I’ve done this before. This is not the first time I’ve done this. I’ve done this before. This is me, by the way, Steve, not a funny character. Although it is hard to tell if this is really me or just a facet of me that I want to project to you or just a performance of a part of me. Let’s just say it is really me.
I want to talk to you tonight about originality.
We all want to be original. Unless it is how our aunts described really annoying people: “Oh, he’s an original, he is. They broke the mold when they made him. One of a kind. Bless his heart.”
But there is a currency to being the original something or other. Whether it is the first to have accomplished a feat or the originator a certain type of pizza or the first to premier a certain character on stage, we give extra weight to that which has primacy. If you are earliest on the timeline, somehow this makes you better. You were the first.
But being the first seems like a fairly weak claim in terms of quality.
In the 18th century, William Lauder accused John Milton of plagiarism by offering evidence of other contemporary poems in Latin that echoed Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost. Milton’s poem was plagiarized because he had borrowed lines from other poets before him, Lauder claimed. Although these accusations caught the attention of several critics, Lauder was later exposed as a fraud and a forger who had a political beef with Milton’s legacy and died in disgrace. Lauder had fabricated his “proof” by translating Paradise Lost into Latin and interpolating these lines into other neo-Latin poems.This was before Google or Turnitin.com, so no one could just search for the lines to see if Lauder was telling the truth. He wasn’t and ended up a shopkeeper in the Caribbean, which doesn’t sound all that bad.
Of course, the content of Milton’s poem is hardly original: Milton was basically rewriting the first part of The Book Genesis, and he borrowed just about every trope and technique from all of the great epics that came before him. So, although he was one of a kind–just ask his daughters who had to transcribe the whole poem while the blind Milton dictated over 10,000 lines of verse– he wouldn’t have been that without all of the writers who came before him. He did claim that his poem was going to tackle “Things unattempted yet in Prose or Rhime.” Which is pretty ballsy, but he wasn’t the first or only person to try to “justify the ways of God to man.” So, let’s say that Milton is an original–but that doesn’t mean everyone wants to read his book-length poem.
There is a philosophical puzzle about the ship of Theseus. It goes something like this: Theseus, the mythical king of Athens, freed the children of Athens after slaying the minotaur and sailed away to Delos. Each year for generations the people of Athens would commemorate this feat by taking the ship out of the seas to trace the path Theseus took. The Athenians, wanting to respect their history, carefully replaced each plank of the ship as it started to deteriorate. The question becomes, “At what point would the boat no longer be the same boat?” Another version of this has Theseus still at sea and repairing the ship piece by piece. Whenever he replaces a piece, he throws the old one overboard. Another ship behind him gathers these planks and reconstructs the ship. Over a period of time, Theseus has replaced all of the parts of his shape with new ones and the trailing ship has re-constructed the parts that were thrown overboard. They both arrive to the port. Which one is the original ship? The one that Theseus has been at helm nonstop? Or the one that has all of the original pieces? Philosophers, ammirite?
What is it that we want when we want to be original? We all groan when newscasters tell us that something that happened yesterday was unprecedented. But then historians point out that most of what is happening has happened before, but maybe in some other way. History might not repeat, but it often rhymes.
It seems like we need things to fit into some sort of pattern or have some sort of predictability for us to make sense of it all.
When I was a PhD student, I was working on my dissertation about plagiarism. Of course, every other person thought they were being original when they asked me if I was going to just copy the whole thing. I didn’t–although I had several recurring nightmares about cryptoamnesia–a situation where you think you are being original but you just have forgotten that you heard those words before.
I got the idea to study plagiarism my very first semester as a student at the University of Michigan. I had assigned a throw-away assignment really–put some words on the page and then come into office hours so we can get to know each other. It wasn’t even graded. A low-stakes assignment, as they say. One student showed up with his writing sample, and I read it with him sitting uncomfortably close in my tiny windowless office. As I was reading, I thought, “This is awful; it isn’t even wikipedia level of good.” I asked him what he was hoping to create–I think I might have said, where would this live outside of this assignment? And he told me that it was like one of the essays at the back of Time magazine or maybe on wikipedia. I said, let’s pull up wikipedia and see how it compares. No, more like the Time magazine essay, he said with a little more urgency. It’ll be easy to compare it to Wikipedia, thinking that maybe we could talk a little about audience or sentence structure or whatnot.
As the page loaded, I noticed that I was looking at his essay, or rather I had been looking at a wikipedia article reassembled on the page in the guise of his assignment.
Usually when we encounter plagiarism as teachers, we are alone in our offices and have time to process the anger, frustration, and dread before seeing the plagiarist face to face. But here, I was discovering it in real time. I think I said something like, “I need to make a copy of this for my records.” Which now feels a little ironic. As I walked down the hall pondering my next steps, I felt like I was in a bit of a dilemma–how do I give a student a zero on an assignment worth no points? Or do I turn him in to the Writing Program Director and have him risk getting expelled or otherwise punished in the first week of his college career? I had wanted to get to know the students a little by having them write this assignment. What had I learned about this kid?
I have told this story before. This isn’t the first time I’ve told this story.
This evening is a remix of what has come before. Some of the script is the same, some of it new, some of it was supposed to be the same but I forgot the lines and made something up. I’ve copied some recipes I found online–did you know that you can’t copyright recipes? I’ve made some adjustments or mistakes that have created something new. I first performed Rocco Bamdesi almost 30 years ago–he used to do the Bamdesi Death Roll as an entrance–and Arthur Pretense first sat down at his Art Table around the same time. But they have entered into a new plot line and I’m a different person, so the whole thing feels new to me. But also precedented.
For those of you who have seen this show, you might have remembered that this is interactive part of the evening. I’m a teacher; I can’t help but give out assignments.
You’ll get a small envelope with a card inside–that’s for you. I would like you to jot down something that is both old and new to you. Feel free to share it with the people around you. What is originality anyways?