Sphinx

I massively pissed off my wife a few nights ago, by going upstairs to the ‘study’ (which doubles as the music room, as well as general storage and nursery for chilli seedlings) to work on my jazz composition homework for twenty minutes or so, and re-emerging just under an hour later. I readily accept that this is not acceptable behaviour, and have agreed to try setting myself an alarm next time – because this was genuinely a matter of losing track of time due to total absorption in the task of trying to get a melodic phrase right. You can almost hear it in your mind, you know you’ll know it when you hear it, but there are so many different things to try adjusting in the hope of getting closer to what it’s supposed to be, not to mention the need to try to save the better versions in case you want to return to them, that suddenly an hour has gone by and you’re not necessarily any closer to success.

Writing can be very similar. One of the reasons I often struggle to get started properly on a piece is that I can get obsessed with trying to get the opening paragraph, or even the opening sentence, perfect – it’s the riff or the hook that is going to pull the audience in and give the whole thing structure, even if I don’t repeat the phrase in the same way as in a musical composition. [thinks: maybe I should try that…] It’s one of the reasons I like blogging, that it feels more like jazz improvisation where a phrase can be ‘good enough’ in the moment rather than needing to be a timeless statement of brilliance. These posts are not quite a stream-of-consciousness splurge, honest, but I do generally feel much less inclined to tinker with them endlessly.

Of course, if the words don’t come, there are alternatives… I’m in the middle of marking student source analysis exercises for my Ancient Tyranny course, and as ever I regularly find that my feedback has to spend quite a lot of time talking about what the author has done with other people’s words. I have yet to encounter anything that looks as if it was constructed by ChatGPT (whose latest triumph is misattributing a quotation to Euripides and mangling the plot of Alcestis in order to justify this), unless they are very clever at adding deliberate spelling and grammar errors at the end; no, these are serious attempts, from people who are still learning. There are the ones who construct entire arguments by stringing together quotations; the ones who have picked up a useful idea and then clearly forgotten where they found it; the ones whose note-taking needs better differentiation between verbatim quotes and their own commentary; the ones who have taken good notes, and know that they need to put things into their own words, but just don’t do a good enough job so that Turnitin all too easily lays bare the components and the composition process…

There are, you could say, many ways of getting this wrong – ‘plagiarism’ is a very broad term, which partly makes sense for student disciplinary processes (and still more as a spectre intended to terrify them into good habits) and partly means we then have to invoke ‘poor academic practice’ instead as a less heinous label for the majority of cases. The obvious reason for this is that there are several different things to get right, and the emphasis on putting things into your own words and properly crediting sources has multiple goals: showing the sources of information and ideas, engaging with a wider range of material rather than just quoting/paraphrasing a single source, demonstrating command of material rather than just parroting, establishing a critical distance from modern ‘authorities’ as a key step in developing one’s own perspective and ideas.

In some moods, I feel that the last point is the most important, that our goal is to give students the drive, skills and confidence to want to develop their own ideas, using the scholarship they read as raw materials and/or inspiration, and to feel embarrassed if all they did was shuffle pre-existing components according to someone else’s plan. You can, I’m sure, tell that I was the sort of child who regarded the advent of ever more complex pre-moulded Lego pieces rather than just basic blocks as a betrayal and symptom of general capitalist decadence…

Of course, I’m conflating two different things; just as the great thing about Lego is that even the most specific-to-this-model part can be turned to other purposes, there is a proud tradition of making art using ‘found objects’ and creating texts out of other texts. I remain a devotee of W.G. Sebald’s beutiful, haunting books, echoing the fragmentation of human consciousness and the European cultural tradition, for all the controversy about whether his use of other people’s writing is acceptable. It was therefore a bit uncomfortable when John Hughes, the Australian novelist accused of serial plagiarism, claimed to have been pursuing a similar artistic approach – albeit having previously first denied plagiarism and then apologised for it as a mistake, which rather undermines the idea that it was deliberate (in the right way) all along. (Decent summary and discussion here – h/t Yasmin Haskell).

It’s not a defence that works for most academic writing, which has yet to embrace collage as a technique. In the face of such an accusation, if owning up and apologising is rejected as an option, it is necessary for an academic to deny absolutely the existence of plagiarism, either by asserting that the copied texts were never anything more than raw materials requiring no acknowledgement of any ‘author’ or by insisting that the use made of them was acceptable. Perhaps it’s enough to create doubt and debate; one might note the vagueness and multi-faceted nature of ‘plagiarism’, the variations of practice and expectation between different disciplines, the fact that great works of the past were entirely careless about bothering to mention their sources. One might question the motives of the accusers, implying resentment and envy or ideological position, or even suggest the existence of a conspiracy to bring the author down for quite different reasons.

This may be unlikely to convince very many people, but it creates the impression that there are multiple sides to the story rather than the simple tale of a researcher who was careless or lazy, who failed to meet professional standards. At this point, perhaps the primary audience for such excuses is the author themself…

I found myself wondering about the apparently opposite case, of attributing one’s own words to another. Could it be a different way of evading the problem of not having the (right) words – not borrowing the words of someone else, but distancing oneself from the words so it matters less if they aren’t especially good? One foregoes the evocation of one’s own authority, such as it is – but that doesn’t necessarily mean the words have to stand on their own; that would be the case for an anonymous publication, but not if they are ascribed to a different author with his/her own authority – if I attribute my ideas on historiography to Thucydides, or my novel about migrants in the United States to a Guatemalan undocumented person, or my reflections on contemporary Eastern European society to a Jewish lawyer from Minsk.

A borrowed identity as author of my words, rather than borrowed words for my identity as an academic authority; perhaps these are mirror images rather than opposites, if one could imagine the same person doing both.

Part of John Hughes’ attempt at claiming to be the acceptable sort of appropriator of other people’s words was to compare himself to Pierre Menard, author of the Quixote, in Borges’ story – implying that, by reinscribing those words in a new context, he had indeed made them his words. I don’t think that would fly as a defence against an accusation of academic plagiarism either, but it could be rather funny if someone were to try it. You could read Borges rather as implying that there is a perfect arrangement of words to be found, such that Menard could not write Cervantes’ work any differently however hard he tried – but that way lies endless obsessive tinkering with the same sentence, hoping to recognise that perfect arrangement when it turns up.

My current goal is certainly to write better – but also to get things written, to get beyond the anxiety that they’re not good enough. Perhaps I need to write as if it isn’t me writing, as if I were the sort of super-confident, eloquent and authoritative historian I’d like to be – or, to write a draft in that persona, and then ruthlessly plagiarise myself…