Sing to Me in Tongues of Fire

English 205
13 April  2010

Sing to Me in Tongues of Fire

    The oldest shared human experience is gathering around a fire.  Once gathered around the fire—for protection against what lurks in the darkness beyond reach of the fire's light—the oldest shared human interaction is the telling of stories.  These earliest human stories regard our place as humans in relation to the mutually non-exclusive worlds of nature and of the mysterious unknown.  It is in the liminal space where these two worlds come together and separate where we find the source of all human science, religion, story, and poetry.  In that space then, the fire becomes is the metaphor for the source of what is knowable among the mystery, and what is knowable is related person to person through the stories told.  Here is the beginning of the oral tradition which would, thousands of years along in human legacy, become the poetry of our culture.  Not the poetry of the written page, to be pontificated upon from towers of glass and steel, nor read silently in hip and trendy cafés of the Lower East Side, but the poetry of sound and movement, of science and nature, of oral traditional, of what Jimmie Killingsworth called, "the poetry of the body."  Dr. Killingsworth uses this phrase in direct application of the work of Walt Whitman, and it is with Whitman where we enter into the stream of oral poetic tradition.  First, we make the journey backwards, upstream towards that source of early humans gathered around a fire to tell stories of the things beyond the reach of their kenning, what evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins calls "the river out of Eden" (qtd. in Drout 269), to discover anaphora as one of the key devices in making the leap from oral tradition to the written word, before a slingshot return to Whitman in order to follow the wake of his influence on those downstream from him.

    As we venture forth from this metaphoric realm of original stories, it is apropos to note that Whitman begins one of his better known poems with the titular line, "I sing the Body electric."  In doing this, he deliberately invokes one of the earliest-known epic poems to have made that leap from oral to written tradition: Homer's The Odyssey ("Sing to me of the man, O Muse" (Homer)).  Whitman is well aware of his place along the river of tradition and displays in the majority of his work, as displayed by his intricate use of cadence; of meter.  As Michael D. C. Drout observes, "One of the major features of any traditional poetic style is meter, however construed (whether by stress, quantity, syllable count, and other tradition-dependent criteria). Meter serves as an important feature of poetic, traditional language" (286-287).  Even though Whitman does not use intentional rhyme scheme, his meter is precise and carefully composed to reflect the traditional referentiality where his work resides.  Drout goes on to say that "if the meter is a marked feature of the poetry, then it is likely to be imitated, and in fact this is exactly what we see across oral traditions: meter is [...] one of the tests of traditionally of poetry" (287).

    This use of repetition is integral to oral storytelling.  Repetition in this manner is used not merely for alliteration but as a mnemonic to serve the purpose of iteration.  This can be seen in works ranging from The Iliad's seemingly endless "Catalogue of Ships" (which serves to familiarize the audience with the participants of the conflict) to the Torah's genealogical lists of who begat whom (which acquaints the audience with the integral ancestral heritage of the protagonists), to the religious refrain that begins each Sura of the Qur'an.  This sort of repetition shows the importance of the information given.  According to Drout, "important elements are more likely to be able to be re-transmitted and thus spread to other individuals. Thus this cultural poetics helps to explain how information gets put into and accessed from what Maurice Halbwachs in 1950 called the 'collective memory'" (283).  A most effective way to illustrate this is in the use of anaphora—a device Whitman excelled at and used often.

    John Miles Foley points out, as quoted by Drout, that anaphora can extend "beyond the poetic line into formula, scene, and theme."  Given this observation, we can easily find examples in Whitman's work of anaphoric themes (e.g. death, nature, the body).  But in using anaphora strictly in the verbal sense, it may just as easily be understood as to why it originated in the oral tradition: such repetition reduces the demands on cognitive ability to memorize a poem or story.  Since, according to both Drout and Foley—and indirectly by the research of Dawkins—such examples can be found in most every language and culture, we could look back at Dawkins' citation of the river flowing out of Eden to consider his hypothesis that such repetitions are a result of natural process, and part of the make up of human genetics.  This recalls our earlier point from Killingsworth, that Whitman's verse is a "poetry of the body," an idea Amitai Avi-Ram expounds upon at the beginning of his essay, "The Body and the Simulacrum."  "Traditional metrical forms," Avi-Ram tells us, "work by invoking in the reader a clear sense of rhythm, might more properly be called 'poetry of the body.'"  He continues, extending this concept to "ballads, hymns, nursery rhymes, and jingles [which] all seem to invite in the reader a sympathetic response to their rhythms in a way that can be and often is directly reflected in movements and feelings in the body" (93-94)  It is Avi-Ram's conclusion that Whitman's verses:

