Category / Literary Motifs

by Edward Champion

Vice Squad

Both Michelle Richmond and Dan Wickett have the scoop on a plagiarism case involving Brad Vice. Vice’s book The Bear Bryant Funeral Train won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. What was not known, until librarian Margaret Butler pointed it out, is that one of Vice’s stories, the title tale in Vice’s short story collection Tuscaloosa Knights, plagiarized one part of Carl Carmer’s Stars Fell on Alabama. The University of Georgia Press revoked the award, recalled all the copies of the book that had been issued and pulped the remainders.

Now here’s the interesting thing: Michelle’s compared the stories and says Vice’s story pays homage to Carmer. And at StorySouth, Jason Sanford has wrtten a passionate defense, claiming that Vice’s slip was “an honest mistake.”

But I think the comparative passages reveal the real story:

Carmer: “Beneath the tall elms on Queen City Avenue rode three horsemen robed in white.”
Vice: “Underneath the towering elms, three horsemen robed in white down the middle of Queen City Avenue”

Carmer: “One of them raised a bugle and again the minor four-note call sounded. Behind the mounted trio stretched a long column of marching white figures, two and two, like an army of coupled ghosts, their shapeless flopping garments tossing up and down in the still night air.”
Vice: “One of the horsemen raised his hood and blasted the same four mighty notes on the bugle. Behind the troika stretched a long watery line of white figures marching side by side like an army of ghosts, their shapeless garments shimmering in the night.”

Carmer: “Look,” he said, “can you see their shoes? They tell a lot.”
Vice: “Look.” Pinion pointed at the Klansmen. “You see their shoes? Invisible empire, my ass. I know everyone of them sum’bitches. Every one.”

Carmer: “Moving under the edges of the white robes were pants-leg ends and shoes, hundreds of them. A pair that buttoned and had cloth tops, a heavy laced pair splashed with mud, canvas sneakers, congress gaiters — a yellow pair with knobby toes swung past. At the very end a long figure in sturdy grained oxfords, his sheet twisted awry, stepped gingerly — a little uncertainly. Knox laughed.”
Vice: “Moving at the hem of the white robes were pant legs and shoes, dozens and dozens of shoes. One pair of button-ups with terrycloth tops, another heavy-laced pair splashed with mud, brown work boots, canvas sneakers, congress gaiters—even a green pair with knobby toes swung past. Pinion chortled. Only the thick holly hedge separated us from the street and the long line of marching shoes.”

I’m not certain if pulping Vice’s book fits the crime, but, with all due respect to Michelle, this is undisputedly plagiarism, with Vice almost reproducing the passages in their entirety. And Vice should have known better. Homage is when T.C. Boyle names his short story collection Tooth & Claw after Tennyson’s “In Memoriam” or when Star Trek VI takes Hamlet‘s “The Undiscovered Country” as its subtitle. Certainly the history of referencing other works and characters goes all the way back to the Iliad, where Homer referenced endless gods and figures steeped in Greek mythology.

Brad Vice may be a good guy, but when a writer takes entire sentences from another’s work and draws attention to himself by naming his short story collection after the story in which he has done this, he is setting himself up for inevitable discovery and the consequences that come from it.

by Edward Champion

Chick Lit, Feminism and the Double Standard

Funny how when it comes to a form like comics being bastardized, Jessa Crispin has no problem broadsiding the critics for declaring a specific genre less than literary. But that apparently isn’t the case when it comes to chick lit. Without citing a single example, Crispin suggests that “chick lit treats women like they’re stupid.” Well, that’s interesting. Because while reading Weiner’s latest, Goodnight Nobody, I didn’t really get the sense that the female characters within its pages were stupid. And while I never really cared for the Bridget Jones books (although I have enjoyed the three Weiner novels that I’ve read), I never got the sense that these novels were contributing to idiotic depictions of women. Unless Crispin somehow believes that any book featuring a professional woman who pursues a relationship or contends with family or pregnancy is dumb (which, interestingly enough, would discount nearly all of the books she links to). Even when certain “chick lit” novels disagreed with me, I nevertheless applauded these books for placing women’s issues to the forefront and having the courage to place these plots within popular literature.

One might dislike the genre of popular literature, but from a feminist perspective, it’s a mistake to dismiss the potential effects of popular art towards pointing out the silent rules and folkways which insist women must act in a certain way.

I think what Weiner is commenting upon in this interview is the double standard. Sure, a popular author like Stephen King can be published in the New Yorker and get mad props from literary maestros. But if a woman is a popular author (like Jennifer Weiner), she’s given the snobbish Sittenfeld-style treatment by her peers. Why is there such a double standard?

