Few sights are as comical as a low-wattage academic astride his war-donkey. Michiel Heyns, once of Stellenbosch University, came wobbling into the plagiarism lists last week on a beast that had clearly gone lame.
Sir Michiel was jousting in favour of redefining plagiarism as a steal-by-numbers system. In a letter to the Mail & Guardian last week, Heyns wrote that author Pamela Jooste’s lifting — into her most recently published novel — of 400 words (virtually verbatim) from a newspaper article was not plagiarism in a “meaningful sense”. Nor was Jooste’s “appropriation of somebody else’s words on a significantly deceitful scale”.
Heyns went on to describe the response of the theftee, Lindsay Bremner, at having her writing filched without so much as a word of accreditation, as a “moral hissy fit”.
With his insistence that plagiarism is not “meaningful” when only low numbers of words get pilfered, Heyns appears to be founding a provocative new academic discipline, a hybrid of literary ethics and accountancy. As they break into the work of others, will future literary burglars have to keep a cautious eye on the Heyns Moral Plagiarism Scale, lest they exceed a permissible quantity of unmeaningful verbal loot?
On the Heyns scale the following example of literary facsimile would probably rank as even less deceitful or, indeed, be anything like plagiarism in its “meaningful sense”. This line comes from an essay, Myth and Education, by British poet Ted Hughes, first published in 1976: ” … it reconciles their contradictions in a workable fashion and holds open the way between them.”
Here is a line from Antjie Krog’s book Country of My Skull published in 1998 — coincidentally by the same Random House which published Pamela Jooste: ” … it reconciles their contradictions of these two worlds in a workable fashion and holds open the way between them.” There is no acknowledgement of this “borrowing”.
Only 15 words. Would Michiel Heyns therefore classify this as a case of Antjie Krog being only slightly pregnant?
Having dealt with Lindsay Bremner’s hysteria, Heyns switched to “meaningful” air tragedies, saying that in my column of two weeks ago I overreacted to Jooste’s petty shoplifting. One would have thought Kirby was writing about the Helderberg, said Heyns. Is he saying that if something smaller than a Boeing 747 goes down, only killing a few dozen people, it’s nothing to be concerned about?
With Heyns’s kind of burble, the “grey area” of plagiarism is further shadowed. His sophistry might have gone down well with the less promising among his first-year students, but I rather prefer the thoughtful reasoning provided recently in the Sunday Times by Charlotte Bauer in which she was refreshingly blunt, saying that plagiarism is never ambiguous but is “theft plain and simple”.
For which we cannot thank Bauer enough, for ever since the whole dingy plagiarism affair erupted a couple of years ago, those to whom we should look to for an unequivocal stance have dodged, dissimulated and tried to weasel their way out of saying — or doing — anything about inhibiting this new infection.
In journalism, as occurred with the case of Darrel Bristow-Bovey, nobody was prepared to lower the boom. The editors of magazine and newspapers let the heat die down and then went on using him. It was all regarded as just a bit of a joke. As the editor of this newspaper said in a letter to The Media magazine: “As a fourth estate we’re supposed to be made of sterner stuff and to live our values and our codes of ethics. To not do so will place us below second-hand car salesmen in the ranks of most trusted professions.”
The bookseller’s role is occasionally a very difficult one. The WH Smith book-store chain in England removed Salmon Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses from sale in response to threats from extremist Muslims. One can hardly blame them. I spoke to the ever-affable Fred Withers, CEO of Exclusive Books, asking whether his stores would continue to stock Pamela Jooste’s novel. His written reply included his core argument: “It is the business of Exclusive Books to make available to the public as many books incorporating as many diverse views as possible. It is not the role of Exclusive Books to mediate in terms of creative integrity or to put itself in a position of ‘judging’ the contents of particular books.”
Indeed, no one wants to be a censor but, on the other hand, I’ve never seen a Hustler magazine on Exclusive’s shelves.
Keeping novels and the like free of plagiarism is the moral and legal obligation of the publishers. Indeed, the standard author’s contract requires assertion from the author that the work is original. If it turns out not to be, a publisher should do the withdrawing and if not, spare everyone the bagwash sentimentality that, in Jooste’s case, has been the response of Stephen Johnson, South African MD of the American publishers, Random House.
Raising a Viagratic finger to both public and literary principle, Johnson said he would not be withdrawing Jooste’s contentious novel from sale and that he “eagerly awaits” the manuscript of her next book. I expect that when it is published, the public will respond with due caution.