Plagiarism

I ran across this really cool article “Annals of Culture: Something Borrowed” by Malcolm Gladwell in The New Yorker. It’s about plagiarism and how—just maybe—some people take the idea to an extreme, persecuting people for it to the point of ruining their career.
Now, his argument doesn’t come from a sympathetic stand point, nor is he advocating wholesale copying of other peoples texts; however, he is attempting to break open the single minded view that good writing, which does not plagiarize, stands on its own, free borrowing for others. As he puts it, “The final dishonesty of the plagiarism fundamentalists is to encourage us to pretend that these chains of influence and evolution do not exist, and that a writer’s words have a virgin birth and an eternal life.”
He is hitting on one of the fundamental ideas of Borgesian literary understanding: all of literature is one text. Any determined reading through English poetry, from Chaucer to Eliot, would surly back this statement up. When we read through and see repeated words and phrases, obvious borrowings of dramatic technique, etc., we wonder where the line is drawn—for example: the word “blank” has about three literary meanings all of which have been written upon by almost every major English poet. Or better yet, the evolution of Gods pronouncement, “I am that I am.”
This is interesting because the logical consequence is that when we speak of allusion, we should ask ourselves how far away we are from plagiarism. There is almost an imperceptible line between the two, and, as Gladwell points out, it is almost always a case of skillful writing. It is tempting to think of literary allusion as artful plagiarism, remembering, “The inventor knows how to borrow.”