Writing in the Observer in 1980, Martin Amis took to task a young New York-based writer, Jacob Epstein, for plagiarising him. In Wild Oats, Epstein had taken not just plot structures or character ideas from Amis’s debut, The Rachel Papers, but had duplicated whole sentences. “The boundary between influence and plagiarism will always be vague,” Amis wrote – but Epstein had “decisively breached” that “hazy” line. Rather magnanimously, Amis went on to praise Epstein as a writer of talent; he simply believed that the similarities ought to be made public.



That boundary remains hazy. Among the 13 novels longlisted for this year’s International Booker prize, announced last week, is Red Dog by Willem Anker, translated from Afrikaans by Michiel W Heyns. It tells the story of Coenraad de Buys, a seven-foot agent of war who lived and died in the violent, fractured Cape Colony. When I reviewed the novel, unfavourably, in the Times Literary Supplement, my objections lay not just in what I found to be a derivative, repetitious and at times deeply unpleasant book, but in a few sections that bore a striking resemblance to those in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, which raised – as I wrote then – “some discussion about the nature and justification of plagiarism”.

Take the following passage, in which Buys leads his gang of outlaws into an attack “like a horde from Hell more abhorrent even than the fire and brimstone land of Christian Reckoning, skirling and shrieking, clothed in smoke like those phantoms in regions beyond certainty and sense where the eye wanders and the lip shudders and drools.”

Here: McCarthy, on a similar approach from a Comanche ambush: “Like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of Christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools.”

To discuss the concept of plagiarism in art is to grasp for something very slippery. Most crucially, it should be noted that a wide range of intertextual manoeuvres are fundamental to creativity. Mark Twain famously wrote to Helen Keller – who stood accused of plagiarising a short story – that “substantially all ideas are secondhand”. Curiously, the application of these tactics to prose literature is frequently deemed worse than when applied to poetry, music or the visual arts. Literary genius is oddly considered sui generis. In answer, we can take Jonathan Lethem’s marvellous essay The Ecstasy of Influence, which deconstructs ideas about originality by forging an argument made almost entirely from fragments, taking to the very limit a line from Montaigne’s essays: “I have gathered a posy of other men’s flowers, and nothing but the thread that binds them is mine own.”

Appropriation – used deftly – seeks to undermine, emphasise or distort meaning, to invert narrative or encourage fresh readings. See Eliot (The Waste Land), Borges (in Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote, he invites us to consider the “staggering” differences between two identical pieces of text), Kathy Acker (Blood and Guts in High School). McCarthy himself (as Michael Lynn Crews, the author of a guide to McCarthy’s influence, has noted) has frequently made use of other authors, weaving neat “phraseological appropriations” into his own books, particularly when they signal back to writers with whom his work shares a philosophical reference. (His borrowings run further still: he once added an annexe to his house using bricks salvaged from James Agee’s old home.) Literature would be left poorer if authors felt stifled to the point that they could not experiment with that which went before them.

I am certainly not precious about McCarthy: his influence is wide, and his sales will not be affected by this affair. And books are, as he has said, made out of books, and we should consider the value in attempts to create them anew. What matters is that they are authentic, that they move with conviction to recast words.

So why is it that these sections from Red Dog stick in the craw? The first objection is that the book does not maintain conviction in its intertextual experiments. Buys, who frequently speaks to the reader outside the narrative, claims his omniscience and his “plundering” of texts “far and wide” – and yet we never sense that the book aims towards a rich allusiveness. Instead we are presented with a clunky act of mimicry that does little to impress upon the reader some deeper purpose.

Second: a reader unfamiliar with McCarthy’s book could reasonably believe these lengthy sections to be wholly of Anker’s design. Those of us who are familiar with McCarthy do not “stumble upon the remains” of his work, as Anker writes in Red Dog’s acknowledgments, so much as discover a corpse with rouged cheeks. Most interestingly, this explicit openness about McCarthy is only present in the English edition, not the original Afrikaans – a language into which McCarthy has never been translated. Anker’s translator Heyns has objected to my criticisms with the response that the novelist names McCarthy – but as McCarthy is not named in the Afrikaans edition, nor published in that language, both seem to me to undermine an already dubious line of defence. Perhaps the International Booker judges will agree – or perhaps that boundary is still too hazy.