[Reader-list] Blog posting on the Da Vinci Trial

[Sandipto Dasgupta]

This is a follow up on my earier posting on the DaVinci trial.. this is a blog from the Guardian Culture Blog by sarah Crown... if anyone wants to post comments on this they can go to http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/culturevulture/archives/2006/02/28/originality_sins.html
 
Before I go any further, I should probably admit that I've lifted this blog post wholesale from a Peruvian literary website. OK, I haven't really. But I have trawled around the internet looking for examples of what other people have written on the subject of plagiarism. Who can say where reference stops and theft begins?
If I were to write a piece on whether it is in fact reasonable to accuse an author of plagiarism on the basis of his or her regurgitation of another person's ideas, I would undoubtedly end up substantially echoing the thoughts someone else has already expressed on the subject. It's hardly groundbreaking stuff, after all. But would that person - or persons - be justified in hauling me up in court for breach of copyright? 
All of this unoriginal rambling is of course prompted by the literary story of the moment: the claim by Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, authors of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, that Dan Brown lifted "the central theme" of their book for his uber-bestselling novel, The Da Vinci Code. 
Although Baigent and Leigh are officially suing Brown's publishers for breach of copyright, if the court finds in favour of them, it's Brown himself who would be humiliated. There is still something deeply sordid about plagiarism: defined as the act of presenting someone else's work as your own, it necessarily involves subterfuge and the dishonourable desire to take credit for something for which you're not responsible. As far as transgressions go, it's a singularly shameful one.
And yet, according to famousplagiarists.com, the threat of potential public humiliation was not enough to stop some of our finest authors from indulging in the practice. TS Eliot, Jack London and Coleridge were all apparently at it; in an excellent post on the literary blog The Valve, Miriam Burstein points out that Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray "includes a chapter distilled from JK Huysmans' A Rebours". More recently, JK Rowling's Harry Potter oeuvre was called into dispute when another children's author, Nancy Stouffer, accused the Potter author of lifting key details from Stouffer's own books. The court found in favour of Rowling and even went so far as to accuse Stouffer of lying and doctoring evidence to support her claims. It's also impossible to get more than five minutes into a conversation on Shakespeare without someone trotting out the oft-repeated (and well-documented) accusation that the Bard borrowed plots from all over the place.
But, unlike today's authors, Shakespeare kept the whole issue of 'borrowing' in perspective. Not only did he make no attempt to conceal the sources of his plays, he even went so far as to write about his activities. Take Sonnet 76, which begins "Why is my verse so barren of new pride / So far from variation or quick change?". 
As all good postmodernists know, there is no such thing as an original idea. There is, technically, nothing stopping two people having precisely the same thought, especially on such a well-trodden subject as religion. As somebody somewhere once said, originality is the art of remembering what you heard but forgetting where you heard it. 
So let's forget about all this plagiarism nonsense. The far more interesting aspect of the Dan Brown case, in my opinion, is the Da Vinci-lite conspiracy theory I came up with all by myself, way back in 2005. The Da Vinci Code and The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail are both, thanks to a series of industry takeovers, published by Random House. Surely this entire farrago is nothing more than a huge sales-driving stunt, carefully orchestrated by Random House to manipulate us poor, impressionable readers? The court case will no doubt generate fantastic pre-publicity for the Da Vinci Code film; meanwhile, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail has shot up the Amazon bestseller charts from number 173 yesterday lunchtime to number 10 at the time of writing. I suspect marketing management on the grandest scale.
It's a great theory, isn't it? But I bet at least half of you reading this have already come up with it yourselves. And to those of you who not only thought it but actually had the foresight to jot it down somewhere: I'll see you in court.