Blind Confessions of a Confabulated Cryptomnesiac
Exploring unconscious plagiarism and assimilating creative ideas
It has recently come to my attention that my extreme intellect and capacity for creative conceptualism may not be entirely due to my extreme intellect or capacity for creative conceptualism.
I beg your pardon … Does this make me a fake … a fraudster … a freebooting filibuster … a, dare I even utter the word most heinous to any writer, … a plagiariser? Egad!
Plagiarism is a scary word, but one that should not strike fear into the heart of an honest writer, should it? At least that was my stance until I added a new and potentially incriminating word to my word bank; cryptomnesia. Now that is a scary word, and not only because of its ghoulish etymology (sadly misinterpreted on my part) tolling the impending death and subsequent entombing of any author who suffers this affliction.
So what is this dreadful affliction I hear you ask? Well, to quote directly from the Oxford English Dictionary, cryptomnesia is “the phenomenon of perceiving a latent or subconscious memory as an original thought or idea.” In other words, I can never again enjoy those moments when I find myself astounded at my own brilliance, sitting there in front of my computer, on a midnight dreary, as visions of book signings dance in my head, for suspicion you see always haunts the reflective mind; what if?
What if these profound thoughts are not my own?
Helen Keller knows what I am talking about. In 1892 she published a short story called The Frost King which when identified as plagiarism of The Frost Fairies by Margaret T. Canby turned out to be a classic case of, yup, you guessed it, cryptomnesia.
Helen, who was only eleven at the time — and blind just in case you didn’t know — had no recollection of hearing the original story. Her carer also had no recollection of ever reading it to her. The mystery was eventually, if not entirely resolved when it was discovered that another person who had cared for her four years earlier owned a copy of the story she was accused of plagiarising, and though that carer had no recollection of reading it to her either, it was likely that she did.
