*Literary plagiarism catfight! Everybody pile on!
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article6982491.ece
France’s notoriously lofty literary world is watching in slack-jawed amazement as the country’s leading female writers lunge at each other with daggers drawn in a ferocious battle about plagiarism.
A tennis metaphor — “ladies’ finals” — has been deployed in a magazine headline to evoke the extraordinary energy being invested by the novelists Camille Laurens and Marie Darrieussecq in the pursuit of revenge for various charges and insults. (((immediately fetches popcorn)))
Their mutual obsession was reflected in the appearance last week of books by each of them about the feud. One was a studious analysis of literary theft; the other was a thinly veiled fictional account of a novelist who is dropped by her publisher after accusing a young rival of plagiarism.
It all began with the publication of a novel by Darrieussecq in 2007, when she shared a publisher with Laurens. Tom Est Mort (Tom Is Dead) tells the story of a woman whose baby dies shortly after being born.
Laurens, who had lost a baby two hours after his birth and who had written movingly about it in a book called Philippe in 1995, accused Darrieussecq of “psychological plagiarism”, a new term in French letters.
“Reading Tom Is Dead,” she wrote in a literary review, “I had the feeling that it had been written in my bedroom, that she [Darrieussecq] had sat on my chair, lain in my bed.” (((Yipe.)))
Darrieussecq, 40, whose first novel, Pig Tales, about a bulimic beautician who turns into a sow, was a bestseller, (((and it's a good book, too, with all kinds of nifty slipstream Kafka feminism going on))) called Laurens’s claim “vile” and denied literary theft.
It was not necessary to have experienced something in order to write about it, she said, adding that from Emile Zola to George Sand, the death of a child had often cropped up in novels.
The media have gorged on the spat (((yum))) and on claims that Laurens, 52, was jealous of the success of the younger author, whose pig book had made her the new favourite of Paul Otchakovsky, the dashing editor shared by the writers.
Laurens was devastated when Otchakovsky, who is head of the POL publishing company, sided with Darrieussecq. He in effect sacked Laurens by announcing in Le Monde, the favourite newspaper of the literary elite, that he no longer wished to publish her books. The fact that Marie NDiaye, another leading writer, had stepped forward to accuse Darrieussecq of “imitating” her work seemed to make little difference.
Darrieussecq’s latest book was greeted with astonishment last week. Critics had thought she had been engaged for the past three years on a novel, only to discover she had been venting her rage in a treatise about plagiarism.
Darrieussecq claimed that Laurens had tried to “assassinate” her “symbolically” with her accusation of theft. Only one sentence, spoken by the grieving mother in Tom Is Dead — “I don’t want another [child]; I want him, the same one” — was textually the same, however. She believed that “all mothers who have lost a child must have said the same thing”. Her own mother had used those words after losing a child, she claimed.
Behind every charge of plagiarism, said Darrieussecq, sticking the knife into Laurens, is “the crazed desire to be plagiarised”. She had spent so much time researching the subject, she claimed, not because she was interested but because “my honour as a writer was at stake”.
Darrieussecq, who besides being a writer is also a psychoanalyst... (((oh brother)))
