The external story of “The Last Crime” is a piece written by a writer as a confession to a life of plagiarism. To me, the internal story is about a man torn apart by his inability to come up with original material, and obsessively trying to make up for his “plagiarism.”
This is a very interesting way to write a story and convey information. I like that the writer is so aware of his audience, and is in fact having a conversation with his reader – addressing him directly and explicitly. With the first paragraph we know that the writer wants to share his story with us. He calls out to us many times throughout as “reader,” reminding us that he knows people will be reading this and judging him, and that he is pleading his case not to a faceless abyss but to a concrete human being on the other side.
Another great thing about this story is how the voice of this narrator is so strong. We get a very clear picture of his obsession, intelligence, propriety, and guilt through the way he describes his story. For example, the way he talks about the letter “e” at the beginning sets up his love for words and prepares us for his feelings about plagiarism, and gives us a sense of his view of the world. Though he is crazy, the reader feels sympathy for him in his “deterioration.”
Something that left me a bit confused is how the writer justifies other writers’ plagiarism. Why does he torture himself for something that apparently every human being does? He claims that there is no such thing as an original idea, that everything has been done or said previously, and that everything should be properly given credit. However, he only attacks himself for this problem – what about all the other writers in the world? Is he angry at them for also being plagiarists? Does he want to convince them of their errors too?
Something that could perhaps help put this story in context would be to step out of it somehow – like bring in another character, include some dialogue, see how and where this piece of writing is presented…etc. I feel like we see a very narrow perspective and don’t get a real feel for the world around this writer. Has anyone else told him to calm down? He mentions that his “mother, a coworker – anyone – would be a better judge as to when I precisely began my deterioration,” so he acknowledges the objectivity of the outside world, but never really uses it to help us understand.
Overall, this was a very interesting subject to explore, and your writing style is very beautiful. Great job!
I understood your outer story to be about a successful academic who is discoveries his own history of plagiarism, goes to great lengths to break this habit, and becomes a subject of ridicule in the academic world. I understood your inner story to be about your narrator’s overwhelming guilt and his struggle to assert an identity for himself that is not reliant on the works of others.
This is a wonderfully original piece, and I think it rides on the great strength of your narrative voice. You have created a voice that is both pretentious and sympathetic, obnoxious and endearing. The pretentious, rambling quality rarely feels forced, and you do a great of job of using details (such as various literary references and the tangent about the man’s tiger zahir) to lend an air of authenticity to the voice. It’s wonderful how he is self-conscious of his own faults and eccentricities, and yet he also takes himself very, very seriously. Your story really came alive for me when he describes his reaction to the discovery of plagiarism, and his new, footnote-heavy work that is shunned by the academic community. Here, I could truly sense his desperation, both to be recognized and to renew his own faith in himself, and I understood how deeply obsessed he had become with acknowledging his sources. The sincerity of his desperation makes his ridiculous behavior very funny. The more seriously he takes himself, the more I both pity and enjoy him.
I think you really hit pretty much all the right notes with this piece, and most of my criticisms are just slight variations. For example, while I like the reluctant, circuitous route he takes to telling his story, it seems excessive to have more than a fourth of your story be dedicated to the narrator’s preparation for telling the story. I started to get restless, and while this might have been the point, I’d consider condensing those opening two pages. Similarly, while I love the ridiculous lengths he goes to in order to avoid plagiarism, the footnotes about his first grade teacher and the airline pamphlet don’t quite seem consistent with the tone of the writing. I think the problem is with how you reference these examples, rather than with the examples themselves. I want to see that he takes them seriously – an explanation of why the airline pamphlet was significant to his writing would be very funny. Also, while I like that he’s so self-absorbed that he scarcely even mentions his wife, I would like to see more of the repercussions that his obsession has on his personal life.
Overall, this is very strong work. Congratulations on thinking of something so unusual, and for pulling it off so well.
I knew that Dune was a great story because Frank Herbert’s description of the desert planet made my mouth go dry. Your story of this epistemologist’s madness actually made me feel as though I was going crazy. Awesome job. This is about a man who has become crushed under the weight of citing every source for everything and his inability to write anything without considering the source, and that source’s source and so on. I had a few suggestions. The first anecdote, about the e’s was really entertaining. However, I think that it would make more sense later in the story. The narrator, for all his stopping and starting again is a fairly good communicator. His further anecdotes seem to describe his madness and build as they go along, getting to the gradually more crazy ideas like thousands of footnotes. This idea about feeling guilty just for using a letter seemed pretty out there and I thought that it might fit better after the section about the Elephant. As it is now, I read it, but didn’t understand until further along. The rest of the story employs a growing madness, I thought this could add to it. Also, in the section opening into the discussion of the zahir, I wanted more of a connection with the elephant. Maybe just one line, to connect it back to one of his beginnings. The book of sonnets was a little difficult for me. Did he write the sonnets, or was he offering an anthology or criticism. If he actually wrote them, I think that this section can be greatly expanded. The idea of citation in scholarly work is one thing, but putting citation in every word and line of poetry is even crazier. In the scene describing the tiger zahir of the fakir, you use amazing language. The crisscrossing dizzy space of nothing but stripes and tiger really shows a madness at work. I think this same tone could be used in describing the literally impossible citation of poetry. He would have to citations on thousands of years of written human thought just for an octave. Also, I had another question. Does he do research just to find things that he might be in danger of plagiarizing? I get the idea that he does, but I’m not sure that it appears explicitly in the story. For example, does he study Greek just to make sure that some idea he might write hasn’t already been published by Plato and then foolishly translated?
I really do not have much else to say. I think this is a very polished first draft. Great job and thanks for the 6 minutes of absolute madness and frustration this gave me.