can be understood not as a simple liberation of the body but as a shifting of the body from a realm of direct experience available through palpable and audible musical rhythms in poetry toward an imaginary item which has only a problematic relation to the body itself, a being whose existence can only be inferred by thought. (94)

This being of thought is akin to the idea of the poetic body's muscle memory; in hearing the anaphoric repetition and the cadence of the verse, the body responds to and remembers that rhythm.  It is that memory that is exercised when repeating or re-reading that poem at a later time.

    But if Whitman's cadence and repetition are remnants of the oral tradition predating Homer, what evidence of a tradition exist leading up to his work?  Whitman certainly did not develop a spontaneous act of aesthetics and suddenly manifest this poetic device in the mid 19th Century after it lay dormant for 27 centuries.  As was stated above, Whitman was (forgive the pun) well versed in knowing his heritage.  Working back from Whitman's own age, we will cite three examples in the English language of works using this "poetry of the body"—the devices of alliterative cadence and anaphora.

    Not long before Whitman began his poetic career, the American Romantic Edgar Allan Poe often used (and some could rightfully argue, committed the perfection of it) anaphora, particularly in his poem "The Bells."  Poe not only uses anaphora to perfection in this poem, but uses the form of the poem itself to resemble the subject matter, with each successive verse he describes the bells building from tinkling sleigh bells to the deafening crescendo of a death knell.  Examine: (verse 1) "To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells / From the bells, bells, bells, bells, /Bells, bells, bells - / From the jingling and the tinkling of the bells."  (Verse 2) "To the swinging and the ringing / Of the bells, bells, bells, / Of the bells, bells, bells, bells, / Bells, bells, bells - To the rhyming and the chiming of the bells!"  (3) "Of the bells, / Of the bells, bells, bells, bells, / Bells, bells, bells - / In the clamor and the clangor of the bells!"  Until, at last, in the fourth verse, the clamor is almost palpable—bringing us back to the idea of poetry as calling for the body to physically respond with movement:

Keeping time, time, time,
In a sort of Runic rhyme,
To the throbbing of the bells,
Of the bells, bells, bells -
To the sobbing of the bells;
Keeping time, time, time,
As he knells, knells, knells,
In a happy Runic rhyme,
To the rolling of the bells,
Of the bells, bells, bells -
To the tolling of the bells,
Of the bells, bells, bells, bells,
Bells, bells, bells -
To the moaning and the groaning of the bells.

It is such an effect that following an aural rendition, that silence consumes the ear in the absence of the poetic chant.

    Another, briefer, example of this technique of repetition and sound, comes from William Blake in his penultimately famous poem, "Tyger."  His use of anaphroa is not only shown in the words, but also in the punctuation (emphasis mine):

What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

    William Shakesphere, bringing poetry to stage presentations in a manner befitting the oral tradition of acting out stories for dramatic effect in the opening scene of Julius Caesar, when Marullus (somewhat rhetorically) asks after Flavius, "And do you now put on your best attire? / And do you now cull out a holiday? / And do you now strew flowers in his way / That comes in triumph over Pompey's blood?"  In this example, the lines themselves do not necessarily call to the body to respond, but instead, the description is of a physical reaction within the body of the subject (Pompey's blood).

    Having stepped out of poetry into the narrative of dramatic theatre, we can reverse our chronological journey, and jump into the wake of Whitman's anaphoric influence, landing squarely in the middle of more blood (Revolutionary France) resulting from the pen of a English literary giant, Charles Dickens (again, emphasis mine).  "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair..."

