Joseph Earp has a Guardian piece on a recent literary scandal involving “the acclaimed Australian author” John Hughes:
John told us early that if we wanted to be writers, we had to write. So that’s what we did. We brought in pieces of our work, and he, smiling, told us what he liked about them. He had recommendations for everyone. There was a library in his head, and when a line struck him, you could see him browsing that library, and pulling out something he thought you’d like.
Through John, I was introduced to Sylvia Plath, one of the central figures in my literary and personal life. He showed me the beauty in The Great Gatsby, a text that I had unfairly dismissed – under his guidance, it bloomed. He told me about Cormac McCarthy, Mark Rothko, Walden. And, as I grew older, I recommended things to him. I became obsessed with cinema, and would lend him DVDs. We talked Herzog; Haneke; von Trier, hanging around each other in the halls of the library, delighting in the conversation. […]
John never told us he was a published author, until his first book, An Idea of Home, won a major literary award. During my last year of high school, his second book, Someone Else, was released. I attended the launch with my parents. Someone Else is my favourite of John’s works, a series of “fictional essays”, in which he borrows the language and lives of the authors he adores to tell you something about himself. At the launch, one of John’s university friends described John as “fox-like”, moving through the world with cunning and wit. […]
John never got the success I felt he deserved for the books I believe he wrote on his own. They were scantly reviewed. If you know of him at all, you probably know him as a plagiarist.
Earlier this year, John’s most recent book, The Dogs, was discovered to have featured whole lines and passages from a number of sources – The Great Gatsby, which particularly stung, given the way John had brought it into my life, as well as Anna Karenina, All Quiet On The Western Front, and more. Entire sentences were lifted and not cited, with only occasional words changed; the book was removed from the longlist of Australia’s most prestigious literary prize, the Miles Franklin, as a result.
John apologised for plagiarising Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich’s work “without realising”, but defended his process in the Guardian, saying he was not a plagiarist. He said that he was shaped by the writers who had influenced him; that he had, in a sense, little versions of them and their words that he kept in his head. He claimed that he saw all writing as a lineage of homage, and pointed to famous artists who have limped after the work of other artists – in particular Bob Dylan, who I know for a fact that John has loved for years.
This defence was not well received. […]
Earp then describes how he discovered that Hughes had taken several paragraphs from a review he himself had published years earlier:
[…] I picked up No One from my bookshelf and read and re-read that section. I felt a number of things. The strangest, most immediate was a version of pride. The man whose approval I had always wanted had decided I was good enough to rip off. I was sitting, with Fitzgerald, in the library in his head; my writing, like Tolstoy’s, had stuck with him, somewhere deep, and he had turned to it when he wanted to say something that he couldn’t say.
I was also fascinated by the lines that John had changed. Some of the changes are merely structural, and made sense in the context of his story. But why the addition of tawny port? Is that what he would have drunk?
What was wrong with my line – “as soon as I sparked up a cigarette” – and what was better about his line – “as soon as I struck the match”? Why “inexplicable” over “unexplainable”?
Some commentators have suggested John changed lines to “cover his tracks”. But he is an astonishingly smart man; if he wanted to cover his tracks, he would do it much better than this.
Instead, I felt that I was encountering some essence of the nature of writing and reading – another lesson from John. Writing is a series of choices. Reading John’s words – which are not really his – and then reading mine – which are not wholly mine either, because they come from my life, which is made up of other people, and which are shaped by those authors who I admire – was a process of watching those choices happen, in as close as we get to real-time with literature.
It hurt, and I was angry for what had happened to me and other writers – the way our labour had been co-opted, and not appropriately cited. Lots of people can imagine that hurt, I assume. But I can’t imagine that many other people understand the way it felt good, too.
