Busytown: A good read
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Oh, very well put.
geddit?
Plumbing the depths...
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Mark Taslov, I think your idea really really silly - who knows where human creativity is going to jump next? (And your example was really really tame. I've been playing with sound/pikkies/vibration stuff lately - will fit in with writing believe you me.)
Which silly idea are you referring to Islander? Which tame example?
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Pierre Menard. Haha - excellent! No reference to JLB should be let past unconsidered. Being a little short of cash I stood and read the Listener article in the supermarket, a particularly heroic effort since I had left my glasses at home - my eyes watered from squinting but I just had to check it out.
Menard achieved a perfect and completely original Quixote through years of effort; Ihi-my-Ra-for-me-would-you tried to dodge the bullet by actually crapping on the edges of the original writing, e.g. by jamming an infelicitous and redundant 'which was' in the flow of Lamb's prose, substituting 'city' for 'metropolis' and other childish tinkerings.
My immediate reaction, being a bit geeky myself, was 'How dumb!' Did he really think that tinkering with a couple of words per paragraph was going to get him through?' He would have had better luck crossing his fingers while he typed.
Let's be honest - WI is the product of an unspoken, unofficial affirmative action programme. He can't write, or at least not well enough to keep me reading to anywhere near the end of any of his books. His people don't sound like people and his places don't sound like real places. Astonishing that someone (was it Jolisa? I didn't squint at that bit) actually described it as a 'great book' and then went on to point out that some illiterate waif delivered rhetoric at the bedside of her dying father????!!!!
Sorry - you can't do that. It's not allowed. Illiterate waifs have to talk like illiterate waifs. It simply cannot be a 'great book' and have that sort of rubbish in it.
Now the 64K question: if the University is genuinely serious (cough!cough!) they must ask the good professor for an electronic copy of The Trowenna Sea so they can pay for thirty to fifty hours of someone's time to check the entire text for plagiarised content. Then let them accept that this was a minor oversight constituting .04% of the total text. I volunteer right now to do the work.
Until that is done, no-one can assert with any surety that this was, in fact, a minor act of plagiarism.
Finally, by not following through and doing what real, grown-up countries do when an author is caught out in plagiarism, which is pulping the work and stripping the miscreant of his honours, the literary and academic institutions of New Zealand concede that we are culturally second-rate.
This is an enormous insult to all the truly excellent artists who have been and are proud to call themselves New Zealand writers. -
Well, you know, on drunken reflection I don't think I'll bother any more.
I'd like to say it's been fun, but instead of proper argument there's just been boring point-scoring.
I would say say enjoy playing with yourselves, but it's obvious that's all you do.
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"That's it, I'm taking my ball and I'm going home!"
This whole system seems designed without forethought or consideration towards the finiteness of language in practicable terms. There is an end point. That end point will be reached within the next 1000 years when the mass of appendix, references, bibliography, acknowledgments or whatever inevitably outweighs the body of the work itself.
This is the silliness you mean Islander. I missed you. As you well know and have pointed out to me many a time, my voice struggles to affect words adequately. I did not mean to imply that I think 'this system' is sustainable, just as the economic system wasn't. I was merely drawing a hypothetical conclusion based on the primitive nature of 'this system' as it would seem to many outsiders. Anyone who has witnessed the mashups on youtube knows 'this system' is already largely irrelevant to a generation (precluding those partaking in publishers' advertisements).
There was no intent to imply that 'this system' is fairing well at all nor that the 'will' could eventuate. My 'will' perhaps should be read as a conditional, aromatic, beckoning 'would', to those in denial of the largely irrelevant nature of this issue beyond the realm of media sanctimony.
I'd hoped this cleared that up.:
omg, the creative event horizon!! It's an interesting perspective.
I think it already passed or was bypassed.
silly and tame I'll duly accept Islander. Valid. It's simply that from where I sit 'this system' is a square wheel and so I imagined making a play on how things might go down for the square wheel vaguely attractive amidst the clamor of intellectuals championing a version of right.
I was quite interested to read what you wrote above your Taslov jibe, you never struck me as being particularly precious before;
Really really shallow (like every human being) and really really protective about original creative works & copyright - authenticity/originality are things I have been criticised for- but which I maintain I am involved with- and I majorly respect any other writer.