    A bridge between Dickens and Whitman, between England and America, can be found in the personage of T. S. Eliot.  Though there are several examples of anaphora in "The Waste Land," it is his use of this device in the infamous conclusion to "The Hollow Men" which is of interest here.  "Here we go round the prickly pear / Prickly pear prickly pear..." sounds like a nursery rhyme which calls to the body for response; to, perhaps, literally dance around this poetic prickly pear cactus.  The verse offers one of the most unforgettable conclusions in poetic lore, "Between the desire / And the spasm / Between the potency / And the existence / Between the essence / And the descent / Falls the Shadow... / This is the way the world ends / This is the way the world ends / This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper."  In a few short, starkly cadenced lines, we've been lead through idea, reality, conception, birth, and finally, not just death of a single body, but the death of the world, the ultimate call which leaves no chance for a bodily reply.

    This conjuring of massive annihilation makes the step from Eliot in the the early 20th Century, to Elie Weisel's description of holocaust in the middle of the century particularly apt.  In another use of anaphora calling to the body to respond, Weisel uses his phrase repeatedly in his narrative memoir, Night, to tell of how annihilation of many bodies caused the death of his God and his hope:

Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed.  Never shall I forget that smoke.  Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky.  Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever.  Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live.  Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust.  Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself.  Never.

Additionally, there is a trait in this similar to that of Poe's—the form of the piece resembling what it describes.  "Seven times cursed and seven times sealed," is invoked in the first of seven sentences, all of which begin with the binding phrase.  What Weisel does is not only invoke the wrath of God in his Biblical (Torahian?) narrative style, but he enacts that seven-fold curse through the idea of words as being magical, as is illustrated not only in the Book of Genesis from Weisel's religion (Tetragrammaton: the unutterable Name of God), but a common trait throughout myriad mythologies from Chinese belief in words having come from the web spinnings of spiders, to the Egyptian never speaking their secret names so as to prevent another from holding power over them.  Wiesel spells out the curse in words, sentencing them to the page.

    Between the time of Weisel's experiences and his publishing them, the poet Allen Ginsberg produced a work that shares so many similarities and connections to Whitman as to be almost innumerable.  The very title of Howl is easily seen to be connective with Whitman's "barbaric yawp" from the roof tops of the world (an image that, itself, appears in Ginsberg's magna opus).  The style and device connection is even more evident when Ginsberg, 46 lines in a row and more than a dozen additional to that, uses the pronoun/verb combination "who..." "...vanished/wandered/lit/studied/loaned/thought/jumped/lounged/disappeared/reappeared/burned/distributed/broke/bit/howled," to cite a few.  Ginsberg also is a poet who performed his work, not merely as readings from a page, but enacted with improvasational inflictions, music, and with bodily response to the poetry's call for movement.

    That call for movement from the sound of words itself reveals itself in the latter part of the 20th Century through the lyric poetry of modern music.  Where modern poetry has become introverted, read in silence far more often than aloud—moreso now than had ever been in the past thanks in large part to other forms of media as well as a change in attitude towards poetry itself.  This is where some songwriters have become far more the voices of poetic literature and oral traditoional than do the modern writers who claim the mantle of being poets.  Citing examples is intimidatingly plentiful, but we shall focus on an singular case, and one which is directly and texturally inspired by Ginsberg's Howl.

    Roger Waters, on the Pink Floyd album Animals, displays his poetic tradition proudly. On the lengthy song, "Dogs," eleven lines in a row all begin with a phrase that appears to be asking a question, but like its forebearer in Howl, instead makes an uncomfortable state of simple, if poetic, fact with a pronoun/verb combination: "Who was born in a house full of pain. / Who was trained... / Who was told... / Who was broken... / Who was fitted... / Who was given... / Who was breaking... / Who was only... / Who was ground... / Who was found... / Who was dragged down by the stone."  This despairing alliterative repetition is repeated in Waters' successive work, The Wall.  Anaphora shows up numerous times in not only the lyrical verses, but extends to repeated musical phrases—leitmotifs—as well.  Given our theme in the 20th Century examples, one verse in particular stands out.  Waters tells us sadly:

I've got a little black book with my poems in.
I've got a bag with a toothbrush and a comb in.
When I'm a good dog they sometimes throw me a bone in.
I've got elastic bands keeping my shoes on.
I've got those swollen hand blues.
I've got thirteen channels of shit on the TV to choose from.
    ...
I've got a pair of Gohill's boots
And I've got fading roots.

