A Tale of Two Lines

This one came about because I had just discovered the case of (Dr.) Brad Vice and the Flannery O'Connor Award controversy.

It's almost a compulsion with me to incorporate current influences on assignments.


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(1st)


FICTION II
04/07/07
First Lines

A TALE OF TWO LINES
OR: THE FIRST LINE OF PLAGIARISM


First lines. Hookers. The tasty openings of a story or novel that are meant to grab the reader and all-but-force them to read on--the second, third, and all ensuing sentences until they have consumed the whole meal, paragraph by paragraph.

Somewhat recently, I read a short story titled "Tuscaloosa Nights" by Brad Vice. It was in a collection that won the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction. I was struck by the power of the words, structure, images, and just plain ol' deep dark story in the piece.

Here's the first line (two sentences, actually): "And that’s how it began. Three distant notes, high blasts on a bugle, then a drop of a minor third on a long wailing note."

I have rarely been so moved by a story as I was by Brad Vice's. Briefly, it's about a self-admitted Yankee in the Deep South who, one night sitting on the front porch with a couple of others, she asks about the bugle she hears blow those three notes. It's the Ku Klux Klan gathering for a rally in the woods. The young Yankee girl talks the guy she's sweet on to take her out to see the rednecks in their long white sheets burn a cross in the forest. She, of course, gets more than she bargained for.

I looked into Brad Vice and his work and was almost shocked at what I found. I love it when research opens new proverbial cans of worms. This instance of delving into background lead me on a path through the swampy area of literature involving plagiarism and how nasty accusations are sometimes worse than the crime.

"Tuscaloosa Nights" is a short story that opens Brad Vice's collection, The Bear Bryant Funeral Train. The collection was awarded the Flannery O'Connor Prize in 2005, only to have it rescinded a few months later.

This is a tale of two first lines, and the murky area where "fair use" becomes an unforgivable act of "plagiarism".

The first of these opening lines comes from a non-fiction work titled Stars Fell on Alabama which is a collection of real-life (i.e. "factual") instances that were collected and published in 1934. It was written in a style not often used at the time, but which gained mass popularity when, thirty years later, Truman Capote would use the narrative non-fiction style for his book, In Cold Blood.

Carl Carmer was a noted professor at the University of Alabama for a number of years and who fell in love with Southern storytelling. He traveled the state and recorded tales and events he heard and witnessed, various myths, legends, and superstitious of the place he called "Conjure Country". One instance he wrote about was a Ku Klux Klan rally that he witnessed.

In Part I: Tuscaloosa Nights, is the chapter titled "Flaming Cross". This opens with the line: "We heard them coming long before we saw them — three distant high blasts of a bugle, then a drop of a minor third on a long wailing note."

70 years later, a student (and native of the town) at the University of Alabama named Brad Vice, wrote his short story called "Tuscaloosa Nights". This was the opening piece in a collection of fictional tales that was to become not only Mr. Vice's doctoral thesis in creative writing, but also The Bear Bryant Funeral Train received the prestigious Flannery O'Connor Award.

Dr. Vice's story begins with the line (two sentences): "And that’s how it began. Three distant notes, high blasts on a bugle, then a drop of a minor third on a long wailing note."

I had a passing familiarity with Carl Carmer's book. Almost anyone from Alabama who reads history or local superstition literature has at least heard of the work. And for a student at the University of Alabama's creative writing program, it would not be something that could have been ignored.

So, cursing all plagiarists as vile and reprehensible people, I re-read Brad Vice's short story. I was still struck by the use he made of the descriptive sentences of Carl Carmer that Brad Vice used.

Okay, I thought, well how much of that is "plagiarized"?

I found Mr. Carmer's original work and read the chapter.

First line is lifted quite directly and deliberately, that much is certain. A few lines of dialogue in the ensuing scene. The closing of the story is closely mimicked:

"We rode on in silence. The lights of town seemed friendlier than the flames we had left behind on the river bank...." (Carmer)

"They were running toward the river, toward the orange light on the horizon, toward the burning cross, leaving us alone in the terrible silence." (Vice)

I thought, there it is. Plagiarism.

Then I read some essays on what legally defines plagiarism and what ethically constitutes it. Then I read both pieces again.