“The Last Crime” is about a madman whose particular obsession is his inability to “forget the influences upon one’s beliefs.” He cannot write a sentence down without remembering (and documenting in a footnote) each and every step of the mental processes that took him to write that sentence. As the narrator himself so aptly puts it, “In the teeming world of my mind there are nothing but particulars and works that came before.” At a deeper level, the story is a very funny, very sharp criticism about the nature of scholarship and how there is a flaw in the way we conceive of research—first, we must read everything written on the topic before we have the authority to write on the topic ourselves, but at the point, what we have to say is already influenced by what others have written before us and no original thought can exist.
I really loved the voice in this piece. I admit the beginning had me very confused, especially with the e’s digression which I still don’t quite understand, but once the narrator settled into a stable level of madness, I enjoyed myself greatly. Some really strong moments of writing—“Every crease in its hide is crisp, every fly resting in the shade of its underbelly is vivid” and “My mind is crowded with a cascade of footnotes, quotation marks and parenthetical citations,” among others. You have a great sense of humor and I was drawn in immediately by this odd, incredibly self-aware narrator. I loved the footnote at the end, very nice, very true to the story.
I found the premise of this story really awesome and it’s very important that the narrator tell the story himself, but I did wonder if the story could be deepened by adding in another character. For instance, the wife comes in briefly on page three and I wanted to know more about her, although she isn’t important in the larger scheme of things. But it might add more to the sense of conflict if we see her trying to get him to stop, if we see him being unable to, and how this plays out in their marriage. Also, in talking about their marriage and happier times, it might also strengthen the contrast between who the narrator was before and how much he’s lost to this “zahir” of his. Don’t get me wrong—I want this to stay a lighthearted piece and I definitely don’t want the narrator to become an actual figure of pity, but I wanted more of an arc to the story. Right now, I don’t really get a sense of progression (which is part of the point, I guess). I get the struggle to say what the problem is, the problem, and then the lack of solution, but I wanted to see more steps in between, maybe. I guess what I was struggling with is what is at stake for the reader? I know that the narrator is driven by this need to confess, right to the last, and just be done with writing, but did you intend for the reader to get more out of this story than just this commentary on scholarship? For instance, how I am supposed to feel about the narrator? I liked his voice, but I didn’t know if I liked him because I only knew him through his obsession, which is fine in a lot of ways, so it’s really up to you and what you want to accomplish in the story, I think.
Overall, though, nice job. I totally dug what you were saying about plagiarism, very appropriate for an English class. I look forward to talking about your story in class. Thanks for sharing!
The outer story is inextricably linked to the inner story – a writer, who appears to have lost his mind while remaining incredibly eloquent, rants to the reader about his obsession with plagiarism. He rebukes himself for his “crimes” of taking from other writer’s ideas and stealing their words. The story seems to be humorously showing the reader the irony of the speaker’s turmoil. The speaker even says himself that everything is based on something else and thus nothing is original. But still he is plagued by his own “stealing” and thinks of himself as a criminal, thus is renouncing writing all together.
I’m sure everyone else is saying this, but, damn, the voice in this story is great. I was amazed by how consistent it what and by how I never became bored with it. It is funny and smart and completely wacky in a completely original way. Well done! The concept of the story is great as well, and addresses the issue of plagiarism – isn’t everything plagiarism? Is there such thing as an original idea? This man seems to be so smart and so aware of written works and the world around him that he is unable to escape this predicament. While the reader finds his ranting to be rather ridiculous and completely hilarious, there is also something credible about what he is saying that makes one think. This was a very brave task to undertake, and you did it amazingly well.
An obvious issue is the ambiguity of the speaker’s predicament. Why does he blame himself for plagiarism if he is aware the there is no such thing as not plagiarizing. I think you’ve done a pretty good job showing us that this man is not in his right mind, but I think showing us that he truly is crazy will help us understand that his problem stems solely from his own psychosis. You do a great job of showing it on page 6 when you describe the Zahir, the man who was obsessed with the image of the coin, and the one who was obsessed with the tiger. Here we really get that it is a psychosis…but what I think would really convince me is for you to show me some interaction with the outside world in which you understand through his crazed perspective that he is not right. Give him some sort of foil or let us see another person reacting to him so that we understand that he’s a loon. That makes his voice all the more interesting and allows us to focus on the irony and complexity of what he’s saying without worrying about it’s absolute accuracy. The story also ends sort of abruptly. It would add to it if you were able to give the letter more finality. The speaker doesn’t seem like the kind of person who would end so suddenly and with so little flourish.
I just love this story. What a fantastic idea…I can’t wait to see where else you take this.
I’m not sure there’s much distinction here between an inner and an outer story: the narrative seems to be mostly concerned with the narrator’s “confession,” so to speak, to the crime of plagiarism. I think the narrator is seeking some sort of penance for his “crime,” and so has constructed this essay to explain why he did what he did, and how he has attempted to atone for it.
I thought this essay had a really unique voice, and I really liked the confessional style a lot. In some ways this piece reminded me of The Telltale Heart, with a clearly unbalanced narrator explaining in a rather erudite and articulate fashion how he went about doing something that was insane. I liked how the narrator was rather was quite intelligent and in some ways almost convincing in his argument that everything he had ever produced demanded footnote and extended citation in order to properly attribute where all of his ideas and concepts came from. I liked the increasingly outlandish page counts and numbers of footnotes to which the narrator resorted, which he relates in a very matter of fact and straightforward way. In general, I liked how this piece seemed to be a satire on academia and the obsession with excessively copious amounts of footnoting in scholarly works. In this respect, I think it was reminiscent of Borges, and I liked how the Borges link seemed to run throughout the story.
