MK's Post : Authorship & Quotation Marks

De Grazia’s “Sanctioning Voice: Quotation Marks, the Abolition of Torture, and the Fifth Amendment” spotlights the case of Jeffrey Masson, who sued for libel over alleged misquotes published in a New Yorker interview.  Two courts ruled in favor of the defendants, upholding their argument that, in the interest of maintaining a free press, journalists are not responsible for inaccuracies in quoted material; rather, they are free to extrapolate meaning from an interview subject’s words and present it as a direct quotation so long as there is no “actual malice.”  The Supreme Court revered this ruling and restored quotation marks to “a unique standard of accuracy” (286).  As with Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Services, we once again see judicial procedures being used to encode interpretations of authorship into law.

But it is De Grazia’s segue into the relationship between quotation marks and sanctioned torture that truly caught my attention.  De Grazia argues that “lax use of quotations summons up the grisly shadow of compulsory self-incrimination, of being forced to bear witness against oneself, in this instance by being made to speak (or, more precisely, by being made to look in print to speak) self-condemnatory words” (286).  I agree with this argument, and wonder about the possible implications for 21^st century American justice.  The chapter itself speaks of torture in the past tense; the title refers to the “abolition” of torture and makes mention of “the shadow” of coerced confessions.  But recent developments (or perhaps more accurately, recent publication of past developments) coming out of the courts suggest that this particular authorship issue—the coerced confession, the institutional takeover of individual voice—is an ongoing point of concern.   

In August of 2011, we witnessed the release of the so-called “Memphis Three,” a trio of men who served eighteen years in prison for murder.  All three were convicted on the strength of a confession elicited from Jessie Misskelley, seventeen at the time, interrogated by police over a twelve-hour period with no parental guardian or legal counsel present.  Another relevant case comes from Radley Balko, an award-winning former investigative journalist with a focus on civil rights, who recently documented the case of Thomas Cogdell, a twelve-year-old who confessed to killing his sister after a multi-hour police interrogation.  Balko used his blog to highlight the case as part of his campaign to require all states to videotape police interrogations.

I think the call for recorded interrogations plays into the historic tension between law and authorship.  As our readings suggest, the law often enforces distorted authorship definitions.   For example, Venuti points out in “Translation, Authorship, Copyright,” that American copyright favors a view of translation that does not truly exist:

A translation is not regarded as an independent text, interposing linguistic and literary differences which are specific to the translating culture, which are added to the foreign text to make it intelligible in that culture, and which the foreign author did not anticipate or choose.  The foreign author’s originality is assumed to transcend any differences, so that the translation can be viewed as effectively identical to the foreign text.  (5)       

I wonder if the effort to require the recording of police interrogations can be framed as an effort to ensure that the authorship of the confession matches the common perception of it (i.e., a confession is “the truth,” freely offered).  

Question

As a teacher of writing, I wonder if raising the specter of this particular murky and violent issue of authorship with a young population is a worthwhile idea?  I wonder if young readers need to be reminded that just because something is in print, in a record, recorded by an institution with a kind of built-in ethos, that does not mean it is completely accurate in the way they might assume.