Nope, I thought, this isn't plagiarism.

Non-fiction work can only be considered legally plagiarized if it has been taken substantially in length without citation. And the events described in a work of non-fiction can be used in fiction without citing the written source. That;s the legalities of it.

Ethically, did Brad Vice steal Carl Carmer's intellectual property?

Dozens of authors copy Arthur Conan Doyle when they write Sherlock Holmes stories. Or Tom Stoppard's play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. And, not to forget the extensive Lovecraftian circle of writers and their shared creations.

A cornerstone of my personal opinion that Brad Vice did not deserve the accusation (and I wondered about a possible personal vendetta in this situation), is that in the collection before it was published by the University of Georgia after winning the Flannery O'Connor Award, there was an opening epigram in the manuscript which quoted Carl Carmer's book, Stars Fell on Alabama. To my personal way of seeing (and I detest plagiarism), this is citing the source work of the single story, and backs up Brad Vice's claim that his short story is an homage to Mr. Carmer. The fact that this epigram was left out of the published book from the University of Georgia is something that goes beyond Dr. Vice's ability as an author to definitively control.

A number of people in the literary community came out cursing Brad Vice and at least one made the statement that his Ph.D should be revoked as well as the O'Connor Prize. But far more in number were those who stood up in defense of Dr. Vice's book. One story out of nine had an accusation made against it. An accusation that falls apart when looking at any of the other versions of the manuscript that have been published in one manner or another (appearance in Five Points magazine, inclusion in his doctoral dissertation), because the cited quote by Carmer is present in those.

A lot of fuss and fallout from what essentially is an admittedly almost-identical opening line in two written works; one non-fiction, and the other, 70 years later, in a short story.

Is this a case of a Harvard student claiming she "internalized" over 90 instances of sentences from numerous other writers in a single book? No. Is it a case of lifting the core elements in a written account of an actual event years later in a fictional story. That's certainly closer to the truth, but I think it overstates a few things.

Carmer's work is a narrative telling of a real event. Brad Vice used that as the setting for a fictional story. The story contains a number of elements, and about four to seven lines that are very similar to the non-fiction account, but there is another level of story being told in Dr. Vice's tale that is not present in Mr. Carmer's work.

What I take from this in application of my own writing are a few key notes to remember.

The Paradox: Never use other people's work--factual accounts or fiction--without making it evident that I am doing so. A line from a famous song or a certain phrase may be used, but make damn sure that it's apparent where they came from. On the other hand, if the story is strong enough as an original piece, I can't be overly concerned with doing such because there has been so much "mash-up" in modern culture that even citing the source of something may be a pitfall of having used something that has been taken from somebody else already. Mark Twain noted, "A bad writer borrows from other writers, a good writer steals." I never took this to mean that it's okay to steal something from someone else. I understand it to be take what you need from where you need it so long as what you use it for is YOUR OWN WORK. That means be original in usage and voice, regardless of using anything from a source not your head.

And since the contents of my head (I can't speak about the contents of someone else's head because I'm not privy to such information unless it's been spilled on a page or photograph or canvas or in a series of musical notes) are a mash-up of everything I see, hear, touch, taste, smell, and think about. Everything.

On the other hand...it's becoming more and more acceptable in publishing to lie, and so without the ethics of attaining your own voice and ideas and work, copping a riff of writing from someone else draws a writer towards the ugly morass of Plagiarism. And that's a death-knell for an artist.

Brad Vice last not only his award, but also his job as an assistant professor at Mississippi State University over the fiasco (he now teaches English at the University of West Bohemia in Pilsen, Czech Republic). As he quotes about the situation, "Wrote a book. Caused a lota trouble. Stay tuned."

This is what the opening lines of a couple of stories lead me to discover, think about, and articulate in a way I hope says something useful.

I don't know as the line on what exactly is plagiarism can be clearly drawn as Here It Is, No Exceptions, but I certainly know plagiarism when I see it.

If you steal something without altering it significantly, or placing it within a vastly new environment, you've probably plagiarized it. If you haven't ever "borrowed" a bit of this or that from someone else, you probably have never written a single thing.


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WHERE TO FIND THE STORIES:

"Flaming Cross" by Carl Carmer:


"Tuscaloosa Nights" by Brad Vice:


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