{"id":230385,"date":"2022-07-04T13:26:19","date_gmt":"2022-07-04T11:26:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/the-case-of-the-acclaimed-south-african-novel-that-borrows-from-samuel-beckett\/"},"modified":"2022-07-04T13:26:19","modified_gmt":"2022-07-04T11:26:19","slug":"the-case-of-the-acclaimed-south-african-novel-that-borrows-from-samuel-beckett","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/the-case-of-the-acclaimed-south-african-novel-that-borrows-from-samuel-beckett\/","title":{"rendered":"The case of the acclaimed South African novel that ‘borrows’ from Samuel Beckett"},"content":{"rendered":"

Pereant qui ante nos nostra dixerunt<\/em>: may those who utter our words before us perish. This lighthearted Latin curse speaks a truth many readers and writers have felt: to have our thoughts articulated by someone else.<\/p>\n

Coenraad de Buys is unruffled by such a possibility. He is the antihero of Willem Anker\u2019s award winning 2014 Afrikaans novel, Buys<\/a><\/em>. Vagabond philosopher that he is, Buys reflects on the nature of memories. Their substance is flaky; their origin sometimes obscure. You might glimpse them in a glass darkly or even find them outside your own mind \u2013 in the books you read. When this happens to Buys, he feels <\/p>\n

\n

as if the stories of others capture something of my own life \u2026 the outlines of a conversation, a fly on the edge of my hat, but not the words. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This musing occurs during one of the novel\u2019s rare moments of uneventfulness. Nothing happens; no one comes or goes. Maybe that\u2019s why the text opens onto four pages of near-undiluted dialogue from celebrated Irish author Samuel Beckett<\/a>\u2019s 1952 play Waiting for Godot<\/em><\/a>. Of course, it\u2019s one thing for a character to be cavalier about the words of others, and quite another for an author.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\"A<\/div>\n

<\/a>

<\/span> NB Publishers<\/span><\/span> <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

According to my analysis<\/a>, at least 78 lines from Beckett\u2019s play are reproduced in Buys<\/em> without significant alteration \u2013 a fact which, if noticed, has not been noted to my knowledge. <\/p>\n

The Afrikaans text carries no acknowledgement of Waiting for Godot<\/em>, nor does it acknowledge Beckett\u2019s influence. The English translation, Red Dog<\/em> (2019), also doesn\u2019t credit the play, though Beckett is mentioned with US writer Cormac McCarthy<\/a> as an author whose \u201cremains\u201d might be recognised.<\/p>\n

The McCarthy affair<\/h2>\n

Not long after the English text appeared, a reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement<\/em><\/a> and The Guardian<\/em><\/a> noted close correspondences with McCarthy\u2019s epic novel Blood Meridian<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n

The reviewer took issue with Red Dog<\/em>\u2019s \u201cclunky act of mimicry\u201d and questioned whether McCarthy was sufficiently acknowledged. He writes that Anker walks a fine line between appropriation and plagiarism.<\/p>\n

This drew a defence<\/a> from the book\u2019s translator, Michiel Heyns. Anker himself<\/a> explained that these correspondences belong to the book\u2019s \u201cplayful rewritings and quotes (which), when noticed, would enrich \u2026 broader conversations\u201d.<\/p>\n

Enter Beckett<\/h2>\n

I said earlier that Buys<\/em> opens onto Waiting for Godot<\/em>. A more precise formulation: it yields the floor, gives itself over to Beckett without giving him any of the credit. <\/p>\n

For scale and seriousness, consider that the amount of appropriated material exceeds the nearly 60 uncredited \u2018borrowings\u2019<\/a> recently identified in Australian author John Hughes\u2019s prize-withdrawn<\/a> novel, The Dogs<\/em>. It also exceeds what Faber and Faber, Beckett\u2019s publisher, considers \u201cfair use<\/a>\u201d.<\/p>\n

Putting aside the question of copyright, the sustained nature of the reproduction of Godot<\/em> perhaps offers its own curious form of mitigation. Surely Anker wants us to pick up on this wholesale transfer? And isn\u2019t it a truth universally acknowledged that a writer in possession of an individual talent might sometimes be in want of a riff? <\/p>\n

In defence of Anker?<\/h2>\n

That was more or less US-born poet T.S. Eliot<\/a>\u2019s position, himself no stranger to charges of unscrupulous liftings<\/a>. But Eliot gets off by having practised what he preached<\/a>: <\/p>\n

\n

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Now, one could mount an unorthodox defence and claim that Anker is a bad writer. You could argue that he has simply failed to pressure-cook his source into something rich and strange. Embarrassing, true, but the plea would at least reduce the charges from ethical to aesthetic badness. <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\"A<\/div>\n

<\/a>

<\/span> NB Publishers<\/span><\/span> <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Trouble is, Anker isn\u2019t a bad writer \u2013 quite the opposite. This is borne out by the awards<\/a> Buys<\/em> has won: among them the UJ Prize (2015), Hertzog Prize (2016), K. Sello Duiker Memorial Award (2016) and, of course, Red Dog<\/em>\u2019s longlist nomination<\/a> for the Man-Booker International in 2020. <\/p>\n

Add to this the voice<\/a> of Anker\u2019s translator, Heyns, who cites the author\u2019s \u201cincredible linguistic dexterity\u201d as a charm against temptations to literary theft: <\/p>\n

\n

Anker is more than capable of writing his own novel.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

It may then be asked: why doesn\u2019t Anker do so throughout? Why copy Beckett so closely and at such length?<\/p>\n

