"The Plagiarist's Tale"

After I posted on 2/19/12 about a 2/6/12 New Yorker story about Chinese workplace novels, I read two additional fascinating book-related articles in The New Yorker, this time in the February 13 & 20, 2012 issue; I will write about one today and one next time. The first article, “The Plagiarist’s Tale,” by Lizzie Widdicombe, details the case of Quentin Rowan, who wrote under the pen name Q. R. Markham, and whose works over a period of 15 years were patchworks of hundreds of excerpts from the work of other authors, some quite famous. Widdicombe points out that “originality is a relative concept in literature,” as “ideas are doomed to be rehashed….Rowan’s method, though – constructing his work almost entirely from other people’s sentences and paragraphs – makes his book a singular literary artifact,” or, according to Thomas Mallon, “an ‘off-the-charts case’ both in the extent of the plagiarism and in the variety of Rowan’s sources.” The article delves into Rowan’s background, and the way in which he gradually plagiarized more and more, while constantly fearing and believing he would get caught, as he eventually -- but only when his novel “Assassin of Secrets” was published and sold well -- did. Rowan characterizes his plagiarism as an addiction, one as powerful as alcoholism -- an interesting take on plagiarism!