On Watson, Krog and "plagiarism”

Rosalind Morris

It used to be that anthropologists turned to literary critics for exemplary models of how to attribute authorship in situations of oral and even collective composition. My discipline has a long history of grappling with the failure of early practitioners to recognise and fully acknowledge the sources of the knowledge that they elicited in circumstances, like those in which Bleek and Lloyd worked – in prisons, in contexts of colonial domination, in situations of desperate economic need. For this reason it was refreshing and instructive to read in Antjie Krog’s recent edition of /Xam “narrations” based on “texts” collected by Bleek and Lloyd, so meticulous and generous a practice of attribution. Krog’s book is unlike many others, including that of Stephen Watson, in giving full credit to the people who authored, or at least bore the poetic knowledge of, their now-vanished moment. Its title page, its notations and its acknowledgements seemed to me, upon initial reading, to be exemplary of the most ethically rigorous practice of acknowledgment.

How surprised, then, was I to read of Watson’s recent outburst, his accusation of plagiarism and his insinuation that his own rendition of /Xam narratives, which were originally recorded more than 100 years ago, should constitute the sole authority and indeed the proxy original for contemporary renditions of the /Xam works. The assertions, which seem dangerously close to a claim of exclusive rights to interpretation for Watson, have been most recently published. It would seem a gross conflict of interests to publish an article of this sort, one so clearly interested in the career of Watson’s own publications, in a non-profit journal on whose editorial board he sits. Indeed, many non-profit literary boards would find this an extremely disquieting abuse of influence.

But there are other issues raised by Watson’s incendiary outburst.

To begin with, Watson seems to have confused academic credentialing with aristocratic titling, as though a mere degree or departmental appointment is adequate to the task of validating scholarship. Like the aristocrats of an earlier moment, Watson treats titles as things which announce in advance one’s right to pronounce verities and profundities, regardless of one’s actual skill in doing so. So he belabours the point that Ms Krog is not qualified as a scholar to undertake the kind of work that she so capably does. Alas, credentials have a very indirect relationship to either excellence or the process of academic adjudication. True, there is often a presumption that demonstrated training in a field is a crucial prerequisite to engagement of that field. Krog is not a linguist and, sadly, there is no vital tradition of /Xam literary culture with which to familiarise oneself as preparation for a translation, transliteration or even editorial compilation of the original works. What Krog offers, then, is her inimitable skill as a poet and as a reader of language-based art. Readers will judge if that is enough.

By the same token, many people would assume that knowledge of Eastern European languages would be necessary to teach courses on Eastern European literatures, even in translation – as does Watson at the University of Cape Town, according to the University’s website. And yet we know that there have been some magnificent contributions to knowledge by people who were not fully trained in the disciplines that they transformed with their work.

Watson underlines his own laborious annotation as evidence of his scholarship. True, he has appended copious notes. These are nothing when compared with Nabokov’s volumes of endnotes accompanying his translation of Pushkin. But then, not everyone likes Nabokov’s translation of Pushkin. So much for the prerogative of titles, and the quantitative argument for scholarship.

As opposed to titles, peer review is the common process by which scholarship is judged to be worthy of publication, circulation and/or citation. Peer review in the humanities takes place in a variety of institutional locations: through manuscript review by publishers and their hired critical readers (often these are blind); through published debates; through critical evaluation and ongoing assessment of claims and innovations made. The peer review process by which scholars (rather than scholarship) are adjudicated is more varied, and differs from institution to institution. In most places around the world, this includes a vigorous review of a scholar’s work over a long period of time. In Europe such reviews may span 25 years of scholarly output. This does not mean that the work produced in the meantime is ignored or deemed untrustworthy, because the work itself is subjected to constant evaluation. Ms Krog’s work will be subjected to such evaluation, by many writers and historians, anthropologists and literary critics. That adjudication is not the sole prerogative of Stephen Watson.

It is unfortunate, given the significant role that New Contrast played in the publication of dissenting and progressive voices in South African literary history, that Watson expresses so jealously controlling a relation to the spaces of knowledge in the nation. Most progressives in the country have acknowledged the historical fact of unequal access to institutions of power and knowledge, not only along racial but also along gender lines. I do not want to impugn Stephen Watson’s right to occupy the place that he does as head of a Department of English, but it cannot help his case for him to be articulating the kind of exclusionary position that was once associated with minoritarian politics. In any case, being the head of a department does not make one more likely to produce good scholarship. In many places, and surely South Africa is one of them, history has demanded that intellectual production occur in a variety of locations outside of the university. A great deal of excellence has been forged in the margins. Antjie Krog’s lack of the credentials desired by Watson certainly does not preclude her from contributing to that tradition of excellence.

On the substantive claims made about plagiarism, a charge that Watson seems to recycle with unsettling frequency, more can be said. The many respondents to LitNet have made it clear, on an assiduously enumerated basis, that he has misrepresented her work and wrongly implied a lack of attribution to the /Xam artists and informants. Krog’s own rebuttal is a very convincing rebuke to such claims.

But the crux of the matter, for Watson, appears to be that he feels a proprietary relationship to the textual material gathered by Bleek and Lloyd.

