Plagiarism, Authenticity, Africa, Literature, Nonsense, and Redemption

by Cliopatria

I’ve been letting this article on The New Republic’s website percolate in my brain for the past two days, and I still do not know what to think of it. The gist is that Malian-born (then the French Sudan) writer Yambo Ouologuem in 1968 wrote what became a classic in African literature, Bound to Violence (Le Devoir de Violence for those of you bound and determined to go find it in the French original). At its heart was a challenge to many of the prevailing views of African “authenticity” (a hot topic today in many disciplines) and particularly of the concept of negritude put forth most prominently by Senegalese poet, liberation leader, and pan-Africanist Leopold Senghor, Senegal’s first President after the nation gained its independence from France in 1960.

Almost as quickly as it gained prominence upon its 1968 publication, Bound to Violence became something of a pariah book after 1971 when it was discovered (by one of its initial supporters, no less) that Ouologuem had stolen and rewritten several passages from other books by other authors, including Graham Greene and Andre Schwarz-Bart. Suddenly a book praised as “authentically African” was discovered to have stolen from the works of western authors. Ouologuem’s meteor flamed out, and he was seemingly lost to history.

Here is where Harold Braswell’s TNR article comes in. Braswell recounts the details of Ouologuem’s rise and fall (and of course I got the story at least partially from the article, so no ironic accusations out there in the blogosphere) but then shows how another generation of scholars began to engage in an attempt at rehabilitation, maybe even redemption. In a book published the same year as Bound to Violence, Letter to Black France, Ouologuem had argued something peculiar. He wrote that writers can take passage from dozens of the great books, cobble them together, and produce their own brilliant novels. (Note to graduate students laboring away on dissertations: If you have reached the phase where it seems as if this is precisely what you are doing, move slowly away from the notecards and photocopies, get out of the apartment, and go have a beer. We need our sources. We cannot rely on them quite this much, however.) Obviously, after Ouologuem’s thievery was discovered, the strands began to come together. However, Braswell shows that there is more here than meets the eye. He argues that in a 200-page-plus book, no more than 2-3 pages had been so pilfered, and even then they were rewritten (and perhaps even improved), and that his blurring of artistic lines and appropriation of European themes even as he created an “authentically African” novel represented a form of revolution, and not ethical transgression.

Obviously I do not buy this. Not entirely anyway. And I strongly encourage you to read the article, which is more comprehensive and well articulated than what I am here providing. But it has gotten me to thinking about a number of things. Of course our old friends Michael Bellisiles and Stephen Ambrose and Doris Kearns Goodwin and many others come into play. But Ouologuem is a novelist (he has disappeared back into Mali and apparently has only written a pornographic novel under a pseudonym, Utto Rodolph, since) and maybe there are different standards. Or maybe the argument holds weight that by rewriting passages, and brief ones at that, in a longer novel with a great deal of merit, Ouologuem was engaging in something revolutionary. Or barring that, perhaps his sins are minor, blown up out of all proportion to the offense (after all Tom reports having seen Doris Kearns Goodwin on television of late, so at least in America, Fitzgerald notwithstanding, there are second acts).

Whatever it is, this case brings up fascinating questions, some of which I hint at in my title to this post. I am curious what Rebunk readers think, especially as my own opinions are far from crystallized.

NOTE: I am also using this piece as my first attempt at the new, kinder, gentler HNN coding system. If I like, I'll go with it. If not, I’ll return to keeping it real, old school style.

FOLLOWUP: Almost immediately I did not like it, largely because I may have not done it right. Maybe next time.

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Ralph E. Luker - 7/18/2004

Yes, across the board here, Derek. The last point seems to me especially important. Erin O'Connor has been raising the question about shaming in academic communities. Surely, it extends to literary communities, as well. The big question, I think, is how much we lose in the defense of lines which ought to be defended but which are nonetheless unclearly defined. And how is it possible to recover a talent which is, perhaps rightly, chastened? I've grappled with that in re Bellesiles, for example. I know him well enough to know that he's a remarkably talented historian. What is gained by junking the last two or three decades of a troubled but productive career? I'm not sure there are any easy answers.

