Various forms of plagiarism

There are certain words whose very phonemes sound as foul as the things they denote: "herpes," for example, or "sigmoidoscopy." Not all are medical. A really terrible word in my field of interest is "plagiarism." There is now and again a sensational scandal involving plagiarism among the world professorate, and always a certain amount among Princeton undergraduates. For instance there is the famous history major who was so thoughtful as to leave between the pages of his submitted thesis the bill from the agency that provided it. More recently there was one of our famous student writers, "creative" indeed, who won fame and the lucrative Shellabarger Prize for a short story written by an M.F.A. student at the University of Texas. The Internet, an apparently inexhaustible aid to the Imaginatively Challenged, has proved an ambiguous ally. Suspicious professors now have an effective tool in Google, creatively employed, and other more powerful (and more expensive) electronic detectives.

The playwright Bryony Lavery, whose much-praised play "Frozen" tenderly examines the psyche of a serial killer, has now been exposed as a ripoff artiste. She took chunks of her dramatic dialogue, unreprocessed, from a psychiatrist's casebook and a "New Yorker" profile. So far as I am concerned, people named "Bryony" are asking for trouble even without writing plays in celebration of homicidal maniacs, but I still feel sorry for her. There is something perverse about the modern conception of plagiarism. I say "modern" in contrast to the medieval conception, which was much better. Modern plagiarism is trying to pass somebody else's work off as you own. Medieval plagiarists tried to pass their work off as somebody else's. It was particularly good if you could make people think it was written by Augustine, Gregory or Bernard, since somebody might actually read it. Hence the vast library of "Pseudo-Augustine." It would be extremely helpful to one overworked professor if he could occasionally whip up the odd lecture from PseudoFleming.com.

There is one arena of contemporary life in which medieval plagiarism survives in honored and well-remunerated form. I refer to the craft of the political "speechwriter." If some desperate junior pays a hundred bucks to a term paper mill, we'll throw him out on his ear. If President Josiah Bartlet pays macrobucks to Sam Seaborn or his lame successor Will Bailey to write his oral reports, critics call it "a dazzling vision of American political reality." I take my examples from the fictional "vision" of "The West Wing" as being somewhat less painful than the "American political reality" itself. Do you really think the junior senator from Massachusetts penned the immortal line "My name is John Kerry, and I am reporting for duty"? One certainly hopes not, given the outside chance that he still might win. How about the Veep's recent zinger, "Now, if they couldn't stand up to the pressures that Howard Dean represented, how can we expect them to stand up to al-Qaeda?'"

I know these politicos are busy and that they have to give a lot of talks. But so am, do I. Bag the "Muse of Fire" stuff. My dream is to get my own speechwriter. I am hoping that after November Sam Seaborn himself will still be looking for a job. He's an alumnus ('88), and I remember him vividly from preceptorial; I think I could lure him back to Princeton. Sam is cool. Or I guess in California it's gnarly? He has the most interesting sex life of any Chaucer scholar I know, and his essay on "Flatulence and Fatuity in Chaucer's Fabliaux" might have been an A even under the new system. It would be so great to be able to turn to my very own speechwriter and say, "Look, Sam, I need fifty minutes on the 'Knight's Tale' pronto, Thursday noon at the very latest. You know our policy on the 'Knight's Tale' — a celebration of harmonious hierarchies under the metaphor of marriage? At least ten minutes on the chivalric credentials of the narrator in relation to the ancient fiction of the Theban knights. Keep on message, but stick in chuckles every four minutes, and I'll need a real thigh-slapper at about the forty-minute marker. Make sure at least to imply the bankruptcy of all competing interpretations, but don't go too negative. Work in something about, you know, how the tale exemplifies the old eternal verities." Then I'd have some time free to watch TV or plan invasions or stuff. John V. Fleming is the Louis W. Fairchild '24 professor of English. He can be reached at jfleming@princeton.edu. His column appears on Mondays.