Skip to main content

Life is imitation


Jim Jarmusch

In his book, The Seven Basic Plots, Christopher Booker says that most works of literature are repetitions of one of seven basic plots. Those seven plots are: 1. Overcoming the Monster, 2. Rags to Riches, 3. The Quest, 4. Voyage and Return, 5. Rebirth, 6. Comedy and 7. Tragedy. Thus David Copperfield is an imitation of The Ugly Duckling and Steven Spielberg’s Jaws has more in common with the ancient Beowulf than you might imagine.

Nothing is really original. Can’t be. Long ago, Plato said that art is an imitation of life. The philosopher was not quite happy about that either. The imitation takes you away from the ideal reality, he thought. You become like a cave dweller who mistakes a moving shadow for the reality. Plato’s disciple, Aristotle, was kinder towards writers and story tellers. Imitation is an essential aspect of human nature, he accepted. We can’t help being story tellers. We are all story tellers. And we take our stories from out there. We copy from the life around us.

Copy makers, that’s what we are. My fellow blogger, Anita, seems to be worried about this quintessential human nature. She raises the question at Indispire this week: How do you react when you come to realize that your idea has been copied? What would you like to say to the copycat?  Obviously she doesn’t mean the kind of copying that people from Plato to Booker meant. She means lifting of your lines by someone who then claims them as her/his own.

You can copy ideas. Every artist does that. Plato would say that God is the only original creator. We all just make copies of the ideals created by God. Well, if you think like me that God is only an idea created by us human beings, you will nevertheless agree that there’s a lot of copying of ideas in the world of writing. Most of my ideas come from great writers of the past. I owe much to Albert Camus and Dostoevsky and many others.

You shouldn’t copy words, however. You copy ideas. There aren’t too many ideas out there anyway. Whatever there are have already been taken. What do you do then as a writer? Steal the same things, wrap them in new clothes and present them as your own to the world. What else? That’s how it goes from the epic Mahabharata to Steinbeck’s East of Eden.

Steinbeck didn’t copy words from the epic, however, as, say, Melania Trump did at the Republican National Convention in 2016 when she allegedly plagiarised Michelle Obama’s 2008 speech. Melania stole ideas rather than words, I think. Maybe, that wasn’t stealing even. Because she spoke about the values of hard work and respect for others which were taught by her parents. Michelle said the same thing. Now, can’t two parents teach the same things to their children? Well, Melania could have dressed the words in her own clothes. Maybe, she’s not much concerned about clothes, you see.

British author Adrian Jacobs claimed that J K Rowling stole many of her ideas for Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire from the book, The Adventures of Willy the Wizard. Even J R R Tolkien was accused of stealing from Ring of the Nibelung, a Wagnerian opera. There are infinite such allegations. The world moves ahead in spite of them. People continue to read Tolkien and watch Harry Potter or vice-versa.

Now, to answer my friend Anita. If I see someone copying me, my first reaction would be: “Wow! Did I deserve this?” Imitation is a form of admiration, isn’t it, Anita? The person who copies you or from you is telling you indirectly that you are worth it. I’m still waiting for such a noble person to come along and make me feel so worthwhile.


Comments

  1. Anita SabatMarch 17, 2020 at 8:15 PM

    Such noble thoughts :)
    Yes, there's a saying- "Imitation is the finest form of flattery".
    But, the original thinker does deserve credit, doesn't she/he?
    I feel a lot as I have faced this many many times :(
    If anyone likes our style or idea or words, they can simply quote us or at least mention our name and give us credit. Sadly, many intellectual thieves don't care about this and thus there's plagiarism :(

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalMarch 17, 2020 at 9:33 PM

      There's plagiarism, of course. I looked at it lightly.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
47 comments
Read more

Relatives and Antidepressants

One of the scenes that remain indelibly etched in my memory is from a novel of Malayalam writer O V Vijayan. Father and little son are on a walk. Father tells son, “Walk carefully, son, otherwise you may fall down.” Son: “What will happen if I fall?” Father: "Relatives will laugh.” I seldom feel comfortable with my relatives. In fact, I don’t feel comfortable in any society, but relatives make it more uneasy. The reason, as I’ve understood, is that your relatives are the last people to see any goodness in you. On the other hand, they are the first ones to discover all your faults. Whenever certain relatives visit, my knees buckle and the blood pressure shoots up. I behave quite awkwardly. They often describe my behaviour as arising from my ego, which used to be a oversized in yesteryear. I had a few such visitors the other day. The problem was particularly compounded by their informing me that they would be arriving by about 3.30 pm and actually reaching at about 7.30 pm. ...
16 comments
Read more

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...
19 comments
Read more

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...
16 comments
Read more

The Ugly Duckling

Source: Acting Company A. A. Milne’s one-act play, The Ugly Duckling , acquired a classical status because of the hearty humour used to present a profound theme. The King and the Queen are worried because their daughter Camilla is too ugly to get a suitor. In spite of all the devious strategies employed by the King and his Chancellor, the princess remained unmarried. Camilla was blessed with a unique beauty by her two godmothers but no one could see any beauty in her physical appearance. She has an exquisitely beautiful character. What use is character? The King asks. The play is an answer to that question. Character plays the most crucial role in our moral science books and traditional rhetoric, religious scriptures and homilies. When it comes to practical life, we look for other things such as wealth, social rank, physical looks, and so on. As the King says in this play, “If a girl is beautiful, it is easy to assume that she has, tucked away inside her, an equally beauti...
31 comments
Read more