It reminded me of the third stanza of chapter 2, "The Rise of Relative Opposites" from 'The Way of Virtue' by Old Master, 600BC
Therefore the Sage:
Manages affairs without action;
Preaches the doctrine without words;
All things take their rise, but he does not turn away from them;
He gives them life, but does not take possession of them;
He acts, but does not appropriate;
Accomplishes, but claims no credit.
It is because he lays claim to no credit
That the credit cannot be taken away from him. -
who knows where human creativity is going to jump next?
Banksy.
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Astonishing that someone (was it Jolisa? I didn't squint at that bit) actually described it as a 'great book'
Spike, if it was me, I might have said (on the radio?) that it was a "great story," which is crucially different. In fact, you might be thinking of this phrase from the review: "This heartfelt novel illuminates a little known moment in Antipodean history, while [also] aspiring to be a jolly good read."
P'raps I'm too subtle or too kind. The thing is, though, there is a really cool story inside this novel struggling to get out from under the weight of all that "research." And the bits that strike me as genuinely "Witi," while not to everyone's tastes, are where that potentially great novel is hiding in plain sight.
Clarification: the detailed disquisition on child labour in the mines is delivered by the child in question ("Sally Jenkins, miss"), while everyone rushes about trying to rescue her father, who is trapped in the mine. Although only "a slip of a girl," she volunteers to go back down the mine with our feisty heroine who wishes to be a doctor (if only the sexist and patriarchal mores of her time would let her!).
The miner, while gravely injured, survives, only to subsequently lose his leg in a gruesome (and very textbook) amputation scene set in a Victorian medical school.
Later on, the moppet, Sally Jenkins, pops up again very conveniently in Tasmania, having been transported for stealing... why yes, a loaf of bread. Sigh. We know such things happened, but why not surprise us with something we don't know?
Now the 64K question: if the University is genuinely serious (cough!cough!) they must ask the good professor for an electronic copy of The Trowenna Sea so they can pay for thirty to fifty hours of someone's time to check the entire text for plagiarised content. Then let them accept that this was a minor oversight constituting .04% of the total text. I volunteer right now to do the work.
That would indeed be a start, although see my earlier note about how a plagiarism detection service actually missed most of the quotes I had found at that point. Some of the borrowed material (see my latest blog) was accessible via Google, but others were only found after actually reading (some of) the books listed in the bibliography.
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Take the case of Sherrie Levine's After Walker Evans for example. She rephotographed Walker Evans photos and presented them unaltered. There is a clear attribution in the title of the work, and yet the Estate of Walker Evans successfully prevented the work being sold because of copyright infringement (ie, passing someone else's work off as your own).
Wholesale reproduction of a work or works in their entirety is completely different from Witi's crime. Doesn't matter how much you reference something, you can't just reproduce it entirely.
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As a novelist myself, sometimes swaying towards the historical, I have found this a very interesting discussion.
Personally I can't stand it when novelists have pages and pages of acknowledgments - I have always felt that it screams 'see! I did my research! I didn't make it up!' , when fiction should be about being free to imagine. At the same time I can't imagine copying another writer's words in the course of my research and letting them get into my novel word for word. My approach to research is to read, to absorb, then to imagine myself there and write what I see. If we can't get into a time machine and go to another time, we have to rely on those that were there. Maybe, we might even - God forbid! - make stuff up. A fiction writer inventing? Call the police!
I also hate novels that read like text books. By all means do the research, but only put into the novel what is relevant to the story or the characters. I read one novel recently that had a character thinking about an unimportant fact about some piece of public transport ("why am I thinking this unimportant fact?" the character thought) and it really was unimportant! Sure enough, in the five pages of acknowledgments, there was listed the very book that this one unimportant fact came from. Yawn.
I am particularly interested in the wondering about novels borrowing from other novels, because I have done just that in my new book, without attribution, because I wanted to leave it up to the reader to spot and to feel smug about spotting, for example, a line of dialogue from Jane Eyre, a dream sequence from Wuthering Heights and various other scenes from these Victorian novels and more that have been worked into a modern-day context. I would hope that nobody would call that plagiarism, but I suspect from this conversation that they wouldn't.
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Jolisa wrote:
In other words, there are ethical reasons not to borrow other people's words, but also artistic ones. (I could write at length about the other examples, but might save that for a follow-up blog post.)
