You’ll find a lot of fiction referenced in this evening’s Nonfiction Views, in support of an examination of plagiarism and appropriation versus pastiche and inspiration. What set me off in this essay was the 1968 novel Bound to Violence, by Yambo Ouologuem, reissued by Other Press last month.
Ouologuem was born in 1940 in what is now Mali but then was French Sudan, part of France’s West African colonies. He was a brilliant student, and was fluent in French, English and Spanish as well as several African languages. In 1960 he journeyed to Paris to study philosophy and sociology. In 1968, at only 28 years of age, he wrote Bound to Violence, a rich novel exploring precolonial and colonial Africa across centuries through the tale of an imaginary kingdom. He received immediate acclaim and was awarded the Prix Renaudot, a French Literary award. The novel also generated a lot of controversy. The book offers harsh judgments not only of European colonialism, but also of precolonial Africa power structures and collaboration with slave traders, so some intellectuals from across the political spectrum found reason to be affronted. But all that is a good sort of controversy, in the literary scheme of things.
It all changed with the accusations of plagiarism. The two most serious examples offered were passages lifted from an early novel by Graham Greene, It’s a Battlefield, and a novel by the Jewish writer by Andre Schwartz-Bart, The Last of the Just. Schwartz-Bart was not offended. As Chérif Keita writes in the preface to this new edition, Schartz-Bart
had been very supportive of [Ouologuem’s] literary experiment that consisted of deliberate parodies and pastiches. [He] said that he was flattered to see that his ‘apple tree’ had found fertile soil in Ouologuem’s hands and added that he was the one indebted to Ouologuem and not the other way around.
Graham Greene, on the other hand was furious and actually sued Ouologuem for plagiarism. The literary world turned against Ouologuem. He was devastated, and in the seventies returned to Mali, where he led a largely secluded life until his death in 2017. He published only a couple other small books under a pseudonym, and wrote some children’’s textbooks. But the world lost what could have been a prodigious literary output had not the world turned against him and crushed his spirit.
Beyond these two copied passages, the novel is filled with thoughts and words lifted from countless sources. In fact, Christopher L. Miller, an emeritus professor of African American Studies is compiling an extensive list of sources borrowed from in Bound to Violence. “I don’t think we have a word for what he did,” Miller says in admiration.
Really, it is hard to not see this as flat-out racism. Borrowing from sources, appropriation and pastiche are standard literary forms. But what was the offense here? Really, what can it be other than a Black African dared to borrow words from his white European ‘superiors.’ The fact that he reworked those words and wove them into a powerful work all his own...well, that could not forgive his...uppityness.
Just this past weekend, I couldn’t help but notice the favorable reviews of of some new novels in the New York Times Sunday Book Review. There was Elizabeth Hand’s A Haunting on the Hill:
Though [the protagonist] doesn’t know it yet, the tree that once stood there claimed the life of Eleanor Vance, the tragic lead from the novel’s antecedent text, Shirley Jackson’s wildly influential “The Haunting of Hill House.” And so, a couple dozen pages into the book, Hand makes her first decisive mark on Jackson’s landscape, acknowledging her predecessor while making the house her own….
There are some direct echoes of Jackson’s novel here — Stevie’s recording equipment picks up a bit of dialogue pulled from the pages of “Hill House,” and both the nursery and the tower host key scenes of terror. For the most part, though, Hand is responding to the source material on a deeper level, echoing Jackson’s structure, characterization and storytelling beats rather than relying on superficial similarities. (The closest she comes to imitation is in the novel’s short prologue, a direct answer to Jackson’s opening paragraph of “Hill House.”)
And then there is the review of Julia, the new novel by Sandra Newman, which retells the story of Orwell’s 1984 through the eyes of that novel’s protagonist George Winston’s girlfriend Julia:
In one sense, this is the undertaking of “Julia” as a novel — to climb into the fictional world of “1984,” as well as the misogyny of Orwell’s writing, and flesh out a woman’s perspective.... “Julia,” then, would appear to “fix” Orwell’s novel for a contemporary feminist readership….
Newman’s version dovetails with the original, following Winston and Julia’s romance and their plot to join the traitor Goldstein’s resistance. But it also embellishes the prehistory of “1984,” and imagines a future beyond Orwell’s ending.
In the case of Julia, the author was granted permission to write this novel by the estate of George Orwell, and indeed, the estate had been “looking for some time” for an author to tell the story of Smith’s lover. It was surprising to me that the Orwell estate was dabbling in the idea of highbrow fan fiction. I wonder what other characters in 1984 the estate is hoping to have fleshed out by a new author. And how would Orwell himself feel about it? After all, he wrote in the preface to the Ukrainian edition of Animal Farm: “I do not wish to comment on the work; if it does not speak for itself, it is a failure.”