Although I liked the unreliable narrator and his obsession, I’m not sure it necessarily works that you have him acknowledge his obsession on the form of the zahir. Although this is not necessarily an explicit concession on the narrator’s part that he is acting crazily, that he compares himself with a man who became obsessed with a tiger and painted tiger patterns all over his cell, seems to be a tacit acknowledgement that the problem of citation and originality is not a reasonable one. The narrator seems to know at this point that his obsession is a “fetish of the mind,” and not a real problem, and I had trouble reconciling that with his surprise that his scholarly works were rejected because of overly extensive footnotes. I think the story is more convincing if the narrator truly believes that he is right, and does his best to convince us of the same. I think he kind of has a case, or at least an interesting point, and I’d like to see that pushed as far as it can go.
In general, I wanted to get a bit more story and narrative from the narrator. He gives some really interesting glimpses of his journey, as, for example, when he mentions his essay on Lolita which included in excess of 1,000 footnotes, or his need to cite his first grade teacher and an airplane pamphlet. I wanted to get more of this, as well as a better sense of the overall journey the narrator had taken to bring him to this point. What first prompted this break with reality? Why the Borges book? Why did he suddenly feel that he was such a blatant plagiarist? I wanted a little more in scene and a little less in summary.
I thought this was a really unusual and compelling story! Michael
There didn’t seem to be much of an outer story, as the bulk of this piece is the inner workings of the mind of a man driven to insanity by his insatiable obsession with citing every source in his academic writings. In a broader sense, a number of very intriguing questions are raised—can any idea be original? Is everything we write simply the regurgitation of someone else’s knowledge, presented in a slight different manner? This piece really got me thinking. Nice work.
At first I was confused about the example of Don’t think of an Elephant, but then as the story continued it made a lot of sense—and was a great, vivid analogy. What you might want to do is reposition this at a later point in the story; I think this will add to its power.
The voice is incredible—it is frantic, filled with panic, and the piece as a whole reads very quickly, I’m sure in line with the narrator’s rapid pace of thought and strong desire to spill out all his pent up emotions on paper. Through the voice, so many things are made clear about the narrator—his intelligence (made apparent through the use of intellectual words like “cerveceria” and mentioning Borges, Heidegger, etc.), his despair (“I lead a despicable life in which nothing is my own”) his bitterness (“the article was rejected by the editorial staff of the prospective journal for the 1,084 footnotes it contained, stretching out for 36 glorious pages…”) and his insanity (“footnotes 232, 1900 and 11,238 received the most condemnation…”). I do wonder, however, if the narrator would actually use exclamation points if he were actually writing this. I understand your desire to include them—they add to the frantic urgency of the piece, and they make the narrator sound more insane and volatile—however, I’m unsure as to whether or not someone writing a monologue would use exclamation points.
I also thought the piece flowed very well; you had some really nice sentence structures that added to the rhythmic madness of the narrator’s inner workings.
Another thing: I feel as though the reader is given a lot of little glimpses into happenings throughout the narrator’s life (getting works rejected, different studies he had done); however, none of these are expanded upon in great detail, and so they kind of all blend together into a mess of rejections and exhaustive works. I know this may be difficult to do given the structure of the piece, but you may want to bring out one or two of these moments into greater detail and more vivid scene—I’d like to see the narrator get his work rejected, and read about how he feels when these editors reject the essays that he had spent exhaustive hours compiling and constructing.
Overall I thought this was an incredibly unique, entertaining read.
Hey Anonymous, I saw the inner and outer story of the piece as very closely connected (it's kinda how it has to be for this type of work): a writer is attempting to explain his paranoia in regards to plagiarizing with his writing, as he struggles within himself to write something that is truly original.
First off, I loved the voice of this piece. In addressing the audience directly, it just grabs the reader at the very beginning and throughout I had this feeling of a paranoid guy hunching over with his arm around me trying frenetically to explain himself. This sort of letter of apology really is the best and only way to write this thing. The writer goes on at a very quick, somewhat chaotic pace, which really put the image in my mind of a writer just writing like crazy at a desk in the middle of the night (with a feather pen, no less). The writer is also a very funny character- his never-ending cycle of seeing plagiarism even in seeing his plagiarism is so exaggerated yet his attitude towards it is so panicked and serious, it just made him a very enjoyable (if pitiable and maybe even pathetic) character. And the way he carries on from subject to random subject within (like when he talks about the three totally unrelated footnotes that supposedly get the most condemnation) really was just delightful to read.
One concern that I had, though, with the writer (as much as I enjoyed him), was that I was occasionally confused about his self-awareness. At times, it just seems like he's almost too aware that he's not actually plagiarizing but merely thinking it, and sometimes he seems to recognize the more ridiculous of his habits (i.e. 240 pages of notes) that I just felt like he was well-enough equipped to know when he was doing his plagiarism thing. And then, I wasn't sure exactly what he thought of the plagiarism- on one hand, he sees it as a crime he's committing, but at other times he sort of tries to explain that everyone is always plagiarizing when they're writing. What are his opinions towards, say, his peers and how they both don't see his plagiarism at first and then can't stand his bad habits? To me, so much of academic writing relies on a discourse between different writers' works that he would have to come to terms with either how they're plagiarizing or how he's really not.
Last, and I don't really know how it might work, but I'd like to see more plot go on in this story. So much time, especially at the beginning, is just spent with the narrator explaining himself (and it seems like he takes a bit too much time before actually mentioning his plagiarism). I don't really know how it could be done with this type of narration (which I really love), but I just wanted a bit more development or some more characters to be involved. Maybe more wife? Or a colleague comes into play? I do think it could be done without sacrificing the great voice.
