Literature Is Theft

In this highly entertaining article, Robert McCrum takes the long view of the latest plagiarism complaint against Ian McEwan. His first novel apparently resembled a novel by Julian Gloag, and another showed close kinship to one of Daphne du Maurier's short stories. Last week, McEwan faced new accusations of lifting phrases and the central idea for a main character for Atonement (2001), a work that met with lavish critical praise. The source in question is a now forgotten memoir by the now deceased Lucilla Andrews. As McCrum points out, it is more than coincidental that the original accusations were filed around the time that the film of Atonement, starring Keira Knightley in the supposedly Andrews derived role, was being shot.

McEwan has acknowledged his debt to Andrews on several occasions, and it is hard to imagine how the kind of literary copying and permutation McEwan does can be called plagiarism . If anything, says McCrum, it is in the grandest of literary traditions- theft. Shakespeare, for example, was notoriously guilty of it, and modern stories based on his purloined plays are too numerous to count. If copying is stealing, then as McCrum gleefully notes, Shakespeare is Fagin. The idea of originality in literature became popular with the Romantics, and the Romantic ideal of the new and always original now exists in a passing odd symbiosis with a corporate culture that stresses the ownership and individuality of intellectual property.

But great literature has always involved theft. Minor authors imitate: great ones steal.

And I didn't invent that. Somebody has already said it.