He ends with a strong condemnation (“I am angry that he did that to me, and to the other authors whose labour he did not attribute”) and a reference to “– on some level – having forgiven him.” The lame justifications of the plagiarist, always the same (“I didn’t realize”… influence… homage…) are boring and annoying, but the ambivalence of the victim here is interesting; it reminds me of the people who are suckered by charming con artists and can’t bring themselves to send them to prison. David Renton writes in the LRB about “the MP and journalist Horatio Bottomley, a fraudster whose victims, according to his biographer Julian Symons, often felt he ‘did not mean to do wrong’.” I can’t decide whether that’s noble or pathetic.
What was wrong with my line — “as soon as I sparked up a cigarette” — and what was better about his line — “as soon as I struck the match”?
The original was trying too hard to sound novel?
If the change had gone the other way, you’d be suggesting the original was too bland. I agree with the commentators who suggested John made the changes to cover his tracks.
not wholly mine either, because they come from my life, which is made up of other people, and which are shaped by those authors who I admire
I’ve just been listening to a Jeeves & Wooster story — courtesy BBC radio dramatisation. Even when Bertie is only half-remembering some line, Wodehouse is punctilious in having Jeeves fill in the exact citation — and not in an overbearing/condescending manner.
OTOH so much of the slang and metaphors must have been ‘in the atmosphere’ at the time Wodehouse was learning his trade. Is he supposed to attribute that too?
How much of “whole lines and passages” are you allowed to copy/paraphrase unattributed before it counts as plagiarism?
Most of ‘The Wasteland’ is assembled rather than written afresh. Did Eliot acknowledge the allusions at publication? Or more part of the pleasure in reading is to recognise those allusions for yourself?
Obviously there are no hard and fast lines to be drawn. That does not mean there is no such thing as plagiarism.
“Plagiarism is the sincerest form of flattery” — that would seem to be borne out by Earp’s reaction.
@lars
I have a problem with “sincere” here. For me the fact that it felt “good” is a further indictment on the plagiarist, who seems also to have practiced a form of mental abuse on Earp of the type when a son continually attempts to please his unresponsive father and is always unsuccessful…
It is possible, based solely on the article, that Hughes was a manipulative fraud from the outset, but alternatively that he was a once helpful talented man who latterly for some reason turned to plagiarism. Further research is needed.
To my ear, “spark up a joint” is sort of a fixed phrase (although I think one that post-dates my own youth), so “spark up a [tobacco] cigarette” sounds odd or off in approximately the same way that referring to a drag on such a cigarette as a “toke” would. But the semantic scope of “spark up” may be different in Australian English or among Earp’s generational cohort, for whom tobacco may have the sort of outlaw glamor that cannabis used to, for all I know. If it’s generational, perhaps Hughes (four years older than me, sez wikipedia) found it odd-sounding for the same reason I do?
For the work of a novelist accused of “borrowing” from other literary sources, I am at some level unconvinced of the necessity of the idea of “plagiarism” as an independent category of wrongdoing. Either the borrowing of wording is sufficiently substantial to constitute copyright infringement (w/o a successful “fair use” defense) or it isn’t. Although I guess ginning up a public controversy about “plagiarism” to skunk the commercial/reputational fortunes of the novel may be cheaper than hiring lawyers to pursue a copyright lawsuit? (There are specific contextual reasons why plagiarism-falling-short-of-infringement might be disapproved of for students, other academics, and journalists, and I don’t start with the default assumption that they carry over to other domains.)
There seem to be two very different sorts of borrowing alleged to have gone on here. The borrowing from e.g. Alexievich is presumably because in part of the author’s need to describe the context of wartorn Eastern Europe in the 1940’s, the milieu from which his own mother fled and eventually (after intermediate stops) arrived in Australia. So it would at least make sense for Hughes to have “read up” on that to supplement whatever family stories he heard growing up. Whereas the borrowings from the Great Gatsby or the record review by Earp have no such logical explanation of why Hughes would have been relying on them for research material. There’s the further oddity that the Alexievich book as I understand it purports to be an anthology of recollections by women who were actually there and interviewed by Alexievich, so unless she did a lot of literary embroidering and embellishing (which I suppose she may have) the words being borrowed (in translation) aren’t really Alexievich’s own literary creation, are they?