All in all, I thought this was a really fun read. While I had a couple of issues of confusion, they really were outweighed by just the enjoyment factor that came from this awesome character, his voice, and his situation. Great job! -Matty
Joaquin: I’m not sure your draft really has an outer story or an inner story. This seems to be more of a character study. The narrator is compulsively neurotic, focusing on an intense fear of plagirism coupled with an inevitable obsession with influences. This character is consumed by language. I find all of this very intriguing, I just wonder if you could present him in a completely different way. I would love to get out of his head, first of all, because the voice, for me, got to be very clunky and verbose to the point of frustrating. The narrator even admits that he is being circuitous. There needs to be some other driving force that keeps me reading. Could the character interact with other characters? Could there be scene? Could he be described through someone else’s perspective?
I find it interesting that you said in class that this was a fantasy story (or one that took place in another world?) I got no clues from the piece that this world is any different from ours. Instead, this narrator actually feels somewhat familiar. I find it interesting that he references both Borges and Nabokov, because I definitely saw those authors’ influences in the narrator’s voice (more specifically, this felt incredibly Pale Fire.) When I read those writers as well, I often ask myself how much they can get away with and be clever, and how much is just self indulgent. You can have your narrator feel tangential without making him tangential to the point of losing the reader. Does this make sense? He can feel verbose, while still making the language more concise.
Most of my comments for your piece have to do with style, and what makes this tricky is that we may just have very different styles, so I’m not sure how constructive this will be. For example, I had a difficult time with the parenthetical statements and the direct address of the reader. However, I know that you’re using these tools very intentionally. So even if I as a reader am slightly annoyed by them, perhaps this is your intention? I would just keep in mind that even in stories with protagonists we hate, we still love to read the work. The narrator should never get in the way of that main objective.
I read your outer story as a confession and your inner story as a story about compulsion. I thought your narrator wanted freedom from his compulsion by being able to produce an original thought. It seems as though he doesn’t accept that rearranging current ideas can produce new knowledge; instead, he seems to want to escape reality completely. In some ways he’s begun to do this—thinking about new languages, experimenting with new forms.
The voice you use is very strong. There was a heavy feeling of confession throughout. The direct address was compelling, and you had some very strong language throughout. The formality of the speech made me feel like the author was not contemporary, though I couldn’t exactly put a time period or place to the story.
I like that the story is framed as the author’s last crime. The introduction did a good job preparing me for what was to come. That said, I think it could be condensed—the story of the compulsion doesn’t seem to being until the top of page three—and this feels like the meat of the story.
I think that you convey well how the compulsion grows. In some ways, you have to “tell” rather than “show” because the narrator is addressing his problem head on and consciously. Still, I think that you can get more inside of the narrator’s head, and use his mental state to convey to the reader the evolution of this mania.
I also think that the mania can be treated more as a plot arc. Being able to observe the consequences of this madness may help drive the story forward. A lingering question I had was what the author will do now. He can’t stop thinking about words, it seems. And yet, as his last confession, what now? Does he kill himself? Is his wife still in the picture? Has someone attempted an intervention? Using the affliction as a catalyst for action—and especially leading up to why this is the last confession of them all—would be helpful, I think.
A last question: why is the piece written by autonomous? Wouldn’t people be able to link past books to the current confession? Who is the confession meant for? Though, this makes me think of another interesting potential outcome—what if your narrator gradually loses his own identity and defines himself wholly in terms of others? Is there a way to show that as the story progresses, until at the end of the story the narrator has no more individual identity?
This was a fascinating idea, and I admire all of the language and references you pulled together to write it,
Joaquin, The outer story is about a man’s obsession with giving credit where credit is ‘due’ to other scholars. The inner story is about a writer who is crippled by the incredible expanse of human knowledge and history and feels that he is constantly plagiarizing the work of others. I think this is a really fascinating conceptual problem that you have isolated, and then used as the subject for a short story. Everything we write is so influenced by others, it is difficult to know what is original idea…or can we ever have one that is truly original? I wonder if you can take this issue and the hyperbole and obsessive nature of your narrator even further. He has thousands of footnotes for just a page. What happens if he tries to write a book? Does he ever footnote footnotes? In the Renaissance, music experts decided that all of the good music had already been created, does he decide that everything has already been written, and vows never to write again? Does he become a hermit, webbing and linking every great work ever written? Also, I wanted to know if his footnoting was a result of his innate genius and ability to read and remember so many great works of art, or if his citing is a crippling, tedious task that he feels utterly compelled to do out of his intense literary conscious. How should I view the narrator? As a rare work of intellectualism, able to beautifully link and web so many works, or is he a madman, driven to unreasonable ends by his psychopathic tendencies? I think maybe more details of how he actually footnotes and cites every work would be helpful in understanding his psyche more. Does he walk around with a tape recorder glued to his lips? Is he constantly writing everything, to try to prevent any unknowing plagiarism? Does he decide in the end to never leave his windowless room so that he cannot have any outside contact? Does he have some sort of extensive filing system so that he can reference his references? Also, if the narrator is as crazy as he is (or potentially even psychopathic), then what is the impetus for the change in his actions? Why does he decide to write this last piece and not footnote it, despite his better judgement? I am not sure I understand how he becomes a transformed writer, and it would be really interesting to see him fight his instincts and end up producing this. This is a really creative and unique departure from the average short story, and I am excited to read your revisions, Katie
11 comments:
Dear Joaquin,
The external story of “The Last Crime” is a piece written by a writer as a confession to a life of plagiarism. To me, the internal story is about a man torn apart by his inability to come up with original material, and obsessively trying to make up for his “plagiarism.”
