Johannesburg — Charlotte Bauer says grey areas are manufactured to protect the perpetrators

REALLY, plagiarism is a very straightforward kind of theft. It is not a grey area; it is not a matter of opinion. To think that a professional writer could commit plagiarism without realising it is as ridiculous as believing that a thief could take money from a purse without knowing it.

Yet in this country, as elsewhere, the concept of plagiarism has become conveniently controversial.

Writers who have been caught red-handed doing it almost always deny it. From Jayson Blair to Darrel Bristow-Bovey, the culprits usually respond with injured tones and persecuted claims about the motives of their accusers. Their supporters and mothers rally round and, in the end, the plagiarist probably starts to believe his own defensive publicity - he has done nothing wrong.

In this regard, the novelist Pamela Jooste stands half a head above the plagiarising crowd: though she has not been brave enough to confess to outright intellectual theft, she is prepared to apologise to the writer whose words she now admits she copied. At least she is squirming - as any writer who lays claim to original talent should.

It took her a while. Striking similarities between passages in Jooste's novel People Like Ourselves and passages in an article titled Theme Park City, written by Professor Lindsay Bremner for the Sunday Times, were noticed by a sharp-eyed reader last November.

Bremner, who held the Chair of Architecture at Wits University, became the first Sunday Times Bessie Head Fellow in 2001. In 2002, her commissioned series of articles about Johannesburg appeared in the paper.

Subsequently, Bremner fleshed out her award-winning narrative of the city's seismic shifts and contrasts in her book Johannesburg - One City, Colliding Worlds.

Anyone who doubts that Jooste plagiarised Bremner's work need only read the juxtaposed excerpts from Jooste's novel and Bremner's article published in last week's Sunday Times.

The apeing is obvious and unambiguous.

Jooste, caught in the act, has at least had the grace not to cry that she is the real victim. Still, her explanation is spun in the dry, denying language of lawyers: she made a mistake; she incorrectly adopted certain phrases; she misunderstood the law; she regrets; she did not intend; etc.

The pivotal point on which Jooste's "misunderstanding" hangs sticks in the craw. She is reported as saying she thought that because Bremner's work was "in the public domain", her unacknowledged cribbing of another author's material would not matter - Besides, Bremner's work was of a "purely factual nature".

I just don't buy that Jooste, a novelist of some repute and worldliness, is so ignorant as to think that any published writing may be grafted merrily onto another's name and stand as another's work. By this leap of logic no author would be safe, whether Shakespeare, Soyinka or Jerry Springer.

Bremner's intensively researched articles were insightful, provocative, creative - far from "purely factual". Yet Jooste implies that all journalism is the equivalent of a train timetable or a weather report - strictly informative with no interpretive power or purpose, and therefore not entitled to claims of authorship.

Anyone who has worked on a newspaper would have to admit that some of what ends up under the grand banner of journalism is thoughtless rubbish.

Yet for a novelist to discover a piece of journalism that is so much to her liking that she pretends she wrote some of it makes a mockery of her breezy dismissal. Jooste's lawyers state that their client apologises to Bremner "for any distress or embarrassment caused to her". Naturally Bremner must have been distressed, but Jooste is surely projecting her own embarrassment.

It is not embarrassing for Bremner, but it is deeply humiliating for Jooste, whose right to call herself a writer - let alone a successful and popular one - rests on the originality of her own creative voice.

But - and this is how the "controversy" of plagiarism is manufactured - Jooste already has sympathisers who cluck about negligence, as if she had forgotten to turn off the stove.

Anyhow, they say, there are no new ideas under the sun. Thus plagiarism is kneaded into a debate that spares the culprit blanket derision.

All writing worth its ink is informed by what we read: good reading is good writing's teacher. To be inspired to write, whether by the classics or by an advert for Calvin Klein underwear, is part of the writer's job. But anyone believing that a writer who copies out someone else's work like a naughty schoolchild writing lines is just doing their job is either stupid or cynical.

Ask two people to describe the same table lamp and you will get two subjective descriptions. They may be similar, but they won't be the same. Plagiarism is not two people describing the same lamp. Plagiarism is one person repeating word for word what the other has already said about it.

The most damaging aspect for Jooste, the artist, is that she risks being considered an untrustworthy storyteller by her readers, no matter how long and hard she has worked to establish her talent.

She must now return to her writing desk and face up to her failure: her failure to acknowledge Bremner's authorship but also, perhaps more painfully, her failure of imagination.

Bauer was Lindsay Bremner's editor on the Bessie Head Fellowship series