So it would at least make sense for Hughes to have “read up” on that to supplement whatever family stories he heard growing up. Whereas the borrowings from the Great Gatsby or the record review by Earp have no such logical explanation of why Hughes would have been relying on them for research material.
See, I don’t understand this line of defense (and I understand it even less coming from disinterested bystanders than from the plagiarists themselves). Do you really not understand the difference between writing a fresh passage with details taken from something you’ve read for research and just swiping a paragraph or two, perhaps changing a few words to avoid detection? Here, let me give you a couple of examples.
1) For the work of a novelist accused of “borrowing” from other sources, I am not totally convinced of the necessity of the idea of “plagiarism” as an independent category of wrongdoing. Either the borrowing of wording is sufficiently substantial to constitute copyright infringement (barring a successful “fair use” defense) or it isn’t. Although I suppose ginning up a public controversy about “plagiarism” to skunk the commercial/reputational fortunes of the novel may be cheaper than hiring lawyers to pursue a copyright lawsuit. (There are particular reasons why plagiarism-falling-short-of-infringement might be disapproved of for students, academics, and journalists, and I don’t start with the default assumption that they carry over to other domains.)
2) It could be considered that plagiarism is actually just a subset, or offshoot, of other offenses, such as infringement of an author’s copyright, though it might make sense to treat it separately in certain cases, and of course it might be in an author’s interest to try to ruin the plagiarist’s reputation rather than undergo the expense of a lawsuit.
Do you really see no substantial differences between those texts? Would you not feel that the first was taking something from you without compensation or at least attribution, while the second was merely restating some of your views? If not, you are not like any other author I’ve known. Writing is hard, and swiping somebody else’s writing is theft.
I’m not defending the borrowing from Alexievich – I’m simply saying it’s easy to understand why he would have had the translation of her book close at hand while working on the novel and then been too lazy (“inadvertently” or otherwise) to recraft the substance in his own wording whereas there’s no obvious parallel reason he would had the Great Gatsby open as … as what? Research material on how to describe people smiling?
In terms of “theft,” I would simply say that we have a well-developed body of rules (perhaps slightly different in Australia than the U.S. but similar due to common intellectual/political ancestry) about what sort of borrowings do or don’t constitute copyright infringement, plus institutional arrangements for applying those rules to disputed situations in an orderly fashion, whereas “plagiarism” is more ill-defined and more likely to be argued about solely in the undisciplined and unconstrained court of public opinion.*
Now, it may well be that Hughes’ degree of borrowing would be found to violate various copyrights (although Great Gatsby is public domain in Australia, I think). My concern is with situations that the applicable law does not in fact consider “theft,” but that nonetheless bother some people who think it’s “theft” in some vague metaphorical sense anyway.
*I guess one difference in the other direction is that if you put the prior writer’s wording in quotation marks and accurately attribute it, most people will accept that that’s not “plagiarism,” but if the quotes are too extensive and permission has not been obtained it may well still be copyright infringement. One practical benefit of flagging/attributing the copied words in your manuscript is that your publisher’s lawyers will have an informed opinion as to whether obtaining permission is necessary/desirable or not, although of course sometimes they err in the direction of being overcautious.
Alexievich, so unless she did a lot of literary embroidering and embellishing (which I suppose she may have) the words being borrowed (in translation) aren’t really Alexievich’s own literary creation, are they?
My understanding of Alexievich’s writing method is that she doesn’t necessarily “embroider,” but she also seldom quotes verbatim. She tape-records her interviews and then, through a process of paring down and splicing, a sort of literary collage, transforms those free-flowing interviews into some kind of coherent narrative. I’ve read a couple of her works in Russian, and ellipses are everywhere, implying that much is being omitted.
Looking at examples of Hughes’ plagiarism on his WP page—dozens of borrowings of very specific phrases and images–his defense rings utterly hollow to me. Whether or not it rises to the level of copyright infringement would be for a court to decide, but I have no doubt whatsoever that I find it morally repugnant, so the useful world plagiarism applies.
