Vitiation and Viswanathan

vitiate: "to spoil or impair the quality or efficacy of" Compact Oxford English Dictionary

Kaavya Viswanathan and her book, "How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got A Life", with its unfortunate infamy is sort of yesterday's news, but it's not too late for the other side of the story. It's a shame what happened to that poor girl. She's at Harvard, she had a publishing deal at only so young, and she has a great future ahead of her. I can think of three reasons right now to hate her. But after reading her book for an hour in the library, I thought it was a great book. It was funny and the description of the parents (which bear resemblance to overzealous people everywhere) is hilarious and certainly not lifted from any other source. But plagiarism is a big deal.

The question is: if the shoe is red with flowing red ribbons, but a mirror shows it to have dots and a wrapped yellow ribbon, is the mirror still a mirror?

"Utter originality is of course out of the question," said a great poet named Ezra Pound once. And, as discouraging as it sounds, it's mostly true. There are cases of books with similar phrases everywhere. There are only finitely many ways to express ideas and, no matter how boundless you think originality is, writers have the same idea once in a while. For a point of illustration, look at the following two quotes:

"All that glisters is not gold" Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice

"All that is gold does not glitter" Tolkien's Lord of the Rings

These two quotes are differ only slightly in meaning and use almost the same words (Tolkien added an extra "does") with order differing only slightly. The similarity of these two phrases are more substantial than the similarity between the "plagiarized" phrases in Viswanathan's book and their original counterpart. Viswanathan, at least, did change the proper names in the sentences that she "copied". But, I've never heard of Tolkien being denounced as a copycat. In fact, there are "similar" books everywhere. Many fantasy novels, written after Lord of the Rings, share plot components or setting components with Lord of the Rings. But, none of these books have been publicly ridiculed.

In particular, J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter shows certain characteristics of orphans and boarding school that can be traced to Dickens. But that certainly was not plagiarism. Why? Because it's okay to write Dickensian books as long as you don't copy specific plot details and students. But, is writing a book with the same structure another book really less atrocious than having a few lines that are similar to another book?

The fact of the matter is that Viswanathan's book has 320 pages and at most 5 pages of allegedly plagiarized material (about 40 phrases). Besides the phrases of questionable originality, Viswanathan managed to come up with approximately 315 other pages, some of which are very entertaining.

Vitiation is the word of the day. The word I actually wanted was the word that means "singled out for punishment for a crime that a large population of people commit" and describes the feeling of being pulled over for speeding when everyone else was going the same speed as you (so if anyone knows this word, please suggest it). But, did Viswanthan vitiate her book and her credibility as a writer by remembering her readings a little too well? Or did the vicious reading community vitiate them for her because of her overwhelming success? Aren't budding writer always told that they write what they read (and hence, go read some good books)? All this lack of originality and vitiating of careers - it's a little like weltschmerz, isn't it?