This is a very interesting way to write a story and convey information. I like that the writer is so aware of his audience, and is in fact having a conversation with his reader – addressing him directly and explicitly. With the first paragraph we know that the writer wants to share his story with us. He calls out to us many times throughout as “reader,” reminding us that he knows people will be reading this and judging him, and that he is pleading his case not to a faceless abyss but to a concrete human being on the other side.
Another great thing about this story is how the voice of this narrator is so strong. We get a very clear picture of his obsession, intelligence, propriety, and guilt through the way he describes his story. For example, the way he talks about the letter “e” at the beginning sets up his love for words and prepares us for his feelings about plagiarism, and gives us a sense of his view of the world. Though he is crazy, the reader feels sympathy for him in his “deterioration.”
Something that left me a bit confused is how the writer justifies other writers’ plagiarism. Why does he torture himself for something that apparently every human being does? He claims that there is no such thing as an original idea, that everything has been done or said previously, and that everything should be properly given credit. However, he only attacks himself for this problem – what about all the other writers in the world? Is he angry at them for also being plagiarists? Does he want to convince them of their errors too?
Something that could perhaps help put this story in context would be to step out of it somehow – like bring in another character, include some dialogue, see how and where this piece of writing is presented…etc. I feel like we see a very narrow perspective and don’t get a real feel for the world around this writer. Has anyone else told him to calm down? He mentions that his “mother, a coworker – anyone – would be a better judge as to when I precisely began my deterioration,” so he acknowledges the objectivity of the outside world, but never really uses it to help us understand.
Overall, this was a very interesting subject to explore, and your writing style is very beautiful. Great job!
-Annie Jonas
Dear Joaquin,
I understood your outer story to be about a successful academic who is discoveries his own history of plagiarism, goes to great lengths to break this habit, and becomes a subject of ridicule in the academic world. I understood your inner story to be about your narrator’s overwhelming guilt and his struggle to assert an identity for himself that is not reliant on the works of others.
This is a wonderfully original piece, and I think it rides on the great strength of your narrative voice. You have created a voice that is both pretentious and sympathetic, obnoxious and endearing. The pretentious, rambling quality rarely feels forced, and you do a great of job of using details (such as various literary references and the tangent about the man’s tiger zahir) to lend an air of authenticity to the voice. It’s wonderful how he is self-conscious of his own faults and eccentricities, and yet he also takes himself very, very seriously. Your story really came alive for me when he describes his reaction to the discovery of plagiarism, and his new, footnote-heavy work that is shunned by the academic community. Here, I could truly sense his desperation, both to be recognized and to renew his own faith in himself, and I understood how deeply obsessed he had become with acknowledging his sources. The sincerity of his desperation makes his ridiculous behavior very funny. The more seriously he takes himself, the more I both pity and enjoy him.
I think you really hit pretty much all the right notes with this piece, and most of my criticisms are just slight variations. For example, while I like the reluctant, circuitous route he takes to telling his story, it seems excessive to have more than a fourth of your story be dedicated to the narrator’s preparation for telling the story. I started to get restless, and while this might have been the point, I’d consider condensing those opening two pages. Similarly, while I love the ridiculous lengths he goes to in order to avoid plagiarism, the footnotes about his first grade teacher and the airline pamphlet don’t quite seem consistent with the tone of the writing. I think the problem is with how you reference these examples, rather than with the examples themselves. I want to see that he takes them seriously – an explanation of why the airline pamphlet was significant to his writing would be very funny. Also, while I like that he’s so self-absorbed that he scarcely even mentions his wife, I would like to see more of the repercussions that his obsession has on his personal life.
Overall, this is very strong work. Congratulations on thinking of something so unusual, and for pulling it off so well.
Zach
Joaquin,
I knew that Dune was a great story because Frank Herbert’s description of the desert planet made my mouth go dry. Your story of this epistemologist’s madness actually made me feel as though I was going crazy. Awesome job. This is about a man who has become crushed under the weight of citing every source for everything and his inability to write anything without considering the source, and that source’s source and so on. I had a few suggestions.
The first anecdote, about the e’s was really entertaining. However, I think that it would make more sense later in the story. The narrator, for all his stopping and starting again is a fairly good communicator. His further anecdotes seem to describe his madness and build as they go along, getting to the gradually more crazy ideas like thousands of footnotes. This idea about feeling guilty just for using a letter seemed pretty out there and I thought that it might fit better after the section about the Elephant. As it is now, I read it, but didn’t understand until further along. The rest of the story employs a growing madness, I thought this could add to it.
Also, in the section opening into the discussion of the zahir, I wanted more of a connection with the elephant. Maybe just one line, to connect it back to one of his beginnings.
The book of sonnets was a little difficult for me. Did he write the sonnets, or was he offering an anthology or criticism. If he actually wrote them, I think that this section can be greatly expanded. The idea of citation in scholarly work is one thing, but putting citation in every word and line of poetry is even crazier. In the scene describing the tiger zahir of the fakir, you use amazing language. The crisscrossing dizzy space of nothing but stripes and tiger really shows a madness at work. I think this same tone could be used in describing the literally impossible citation of poetry. He would have to citations on thousands of years of written human thought just for an octave.
Also, I had another question. Does he do research just to find things that he might be in danger of plagiarizing? I get the idea that he does, but I’m not sure that it appears explicitly in the story. For example, does he study Greek just to make sure that some idea he might write hasn’t already been published by Plato and then foolishly translated?
I really do not have much else to say. I think this is a very polished first draft. Great job and thanks for the 6 minutes of absolute madness and frustration this gave me.