Whether or not it rises to the level of copyright infringement would be for a court to decide, but I have no doubt whatsoever that I find it morally repugnant, so the useful world plagiarism applies.
Well said.
Wait, so Alexievich takes words uttered by others and weaves excerpts of them together into something new? That sounds rather similar to Hughes’ (obviously self-serving) characterization of what he did. Does she pay royalties to the ladies who uttered the words originally? Of course, she did that particular book back in Soviet times when the ladies might not even have thought to ask for compensation for and/or control over what subsequently became of their words, and similarly Alexievich might not have thought to have them sign away whatever rights they might have by default had.
I recently happened to be flipping through “We Got the Neutron Bomb,” a 2001-published oral history of the late Seventies L.A. punk scene, put together by judicious extracting and sequencing of short excerpts from interviews with (or prior public statements by) dozens (possibly over a hundred in all) of different eyewitnesses and participants. There was considerable skill and artistry in how the words of the underlying participants were excerpted and spliced together into a coherent narrative by Marc Spitz and Brendan Mullen, yet if someone were to take without attribution a turn of phrase from one of those participants, I would think in the first instance that if they were wronging anyone in a moral sense they were wronging the person who said the words not Spitz/Mullen.
FWIW I do find Hughes’ claim that he was not aware that he was liberally borrowing wording from the English translation of Alexievich’s book to be … comparatively implausible absent some sort of weird neurological quirk.
I’m afraid your analogy tumbles at the very first hurdle.
Alexievich’s quotations are all those of named individuals and their words invariably are given in quotation marks, so there’s zero question of stealing someone else’s words without due attribution. Further, her shaping of the words is little different from what any interviewer would do before a long profile of a person appears in print. It couldn’t possibly be more different from Hughes’ unattributed “borrowings,” attempting to pass off phrases and ideas as his own when they were no such thing.
OTOH so much of the slang and metaphors must have been ‘in the atmosphere’ at the time Wodehouse was learning his trade. Is he supposed to attribute that too?
Not a word of that is original, in the sense that Wodehouse was using words and phrases current in his time.
=======
I have not read any of Hughes’s unattributed quotations, but I am myself — in my fiction — a plagiarist in what I believe to be the same sense. My characters (I don’t do narrative) often say things that echo, verbatim or modified, what characters by other authors have said, or sometimes what real people have said. My characters themselves are unaware of these connections, but I am, and I am glad when readers see the connections between my characters and their unconscious sources. Adding footnotes or other forms of attribution seems absurd to me.
I think the problem with academic plagiarism (I posted on Language Log about this, I think, but I can’t find it now) is that it corrupts the process of evaluation. When a student submits someone else’s essay as their own, the judgment on the work winds up attached to the wrong person. There are a whole series of analogous cases: if I submit an essay in someone else’s handwriting (or typed, which is is nobody’s handwriting), I am in a sense falsifying it, but unless the class is in penmanship, I am not corrupting the evaluation process, because I am not being evaluated for my writing in the literal sense, only for its content. But in the commercial world, I may be asked to provide a slide for someone else’s presentation, perhaps my manager’s; I don’t expect to be credited for that slide, because it is my superior’s responsibility to use it or not, and I am part of his team.
But I am not asking anything in exchange for my fiction: there is no evaluation process to corrupt.
Huh. I’m perfectly capable of reproducing multiple paragraphs of somebody else’s prose without knowing I’m doing it. Doesn’t matter, because I have no publishing ambitions: but I’m startled at the confidence evinced in this thread. So you all really remember where everything comes from? Maybe I’m odder than I thought.
Huh. I’m perfectly capable of reproducing multiple paragraphs of somebody else’s prose without knowing I’m doing it.
I find that very hard to believe. Multiple paragraphs, really? Word for word? Of prose you haven’t read recently? And you feel as you’re writing the paragraphs that you made them up? In that case, how do you know you’ve done it? I’m not saying you’re wrong, but I’d sure like to hear more details.
So you all really remember where everything comes from?
