Plagiarized, From A Parrot

When people ask me how I got a novella published while in college, I usually shrug

bashfully and change the subject. I never tell them the truth: I plagiarized the whole

thing, from a parrot.

It all began when a friend and I coaxed a local shopkeeper into granting us half an hour

with his kittens. Finals had begun, we were high on caffeine, and we’d resolved to

take something of a rest. From the smattering of red pins in Google Maps, our verdict

was “Guppies to Puppies,” a dim little shop just off the highway. Having changed our

clothes for the first time in days, we strode in, aiming for the cash register. Finding

no one, we ducked into an aisle labeled “Fish.” There was the shopkeeper, a thirty-ish

man with a nose ring, aqua tattoos, and the resignedly bemused look of a person whose

summer job has become his career.

“Have ya’ll handled animals before?” he said, after we’d announced our intention to buy

a cat.

With a seasoned laugh I replied that yes we had, my fiasco with a bull notwithstanding.

(Things had gone downhill after I’d rested my cheek on the electric fence.)

At last he nodded, ushering us into to a glass room in the bowels of the store. Inside, two

Siamese kittens were stalking the length of their confines. Delighted, we amused them as

best we could, until both retreated to their crates. We thanked the shopkeeper, promising

to return for a cat when we’d fallen into the requisite $1k. We were inches from the door

when I noticed a flash of neon green.

“That there is Max,” said the shopkeeper, anticipating my question. “Our dumbest bird.

Knows one word and one word only.”

As if listening, Max—banana-sized, and with a beak twice the length of his skull—

retorted:

“Hello.”

“There it is,” the shopkeeper said ruefully.

“HELLO,” Max repeated, louder now. He paced the length of his wooden stand, blinked,

and began rocking from claw to claw. Before long he had begun to flap, dismembering

his lone word into a string of monosyllables—“HELL, OH! OH, HELL…” On and on

he went, trying—it seemed—to wring out of the empty sounds some declaration, some

command.

My friend had already advanced toward the cage. She watched Max through the iron

bars, shifting her gaze in time with his rocking.

“Max,” she said finally, “what is being?”

For the first time, Max paused. He adjusted his feathers, cocked his head. Then, he

sneezed.

So abrupt was his response, so koan-like in its simplicity, that for one mad instant neither

my friend nor I knew what to say. So we laughed, thanked the shopkeeper again, and

laughed some more, all the way home. As I wrote the final chapters of my novella that

winter, I thought often of Max, who had managed to articulate—wordlessly and by

accident—the state of baffled surrender that art demanded. The best material, I found,

came only after I relinquished control and let language say what it wanted. Nothing was

more self-stultifying than the pursuit of originality. The most honest work was the work

that seemed to hatch on its own, that surprised me in its deviation from what I thought I

wanted to write. (Partly for that reason, I’ve never understood the school of criticism that

equates meaning with authorial intent. By that logic, moreover, life itself must have been

divinely conceived in order to be meaningful.)

Much of the novella consists of the writings of its protagonist, Pierre. Those writings

are closer to poetry than prose, and I’m sometimes asked what exactly I meant by

this “disruption of genre bounds,” as if such a “disruption” had been an act of defiance,

and a deliberate one at that. The truth is that such a ploy—like every notion of what the

book ought or ought not to be—would have paralyzed me from the start. Pierre’s writing

was poetic not because I planned it as such, but because it happened that way. It was its

own why.

Things are getting rather abstract. My Macintosh dictionary defines a “sneeze” as “a

sudden involuntary explosion of air from the nose and mouth.” Its definition of “write”

pales in comparison. To write is to invite sudden involuntary explosions. Those

explosions are hard to come by. Most of mine were blotted out by fear, preconceptions,

and fatigue. All I could do was try my best to unmoor the anchors of ideology I’d cast

overboard when things became too disorienting, when I needed some capital-P Principle

(or Genre) within which to think. The paradox of that attempt is that it made writing into

a kind of unlearning, or at least a disavowal of ownership. In the end, I felt curiously

alienated from the book, as if I’d plagiarized it from some incommunicable source. So

thank you, Max, for saying what I couldn’t. And Gesundheit.

Lindsay Stern grew up in New York City. She lives in Massachusetts, where she is completing her B.A. in English and Philosophy at Amherst College. Her first book, Town of Shadows, was released this fa ...read more

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