Mike
Dear Joaquín,
“The Last Crime” is about a madman whose particular obsession is his inability to “forget the influences upon one’s beliefs.” He cannot write a sentence down without remembering (and documenting in a footnote) each and every step of the mental processes that took him to write that sentence. As the narrator himself so aptly puts it, “In the teeming world of my mind there are nothing but particulars and works that came before.” At a deeper level, the story is a very funny, very sharp criticism about the nature of scholarship and how there is a flaw in the way we conceive of research—first, we must read everything written on the topic before we have the authority to write on the topic ourselves, but at the point, what we have to say is already influenced by what others have written before us and no original thought can exist.
I really loved the voice in this piece. I admit the beginning had me very confused, especially with the e’s digression which I still don’t quite understand, but once the narrator settled into a stable level of madness, I enjoyed myself greatly. Some really strong moments of writing—“Every crease in its hide is crisp, every fly resting in the shade of its underbelly is vivid” and “My mind is crowded with a cascade of footnotes, quotation marks and parenthetical citations,” among others. You have a great sense of humor and I was drawn in immediately by this odd, incredibly self-aware narrator. I loved the footnote at the end, very nice, very true to the story.
I found the premise of this story really awesome and it’s very important that the narrator tell the story himself, but I did wonder if the story could be deepened by adding in another character. For instance, the wife comes in briefly on page three and I wanted to know more about her, although she isn’t important in the larger scheme of things. But it might add more to the sense of conflict if we see her trying to get him to stop, if we see him being unable to, and how this plays out in their marriage. Also, in talking about their marriage and happier times, it might also strengthen the contrast between who the narrator was before and how much he’s lost to this “zahir” of his. Don’t get me wrong—I want this to stay a lighthearted piece and I definitely don’t want the narrator to become an actual figure of pity, but I wanted more of an arc to the story. Right now, I don’t really get a sense of progression (which is part of the point, I guess). I get the struggle to say what the problem is, the problem, and then the lack of solution, but I wanted to see more steps in between, maybe. I guess what I was struggling with is what is at stake for the reader? I know that the narrator is driven by this need to confess, right to the last, and just be done with writing, but did you intend for the reader to get more out of this story than just this commentary on scholarship? For instance, how I am supposed to feel about the narrator? I liked his voice, but I didn’t know if I liked him because I only knew him through his obsession, which is fine in a lot of ways, so it’s really up to you and what you want to accomplish in the story, I think.
Overall, though, nice job. I totally dug what you were saying about plagiarism, very appropriate for an English class. I look forward to talking about your story in class. Thanks for sharing!
Jessamyn
Joaquin:
The outer story is inextricably linked to the inner story – a writer, who appears to have lost his mind while remaining incredibly eloquent, rants to the reader about his obsession with plagiarism. He rebukes himself for his “crimes” of taking from other writer’s ideas and stealing their words. The story seems to be humorously showing the reader the irony of the speaker’s turmoil. The speaker even says himself that everything is based on something else and thus nothing is original. But still he is plagued by his own “stealing” and thinks of himself as a criminal, thus is renouncing writing all together.
I’m sure everyone else is saying this, but, damn, the voice in this story is great. I was amazed by how consistent it what and by how I never became bored with it. It is funny and smart and completely wacky in a completely original way. Well done! The concept of the story is great as well, and addresses the issue of plagiarism – isn’t everything plagiarism? Is there such thing as an original idea? This man seems to be so smart and so aware of written works and the world around him that he is unable to escape this predicament. While the reader finds his ranting to be rather ridiculous and completely hilarious, there is also something credible about what he is saying that makes one think. This was a very brave task to undertake, and you did it amazingly well.
An obvious issue is the ambiguity of the speaker’s predicament. Why does he blame himself for plagiarism if he is aware the there is no such thing as not plagiarizing. I think you’ve done a pretty good job showing us that this man is not in his right mind, but I think showing us that he truly is crazy will help us understand that his problem stems solely from his own psychosis. You do a great job of showing it on page 6 when you describe the Zahir, the man who was obsessed with the image of the coin, and the one who was obsessed with the tiger. Here we really get that it is a psychosis…but what I think would really convince me is for you to show me some interaction with the outside world in which you understand through his crazed perspective that he is not right. Give him some sort of foil or let us see another person reacting to him so that we understand that he’s a loon. That makes his voice all the more interesting and allows us to focus on the irony and complexity of what he’s saying without worrying about it’s absolute accuracy. The story also ends sort of abruptly. It would add to it if you were able to give the letter more finality. The speaker doesn’t seem like the kind of person who would end so suddenly and with so little flourish.
I just love this story. What a fantastic idea…I can’t wait to see where else you take this.
-Brodie
Joaquin,
I’m not sure there’s much distinction here between an inner and an outer story: the narrative seems to be mostly concerned with the narrator’s “confession,” so to speak, to the crime of plagiarism. I think the narrator is seeking some sort of penance for his “crime,” and so has constructed this essay to explain why he did what he did, and how he has attempted to atone for it.
I thought this essay had a really unique voice, and I really liked the confessional style a lot. In some ways this piece reminded me of The Telltale Heart, with a clearly unbalanced narrator explaining in a rather erudite and articulate fashion how he went about doing something that was insane. I liked how the narrator was rather was quite intelligent and in some ways almost convincing in his argument that everything he had ever produced demanded footnote and extended citation in order to properly attribute where all of his ideas and concepts came from. I liked the increasingly outlandish page counts and numbers of footnotes to which the narrator resorted, which he relates in a very matter of fact and straightforward way. In general, I liked how this piece seemed to be a satire on academia and the obsession with excessively copious amounts of footnoting in scholarly works. In this respect, I think it was reminiscent of Borges, and I liked how the Borges link seemed to run throughout the story.