Amidst a rock opera concerning a child who grew up without a father (who was killed in World War II), we see this ancient device of anaphora and repeatative alliteration citing the exclusively modern paraphenalia of elastic bands, television, and a trendy shop for purchasing the latest in foot fashion wear, as well as the writing of poetry itself.

    In making this journey, we have seen how a poetic device which began shortly after humans first gathered around a fire as a memnonic to be able to recite the stories heard from others as stories of our own became a means to relate history, convery aspects of religion, instruct, entertain, warn, and finally to become the memnoic for silently calling our own bodies to respond to the memory of cadenced words when we recall, to ourselves, the lyrics to a favorite song.  The connecting historical tradition of  anaphora, rhythm, and the oral tradition of poetic storytelling has journeyed a long way since flowing out of that distant mythic Eden in our collective distant past, and splashes us continually, even right where we are sitting now.

Bibliography

Avi-Ram, Amitai. "Free Verse in Whitman and Ginsberg: The Body and the Simulacrum." The Continuing Presence of Walt Whitman: The Life after the Life. Iowa City: U. of Iowa Press, 1992. Web. 23 Mar. 2010.

Blake, William. Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience. New York: Dover, 1992. Print.

Canada, Dr. Mark. "Walt Whitman." Mark Canada's Work. UNC-Pembroke. Web. 21 Mar. 2010.

Dickens, Charles. A Tale of Two Cities. New York: Signet Classics, 2007. Print.

Doty, Mark. "Form, Eros, and the Unspeakable: Whitman's Stanzas." Virginia Quarterly Review, 2005. Web. 21 Mar. 2010.

Drout, Michael D. C. "A Meme-Based Approach to Oral Traditional Theory." Oral Tradition 21.2 (2006). Web. 23 Mar. 2010.

Eliot, T. S. Poems, 1909-1925. London: Faber and Faber, 1925. Print.

Ginsberg, Allen. Howl, and Other Poems. San Francisco: City Lights, 1996. Print.

Hall, Donald. "The Art of Poetry No. 1." The Paris Review 21 (Spring-Summer 1959). Paris Review. Web. 9 Apr, 2010.

Homer. The Odyssey. Trans. Robert Fagles. New York: Viking Press. 1996. Print.

Killingsworth, M. Jimmie. Whitman's Poetry of the Body: Sexuality, Politics, and the Text. Chapel Hill: U. of North Carolina, 1989. Google Books. 23 Mar. 2010.

Poe, Edgar Allan. The Complete Edgar Allan Poe. New York: Avenel, 1981. Print.

Shakespeare, William. Julius Caesar. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002. Print.

Waters, Roger. "Dogs." Animals. Pink Floyd. Pink Floyd, 1977. Album.

—. "Nobody Home." The Wall. Pink Floyd. Bob Ezrin, David Gilmour, James Guthrie, Roger Waters, 1979. Album.

Wiesel, Elie. Night. New York: Bantam, 1982. Print.

Wiley, Autrey Nell. "Reiterative Devices in Leaves of Grass." American Literature 1.2 (1929). Literary Reference Center. Web. 21 Mar. 2010.



~•~

"Bad writers borrow from other writers; Good writers steal."

Here's a paper I wrote for Books & Publishing class about plagiarism. I framed it around the controversary of Dr. Brad Vice's Flannery O'Connor Award, but included a few other public cases.

In a comment on a semi-public forum, Vice commented about the passing of the author and his mentor, Barry Hannah.

