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Pi and plagiarism?
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Was Booker Prize winner Yann Martal a plagiarist? Well, that was among many a question discussed at the British Council's "annual Booker Prize event".
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CHAPTER 1: "How's this `Pi thing' book?"
"It's good."
"And ... the plagiarism bit?"
"Well, he demolished that."
"You've read the book?"
"Begged and borrowed it. Renuka had a copy. Quite okay so far."
(A snatch of conversation overheard at the British Council last Thursday.)
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Chapter 2: Twenty-five, ... 32 people, yes, the Lecture Hall would be full... . Familiar faces, the sole dhoti clad gentleman and a shorts and chappal-shod young man... . Everyone there to listen to the BC's "annual Booker Prize event".
Director Eunice Crooke, who highlighted this year's new format — a discussion after the prize had been announced — then pronounced Dr. Joseph as the winner of the library's Booker competition (decided by the drawing of lots).
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Chapter 3: "I don't know how many here have read the book," began Geeta Doctor, in her analysis of "Life of Pi". "I was delighted to know that Yann Martel has won. I was given this book by India Today eight months ago to be reviewed. And, when I saw it first, I thought to myself, what a silly book, another weird animal book. But, I was riveted ... everything about it seemed so real." And then after a quick narration of the genesis of the plot, Doctor elaborated on how the focus on characterisation is so sharp that it draws the reader to empathise with the protagonist, Piscine Molitor Patel's predicament.
She then proceeded to read passages to substantiate her premise. The first was where Pi catches fish to feed to Richard Parker, the Bengal tiger (pp.184-185).
The second is when Pi is without food. The solution? "To harvest the tiger's s***, without being endangered" (pp. 213-214)
It reads: "I tried once to eat Richard Parker's feces. It happened early on, when my system hadn't learned yet to live with hunger and my imagination was still wildly searching for solutions... . In size it was like a big ball of gulab jamun, but with none of the softness. In fact, it was hard as rock. Load a musket with it and you could have shot a rhino."
Doctor ended by saying that as a writer, Martel was relatively unknown, "sounds normal" — as it was a plausible scenario that he had heard of such a story, and had then proceeded to craft the novel — and that the book as such took the reader back to the era of the well-told story.
The evening slipped into a more literary mode when the other speaker Mukund Padmanabhan, first dwelt on the issue of plagiarism.
So, was Yann Martal a plagiarist?
An emphatic no, because of the circumstances under which the charge has been levelled and also because people haven't understood how literary plagiarism operates.
In his defence, Padmanabhan elaborated on the book's "Author's Note", which is "interesting as he thanks a whole list of people". Martel does acknowledge the source of the plot, but if there was a rumpus, the press was also partly to blame as it likes a good story.
Padmanabhan then gave further examples from literature to substantiate his point, concluding with this: "If you look at the idea of a journey by ship, I think the Intellectual Property Rights to this should belong to the Old Testament." He then proceeded "to peddle a theory on the book's element of magic realism", with two settled characteristics to this ambiguous term.
The first weaves the mundane with the fantastic and the real with the magic, and the second is the magical aspects of the novel addressed in an even, deadpan tone. If magic realism is to evoke reality, then Martel's "literary agenda", he said, is in trying to seduce the reader to systematically forget this ... almost using the fantastic as a peg or drape to cover the realistic novel.
This attempt to attain such realistic credibility is realised in the "Author's Note".
About the book, Padmanabhan also said he didn't like the section towards the end (p. 256) — the bit on the island of floating algae — symbolic of Nature's brutality, describing it as a kind of unreality check. The end, he added, has a lovely meditative twist that looks at story-telling.
The hour-long programme was wrapped up with an overview by Geeta Doctor. "The charge of plagiarism was perhaps a price one has to pay for success", and the humour was wonderful. But Martel, that ordinary guy, did make a cheap remark on winning, she felt, with his "I feel like I'm in the arms... " utterance.
Finally, the really magnificent achievement about the book was that there were "no steamy scenes".
Postscript: Envy and squabbling enliven most literary awards. But this year's 50,000 pounds Whitbread Book of the Year has come up with a dizzying new ingredient: possible marital strife. Well, Claire Tomalin and Michael Frayn, one of Britain's most successful literary couples, have been shortlisted for the award, second only in prestige to the Booker Prize. "If one of us wins our category and the other doesn't, we're going to have to learn to behave over the breakfast table," said Frayn.
MURALI N. KRISHNASWAMY
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