The reviews in this past Sunday’s NYT Book Review also includes one of Mary and the Birth of Frankenstein, by Anne Eekhout, and manages to work in this paragraph:
Eekhout’s title, “Mary and the Birth of Frankenstein,” declares her ambition. She has set herself the task of conjuring the workings of Mary’s outrageous imagination as the first inklings of an idea take shape. Few novels have successfully suggested the murky swirl of impulse, instinct and experience behind real examples of great literary achievement. There’s Michael Cunningham’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “The Hours” (1998), in which Virginia Woolf writes the opening lines of “Mrs. Dalloway”; more recently, Colm Toibin has made compelling and much-admired fiction from the lives of Henry James (“The Master”) and Thomas Mann (“The Magician”).
It’s certainly not the first novel to mine the the authoring of Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. Frances Sherwood’s 2003 Vindication: A Novel comes to mind, but on Goodreads you can find a list of no fewer than 34 novels about Mary Shelley.
Many an author has lost a metaphorical leg to Herman Melville, and become obsessed with building on his work. The recent novel Dayswork, by husband and wife team Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel revolves around a married couple who during the Covid lockdown become obsessed with Melville...and authors and biographers who became obsessed with Melville:
One could trim the nibs of a great number of Herman Melville’s famous quill pens analyzing the question of genre in “2.” It calls itself a novel, but it is also a biography, a work of literary criticism, a poem and a pandemic diary….Some characters are living (a wife in the grip of an intellectual passion; a husband who is game, dry and distant; two daughters on Zoom school), while others are dead (Melville and his family; Elizabeth Hardwick and Robert Lowell; a host of other scholars, critics and devotees). Habel and Bachelder’s form works beautifully to at once evoke and hold back the tide of information. Just as a line drawing can bring more to life than a thickly impastoed canvas, I came to know Melville — his work, his house, his debts and his silences — in a deeper and more profound way by reading this book.
Another example is 1999’s Ahab's Wife: Or, The Star-gazer: A Novel, by Sena Jeter Naslund, inspired by a less than a paragraph’s worth of references to Ahab’s young wife in Moby-Dick. From this slender thread she created a new character and world. As the New York Time’s review stated:
Melville probably would have found Naslund's inversion of his work anathema: not only did he basically exclude women from the decks of his fiction, he could barely tolerate the thought of them reading his books. Of ''Moby-Dick'' he wrote to a female acquaintance, ''Don't you buy it -- don't you read it when it does come out, because it is by no means a sort of book for you.''
Many authors have made their careers through novels using the form of pastiche, building on a previous work by another author, using the characters, the plot-line and/or the style of the previous author. It is such an established concept that you can reel off examples endlessly. Gregory Maguire has built a career off the Wizard of Oz books and of fairy tales. Arthur Conan Doyle died in 1930, but Sherlock Holmes, Watson and Moriarity live on in books by numerous authors. Raymond Chandler died in 1959, but Philip Marlowe is still solving cases, as in 2022’s The Goodbye Coast, by Joe Ide, and Denise Mina’s The Second Murderer, just published in August.
Yambo Ouologuem’s Bound to Violence is not a full-fledged pastiche as some of the examples above. It is more of a montage, pulling text, ideas and situations from dozens of sources, but weaving them together in a text that is clearly the author’s own vision, and making important points about both colonial and precolonial Africa. Today it is recognized as a brilliant book. But too late. Who knows what other powerful works Ouologuem might have produced.
Here is an interview with him from The New York Times in 1971, before he turned his back on the Western literary world and returned to Mali.
THIS WEEK’S NEW NONFICTION
Here is a link to my comment in today’s Black Kos diary of this week’s new fiction and nonfiction of particular interest to Black and Latino/a readers of all ages.
- Charlie Chaplin vs. America: When Art, Sex, and Politics Collided, by Scott Eyman. In the aftermath of World War Two, Chaplin was criticized for being politically liberal and internationalist in outlook. He had never become a US citizen, something that would be held against him as xenophobia set in when the postwar Red Scare took hold. Politics aside, Chaplin had another problem: his sexual interest in young women. His sexuality became a convenient way for those who opposed his politics to condemn him. Refused permission to return to the US from a trip abroad, he settled in Switzerland, and made his last two films in London. "Charlie Chaplin was an arrogant, combative, narcissistic, over-sexed and unreliable human being; he was also arguably the most brilliant cinematic genius of the 20th century. Scott Eyman captures his greatness and his flaws, and deftly traces the campaign of the FBI and its right-wing allies to destroy him, in a book that resonates with relevance for our own troubled era."
— Glenn Frankel, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of Shooting Midnight Cowboy
- American Anarchy: The Epic Struggle between Immigrant Radicals and the US Government at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century, by Michael Willrich. In the early twentieth century, anarchists like Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman championed a radical vision of a world without states, laws, or private property. Militant and sometimes violent, anarchists were heroes to many working-class immigrants. But to many others, anarchism was a terrifyingly foreign ideology. Determined to crush it, government officials launched a decades-long “war on anarchy,” a brutal program of spying, censorship, and deportation that set the foundations of the modern surveillance state. The lawyers who came to the anarchists’ defense advanced groundbreaking arguments for free speech and due process, inspiring the emergence of the civil liberties movement.