I'm proud to say that you can find my name and a little blurb on the paperback copies of Yonder Stands Your Orphan. Later it was used to make me look like some sort of criminal when my book controversy hit. It really made me depressed. I can't even find the review on-line now as there are more so ... many articles about the review that the review is lost. You could find it on the SFC page if you were interested. I even told my editor when he gave me the book--Look, I've read everything by BH, and I love it all --so if you give me this book, I'm likely to write a good review. He said, "You sound like your qualified for the job." Anyway, it made me so angry that they tried to smear Barry through me. I still can't get over the Lucifarian villain who looks like Conway Twitty--too concerned about his hair to play high school football.

I have no reason to believe he's actually referring to Robert Clark Young being a prissy pansy and disrespectable no-account lying jealous sack of excrement or anything of that nature. No reason at all to associate that person with those traits.

If I ever rewrite this—or write again on the subject—I think I shall bring into the conversation the legal criminology term of "larceny," that is, theft by stealth, and equate it to the Twain attribution. Steal it quietly, make it your own, and wear your influences as evidence of the literary stream which has washed down from those who came before you. Or something poetic like that.



~•~



CRW 321 - 001
February 24, 2009
Wild Card Essay


"Bad writers borrow from other writers; Good writers steal."


This quote is often attributed to Mark Twain, T. S. Eliot, or Oscar Wilde. It's witty and deeper than it seems at first, and completely apropos to our discussion. Without absolute veracity of such an attribution, for the sake of this argument, we'll leave the source of that quote with Mr. Twain.

Does this comment mean that Twain encouraged and condoned plagiarism? Although it may not be immediately apparent in this statement, we can be fairly certain that, indeed, Twain (nor Eliot, nor Wilde) was not encouraging anyone to plagiarize another's work. But let us take a closer look at what defines plagiarism before picking apart what Twain might, or might not, have meant by that.

In examining this subject of borrowing and stealing other people's work—focussing exclusively on the written word and not on intellectual theft in the other arts—we will discuss ideas and intellectual property rights, touch briefly on copyright law, and take a look at three cases involving the accusation of plagiarism, and find evidence that in the world of literature, stealing is not as readily evident from borrowing as one might expect. Following that, we will return to Mark Twain's (attributed) quote and have another look at what it might really mean.

Before we get into our three specific cases, let us take a moment to define some things. Intellectual Property, to put it simply for our use in this discussion, is considered to be—as stated by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO)—"Intellectual property refers to creations of the mind: inventions, literary and artistic works, and symbols, names, images, and designs used in commerce." The term is used to denote the legal rights of a work and not the work itself. Under intellectual property laws, the creator, or rightful owner of a work, are granted certain exclusive rights to their work in any medium. Copyright, trademarks, trade secrets, and patents are just a few examples of intellectual property rights. For the purposes of this discussion, however, we will limit our commentary to copyrights, and not touch upon any of the other defined forms of intellectual property.

So what is involved with copyright law?

A comprehensive answer to that would involve a firm of lawyers and more pages of explanation than a small room could hold—this is why there are specialized attorneys to deal with the complexities of copyright law—but we will try to offer a very brief description of what it covers in relation to our purpose.

The intent of copyright in the United States is based on Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 in the U.S. Constitution, which states: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." This is intended to give the creator of a substantive and discrete idea—that is, an idea that is seen to fruition in an extended written work, and not merely the idea itself, nor titles, situations, or characters without their placement in a substantive, discrete work—certain exclusive rights (as we said about intellectual property) to publish, distribute, or adapt their work for a reasonable amount of time. That reasonable amount of time is currently given to be 50-100 years following the death of the creator of the work. This complexity is further muddled by "fair use."

The fair use doctrine does not specifically define "fair use" but rather gives a four point rubric to discern if use of copyrighted material is able to be used fairly by another party. The factors given to consider this are: the purpose and character of the use; the nature of the copyrighted work; the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work. Thus there is a legitimate right to use excerpts or quotes from a copyrighted work "for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching […], scholarship, or research," (U.S. Code) which means book reviews can use portions of a work for purposes of illustrating an opinion; schools can use copyrighted work so long as they are not charging a fee for its use in an educational manner; and very brief quotes can be used as epigrams by others in their own work.
Confused by that? You begin to see how quickly complicated this matter can become; especially when copyright/intellectual property right laws differ from country to country. The entire matter is about as clear as a lecture on theological nuclear physics recited by Carl Sagan, backwards, in Pig Latin.