In fact, I applaud Weiner for featuring one of the most realistic (and hilarious) sex scenes I’ve read in a novel this year, complete with a woman flustered by her husband’s tired advances and the husband clueless enough to wear nothing but black socks to bed (and let’s face it, men, we’re all guilty of this, even when we’re told not to). I certainly haven’t seen sexual failure presented in such candid terms within a single literary novel I’ve read this year.

by Edward Champion

Hypertext Fiction: Dead or Alive?

I alluded to Robert Coover’s Litquake[1] appearance at Elbo Room in the previous post. But what I failed to mention was Andrew Sean Greer‘s introduction for Coover. Greer, who despite clutching what appeared to be a ferocious palimpsest in his fist, managed to find the will to extemporize about how he met Coover, which was in a classroom at Brown University. The class that Coover taught was “Hypertext in Fiction,” and Greer noted this was a bit before the web browsing days. Coover used hypertext as a way of interconnecting the students’ various stories. Greer confessed that, at first, he thought that such an exercise would be easy, tantamount to devising a “Choose Your Own Adventure” book. But as it turned out, most of the students skipped out on the class, leaving Coover with a small cadre of students (including Greer).

The funny part of Greer’s story was that, as students were composing their work on hypertext, they noticed that some of their minor details had been changed around. Furious, the students approached Coover, pointing out that, as authors, they rightfully controlled the details to these works. Coover responded that he wasn’t the one changing the details, but thought that the mysterious person doing this was on the right track.

Greer’s hypertext anecdote had me wondering, in these days of Web 2.0, Wikipedia and podcasting, whether hypertext is even a suitable medium for fiction anymore. Is hypertextualized fiction something to be frowned upon or ignored, much like the theatrical Happenings of the 1960s? Or is it simply misunderstood? Perhaps we’re limiting our options in thinking, as we have thought since the advent of the byline, that the author exclusively controls the narrative. Since the reader is bound to form certain impressions from a story’s subtext, often wildly disparate from other readers, perhaps the author doesn’t really control the destiny. Because while he is organizing the information, he cannot possibly control how it is read. (And one might argue that David Foster Wallace’s infamous essay from earlier in the year, “Host”[2] which featured several internecine branches of footnotes, might be representative of this potential new model.)

If this is the case, then perhaps the next step after postmodernism is something along the lines of hypertext, something that might be dictated either by footnotes, by hypertext, or through some other device, as yet beyond our powers. Whatever method used, I’m suggesting here that the order in which the information is presented and perused is entirely up to the reader, but the author can control the taxonomy and the structure through which it is accessed. Not unlike a category that might clarify a blog posting and allows it to be strung together through a search engine (such as Technorati) for a common frame of reference.

For more on hypertext[3], they’ve got a lively discussion over at I Love Books, complete with hypertext fiction linkage.

[1] — Additional Litquake coverage can be found at Frances Dinkelspiel’s place.

[2] — Sadly, the PDF version is only readable to Atlantic subscribers. But the essay is contained in Wallace’s forthcoming essay collection, Consider the Lobster.

[3] There are several hypertext stories for sale at Eastgate. Thankfully, Norton has an excerpt of J. Yellowlees Douglas’ “I Have Said Nothing.”

by Edward Champion

A War on Working Class Fiction?

Laila Lalami asks, in a Powell’s essay, why the impoverished are so underrepresented in current literature. I suspect that there might be similar reasons for why the American novel also fails to acknowledge work or employment, or, for that matter, tales outside that socioeconomic rank favored by our plutocratic society.* It may be too quotidian for those hermetics accustomed to reading flaacid tales of a middle-class, middle-aged Caucasian man having yet another midlife crisis (that hackneyed literary genre best represented by Richard Ford and John Updike that I would style the “middle novel”).

Do the majority of the pepole who read books (i.e., heavy readers who are likely to buy and read at least 50 books a year) have an expendable income with which to afford these books? Is the publishing industry aware of this particular type of consumer and, in some small way, marketing directly to him? Further, are these possibly affluent heavy readers even interested in novels which deviate from their own comfortable class, ethnic and monetary trappings?

Here in America, we’re so accustomed to asking “What do you do?” to someone at a party. If one answers “plumber” or “barista,” an elitist interlocutor will often categorize that person as beneath his class and education, rather than basing his judgment on the individual. If such a mentality has been transposed to how people select and read fiction, then I hope that there’s someway it can be averted. For it’s often the plumbers and baristas who often have pivotal perspectives and important existential answers that are worth considering — particularly, if you’ve lived a lifetime without ever missing a hot meal.

* — The following observation doesn’t deal specfically with literature, but it’s worth considering. Kieslowski’s Bleu tries to explore how much one can find personal liberty while shutting one’s self off from society. But even a master like Kieslowski couldn’t do this without making Bleu‘s protagonist financially solvent. Since most people wouldn’t be lucky enough to live in such a condition, is Kieslowski’s rhetorical question invalidated because it’s not true liberty? Or did Kieslowski take the easy way out? Or have we become so accustomed to the habit of an affluent protagonist that a major overhaul of our hard wiring is in order?

by Edward Champion

In Defense of Bret Easton Ellis

Just when we thought we had heard the last about Lunar Park, Dan Green has offered this thoughtful post on the book, approaching Ellis’ work from the standpoint of Lunar Park (Dan’s sole exposure to Ellis, but this does not stop Dan from criticizing books that, by his own admission, he has not even read) and not finding him agreeable.

