In school, one is taught that plagiarizing is bad and that one should never do it. It's basically stealing isn't it? That's why there are laws such as those of copyright and things such as patents. If you patent something, you put it in a safe where, if it is stolen, it can be traced back to the thief in order to put him behind bars. In my school there was a whole campaign regarding academic dishonesty. They used pamphlets and everything. According to my school's NHS, after graduation, these behaviors could lead to economic ruin.
Well, in Reality Hunger, David Shields decides to throw all this out the window. 0% of this manifesto is written by Shields himself. In Layman's terms, this text is a bunch of ctrl c and ctrl v. That isn't really in Layman's terms you say? Well, let me put it simply. Remember that poem you wrote in first grade where you misspelled flower? That required more writing that Shields' Reality Hunger. Don't get me wrong, I am not taking anything away from Shields. His manifesto is probably better than your childhood poem. In fact, this manifesto is regarded as brilliant by many. He might not have written anything, but he still had to think of where to put each statement and what would be accomplished by doing that. In the end, aren't we all writing with words that are not our own? We didn't invent them. They were fed to us by our parents during our first years and by teachers after that. What's the difference between a word and a phrase? This post right now is being written with a great amount of stolen property. Shields was just thinking bigger by using fragments instead of simple words.
Moving on, in his fourth chapter, "d trials by google," Shields mentions many writers with controversial stories. Among these are James Frey, JT LeRoy, and Misha Defonseca. The one that really caught my attention was JT LeRoy since statement 96 said that "'JT LeRoy' was nothing more or less than a highly developed pen name." This led me to conduct a research on who exactly is JT LeRoy. It turns out that she is a woman. It's like playing Metroid for the NES for the first time. The whole time you think that you're playing as the tough bounty hunter, Samus, but then at the end you find out: Samus is a girl?! A moment that changed gaming. Well, not really since the people that played it got over it soon enough. Nowadays, gamers are like, "Ok, Nintendo. Samus is a woman. We know!" Going back to JT LeRoy if that's even her real name (it isn't. It's Laura Albert), the reason this caused great controversy wasn't because sexist men couldn't stand having a female writer (she revealed herself in 2005, a time where I hope this is no longer an issue). The real reason behind the hate was that this JT LeRoy persona that she created was thought to be real by the readers. They believed that there was actually a JT LeRoy who had lived through all the events that he wrote about. Turns out that this person that you admired or were intrigued by is just an invented character. Some people are ought to be angry. It's like that whole fake Paul McCartney story where apparently Paul died in a car crash, and the MI6 replaced him with a Canadian cop in order to prevent various fan girl suicides. It's relatively similar if you take away the death, MI6, and the Canadian cop. Alright, it isn't similar at all. But the essence is still the same.
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