This is the crux of the issue for me. All this talk about how quote marks should be used and attributions made is redundant in a novel... the art of writing fiction is to use research to help your character be in a scene, but you have to filter it through their eyes. This is what makes it engaging fiction.
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Crikey, I feel a blog post coming on too, Jolisa.
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Crikey, I feel a blog post coming on too, Jolisa.
I'm so glad! It's all very well to talk about how historical novelists should do it, but extra lovely and illuminating to hear directly from them how they do do it.
I am particularly interested in the wondering about novels borrowing from other novels, because I have done just that in my new book, without attribution, because I wanted to leave it up to the reader to spot
I'd call that allusion, rather than plagiarism. Conscious, deliberate intertextuality. Homage. Because the thing is, the literature you're citing has an organic relationship to the literature you're writing, an affiliation, so you're invoking the ancestors, as it were, and inviting the reader into an expanded relationship with your story and its progenitors. It's like a staircase wall lined with photos of several generations of the family. (NB I haven't yet read your new novel, but I've read about it).
Whereas most of the borrowings in The Trowenna Sea sit there like placards in a silent film, explaining things to the reader.
I read one novel recently that had a character thinking about an unimportant fact about some piece of public transport ("why am I thinking this unimportant fact?" the character thought)
I read one novel recently that had a character thinking about an unimportant fact about some piece of public transport ("why am I thinking this unimportant fact?" the character thought)
There was a fair amount of this in the novel - including the old chestnut about Victorians covering their piano legs, and an extended meditation about how very long the mail took to arrive at the other end of the world, on account of having to travel by boat, you see. I so much prefer it when authors presume a certain level of knowledge of the times, and only use the encyclopedia bits that actually bear on the plot.
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When I have said 'intertexuality', people have looked at me funny, but yes, that's what I'm going for.
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Found myself thinking about Dorothy L Sayers' Gaudy Night reading this -- since it is about academic ethics, and also for her characters' habits of tossing all sorts of quotes and allusions into their speech -- often uncredited, but very much in character.
[Never mind her somewhat antediluvian politics]
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When I have said 'intertexuality', people have looked at me funny
Probably misheard you. :)
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Philip Matthews has added his reflections here. I'd say he doesn't seem to be terribly clear on the standard definition of plagiarism, but then I'd hate to become "somebody called Giovanni Tiso" who is part of the Public Address "clique". As Harold Ramis said in Ghostbusters I believe, that would be bad.
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When I have said 'intertexuality', people have looked at me funny
Probably misheard you. :)
Yes. You were probably at a party talking to them about it, and you thought they were listening. But no! They were actually doing a gadgety internetty thing communicating with others online instead. How rude! :)
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Philip Matthews has added his reflections here.
Oh for goodness' sake. No one is 'willing to take up' the film quotation thing because it's NOT THE SAME ISSUE. In Rushmore, Wes Anderson uses a shot reminiscent of one from Kubrick's Barry Lyndon. (Not-as-clever-as-I-sound-nerd-alert: I admit I picked that up by listening to the Criterion Collection DVD commentary, because I have only seen Barry Lyndon once, and I've seen Rushmore an embarrassing number of times.) The fact that Anderson was *informed and inspired* by that shot, and included a variation of it in his film, is not the fucking same as taking quotes from someone else, tweaking them and passing them off as your own. It just isn't. One is referential/reverential, the other is emphatically... not. If all you have is words, and you use the *exact same words*, there's no way you're reworking the source material or having a 'dialogue' with it in the way that a filmmaker can.
(I liked 'someone called Lucy Stewart', though. Clique-tastic!)
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3410,
It's a complicated thing. This (warning: really horrible) single "borrows" heavily from two of rock's staples. One suspects a deal with the appropriate publishers, so you probably can't call it plagiarism, per se, but I wish you could.
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To be fair to Philip Matthews, I didn't "take up" his response to my initial -- and far from unique comment -- that Brian De Palma's wholesale rips from Hitchcock are the least interesting thing about his films. And I'll go to my grave saying Gus Van Sant's in your face carbon copy of Psycho might have been "clever" (in a wanky po-mo way), but it was also an utter waste of the time and considerable talents of everyone involved.