It is interesting to me that Ellis, even with this latest offering (which is, I must confess, lacks the ardor of Less Than Zero, The Rules of Attraction, or American Psycho, but is not as middling either), continues to divide people. And I would suggest that the divide occurs more between people who enjoy entertainment and people who enjoy literature and, to a greater extent, style vs. narrative.

Ellis’ work is largely episodic in nature. If you’re coming to Bret Easton Ellis for a coherent plot, then you’re best advised to look elsewhere. It unapologetically drapes itself in brand name description. And it often goes down extraordinarily atavistic routes that involve graphic mutilations of women (the source of most of Ellis’ controversy). Does this preclude us from enjoying Ellis? I don’t think so. The key to appreciating Ellis, I think, is that you’re not intended to relate or identify with his characters. (Certainly, one cannot imagine a level-headed person relating to American Psycho‘s Patrick Bateman, who is clearly a homicidal maniac.) Rather, you are supposed to remove yourself and see these characters from the outside, determining whether or not you can accept the fact that terrible behavior is happening around you. Are you truly acquainted with this world? Is this a world that you’re deliberately ignoring? Ellis’ pugilistic tone does often test a reader’s limits. It might be argued that the prose itself contains a blueprint for a certain culture that Americans often overlook, framed within what seems a throwaway read.

Consider the opening of Less Than Zero:

People are afraid to merge on freeways in Los Angeles. This is the first thing I hear when I come back to the city. Blair picks me up from LAX and mutters this under her breath as her car drives up the onramp. She says, “People are afraid to merge on freeways in Los Angeles.” Though that sentence shouldn’t bother me, it stays in my mind for an uncomfortably long time. Nothing else seems to matter. Not the fact that I’m eighteen and it’s December and the ride on the plane had been rough and the couple from Santa Barbara, who were sitting across from me in first class, had gotten pretty drunk.

If we take this at face value, then we see writing composed of repetitive details, formed through run-on sentences, composed of simple language that feels disjointed, and details that are extraordinarily general. However, if we filter this passage through perspective (and this, I would argue, is the key to appreciating Bret Easton Ellis’ work), then we see a dead-accurate portrayal of Southern California life in the 1980s: obsessed with mundanities, groping to remember things and struggling with details. Perhaps this represents a mind set that Dan Green may not find palatable. (He calls the fictional Bret Easton Ellis of Lunar Park “an extremely annoying character” and his umbrage seems to be targeted towards the character’s behavior. Because he then complains that this BEE is “unpleasant” and “utterly contemptible.”) But is it truthful? Should it be explored? I say, you bet.

And I would argue that forcing the reader to examine the rudimentary underbelly is precisely Ellis’ point.

In the passage cited above, we see Clay (the narrator) trying to take in some half-assed remark, perhaps some primitive homily to hang onto, and we immediately establish the mental timbre at which this world operates. It is not always absurd. It is often quite brutal. But it is certainly one that involves a wholesale reversal of conventions (McDonald’s seen not as a family-friendly restaurant, but as a place to eat alone in Less Than Zero; tacky and commercial records favored over the artistic in the Huey Lewis, Genesis and Whitney Houston in American Psycho; and trick-or-treating in which youngsters don’t walk from house-to-house, but hop into their parents’ SUVs to travel such a short distance in Lunar Park). In this way, we can style Ellis a cultural observer and, at least to my eyes, an entertainer. This is funny stuff.

I would agree with Dan that the book’s horror elements, hung upon mere homage, fall notoriously flat and cause the book to peter out just as it has dared to bare its soul. But where Lunar Park is ambitious in the way it adds another level to Ellis’ stylistic cultural riffing. Now, in addition to wondering whether the world and mentalities as presented within the prose can be believed, we’re also wondering how much of the extant details reflect the real Bret Easton Ellis. The metafiction, it turns out, has been there all along. No, it’s not Infinite Jest or Gravity’s Rainbow. The writing itself is often ingenuous. But I believe Ellis’ purpose in planting a version of himself into his novel is to suggest that, all along, his novels have been operating as a fey anthropological filter.

The “supremacy in imagination” doesn’t come from the characters or the patchwork plots (Glamorama is, perhaps, the most ridiculously plotted of all of Ellis’ novels). The imagination in question has everything to do with how much the reader is willing to expand his own world consciousness. And what Ellis is telling us, I think, is that this world is an ugly place, hombre, and we better start paying attention.