My sarcastic analogy is silly, but is meant to illustrate the complexity of this point. We are three pages into a discussion of plagiarism and we have only now reached the examples.

Our first look will be at the case involving the accusation that in The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown plagiarized the work of Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln (although Lincoln's name did not appear on court records in this accusation) in their non-fiction work, Holy Blood, Holy Grail. This is a case of fiction appropriating material from non-fiction, which is not as common as fiction appropriating from other fiction, as well as the fact that the accusation hinged upon the direct use of ideas and framework of the earlier material. As author Richard Leigh stated, Dan Brown "lifted the whole architecture—the whole jigsaw puzzle—and hung it on to the peg of a fictional thriller." (Day)

So the accusation of Brown's plagiarism did not involve direct use of phrases and word choice, but on the framework, background, and general idea of Baigent's and Leigh's intellectual property.

To many in the literary world, the case Baigent and Leigh brought against Brown looked to be a clear case of copyright infringement; plagiarism. Myriad ideas put forth in Holy Blood, Holy Grail (HBHG) were present in nearly identical form in The Da Vinci Code, including a character who physically resembled the third author of HBHG, Henry Lincoln, and whose name, Leigh Teabing, is lifted directly from authors Leigh and Baigent (anagram of Teabing). The Justice who heard the case in UK Court disagreed with the accusers, and the verdict dictated that the ideas depicted in non-fiction work could not be plagiarized.

As a work of historical research, HBHG was often criticized as being faulty and venturing into the realms of fiction. So, ironically, if Baigent's and Leigh's work had been fiction, they would have likely won their plagiarism case against Brown. As it was, copyright precedent had been set for works of fiction to be able to use non-fiction ideas without infringement.

Our next example involves a case of fiction borrowing from other fiction, coming from a first time author and young student at Harvard University named Kaavya Viswanathan. At the age of 19, she had her first novel published to notable acclaim. How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got A Life garnered Viswanathan a large advance along with a two-book deal, praise from the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, The Boston Globe, and many others. An film deal with Steven Spielberg's company DreamWorks SKG had been signed. Her academic and literary future seemed bright (Bailey; McGonigle; Memmott).

Then The Harvard Crimson ran an article claiming Viswanathan had plagiarized 12 passages in her book from two novels by Megan McCafferty. The passages were more than merely similar, they were virtually identical (Zhou). Both the author and her publisher denied the accusations, but things got worse quickly. By mid-May of that year, the New York Times had covered the story with several articles, and the evidence of plagiarism expanded. From 12 passages to 29 passages to more than 40 passages of almost identical phrases had been used by Viswanathan, taken from the two novels by McCafferty, as well as novels by Sophie Kinsella, Meg Cabot, and Salman Rushdie. As it turned out, more passages from Viswanathan's debut novel were copied from previous works than were not (Zeller; Smith and Moto).

Soon the publishers, Little, Brown and Company pulled the book from stores—at first to republish it with the offending passages removed—but as the scandal grew, they cancelled republication and Viswanathan's book deal (Crimson).

When the initial accusations were reported, Viswanathan appeared on The Today Show with Katie Couric, were that she commented that she must have "internalized" the details of McCafferty's books without realizing it. Following the expansion of the accusations, neither Viswanathan, nor her publisher, offered further comment directly concerning the issue. Viswanathan has since left Harvard and is currently attending Georgetown University (Atwan).
Our third example is perhaps the most difficult to deduce facts from accusation since it involves the overlap of academia, professional publication, and the sometimes uncomfortable meeting between fiction and non-fiction narratives.

In 2005, Brad Vice was an assistant professor at Mississippi State University when he was awarded the 2004 Flannery O'Connor Award for his short story collection, The Bear Bryant Funeral Train. Not long after this announcement, a library advisor at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa (where Vice received his B.A. and where the story of contention is set) contacted the publisher of the award alleging plagiarism in one of the collected stories. Based on this single allegation, and without questioning the author, the University of Georgia Press rescinded the award to Vice, and ordered copies of his book to be pulled from distribution and pulped (Media Bistro).

