PLAGIARIST! . . . Maybe Let's Keep Accusations on the Down-Low

No, I'm not backing off of my mocking of romance novelist Cassie Edwards' unusual methods of writing dialog.  I had reviewed the 51 .pdf pages of comparisons of her sources and her books provided by the smartbitches and checked "Look Into the Book" myself first before I wrote a word.

But I've been steamed for a few weeks about the tendency for writers today (hardly ever good writers, but let's put that aside) to, let's see, what's the technical term?  Talk smack.  Yes, some people out there seem to get a big charge out of talking smack about dead writers who can't defend themselves.  If I looked into a classic author's work and found some problems -- or just plain didn't care for it -- do you know what I'd do?  Move on to the next work that I did enjoy and focus on that.

This just isn't satisfying for people with a jones to, I think, prove themselves better than the talents of the past who've enriched our world.

What started me off was a horrific piece of book jacket copy about Charles Dickens.  Did you know there are "scholarly" bits of info on the internet that refer to Dickens as "Charles John Huffam Dickens?"  I've read nearly everything Dickens ever wrote and have studied his writing off and on since college oh so very long ago (aww . . . well not SO long ago . . . maybe well).  I've never seen him referred to that way.  It's usually just "Dickens." 

Looking for the source of the horrible book jacket copy just now (and failing in that), I stumbled across this, from a blog that stopped last December, "The Sharp Side."  It's by an "experimental UK writer," Ellis Sharp, who has published three SF novels with "Zoilus Press."

"What should most concern us now, of course, are Dickens’s crimes against literature. His use of exclamation marks, say – scattered like sugar across the marzipan treats of anagnorisis and peripeteia. Worst of all, perhaps, is what he did to his finest novel, Great Expectations. Here, the whimsy and the sentiment are held back and Dickens delivers a dark, troubling study of delusion and obsession. But when his friend the hack bestseller writer Edward Bulwer Lytton deplored the unhappy ending, Dickens rushed to make amends. In place of the bleak and desolating original, Dickens substituted a trite romantic coincidence and the serene reassurance of closure. Of this cop-out new ending he wrote, ‘I have put in as pretty a little piece of writing as I could, and I have no doubt the story will be more acceptable through the alteration.’"

People are not stupid for enjoying twists of fate, role-reversals or sudden revelations in stories in which they are engaged in the characters (the meaning of the Aristotelian terms used above to make "Ellis Look Smart").  Such things are not as easy to fit into modern novels.  But they can fit, and do fit -- and people love them in the movies.  Of course anything that people might enjoy must By Definition! be Bad Writing!

But I'm not disturbed by this garden variety troglodyte snippery. 

It's "Oscar Wilde is a plagiarist" that torques me.  This came up on one of my ladies' lists as a statement of bald fact.  "Oscar Wilde plagiarized most of The Picture of Dorian Gray."

Oh, really?  Having read everything Oscar every published and his edited typescripts for Dorian Gray (he eagerly adopted the use of the typewriter to - I guess - plagiarize faster!), I could immediately say, "If he was copying, he certainly worked hard on it and changed a lot of things."

Checking a bit, the plagiarism accusations rest with the painter James McNeill Whistler.  A recent article in the Scotsman describes the view of a Scottish professor that takes Whistler's feud with Wilde at face value.  The professor also doesn't comprehend Wilde's desire to build upon his extensive classical education, and other ideas and writings of the past to form new aesthetic values and experiences. 

She told the Scotsman,

Wilde is known for being this big, very original personality," says Dr Michèle Mendelssohn, lecturer in English Literature at the University of Edinburgh. "But that personality came about by attaching himself to other people, being a sycophant and getting enough of these people until he could do his own thing. We allow Wilde the licence to be a plagiarist, but if any one of my students did this sort of thing - my God!"

Oscar Wilde is more often known by those who read him as being a great writer.  What has the development of his personality (and he had far more sycophants than he was a sycophant himself), which he did promote as a form of art, to do with his writing?  A charge of plagiarism requires more than "he was a sycophant to other people and used them."  It it were not so comically absurd a statement, it would be cruel, for this accusation to be made against a man who suffered so greatly as a result of giving himself to others, rather than trying to take something away, as the Professor describes.  And, even if completely true:  it is not plagiarism.

Today, the term for Oscar Wilde's borrowing of themes from earlier literature is well-known:  "intertextuality."  The source for the rumors that Oscar was a plagiarist does seem to have originated with his brief friendship and much longer rivalry with the painter James McNeill Whistler.  It was one of those famous literary or "artistic" feuds, culminating with Whistler's book, The Gentle Art of Making Enemies.

Whistler and Wilde were at war publically and privately for years.  The aphorism attributed to Whistler as a parting shot is famous:  "I wish I had said that!" Wilde exclaimed about one of Whistler's aphorisms.  "You will, Oscar," Whistler replied. "You will!"