Class discussion towards the end of Ragtime about Doctorow copying from Michael Kohlhaas reminded me of a conversation that I had with a Brazilian exchange student a few weeks ago. The student told me that Life of Pi was copied from a work by a Brazilian writer. I went home, googled this, and found that Yann Martel, author of Life of Pi, had borrowed the plot from Moacyr Scliar's Max and the Cats.Max and the Cats follows a man named Max who is fleeing Nazi Germany after he is reported to the secret police for having an affair with a married woman. He is on a boat with few passengers and many zoo animals, headed for Brazil. The boat is sabotaged and sunk. Max manages to escape into the sea on a life boat, and finds that he is sharing the boat with a jaguar. At one point, he entertains the thought that the jaguar could be trained. At the end of his many days afloat, it is revealed that there was never a jaguar on the boat with Max.
Life of Pi is about an Indian boy named Pi who climbs aboard a lifeboat, but is on the boat for completely different circumstances. He finds a tiger on his boat, and sails with it for many days until he reaches land. At one point he tries to show the tiger that he is the alpha male. Like Scliar's book, readers find out that there was never a tiger on the boat with Pi. The similarities are obvious. But just like Doctorow surrounded the plot of Michael Kohlhaas with many other stories, Martel adds so many more parts to the plot of Max and the Cats that it is transformed.
In Life of Pi, Pi is joined by a female orangutan, a hyena, and an injured zebra. The hyena kills both the orangutan and the zebra, then is killed by the tiger. At the very end of the book, when this incident is investigated, it is revealed that each animal on the boat was actually a human being (each a metaphor for a human?), and that the tiger was Pi himself. This is so much more complex than Max and the Cats. Additionally, Pi and the tiger stumble upon an island made of carnivorous, acidic algae that is inhabited by meerkats. What this is a metaphor for, I don't know, but it surely is something that Max and the Cats doesn't have.
Just like Life of Pi is "copying" from Max and the Cats, Ragtime borrows the plot from Michael Kohlhaas, while adding on so much more. In addition to several other characters, fictional and historical, Ragtime is different from Michael Kohlhaas in that it weaves all of these characters together instead of just substituting them for characters from Michael Kohlhaas.
I think borrowing plots works, but it may be more acceptable to first ask the original author first before following a certain book so closely in plot.
You know, that's really interesting. What strikes me as particularly peculiar (and, surprisingly similar to Ragtime) is the fact that Yann Martel openly discloses some of his inspiration for Life of Pi came from -- and this is the fascinating part -- not Max and the Cats itself, but a review of the book published in the New York Times. That's just bonkers! More or less, what Martel did was read a book review, think to himself, and decide he would do the same thing, but better. Of course, if you read the two of them, the books themselves are only superficially similar; Max and the Cats is more allegory for Nazism than jungle cat-lifeboat survival guide. But, just like Ragtime, the basic idea of the story seems to be lifted from somebody else without citation. According to some basic Google-fu, Scliar initially was surprised that Martel would use the idea without consultation / informing him. But, after talking together, Scliar dropped the idea of taking some response. I wonder how von Kliest would have reacted to Doctorow's story if he had been alive at the time...
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