Online LitMag Defends Vice’s Virtue

By Ron Hogan on November 7, 2005 8:48 AM

Galleycat was one of the first outlets to report the decision by the University of Georgia Press to withdraw Brad Vice’s The Bear Bryant Funeral Train from circulation after confirming the story included unacknowledged material from another text (Carl Carmer’s Stars Fell on Alabama). Now, storySouth editor Jason Sanford is speaking out on Vice’s behalf, charging that the young author “has been given the shaft from his publisher for what appears to be an honest mistake.” The opinion piece provides a link to the story from Vice’s collection that set off the controversy, “Tuscaloosa Nights.”

Sanford’s main line of reasoning seems to be (a) Vice didn’t know any better, (b) he was just “taking the time-honored route of updating and commenting upon a classic literary story,” and (c) if Georgia’s editors are so smart, how come they didn’t spot the borrowings when they read the story? In support of point (b), he invokes Alice Randall’s parody of Margaret Mitchell, and Suzan-Lori Parks’s mirroring of Faulkner’s narrative structure in As I Lay Dying, but let’s be clear: Vice wasn’t parodying Carmer or merely trying to pay tribute to him by imitation; in his apology, he specifically conceded he’d tried “to add authority to my story with the visual details of Carmer’s historical reckoning.” Sanford might have had better luck pulling out all the stops and arguing in favor of full-on Kathy Acker-style appropriation.

Sanford’s sympathies are not unique; novelist Michelle Richmond, a friend of Vice’s, professes similar sentiments, further suggesting that Georgia might be controversy-shy after the hassles with its poetry prizes.

Meanwhile, Jake Adam York, another storySouth editor, has revisited the story and his decision to publish it online, declaring, “I heard the echoes of Carmer right away, and I thought Vice had done a smart thing.” York’s argument is a bit more convoluted than Sanford’s: He believes exact quotation of Carmer’s story is necessary for Vice to show that “Alabama, culturally, isn’t all that different from the Alabama Carmer described” and to establish Vice more firmly in a canon of Alabama literature. This reasoning occasionally gets downright silly, e.g., “We need to feel that the terror incited by the Klan, the same Klan, is the same terror Carmer felt, so that the climactic scene of Vice’s story is one of terror.” (And of course only the exact same words Carmer used will do that…) He also makes a more substantial point about the copyright situation, although it basically boils down to not thinking there should be a problem.