole sentences unchanged.

I mean if you're going to save yourself the effort of thinking up original shit, why not expend 1/10 of the saved effort on obscuring your INTELLECTUAL DISHONESTY. *huge huge eyeroll*

And I'm sorry, plagiarising sex column questions? How fucking hard is it to come up with a fake one of those. OR ASK YOUR FRIENDS.

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

It seems like the logic behind the Savage Love this is:
a) She didn't copy anything Dan Savage wrote, so it's not plagiarism
b) It was a write-in letter, so it's free for anyone to use
c) Her job is to answer the questions, which should magically appear in her inbox, so she's totally allowed to take someone else's for her first column

It's this sort of psychological blindspot for it that got me thinking about When the Ground Turns in Its Sleep, because that's the only book I've ever read that made that kind of thinking make sense to me.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_abulafia/]

It was a write-in letter, so it's free for anyone to use

I mean, she realizes that that shit is really, really heavily edited for style and clarity, right?

[amari-z.livejournal.com]

The book sounds interesting. You've convinced me to add it to the 34,576 books on my amazon wishlist. I'll let you know when I read it--although we might both be old ladies by then. ;)

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

I know the feeling. And I forgot to mention one important factor--Aman is a very sympathetic character. You do like him, even with all his fucked-up-ness.