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Plagiarism is always aspirational. In a wish to have someone else take their place, or supply their words, plagiarists generally steal something better than they might write themselves. In this way, though it may seem an anxiety about status or a nervousness about originality, plagiarism paradoxically displays privilege—the belief that I could’ve thought of it if I’d had enough time or desire. This is one reason that while the hoax regularly refers to race, plagiarism is about class. But it isn’t the class warfare those few “in favor” of plagiarism declare, seeing it as a radical recapturing or conceptual collage. The plagiarist is no Robin Hood of words. Rather, plagiarism is the very definition of work without work. While hoaxers want to be someone else, plagiarists want someone else to be them.
In the novel How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life (2006), Kaavya Viswanathan details the aspirations of the main character, who seeks to get into Harvard, and by implication, realizes her own wish to become both a best-selling author and a polymath. A Harvard undergraduate herself, Viswanathan was marketed as many things in the run-up to the book’s publication, especially as a young overachiever who resembles her title character. Despite the character’s perfect scores and extracurriculars, when a Harvard interviewer asks Opal why she wants to go there and she cannot answer, he insists she pursue having fun or “getting a life” with the same kind of fervor with which she pursued perfection. Opal’s parents are also in on the project of making her more commercial, you could call it, with a schedule for getting busy in another sense, trading what they called HOWGIH (How Opal Will Get Into Harvard) for HOWGAL (How Opal Will Get A Life). Dating and television, the American dream.
The review copy I tracked down of Opal Mehta has an extraordinary amount of supporting material—advance press, publisher statements, reviews, and copies of glossy magazine features—that first accompanied the book and continued to accumulate in the few weeks it was on the shelves. Focused on Viswanathan’s backstory as a Harvard undergraduate—“The Six-Figure Sophomore” the Boston Globe would coo on 22 February 2006—the book’s press packet purposefully confuses the author photo and front cover, Viswanathan and Opal: “One is a sophomore at Harvard, and one will do just about anything to get in. Meet Kaavya Viswanathan. . . and Opal Mehta.” The sheer preponderance of evidence surrounding the book is actually reminiscent of the kinds of proof marshaled only after a plagiarist is discovered—usually listing the kinds of parallels between passages that ultimately indict the thief—not to mention the passages the plagiarist herself amasses, or the de rigueur excuses a plagiarist produces to say she isn’t one.
The book’s advance publicity had certainly helped, as Opal Mehta quickly climbed the bestseller list—unfortunately for Viswanathan, it was climbing right behind the latest of Megan McCafferty’s series of young adult books that began with Sloppy Firsts and Second Helpings. Within days after the book was published in April 2006, the Harvard Crimson revealed that Viswanathan had plagiarized several portions from McCafferty. Reaching for thirds, Viswanathan helped herself to both of McCafferty’s books to cook up her own. One similarity soon spread to a baker’s dozen of exact wordings, and less than a fortnight later, after previously featuring the author in a fluff piece, the New York Times reported, “The Crimson cited 13 instances in which Ms. Viswanathan’s book closely paralleled Ms. McCafferty’s work. But there are at least 29 passages that are strikingly similar.” All this gives new meaning to the question posed in the press release: “How far would you go for that one thing you’ve always wanted?”
Why, when they steal, do plagiarists take from popular material? Why not stick to the obscure? Or is it that we only catch those plagiarists who become popular themselves? Most plagiarism cases, as with other hoaxes, include what amount to clues planted almost expressly to be found. In the midst of the mounting accusations, Viswanathan went on the Today show where anchor Katie Couric subtly undermined the book, asking the tough but obvious question just weeks after it had gotten published. I remember watching that episode at the time, cringing. Bravo for Viswanathan for keeping what appears to be a previously scheduled appearance; she’s in full damage control, saying she’s sorry and that it was unintentional. When discovered, many do what Viswanathan did at first: plead subconscious stealing. (Don’t try this at your local Walmart.)
This is the first defense of the plagiarist: I only did it once, and by accident. The second defense is plagiarized from the first: I only did it once. Yet as Mallon reminds us, “Plagiarism is something people may do for a variety of reasons but almost always something they do more than once.” The “unconscious stealing plea” goes hand in hand with the idea of only doing it once—not simply that I did it just that one time, but rather, in that one instance too, I was so unconscious as to be blameless.
To rewatch the episode now is to see the hoaxer plead innocence in a way familiar enough that it may seem plagiarized from some clichéd script. Indeed, all this was happening within months of James Frey, “Nasdijj,” and JT LeRoy implosions. Where the fake memoirist plays at suffering, the plagiarist, like the impostor, often performs innocence. In Viswanathan’s case this doesn’t mean just “not guilty” of the charges before her, but innocence as a permanent state—one feminine, youthful, American. Such enforced innocence—gendered and often raced—may explain why, in the press material of the young author, she is regularly referred to as a “starlet,” a term usually reserved for cinema. No matter her actual age, a starlet performs youthfulness—and matching beauty. Such youthfulness quickly if quietly signifies newness, freshness, and originality in turn, an approachable prodigy.
The early notices and prepress frame Viswanathan as a “girl wonder” a century after the iconic figure’s heyday. “A clever novel by a promising author. . . one of the hottest young talents in fiction,” says the Boston Globe. There’s a sense too of the author as somehow a new invention: the “young adult” (or YA as it’s known) Indian author; or more exactly, the Indian YA one. But by far the biggest suggestion of all is that the fictional Opal is true to life, a double who’s her and not-her. Opal Mehta is plagiarized from Viswanathan.
I don’t mean to substitute Freud’s couch for the Today shows, yet we must be able to see the ways our culture’s cult of innocence and youth is also the culture of plagiarism. Newness at all costs yields pressure not just on the potential author but also on the culture that cannot be honest about its recycling, much less its trash.
The New York Times reported on 25 April, “In an e-mail message yesterday afternoon, Ms. Viswanathan, 19, said that in high school she had read the two books she is accused of borrowing from, “Sloppy Firsts” and “Second Helpings,” and that they ‘spoke to me in a way few other books did.’” The reports continues, quoting Viswanathan as saying, “Recently, I was very surprised and upset to learn that there are similarities between some passages in my novel, How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life, and passages in these books.” The press release goes on to reiterate that any borrowing was “unintentional and unconscious.” I didn’t do it; Opal Mehta must have.
Is such a story believable on its poorly made-up face? How can Viswanathan recall and rewrite, word for word, a book she claimed to have forgotten she even read?
The first rule of influence is that there isn’t any. The second rule of influence is that it is everywhere. In the case of Opal Mehta, it wouldn’t matter for much longer which was which. For Viswanathan’s book—a phrase we can no longer use—turns out to have filched from a number of other authors, including fellow writers of Indian descent Salman Rushdie and Tanuja Desai Hidier, who published a novel titled Born Confused (2002), dubbed “the first book with a US female teen desi heroine.” Desi, to quote the contemporaneous, now-defunct website Sepia Mutiny, is “slang for the cultures of South Asia and the diaspora. It’s similar to homeboy, paesano or boricua. Etymology: deshi, Hindi/Urdu for ‘from the country,’ ‘from the motherland.’ Pronounced ‘they-see,’ it’s the opposite of pardesi, foreigner.” Opal Mehta’s publicity claims of being a new, original voice are not even true in terms of Desi culture.