Look, we all regurgitate stuff we’ve heard and read all the time. Almost every phrase and sentence out of most people’s mouths is something they picked up somewhere, and if they try to write a passage of connected prose it will be a tissue of cliches. That’s not what we’re talking about, we’re talking about literally reproducing long passages of other people’s prose — the prose of writers who select their words carefully, not bureaucratic committees or whatever. Menard/Cervantes, that kind of thing. I can easily believe that someone could write “the clocks were striking thirteen” and feel very clever, not realizing it was from Orwell, but not that they could write:
… and think they were coming up with it on their own.
laowai’s point is the commonplace one that “plagiarism” is fundamentally about failing to properly attribute the words of others and at least implicitly pass them off as ones own (or as the words of a fictional character of ones own creation, if that’s any different). So using the attributed words of others without appropriate permission may be a legal wrong (e.g. copyright infringement if sufficiently substantial), but can’t be plagiarism? Is it “theft”? Obviously how much “permission” with what level of formality/legality/documentation is sufficient to make the user-with-attribution blameless in either a legal or moral sense may depend on context.
But I don’t know that laowai has addressed my separate hang-up about whether Hughes is plagiarizing from Alexievich herself or from her named sources, on whose behalf it may or may not be appropriate for Alexievich to take derivative umbrage.
And for the love of Pete, if you’re right and you and others (presumably not that many) are capable of such a feat, surely if you were caught out — “Hey, that’s word-for-word what that other guy wrote!” — you’d immediately apologize, not babble some crap about homage and/or the collective unconscious. And you would presumably, knowing your ability to unwittingly plagiarize, take steps to make sure it didn’t happen again. It’s like walking out of a store without paying for something: sure, it happens, but if you’re a decent person you apologize and pay, you don’t start speechifying about the evils of capitalism.
(Obviously, that was addressed to Dale, not JWB.)
So you all really remember where everything comes from?
I think anyone is capable of accidentally coughing up the occasional turn of phrase or bon mot without being precisely aware that they’re quoting, just as a rock guitarist will sometimes come up with a killer hook that–whoops!–turns out to have been used before.
But a full paragraph (not a well-known one) pinched from The Great Gatsby? Either Hughes knew exactly what he was doing, or plagiarism is the least of his problems, and he needs the help of a neurologist. There’s also the sheer number of his borrowings. It’s extremely hard to believe the four score of them (identified so far) all just randomly burbled to the surface.
Hat: I seem to remember you posting somewhere that all pre-revolutionary Russian novels are full of unattributed quotations from earlier (often more famous) novels: am I wrong here?
“or plagiarism is the least of his problems, and he needs the help of a neurologist”
Photographic memory does not sound like a “problem”:-) It is an ability.
Hat: I seem to remember you posting somewhere that all pre-revolutionary Russian novels are full of unattributed quotations from earlier (often more famous) novels: am I wrong here?
No, you’re not wrong (except it’s not just pre-revolutionary — they’re still doing it). That’s an entirely different matter, of course, using the common literary tradition as material they expect to be recognized and appreciated. No Russian would consider it plagiarism, and any author would be glad to tell you where the citations were from.
Photographic memory does not sound like a “problem”:-) It is an ability.
In my long-distant youth I had, if not exactly a photographic memory, an ability to recall scenes and pictures with great clarity. Even now, I rarely need driving directions twice, because once I’ve traveled a certain route it sticks in my head.
Recalling words, though, is a whole different ability, and one I’ve never possessed. I tried memorizing a few poems when young but it was tough sledding and I can only recall fragments now.
Some famous literary person — Harold Bloom? – was known for being able to spout off entire scenes from Shakespeare at the drop of a hat. Fun at parties, I’m sure. But he knew what he was doing. He didn’t pretend or imagine that he was improvising Shakespearean drama ad lib.
A limited number of people in New Haven (not me!) would play what you might call a parlor game with the late Harold Bloom, except it was best played outdoors rather than in his parlor. You chanced upon him walking across campus, and without preamble recited to him a few lines (ideally from somewhere obscure in the middle) from Paradise Lost. He would allegedly pick up wherever you’d left off with the next few lines, from memory. He was almost certainly (especially as adjusted for memory/recall) the best-read human being in the English-speaking world and it seems unlikely we will encounter his like again.
