[ilds] Mustapha Marrouchi and Lawrence Durrell

[Bruce Redwine]

Thanks, James.  I see your point about Durrell’s method of composition in his latter years.  I don’t agree with the direction he was heading, but this is my problem and not his.  Then, I’m an old fogey, pace A. N. Wilson.  I stand by, however, my contention that plagiarism is part and parcel of a bigger aspect of Durrell’s personality.

As to the “scenario” you describe below, I can well imagine Durrell doing just that.  Namely, writing a travel book on Sicily or the Greek islands, sitting by his typewriter, and working off various pieces of scholarship and travel literature in order to fill in the blanks of his memory.  It seems to me this is exactly what he was doing in parts of Prospero’s Cell.  As is well known, the events in Sicilian Carousel are mostly fiction, delightful as they may be, and I don’t think Durrell in fact visited all the places he mentions in Greek Islands.  Is this a big sin?  Aside from the issue of plagiarism, it is probably not.  Moreover, it is probably done all the time—inventing one’s travels.  We can go all the way back to Mandeville’s Book of Marvels and Travels (c. 1350) and then to Steinbeck’s Travels with Charlie (1962).  Both books contain much fiction.  So, it can be argued that Durrell was simply following a “Great Tradition.”

As to academic publishing, you and Richard Pine have a good point.  I recall one of my professors saying that most of what was being published was worthless, trash.  Of course, that didn’t stop him from publishing and contributing to the problem.  I have to confess that I like reading scholarship, even when I vehemently disagree with the academic, as I do with Edward W. Said.

Bruce







> On Dec 29, 2015, at 9:51 AM, James Gifford <james.d.gifford at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Hi Bruce,
> 
> As it happens, I'm going through Caesar's Vast Ghost fairly carefully just now -- I think some of the hints are in the references to "commonplace books."  Durrell's project around this time in the Notebooks of Demonax suggest his move from the Quintet to a novel that works aphoristically.  His method involved moving from his quarry books the novel by shoring up fragments (to borrow from one of those High Moderns).  By the later parts of his career, I think he just wanted to let the fragments be on their own and leave the shoring to the reader. The rightly egregious theft from Haag in /Caesar/ strikes me as a product of his carelessness (and editorial help) in the process of moving from commonplace book to "book" book.  He wasn't interested in it at that point, and informally some suggest it wasn't a book entirely of his own concoction too.
> 
> I tend not to be as worried about things in the Quartet.  The notebook method is the same, and I'm generally inclined to see it as allusive more than theft, although I understand your point.  Students will often tell me they copied a quotation and then forgot it was a quotation while revising, mistaking it for their own writing -- when the student's writing is very weak and the quotation is excellent, I find that harder to believe, especially in a very short essay in which the thefts make up the majority of the work...  For Durrell, looking at the notebooks, where the copied portions are more on the order of sentences rather than pages, the movement from commonplace book or quarry book to final novel strikes me as a combination of allusion and method.  "Be ye part of one another" or books made up of spare parts.  Kathy Acker made an art of it (including lifting from Durrell).
> 
> What I don't see in Durrell is the scenario of setting a book beside his typewriter to lift passages into this novel draft...  That looks a lot more like what Marrouchi appears to have done, or even more likely, cut & paste from the internet.
> 
> Unfortunately, the instrumentalization of learning in the neoliberal university has prioritized advancement (the code word for endowment growth), and that makes students and some academics value career advancement over contributions to knowledge and nurturing learning. In the UK, the "productivity" measures even include how many times an article is cited as a measure for advancement -- yet citations saying "this article is rubbish" still count in that quantified measure, so being debunked extensively is a good career move!  Happy, Canada and the USA haven't created such a national system (yet), but we have our own set of troubles in academia too.
> 
> All best,
> James
> 
> On 2015-12-28 5:17 PM, Bruce Redwine wrote:
>> It takes all sorts, indeed.  Durrell’s “use” of his sources, if you
>> will, has been discussed extensively on this listserv.  Since it’s once
>> again coming up, we can agree that there’s little, if any, agreement.
>>  My view is that Durrell plagiarized material in /Prospero’s Cell,
>> Balthazar,/ and /Caesar’s Vast Ghost,/ to name only three egregious
>> examples.  He did this deliberately, in my opinion.  I don’t know if he
>> himself considered it a “crime”—that I doubt, for he seems to have
>> forgotten what were actually his own words and what were someone else’s.
>>  I think, however, that had he been found out at the time he would have
>> run into big problems with his publishers, Faber in particular.  Why?
>>  Because there is a big difference between dropping witty allusions (à
>> la the High Moderns) and the theft (in bits or chunks) of some other
>> writer’s prose.  It appears that Marrouchi indulged in the latter.
>>  Durrell’s practice is open to debate.
>> 
>> Bruce
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>>> On Dec 28, 2015, at 12:47 PM, mail at durrelllibrarycorfu.org
>>> <mailto:mail at durrelllibrarycorfu.org <mailto:mail at durrelllibrarycorfu.org>> wrote:
>>> 
>>> Mustapha Marouchi certainly made a good impression when he attended
>>> the Durrell School some years ago, but he did and does seem
>>> "plausible" and it does not surprise me that he has been detected
>>> "borrowing" - but is there a distinction to be made between plagiarism
>>> in academic work (i.e presenting others' work as one's own) which is
>>> rife among students these days (as Dr Gifford knows to his cost) and
>>> taking bits from others' books and putting them into one's novels and
>>> other imaginative fiction(as LD did , as we know, In Prospero's Cell
>>> (from Sophie Atkinson) and in Caesar's Vast Ghost (from...?).
>>> As far as plausibility is concerned, Marouchi would not be the only
>>> chancer, plagiarist and thief who has graced the Durrell School - some
>>> escaped detection at the time, others were so transparent as to defy
>>> arrest. Takes all sorts...
>>> RP
>> 

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