Editorial

This editorial was written before the death of Jason Arday was announced on 14 August.

One aspect of contemporary academic plagiarism by professors, lecturers and students is the characterlessness of the material plagiarised – the more anonymous, or style-less, the ‘original’ which is being adapted, the less detectable the plagiarism is likely to be. Plagiarists borrow from a text where small adjustments might deceive plagiarism tracking programmes. There is no snow, and the plagiarists footprints are less likely to show. If at the same time they invent data and plausible attribution, the weave of their deception is more complete: the policing programmes are looking for outright theft, not invention. The early retirement of the Cambridge sociology professor told us a great deal about contemporary recruitment practices in some of our leading institutions. It is possible to feel that Jason Arday is no more at fault than those who awarded him his PhD and appointed him to a sequence of distinguished jobs. Who are they, and should they too not be considering early retirement? Their discipline is damaged by their credulity quite as much as by his unproven statements, most of which he perhaps believed to be true, and some of which are now proving to be so.

Plagiarism is a scary charge to face. When I submitted The Novel: A biography to my publisher in 2012, without alerting me they put it through a plagiarism detector. I received a message pointing to a single plagiarised passage and asking me to alter it. I had incorporated a paragraph from a review I had written. Though the original text was mine, I was asked not to recycle it. It was long enough ago for my auto-theft to be regarded as a matter of impropriety, not improbity.

One reason we require computers to detect academic plagiarism (TurnItIn, for example) is that the plagiarist usually borrows from writing which is neutral. One can’t borrow from the civilising prose of Bowra or Kermode, or the sharp, forensic precisions of Jacqueline Rose or Jessa Crispin, without raising a human reader’s suspicion. Perceivable influence and imitation have become risky. The common objective of the plagiarist is to become one of the cloud, or crowd, of witnesses, avoiding exposure, rejecting anything individual that might reveal a face by risking a tone. ‘Speak that I may see thee,’ Ben Jonson declared. The plagiarist discourages readers from re-reading, from pausing. Remove the isinglass so the mirror won’t come to life.

In The First Poets I wrote about the ways in which classic composition in Latin and Greek require deep reading by the student in terms of prosody, syntax, vocabulary. There is an abundance of rules and the writing is checked against them and against existing examples. The grammarians preserved the best examples of good practice and the writer composing Latin hexameters could be accurately marked for obedience and understanding. I likened this programming of the pupil to the ways in which large language models ingest text to transform and regurgitate upon command. I should have laid greater stress on the difference between learned discriminating on the one hand (the active presence of taste and judgement), and on the other that universalising of language which agglomerates and anonymises.

But large language models can, if asked, imitate a specific writer’s manner. And here the issue of the place of the computer in creative writing raises its head, as it has done in recent cases of novels, short story competitions and other writing which, hovering on the very brink of success, is suddenly doubted: did a mind or a machine produce it? How does this form of mechanical manufacture differ from standard plagiarism? If it persuades editors and reader, is it culpable in the same way? As an editor, I could lose sleep over this, given the bulk of submissions which PNR receives in prose and verse.

A compelling Substack to which I subscribe is Jonathan Bates’s Literary Remains. Professor Bates raises the issue of ‘alleged plagiarism in creative writing and the question of whether AI usage is or is not akin to plagiarism’. He provides a fascinating context in re-examining the appropriations of the Elizabethans and Jacobeans (even Shakespeare has suspect ink on his hands), and later of Samuel Taylor Coleridge in some of his most famous prose writings. ‘The matter of writers borrowing/stealing from other writers has a long and fascinating history. The word plagiarius was coined by the dyspeptic and sometimes filthy Roman poet Martial, whom I’ve long enjoyed reading.’ Bates asks Claude, one of the most eloquent programmes, ‘Was Martial the first to introduce the word and the idea of plagiarism?’ Claude obliges with a pleasantly personalised reply:

Not quite – the answer splits along exactly the line your question draws between the word and the idea. Martial does deserve credit for the word. In his Epigrams (most famously Book 1, epigram 52, addressed to Quintianus), he complains that a man named Fidentinus is reciting Martial’s poems as his own. Martial builds an elaborate legal metaphor: his poems are like slaves he has manumitted (freed), and Fidentinus is a plagiarius – the Roman legal term for a kidnapper, someone who abducted free people or stole another person’s slaves and claimed them as his own. This crime was covered under the Lex Fabia de plagiariis. By applying that word to literary theft, Martial coined the metaphor from which our ‘plagiarism’ ultimately descends. As far as surviving evidence goes, he is the first to use plagiarius in this figurative, literary sense.

Bates notes that ‘“Plagiary” entered English around 1600 (Joseph Hall and Ben Jonson helped popularize it), and “plagiarism” followed a couple of decades after’. He corrects Claude who gets the actual number of Martial’s epigram wrong.

The distinction between verbatim copying and imitation has been blurry from the beginning. It is simplified, or codified, later:

It was only with Romantic ideas of ‘original genius’ that literary borrowing came under suspicion. This whole area is something that I’ve been writing about for over forty years, in books such as Shakespeare and the English Romantic Imagination and The Genius of Shakespeare. Though the former was my first book, […] I still remember with pleasure the moment when I came up with a title for chapter 2: ‘“The Eighth Commandment was not made for Bards”: Coleridge and the Problem of Inherited Language.’ That quotation is from STC’s poem ‘The Reproof and Reply.’ I don’t need to remind readers as to which of the biblical Commandments was the 8th. My reflections there were in the spirit of T. S. Eliot’s much quoted (and sometimes misquoted) sentence in his essay on Philip Massinger: ‘Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different’.

In the popular twenty-first-century discipline of creative writing, the ‘original geniuses’ can identify themselves as those who avoid reading work (present and past) that might contaminate or influence them, rather than those who acknowledge origins and honour by extending them and risk playing within and between languages, who recite their favourite passages effortlessly without the book to hand.

The fact that the discipline of creative writing has emerged from English departments is a great educational irony: this little cuckoo has prospered and in some cases de-valued, in the etymological sense, the nest itself. But then English departments themselves were once cuckoos in departments of classics or philology. The cuckoo family is versatile. It includes the common cuckoo, roadrunner, koel, malkoha, coua, coucal and ani, Google helpfully tells us. Inexhaustible variations of disruption in store…