Following this, Robert Clark Young published an article in the New York Press attacking not only Vice's short story collection, but extending the plagiarism claims to other short stories and articles Vice had written, but also calling into question Vice's Ph.D dissertation at the University of Cincinnati. Young's allegations went beyond Vice's work, but to his academic career, both as a teacher and a student, and made inflammatory comments about a number of another writers—all of whom were graduates of the Sewanee Writers' Conference—including Barry Hannah (Young; Sanford).

"Tuscaloosa Knights" was the story at the center of these allegations. It contained two sentences that were very similar to those appearing in a non-fiction book by Carl Carmer called Stars Fell On Alabama (It would be another year before a British court would offer an opinion as to the validity of fictional work using non-fiction source material, so a case of fiction "plagiarizes" non-fiction had not yet had a ruling in court). Carmer's work is quite famous around Tuscaloosa, as the author had been a professor at the university for a number of years in the 1930s, during which time he wrote his book (York). Vice stated that his use of Carmer's words and setting was an example of intertextual postmodernism, and an homage to Carmer's work. Indeed, previous version of the manuscript, including that of his Ph.D dissertation, contain epigrams to Carmer (Vice).

Critics, particularly Young, argued that it was deliberate plagiarism. Vice's supporters—who included other authors, editors of magazines where Vice's work had previously appeared, and Vice's former professors and advisors—leveled their own claims against Young, stating the latter man was bitter at Vice, Hannah, and the Sewanee Writers' Conference because Young's work was widely panned at the conference, and in his article accusing Vice of plagiarism, there are numerous factual errors concerning the Sewanee Conference and unfounded allegations against its sponsors and organizers.

The context in which Vice used a few sentences of Carl Carmer's work places the appropriated phrases in a very similar setting—that of a nighttime Ku Klux Klan rally in Tuscaloosa—but with different characters and a different outcome. Carmer's "Flaming Cross" chapter of Stars Fell On Alabama, was a description of an actual event (Carmer; Cobb). Vice's story is fictional, although keeps the setting of several people discussing, and then attempting to attend out of curiosity, the Klan rally (Vice).

The result of these allegations against Brad Vice resulted in his loss of the Flannery O'Connor Award (although another publisher picked up the book and made a few minor editorial changes) and eventually his dismissal from his position at Mississippi State University. He now teaches at the University of West Bohemia in the Czech Republic (ZČU).

These tales of caution bring us back to the quote we've attributed to Mark Twain, "Bad writers borrow from other writers; good writers steal," and our question at the beginning as to what such a volatile statement as that could possibly mean.

Twain is almost certainly not condoning nor encouraging plagiarism. What this quote is taken to mean is that if an idea or phrase or concept appeals to a writer, they shouldn't borrow it, as in merely using the words of another to make their own piece seem stronger or more literary or more legitimate, instead stealing an idea, concept, or phrase, means to take it and use it in a manner unique to the voice of the "thieving" writer; to re-engineer, deconstruct, improve, fold, spindle, and alter it into a manner fitting the voice and setting and framework of a new piece.
If all literary theft was plagiarism, Byron could sue Poe, Petrarch could sue Shakespeare, and Shakespeare could sue almost everyone else. T. S. Eliot called such appropriations "verbal kleptomania," and practiced such himself.

In other words, if you are going to liberate material from another writer—from another source—don't just rent it and make a copy; turn it into something of your own.

The moral of this story may well be: Be aware of where the words and ideas you use have been before they showed up on your page, but when they do—and here I steal a comment from Martin Luther—"sin bravely."

•


Works Cited

Atwan, Greg. "Kaavya Emptor."

02138 Dec. & Jan. 2008-2009, Vol. 3, No. 1.

Bailey, Marilyn. "HOWMTF:

How 'Opal' will make teen famous."

The Boston Globe 17 Apr. 2006.

Cobb, Mark Hughes.

"Book's passages raise questions of plagiarism."

TuscaloosaNews.com.
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