- The Dissident: Alexey Navalny: Profile of a Political Prisoner, by David Herszenhorn. A biography of Vladimir Putin’s nemesis Alexey Navalny— lawyer, blogger, anti-corruption crusader, protest organizer, political opposition leader, mayoral and presidential candidate, campaign strategist, provocateur, poisoning victim, dissident, and now, prisoner of conscience and anti-war crusader. “His vivid account of how Putin’s Russia has descended into a repressive, corrupt autocracy raises important questions about the fate of this famous dissident—and of Russia itself." —Angela Stent, author of Putin’s World: Russia Against the West and with the Rest
- Fierce Ambition: The Life and Legend of War Correspondent Maggie Higgins, by Jennet Conant. Marguerite Higgins was both the scourge and envy of the journalistic world. A longtime reporter for the New York Herald Tribune, she first catapulted to fame with her dramatic account of the liberation of Dachau at the end of World War II. Brash, beautiful, ruthlessly competitive, and sexually adventurous, she forced her way to the front despite being told the combat zone was no place for a woman. Her headline-making exploits earned her a reputation for bravery bordering on recklessness and accusations of “advancing on her back,” trading sexual favors for scoops. Drawing on new and extensive research, including never-before-published correspondence and interviews with Maggie’s colleagues, lovers, and soldiers and generals who knew her in the field, journalist and historian Jennet Conant restores Maggie’s rightful place in history as a woman who paved the way for the next generation of journalists, and one of the greatest war correspondents of her time.
- Mischievous Creatures: The Forgotten Sisters Who Transformed Early American Science, by Catherine McNeur. The author uncovers the lives and work of Margaretta Hare Morris and Elizabeth Carrington Morris, sisters and scientists in early America. Margaretta, an entomologist, was famous among her peers and the public for her research on seventeen-year cicadas and other troublesome insects. Elizabeth, a botanist, was a prolific illustrator and a trusted supplier of specimens to the country’s leading experts. Together, their discoveries helped fuel the growth and professionalization of science in antebellum America. But these very developments confined women in science to underpaid and underappreciated roles for generations to follow, erasing the Morris sisters’ contributions along the way.
- Inflamed: Abandonment, Heroism, and Outrage in Wine Country's Deadliest Firestorm, by Anne E. Belden and Paul Gullixson. Just after midnight on October 9, 2017, as one of the nation’s deadliest and most destructive firestorms swept over California’s Wine Country, hundreds of elderly residents from two posh senior living facilities were caught in its path. The frailest were blind, in wheelchairs, or diagnosed with dementia, and their community quickly transformed from a palatial complex that pledged to care for them to one that threatened to entomb them. The rescue of the final 105 seniors left behind on an inflamed hillside depended not on employees, but strangers whose lives intersected in a riveting tale of terror and heroism. Headlines blamed caregivers for abandonment and neglect, but the truth proved far more complex—leading to a battle for accountability that stretched from the courtroom to the state legislature, and ultimately, to the ballot box.
- Unmasking AI: My Mission to Protect What Is Human in a World of Machines, by Joy Buolamwini. After tinkering with robotics as a high school student in Memphis and then developing mobile apps in Zambia as a Fulbright fellow, Buolamwini followed her lifelong passion for computer science, engineering, and art to MIT in 2015. As a graduate student at the “Future Factory,” she did groundbreaking research that exposed widespread racial and gender bias in AI services from tech giants across the world.
Unmasking AI goes beyond the headlines about existential risks produced by Big Tech. It is the remarkable story of how Buolamwini uncovered what she calls “the coded gaze”—the evidence of encoded discrimination and exclusion in tech products—and how she galvanized the movement to prevent AI harms by founding the Algorithmic Justice League. Applying an intersectional lens to both the tech industry and the research sector, she shows how racism, sexism, colorism, and ableism can overlap and render broad swaths of humanity “excoded” and therefore vulnerable in a world rapidly adopting AI tools. Computers, she reminds us, are reflections of both the aspirations and the limitations of the people who create them.
- The Life and Lies of Charles Dickens, by Helena Kelly. Partly due to the massive digitalization of papers and letters in recent years, Helena Kelly has unearthed new material about Dickens that simply wasn't available to his earlier biographers. Second, in an astonishing piece of archival detective work, she has traced and then joined the dots on revelatory new details about his mental and physical health that, as the reader will discover, had a strong bearing on both his writing and his life and eventual death. Together these have allowed her to come up with a striking hypothesis that the version of his life that Dickens chose to share with his public—both during his lifetime and from beyond the grave in the authorized biography published shortly after his death—was an elaborate exercise in reputation management.
- A Strange Life: Selected Essays of Louisa May Alcott, edited by Liz Rosenberg. Louisa May Alcott (1832–1888) is, of course, best known as the author of Little Women (1868). But she was also a noted essayist who wrote on a wide range of subjects, including her father’s failed utopian commune, the benefits of an unmarried life, and her experience as a young woman sent to work in service to alleviate her family’s poverty. Her first literary success was a contemporary close-up account of the American Civil War, brilliantly depicted in Hospital Sketches, which was drawn from her own experience of serving as an army nurse near the nation’s capital. As with her famous novel, Alcott writes these essays with clear observation, unforgettable scenes, and one of the sharpest wits in American literature.
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