Although I liked the unreliable narrator and his obsession, I’m not sure it necessarily works that you have him acknowledge his obsession on the form of the zahir. Although this is not necessarily an explicit concession on the narrator’s part that he is acting crazily, that he compares himself with a man who became obsessed with a tiger and painted tiger patterns all over his cell, seems to be a tacit acknowledgement that the problem of citation and originality is not a reasonable one. The narrator seems to know at this point that his obsession is a “fetish of the mind,” and not a real problem, and I had trouble reconciling that with his surprise that his scholarly works were rejected because of overly extensive footnotes. I think the story is more convincing if the narrator truly believes that he is right, and does his best to convince us of the same. I think he kind of has a case, or at least an interesting point, and I’d like to see that pushed as far as it can go.
In general, I wanted to get a bit more story and narrative from the narrator. He gives some really interesting glimpses of his journey, as, for example, when he mentions his essay on Lolita which included in excess of 1,000 footnotes, or his need to cite his first grade teacher and an airplane pamphlet. I wanted to get more of this, as well as a better sense of the overall journey the narrator had taken to bring him to this point. What first prompted this break with reality? Why the Borges book? Why did he suddenly feel that he was such a blatant plagiarist? I wanted a little more in scene and a little less in summary.
I thought this was a really unusual and compelling story!
Michael
Joaquin,
There didn’t seem to be much of an outer story, as the bulk of this piece is the inner workings of the mind of a man driven to insanity by his insatiable obsession with citing every source in his academic writings. In a broader sense, a number of very intriguing questions are raised—can any idea be original? Is everything we write simply the regurgitation of someone else’s knowledge, presented in a slight different manner? This piece really got me thinking. Nice work.
At first I was confused about the example of Don’t think of an Elephant, but then as the story continued it made a lot of sense—and was a great, vivid analogy. What you might want to do is reposition this at a later point in the story; I think this will add to its power.
The voice is incredible—it is frantic, filled with panic, and the piece as a whole reads very quickly, I’m sure in line with the narrator’s rapid pace of thought and strong desire to spill out all his pent up emotions on paper. Through the voice, so many things are made clear about the narrator—his intelligence (made apparent through the use of intellectual words like “cerveceria” and mentioning Borges, Heidegger, etc.), his despair (“I lead a despicable life in which nothing is my own”) his bitterness (“the article was rejected by the editorial staff of the prospective journal for the 1,084 footnotes it contained, stretching out for 36 glorious pages…”) and his insanity (“footnotes 232, 1900 and 11,238 received the most condemnation…”). I do wonder, however, if the narrator would actually use exclamation points if he were actually writing this. I understand your desire to include them—they add to the frantic urgency of the piece, and they make the narrator sound more insane and volatile—however, I’m unsure as to whether or not someone writing a monologue would use exclamation points.
I also thought the piece flowed very well; you had some really nice sentence structures that added to the rhythmic madness of the narrator’s inner workings.
Another thing: I feel as though the reader is given a lot of little glimpses into happenings throughout the narrator’s life (getting works rejected, different studies he had done); however, none of these are expanded upon in great detail, and so they kind of all blend together into a mess of rejections and exhaustive works. I know this may be difficult to do given the structure of the piece, but you may want to bring out one or two of these moments into greater detail and more vivid scene—I’d like to see the narrator get his work rejected, and read about how he feels when these editors reject the essays that he had spent exhaustive hours compiling and constructing.
Overall I thought this was an incredibly unique, entertaining read.
-Nick
Hey Anonymous,
I saw the inner and outer story of the piece as very closely connected (it's kinda how it has to be for this type of work): a writer is attempting to explain his paranoia in regards to plagiarizing with his writing, as he struggles within himself to write something that is truly original.
First off, I loved the voice of this piece. In addressing the audience directly, it just grabs the reader at the very beginning and throughout I had this feeling of a paranoid guy hunching over with his arm around me trying frenetically to explain himself. This sort of letter of apology really is the best and only way to write this thing. The writer goes on at a very quick, somewhat chaotic pace, which really put the image in my mind of a writer just writing like crazy at a desk in the middle of the night (with a feather pen, no less). The writer is also a very funny character- his never-ending cycle of seeing plagiarism even in seeing his plagiarism is so exaggerated yet his attitude towards it is so panicked and serious, it just made him a very enjoyable (if pitiable and maybe even pathetic) character. And the way he carries on from subject to random subject within (like when he talks about the three totally unrelated footnotes that supposedly get the most condemnation) really was just delightful to read.
One concern that I had, though, with the writer (as much as I enjoyed him), was that I was occasionally confused about his self-awareness. At times, it just seems like he's almost too aware that he's not actually plagiarizing but merely thinking it, and sometimes he seems to recognize the more ridiculous of his habits (i.e. 240 pages of notes) that I just felt like he was well-enough equipped to know when he was doing his plagiarism thing. And then, I wasn't sure exactly what he thought of the plagiarism- on one hand, he sees it as a crime he's committing, but at other times he sort of tries to explain that everyone is always plagiarizing when they're writing. What are his opinions towards, say, his peers and how they both don't see his plagiarism at first and then can't stand his bad habits? To me, so much of academic writing relies on a discourse between different writers' works that he would have to come to terms with either how they're plagiarizing or how he's really not.
Last, and I don't really know how it might work, but I'd like to see more plot go on in this story. So much time, especially at the beginning, is just spent with the narrator explaining himself (and it seems like he takes a bit too much time before actually mentioning his plagiarism). I don't really know how it could be done with this type of narration (which I really love), but I just wanted a bit more development or some more characters to be involved. Maybe more wife? Or a colleague comes into play? I do think it could be done without sacrificing the great voice.