This is a preposterous idea, and not merely because Krog is not Eliot. Imagine feeling obliged to cite every translation of Vergil’s Georgics, or even just Dryden’s absurdly rhymed version, in order to undertake a new one. Must Anne Carson invoke Holderlin’s failed translations of Greek classics to go forward with her own audacious, and by many people’s standards, unrecognisable renditions? Whose Dante must we reread in order to read Dante? Of course, one thinks of these originals as part of a cultural patrimony, an emphatically European, and indeed Eurocentric, cultural tradition. It would be grotesque to imagine that anyone possesses these originals; we are rather possessed by them.

One therefore wants to ask what leads Watson to imagine that the orature of the /Xam is that which can be possessed – by him. The entire series of accusations against Krog cannot but smack of the most vulgar colonial fantasy – of possession and alienation. At least one can give Mr Watson credit for a degree of honesty, for he never really claims to be representing the interests of the original authors/narrators.

He is, however, defensive of Ted Hughes, although the issue of affinity between Watson and Krog has nothing whatsoever to do with the /Xam texts, and Watson’s linking of the two is a particularly inventive, if not invidious gesture. In any case, this is one of those instances in which the above-mentioned debt of anthropologists to literary critics could be repaid. Both Hughes and Krog are noted by Watson for their use of a concept of myth in which it functions to reconcile opposites. Watson presumes that this convergence is evidence of derivativeness on Krog’s part. It is true that they converge in this one aspect of their writing. It is also true that both use an expression, “unit of imagination”. To my mind, the issue is less one of Krog’s knowing too much and saying too little about her sources than of Watson’s knowing too little and saying too much about the same thing. The phrase “unit of imagination” is, frankly, a commonplace, and has been since the concept of unreal numbers was developed several centuries ago, although it became a marked issue in pedagogical practice in the aftermath of Einstein’s theory of relativity because it is not easy to teach students how to conceive of an unreal number.

More pointedly, the conjunction of the phrase, “unit of imagination” and the theory of myth is taken, by Mr Watson, to prove plagiarism on Krog’s part. If that is so, then most of the writings on myth which rely on anthropological theory and which have been produced in the last fifty years will have to be subjected to the same criticism.

Perhaps a little intellectual history would help to clarify matters.

It is Claude Levi-Strauss who is most associated with the idea that myth is a form of thought which is simultaneously linguistic and extralinguistic, and which works to mediate contradictions. In his case, the two axes of contradiction were history and structure, diachronicity and synchronicity. This is perhaps not the same as the idea of inner and outer worlds, invoked by Krog in the very title Country of My Skull and explicitly stated in a passage on p 250, which reads: “A myth is a unit of imagination that makes it possible for a human being to accommodate two worlds …The two worlds are the inner world and the outer world.” That particular formulation bears more affinity with Carl Jung’s theory of myth than with Levi-Strauss’s – and many commentators on Jung have noted his preoccupation with the relationship between interiority and exteriority. And Krog acknowledges her debt to Jung. In his case, the inner world was that of the unconscious, which myth made visible (outer) and hence available to consciousness. Not incidentally, Levi-Strauss developed his logical model of myth in opposition to Jung’s theory of archetypes, but Jung himself was arguing with Bronislaw Malinowski’s more crudely Freudian anthropology. Almost none of these writers cites the others on the question of myth’s function as that which mediates contradiction, for that function is almost axiomatic in the theorisation of myth. And most certainly, this idea is not the intellectual property of Ted Hughes.

The issue, then, is the conjunction of the idea of a “unit of imagination” with a general and widely circulating concept of myth. In this case, as well, a reconsideration of Levi-Strauss proves illuminating. Myth intrigued Levi-Strauss in part because he believed it to be a phenomenon of the “thought-of order” which nonetheless becomes part of the “lived order” through repetition and ritualisation.

This repetitiveness of myth is rightly remarked on by Krog, and by all anthropologists concerned with the topic. In his 1955 essay, “The Structural Study of Myth”, Levi-Strauss advanced a method of analysis which would break myth into its most basic constituent “units” in order to understand why myths are simultaneously so various and seemingly so alike around the world. His formulation is an early conjoining of the idea of “units” of the “thought-of order” and the analysis of myth as the reconciliation of binarities – although it is not absolutely original, and even Jung used the concept of “mythologem” to refer to something like a unit of imagination. Many later writers in anthropology and in the fields of cultural studies influenced by it would assume these principles, even when, as in the case of René Girard, they were writing against Jung or Levi-Strauss. It would, in fact, be impossible to adduce here the full genealogy of the concepts of myth on which both Hughes and Krog draw. But neither of them claims to be offering a new theory of myth. They are, rather, concerned with the effects of a certain kind of thought on the worlds in and of which they write.

Today an anthropological analysis of their shared deployment of these concepts would perhaps lead one to speculate about how and why the idea of the mythic has returned to our critical vocabulary. It would perhaps lead to a reflection on the enduring force of and propensity to violence of some orders of thought. Such an anthropology would almost certainly understand that the generalisation of a discourse is not a matter of plagiarism but of social relevance and the material circulation of ideas and terms beyond the narrow confines of literary citation. Perhaps as an afterthought it would consider the culture of literary celebrity to understand how and why one writer would choose to falsely accuse another of infamy as a means of producing his own fame, while trammeling the hallowed ground of a literary tradition that has been so tragically lost. Stephen Watson would have served everyone better with a simple word of gratitude for Antjie Krog’s efforts to extend the afterlife of that tradition. Sustaining that afterlife is, as Walter Benjamin once remarked, the sacred charge of translation.



LitNet: 14 February 2006

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