Exactly; and the problem with self-plagiarism is that by pretending you had all your good ideas at once (instead of spread out over years in different publications) you make yourself look smarter than you are, and you’re more likely to be hired or have your grant proposals funded if you aren’t caught.
“Photographic memory” has a much more literal meaning than this. The two people I’ve talked to who have it don’t just remember disembodied content, they can see the page where they read it in their mind. (One of them has the resolution to actually read that page, the other can still tell you where on the page something was.)
@Dale Favier:
I’m sure most people find it very hard to reproduce verbatim a single entire paragraph of prose from any source. If we manage to it’s because we made a conscious effort to memorize it. In that case, of course we memorized the source too.
It isn’t all that surprising that a few people, like you, are gifted with the highly exceptional ability to memorize whole paragraphs of prose effortlessly. What’s astonishing to me, and I’m sure to everyone else here, is that this memory may come without the recognition the remembered paragraph is a verbatim citation from somewhere. Forgetting the source, sure; but that’s immediate to check. Forgetting there is a source? That’s literally unthinkable.
Maybe an apt analogy for people with unexceptional memories is music tunes. We all remember dozens or even hundreds of tunes. It’s extremely common not to remember exactly where each is from. But I’ve never met anyone who failed to realize they’re remembering the tune, and not composing it for the first time.
failed to realize they’re remembering the tune, and not composing it for the first time.
Why George Harrison was found guilty of plagiarism. I’m surprised anyone (who knows anything about the Beatles) would fail to remember that incident.
That one was above and beyond the usual sharing of soundalikes/chord sequences/bass lines: there’s so many popular tunes, it’s difficult to come up with a genuinely new sequence of notes. The Grotesque Legacy of Music as Property — Gershwin, Thelonius Monk, Jean-Jacques Roussea, Genesis 3:19 and more.
Indeed. I fall into the latter group (where on the page something was). I can also always remember my exact location (e.g. which part of which street) at the point of listening to a specific part of a podcast or audiobook. So if I replay a random section the following day I’ll be like, oh, when this came up I was walking past so and so (I am not sure if this is unusual at all, though).
But I am terrible at remembering anything verbatim. Lyrics, poems, famous quotes, etc. Even if I do remember them, I replace some of the words with synonyms without realizing it.
Coleridge’s theoretical writings contain passages translated straight out of Schelling. It’s said, I forget on what basis, that he’d translate passages into his notebook while gooned out on laudanum, nod off, and, when he woke up, had no memory of what he’d done and assumed the entry was his own thoughts.
Let me second AntC’s recommendation of “The Grotesque Legacy etc.” The creator of that essay, a young musician named Adam Neely, has made a number of interesting videos on many music-related topics. Many of them touch on borrowing in music. He’s got a channel on a site called Nebula but you can watch them (sometimes shorter) on Youtube. (He also does q&a’s and player instruction, which you can skip.)
The extent is unusual. Many people have found it unusual that they remember where they were at 9/11.
I tend to remember where I was when I did or learned something memorable, likely for a wider definition of “memorable” than most people’s in that’s not just 9/11 or events of that subjective magnitude, but nowhere near for everything.
young musician named Adam Neely, has made a number of interesting videos on many music-related topics.
Thanks @Bloix, indeed.
Clearly Adam prefers performing over youtubing (and of course!) It’s been a blessing of the pandemic he (and several other performers) have been forced to make those videos to give us a glimpse inside musicianship.
Many people have found it unusual that they remember where they were at 9/11.
I don’t remember where I was but I do remember where I heard it. It was at a stage performance (I vaguely remember it as a comedy performance) when I was in Xiamen for a few days. They suddenly started talking about buildings falling, etc. and I didn’t know what they were talking about. I think I found out the next day and it all made sense.
It would be hard for me to forget, since I was at work in Manhattan.