All in all, I thought this was a really fun read. While I had a couple of issues of confusion, they really were outweighed by just the enjoyment factor that came from this awesome character, his voice, and his situation. Great job!
-Matty
Joaquin:
I’m not sure your draft really has an outer story or an inner story. This seems to be more of a character study. The narrator is compulsively neurotic, focusing on an intense fear of plagirism coupled with an inevitable obsession with influences. This character is consumed by language. I find all of this very intriguing, I just wonder if you could present him in a completely different way. I would love to get out of his head, first of all, because the voice, for me, got to be very clunky and verbose to the point of frustrating. The narrator even admits that he is being circuitous. There needs to be some other driving force that keeps me reading. Could the character interact with other characters? Could there be scene? Could he be described through someone else’s perspective?
I find it interesting that you said in class that this was a fantasy story (or one that took place in another world?) I got no clues from the piece that this world is any different from ours. Instead, this narrator actually feels somewhat familiar. I find it interesting that he references both Borges and Nabokov, because I definitely saw those authors’ influences in the narrator’s voice (more specifically, this felt incredibly Pale Fire.) When I read those writers as well, I often ask myself how much they can get away with and be clever, and how much is just self indulgent. You can have your narrator feel tangential without making him tangential to the point of losing the reader. Does this make sense? He can feel verbose, while still making the language more concise.
Most of my comments for your piece have to do with style, and what makes this tricky is that we may just have very different styles, so I’m not sure how constructive this will be. For example, I had a difficult time with the parenthetical statements and the direct address of the reader. However, I know that you’re using these tools very intentionally. So even if I as a reader am slightly annoyed by them, perhaps this is your intention? I would just keep in mind that even in stories with protagonists we hate, we still love to read the work. The narrator should never get in the way of that main objective.
-Michelle
Dear Joaquín,
I read your outer story as a confession and your inner story as a story about compulsion. I thought your narrator wanted freedom from his compulsion by being able to produce an original thought. It seems as though he doesn’t accept that rearranging current ideas can produce new knowledge; instead, he seems to want to escape reality completely. In some ways he’s begun to do this—thinking about new languages, experimenting with new forms.
The voice you use is very strong. There was a heavy feeling of confession throughout. The direct address was compelling, and you had some very strong language throughout. The formality of the speech made me feel like the author was not contemporary, though I couldn’t exactly put a time period or place to the story.
I like that the story is framed as the author’s last crime. The introduction did a good job preparing me for what was to come. That said, I think it could be condensed—the story of the compulsion doesn’t seem to being until the top of page three—and this feels like the meat of the story.
I think that you convey well how the compulsion grows. In some ways, you have to “tell” rather than “show” because the narrator is addressing his problem head on and consciously. Still, I think that you can get more inside of the narrator’s head, and use his mental state to convey to the reader the evolution of this mania.
I also think that the mania can be treated more as a plot arc. Being able to observe the consequences of this madness may help drive the story forward. A lingering question I had was what the author will do now. He can’t stop thinking about words, it seems. And yet, as his last confession, what now? Does he kill himself? Is his wife still in the picture? Has someone attempted an intervention? Using the affliction as a catalyst for action—and especially leading up to why this is the last confession of them all—would be helpful, I think.
A last question: why is the piece written by autonomous? Wouldn’t people be able to link past books to the current confession? Who is the confession meant for? Though, this makes me think of another interesting potential outcome—what if your narrator gradually loses his own identity and defines himself wholly in terms of others? Is there a way to show that as the story progresses, until at the end of the story the narrator has no more individual identity?
This was a fascinating idea, and I admire all of the language and references you pulled together to write it,
James
Joaquin,
The outer story is about a man’s obsession with giving credit where credit is ‘due’ to other scholars. The inner story is about a writer who is crippled by the incredible expanse of human knowledge and history and feels that he is constantly plagiarizing the work of others.
I think this is a really fascinating conceptual problem that you have isolated, and then used as the subject for a short story. Everything we write is so influenced by others, it is difficult to know what is original idea…or can we ever have one that is truly original?
I wonder if you can take this issue and the hyperbole and obsessive nature of your narrator even further. He has thousands of footnotes for just a page. What happens if he tries to write a book? Does he ever footnote footnotes? In the Renaissance, music experts decided that all of the good music had already been created, does he decide that everything has already been written, and vows never to write again? Does he become a hermit, webbing and linking every great work ever written?
Also, I wanted to know if his footnoting was a result of his innate genius and ability to read and remember so many great works of art, or if his citing is a crippling, tedious task that he feels utterly compelled to do out of his intense literary conscious. How should I view the narrator? As a rare work of intellectualism, able to beautifully link and web so many works, or is he a madman, driven to unreasonable ends by his psychopathic tendencies? I think maybe more details of how he actually footnotes and cites every work would be helpful in understanding his psyche more. Does he walk around with a tape recorder glued to his lips? Is he constantly writing everything, to try to prevent any unknowing plagiarism? Does he decide in the end to never leave his windowless room so that he cannot have any outside contact? Does he have some sort of extensive filing system so that he can reference his references?
Also, if the narrator is as crazy as he is (or potentially even psychopathic), then what is the impetus for the change in his actions? Why does he decide to write this last piece and not footnote it, despite his better judgement? I am not sure I understand how he becomes a transformed writer, and it would be really interesting to see him fight his instincts and end up producing this.
This is a really creative and unique departure from the average short story, and I am excited to read your revisions,
Katie
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