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Sunday, November 06, 2005

VICE II

Another note on the extent to which Brad Vice is guilty of the vice of plagiarism. In a thoughtful essay, Jake Adam York, at the blog Story South, defends what Vice did in one of his short stories (see this post for background) as intentionally and clearly allusive of its precursor text and of the Alabama literary tradition generally:

[Vice’s story is] an act of Alabama literature, which would necessitate at some point a consideration of Carmer's Stars Fell On Alabama, one of the few outstanding works of classic Alabama literature. And it's hard to imagine that, with Carmer's work in mind, we could read Vice's work without hearing the quotations and without understanding them as such and without understanding the quotations not as a simple homage to a segment of another work of Alabama literature but as well as an appropriately rich response to a work that is itself so heavily invested in quotation, taking its name from a popular jazz tune and frequently quoting real people in the course of its narrative.

…To have been more explicit within the story itself, Vice would have had to have included an epigraph from Carmer's work or perhaps named Carmer, but such a gesture diminishes the allusion, which works when the reader makes the connection the author has already made. The joy of allusion lies in the reader's arrival at that place already inhabited by the author, a place in which reader and writer come to be in profound sympathy with one another. To force this arrival, as an author, is to mistrust the reader.



I’m sympathetic to some of this, but there are problems, foremost among them the fact that the Carmer book is very obscure and basically out of print, so it’s presumably little read and little known. It is one thing for T.S. Eliot to quote lines from Dante’s Inferno without identifying them, and another for a writer to pick up paragraphs of prose from a book he has reason to believe few of his readers have encountered. Indeed, I’m afraid one of the classic strategies of plagiarists is to find an obscure work on their subject written awhile back and assume (often rightly - these cases more typically come to light long after publication) that no one will notice their having plundered it.

And, having now looked at both texts side by side, it is clear that Vice did lift a significant amount of Carmer. Occasionally Vice made very minor changes. But basically he just took it, metaphor, mood, and all.