I was recently reading a great book set in a secondary world with wytches and magical items and the like, when the author used a great line. It was such a good line, I looked it up.
Turns out the line is often attributed to St. Francis of Assisi, so my admiration for the author's skill shrank a little.
Now I know that the bible has been a major source of inspiration for all of Western lit, but this lifting of a line from a saint (although it is doubtful the saint ever said or wrote the actual line) doesn't sit well with me.
I'm not offended by this on a religious level. If authors want to have good characters showing good Christian values and ideas, I'm fine with it. I guess I feel that the author should have reworked , reworded, or recreated the line instead of just copying it.
Any thoughts about this?
Posted by BenM (Member # 8329) on :
To get a better feel for the context, can we know what the line is?
Posted by babooher (Member # 8617) on :
Preach the gospel at all times, and if necessary use words.
It was spoken in the book by a man who believes in one god which is a rarity in the secondary world the author created. The man's belief is obviously derivitive of a Judeo-Christian faith with enough differences so that it isn't Christian.
Posted by philocinemas (Member # 8108) on :
I'll be honest - this does not bother me. I've read many books, can't remember specifics, where authors have used a phrase from another writer, religious or secular, as a sort of "tip-of-the-hat" to that writer.
Posted by philocinemas (Member # 8108) on :
Granted, if something falls under copyright laws, one should be very careful in doing this.
Posted by BenM (Member # 8329) on :
It being in dialogue makes a big difference to me. If the secondary world is a derivative of the real one - so it had its own St Francis, for example - then this wouldn't bother me at all. The character could very well be quoting St Francis consciously.
If however the narrative makes this point as part of authorial intrusion, I'd get very annoyed, mostly at the overtness of the intrusion and a little at the author (*apparently*) trying to make a quote without an attribution. Likewise, if the secondary world has no tie to the real world (so there's no St Francis to have made the quote) I would be just as bothered as if someone in a horse & cart milieu was told to "step on it" (a subject we discussed not long ago, iirc).
Posted by babooher (Member # 8617) on :
Nope, no St. Francis. Perhaps the author is trying to hit the reader with the Hammer of No Duh that the faith of the people who believe in the one god is based on the Judeo-Christian beliefs.
Posted by philocinemas (Member # 8108) on :
Let me add that people have used phrases from Shakespeare so often in literature for the past 400 years, without crediting him, that the phrases are now part of our common language.
The same is true for Benjamin Franklin within the last 200 years.
Since St. Francis lived 800 years ago, I would not be surprised if several of his maxims have become commonplace in our language.
Posted by JSchuler (Member # 8970) on :
It's a well known quote, so I doubt the author is trying to pull a fast one. It would be like trying to claim "Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country" as your own. People would just laugh at you.
Posted by Kathleen Dalton Woodbury (Member # 59) on :
Yeah, it's an allusion, which is allowed, but I agree, bahooher, that it would have been much, much cooler for the character to have expressed the idea "in his own words" so to speak.
That way, the allusion would have been more subtle, and the speaker would have seemed more original in himself (because unless the character knew who St. Francis was and was deliberately alluding to him, it does make the writer look like a cheat).