Derek Charles Catsam - 7/18/2004

Ralph --
One of the fascinating questions here is about here that line is drawn. As Jonathan has pointed out with folk music, and you have with your very germane point on sampling, we do allow artictic license and we obviously believe in some sort of common domain. But we also know that somewhere in there is a line. In the historical profession in a sense we are inured if we do it right -- footnoting gives one a huge license to borrowm steal, pilfer, or perhaps just sample. Not only do we accept it, when it is our work being sampled, if it is properly attributed and we agree with the author, it is even an honor. In fiction or music, there are ways to do it -- attributiions in acknowledgments or liner notes, on the page with all of the LOC info you'll often see novelists who got permission to quote song lyrics, poems and the like. Musicians can get licensing permission, as in the form of the most common phenomenon actually called "sampling," which is use of other music to provide a sonic backdrop, for example, in hip hop music.
So maybe Ouologuem has, or perhaps from a tense perspective, did, sustain that form, but the question of authenticity, the matter that it made up such a small and evidently self-conscious porton of the book, and the fact that he did not attribute in the agate print still is problematic.
My big wondrment comes about the fact that we may well have lost several decades of a brilliant and important writer as the result of a hubbub that may have been overblown.
dc

Ralph E. Luker - 7/18/2004

What you all are discussing is called "sampling". It is common in folk traditions of all sorts, gospel, jazz, preaching, blues, folk tales, etc. You never needed to get Milton Berle, Bob Hope, Henny Youngman or Jack Benny started talking about it. It was done and they did it. Why leave a good punch line unrepeated? Or unimproved? Preachers conferences were places where models were rolled out in front of those who needed them and were borrowed from freely. It was assumed that that's what was going to be done. In fact, preaching is one form in which the genuinely innovative is likely to be suspect -- precisely because it sounds unfamiliar and, therefore, may be inauthentic to the tradition.
Is it in the transition to print and visual culture that "sampling" becomes suspect. Is there a line in translating a novel to film between what is acceptable and what is not? What of print translations? My friend, Karen Fields, painstakingly translated a French classic in sociology. A couple of years later, Oxford University Press published an edited version of that work. It claimed to have a different translator, but it followed Karen's translation in every detail. She appears to have no legal recourse and will get no credit or pay for the work. As described by Braswell's article and Derek's fascinating post, it was the claim of an original "African authenticity" that appears to undo Ouologuem; and yet if "sampling" is common in folk culture hasn't he sustained its form, in some sense, even as he sampled from non-African sources?

Jonathan Dresner - 7/18/2004

Pete Seeger, at the time, was referring to Woody Guthrie's habit of using the tunes of spirituals as the framework for his own writing, as well as the "folk process" of borrowing and modifying melodies or words as songs got passed from one person to another. (There are certain traditional songs which exist in literally dozens of distinct variations. Pete Seeger himself is notorious for making slight changes to the words of other songwriters; you can often tell when someone has learned a song from a Pete Seeger recording instead of the original songwriter....)

A lot of that stopped when modern recording and copyright became widespread. At that point a lot of what used to be considered "borrowing" and "adapting" came to be considered "stealing." But that's a more modern formulation.

Derek Charles Catsam - 7/17/2004

I'm not certain I buy Pete Seeger's formulation. It is one thing to borrow, use, grow from existing art or culture. It is quite another thing to steal it. I am not certain if this is what Ouologuem did either, and unfortunately I doubt we'll ever know what he thinks, as he disappeared so soon after this fiasco emerged.
dc

Jonathan Dresner - 7/17/2004

The method which Ouologuem used to produce his masterpiece is not too different from quite a bit of the 'installation' art and collages which have been so popular in contemporary art circles: taking a known object and "decentering" or "reclaiming" or "redefining" it by changing it's context. Usually, this is done quite openly, so that the viewer is well aware that a familiar object or image is being so manipulated. Perhaps Ouologuem thought that the parallel publications would alert readers to that, and was surprised that his work was taken as wholly original?

Let's face it, as Pete Seeger said, plagiarism is basic to all culture. Not scholarship, but literary and dramatic and artistic production is almost always highly derivative, evolutionary, conventional (which means that it's a lot like what other people did). If, as the article suggests, it's 1-2% of the work and it is strongly tied to the rest of the original material.... that's pretty good, really.