December 8, 2006
Plagiarism and Historical Fiction Posted by Fredric Smoler at 09:30 AM EST An interesting article in yesterday’s New York Times describes a pseudoscandal alleging plagiarism by Ian McEwan. The writer for the Mail on Sunday who relayed the charge has managed to provoke a remarkable level of indignation from writers, a class of men and women who seem generally more exhilarated by the humiliation of a better-paid member of their profession than moved to solidarity with a rival. The details of the allegation are printed in the article, but in brief, McEwan’s novel Atonement describes a scene in a hospital during the Second World War and uses material from a biography. The allegation of plagiarism seems truly absurd, and some of the writers who have written letters to that effect, many of them published in the Telegraph, include Margaret Atwood, Kazuo Ishiguro, John Updike, Zadie Smith, Martin Amis, and, most remarkably, Thomas Pynchon. A copy of Pynchon’s letter appears in the Times.
If you read the article on line you have to click on the document to increase its size. That is very much worth doing. The letter is quite beautifully written, and if you know the novels, is fascinatingly different from Pynchon’s other voices. It includes a few meditations on what it means to write historical fiction, which should interest any reader of this blog. I find it consoling to reflect that this intervention by Pynchon, who has long been famous for shunning publicity of any kind, is possibly the most effective balm for the pain of being accused of a shameful thing, however unjustly. I certainly hope McEwan takes it that way.
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