Also nice to bring up Scorsese -- who anyone who's seen his "personal journeys" through American and Italian films would acknowledge is film-literate to a terrifying degree. (In my idea of heaven, Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino would be running the ultimate repertory cinema.) But his "dialogue" is a damn sight more subtle, and interesting, than wholesale liftings of set ups.
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Craig: You should read Robin Wood's section on De Palma and Hitchcock in his seminal Hollywood From Vietnam to Reagan. I think the 1986 edition is online through Google Books. Makes a strong case for De Palma transforming his Hitchcock appropriations into something quite distinct. You'll have to navigate a lot of Freudian language.
Giovanni: I am "clear" on the standard definition of plagiarism. I was merely pointing out that there are cases we might otherwise define as plagiarism -- according to that standard definition -- that have not been identified as such. And I would hope they are not identified as such.
Danielle: I'd have to watch Rushmore again -- and Full Metal Jacket again -- to see how close those shots are. But we could fill up a thread as long as Copyright Must Change -- heaven forbid -- with examples of words, shots and themes in films that are strongly reminiscent of words, shots and themes in other, earlier films (if you get a chance, look at the piece on Taxi Driver that I linked to in my blog). That is one of the things I like about cinema and all through my career as a reviewer I was interested in tracking some of those sources and parallels. I'd never call it plagiarism; I guess I'm just interested in why writing -- especially fiction writing -- is seen as and treated differently. Part of me wonders if writing has to -- and will -- catch up. What did William Burroughs say (in a slightly different context)? "Writing is 50 years behind painting."
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Actually, Brion Gysin. But often attributed to Burroughs.
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Giovanni: I am "clear" on the standard definition of plagiarism.
You asked whether in order for it to be plagiarism the source had to be unacknowledged - that's what I was referring to.
Danielle: I'd have to watch Rushmore again -- and Full Metal Jacket again -- to see how close those shots are. But we could full up a thread as long as Copyright Must Change -- heaven forbid -- with examples of words, shots and themes in films that are strongly reminiscent of words, shots and themes in other, earlier films
The nature of a cinematic quotation and periphrasis is simply not the same as a ilterary one. Earlier today I put to you the first example that came to mind - De Palma referring to the puschair scene in Battleship Potemkin during a shootout in The Untouchables. But this is the equivalent of a literary allusion, not of a direct quotation, of the lifting verbatim of a whole sentence - that would be De Palma splicing in the film the sequence from Potemkin (and when that happens, you most certainly have to state it), or working off the same script for a significant enough length of time.
My personal feeling is that literary fiction is really just as intertextual as film, and the ideas of authorship and plagiarism aren't all that different. You still can't purloin a story (in the technical sense of the word) or lift frames or chunks of dialogue without attribution and (if copyright still applies) permission. And while you and David Cauchi make interesting points for a broader reflection on what constitutes authorship and plagiarism, I think they are poor analogies for Ihimaera's 'oversights'.
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I am "clear" on the standard definition of plagiarism.
Er, you asked if attribution was essential to the issue of plagiarism; given that yes it really rather is, I can see why Giovanni was a bit suspicious. (& the refusal to acknowledge deceit as important to plagiarism makes me wonder.)
Part of me wonders if writing has to -- and will -- catch up.
See, this is what annoys me. Instead of looking at the medium as a thing-in-itself, it just becomes a bad version of painting, or film, or whatever, You and David aren't engaging with the medium at all, you're just doing rough translations to film/painting and then acting surprised when the translation isn't exact. You also have a tendency to play fast and loose with terminology: is `strongly reminiscent' plagiarism?
(The tendency to take a naive definition of a concept, prove the naive definition is incapable of dealing with a pathological case, and then announce that the concept is bankrupt isn't particularly impressive.)
Dunno, I rather hate myself for this kind of arguing, where you merely pick holes and don't actually advance any positive ideas yourself, but as far as I can tell David and Philip have positions so difficult to actually grasp there's not much else you can do. (And David tends to play the contrarian two-step; one minute it is `yay plagiarism' the next `artistic influence is a very complicated issue.' Yes, we know that, so what? We can make plagiarism as subtle a concept in response.)
ETA Er, pwned by Giovanni.
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You asked whether in order for it to be plagiarism the source had to be unacknowledged - that's what I was referring to.
The question was rhetorical following the example of Geoff Dyer.
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