Comparing the texts<\/h2>\n

What about allusive aptness? After all, the \u2018borrowings\u2019 occur at a moment when Buys and another character are waiting on a farmer who never shows. This lull makes them attentive to their existential plight and to the received wisdom that blunts a critical faculty. The niggle, though, is that these ideas occur only because of Godot<\/em>\u2019s presence. They are themselves a received wisdom blunting Anker\u2019s creative faculty: <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\"Graphic<\/div>\n

<\/a>

<\/span> Rick de Villiers<\/span>, CC BY<\/a><\/span> <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The acknowledgements<\/h2>\n

Late to the party, I had started reading the novel<\/a> towards the end of May 2022, unaware of the earlier accusations. About halfway in \u2013 before I noticed the Godot<\/em> snatchings \u2013 I flicked to the back pages. Here I encountered the \u201cAcknowledgements\u201d:<\/p>\n

\n

As far as other quotations, references and rewritings are concerned: Omni-Buys saw it all, read every word. He eats as he reads. As he plunders mission stations and cattle kraals, so he plunders the texts of others far and wide in order to tell his own tale. Should you then in his retelling stumble across the remains of other authors, regard it as the homage of a scoundrel.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

(I reproduce Heyns\u2019s translation but without mention of Beckett and McCarthy, since these do not appear in the Afrikaans version.) I took this as an ingenious defence of the creative logic that lets the protagonist slip his temporal borders and rove trans-historically. <\/p>\n

But after I encountered the Godot<\/em> pages, it became clear that this insert was a get-out-of-jail card, an authorial self-pardoning. Anker isn\u2019t speaking on behalf of Buys; he\u2019s speaking on behalf of himself.<\/p>\n

What to make of it?<\/h2>\n

There seems to me three ways of responding. The good-faith reader will say, sure, while the Afrikaans text doesn\u2019t cite Beckett, the oversight is corrected in the English translation. <\/p>\n

They might add: we hardly expect novelists to declare influences and sources that go into the making of their work. Isn\u2019t intertextual play the beating heart of the modernist tradition to which Buys<\/em> brings tribute? Half the pleasure in reading a work of literature is that it enlists our participation. <\/p>\n

Consider also how Anker takes Godot<\/em>\u2019s Bible and transforms it to match the wilderness of late 1700s\/1800s South Africa, and also Buys\u2019s untamed psyche:<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n
\"Graphic<\/div>\n

<\/a>

<\/span> Rick de Villiers<\/span>, CC BY<\/a><\/span> <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

A sceptical reader must agree that this is a fine bit of transposing. But this isolated example shows exactly how minimally other phrases have been changed.<\/p>\n

Forget the not-insignificant fact of the missing acknowledgement in Buys. Set aside the puzzling fact that an out-of-copyright addendum receives full bibliographic treatment (a quote from German physician and explorer Hinrich Lichtenstein) while Godot<\/em> doesn\u2019t. Also disregard the grim view that the Beckett estate is likely to take. You are still confronted with Buys\u2019s baffling disavowal: <\/p>\n

\n

It\u2019s as if the stories of others capture something of my own life \u2026 the outlines of a conversation, a fly on the edge of my hat, but not the words.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Given the barefaced translation of Beckett that soon follows, \u201cbut not the words\u201d reads either as suppression or provocation. Albeit in a different language, it\u2019s exactly the words of Beckett that manifest on the page.<\/p>\n

The third position is that of the \u201cruimhartige\u201d reader. This word occurs in Buys. It\u2019s much more expressively generous than its English counterpart, magnanimity (generosity). To be ruimhartig<\/em> is to be disposed to complexity \u2013 as a principle of compassion but also of intellectual broadmindedness. <\/p>\n

Such a reader will respond to the good-faith argument by following it through to its logical conclusion: if Anker declares his debt and wants us to see the presence of Godot<\/em>, it comes at the cost of his own achievement. For who, following Beckett nearly word for word, would not pale by comparison? Homage to the master means damage to the pupil.<\/p>\n

Except, of course, if the homage remains unrealised. By trading on the beauty of Estragon and Vladimir\u2019s exchanges, by drawing from the well of Beckettian despair, and by securing a buy-out through a cover-all acknowledgement, Anker has his cake and eats it too. <\/p>\n

A ruimhartige<\/em> view must also admit the possibility that Anker was seduced by his very seductive creation. Buys declares himself to be a rover, a plunderer. He acts with impunity not only in the world of the novel but across time. <\/p>\n

Having written a conceptual \u201cgrensroman\u201d (border novel), Anker has been charmed by the idea that boundaries don\u2019t exist. He has spoken the pereant<\/em> curse without considering that the already-said might come back to haunt him.<\/p>\n

Disclosure: While writing this article, the author was contacted by the publisher of Buys, NB Publishers, who requested he submit a report detailing his analysis. This he did as a freelance consultant.<\/em><\/p>\n

Source: The Conversation<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Pereant qui ante nos nostra dixerunt: may those who utter our words before us perish. This lighthearted Latin curse speaks a truth many readers and writers have felt: to have our thoughts articulated by someone else. Coenraad de Buys is unruffled by such a possibility. He is the antihero of Willem Anker\u2019s award winning 2014 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":230386,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4584],"tags":[3257],"class_list":{"0":"post-230385","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-africa-news-2","8":"tag-mypr","9":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/07\/the-case-of-the-acclaimed-south-african-novel-that-borrows-from-samuel-beckett.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/230385","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=230385"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/230385\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/230386"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=230385"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=230385"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=230385"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}