Art of representation

BASYA LAYE

After Canadian Man Booker Prize-winning author Yann Martel published Life of Pi, his 2001 novel fêted for its use of animal allegory, his readers could be forgiven for expecting a similarly whimsical and entertaining follow up, replete with a tidy ending. While his new novel, Beatrice and Virgil, is, at times, entertaining and, most seriously clever, the response to this much-anticipated novel has been mixed, to say the least.

Alternately seen by critics as a “haunting fable,” “perverse,” “ingenious,” “clichéd,” “misconceived,” offensive” and “compelling,” Beatrice and Virgil is the allegorical tale of a writer at a crossroads and a taxidermist in need, who work together to complete a play that has, as its main characters, a monkey and a donkey who experience catastrophic violence. Though the events are never clearly identified as the Holocaust, they clearly allude to this singular, cataclysmic event, a context that becomes clear in the climax of this grave tale, and it is this allusion that is at the crux of the criticism brought against the novel.

Martel has been touring with the book, and spoke in Vancouver at a joint Cherie Smith JCCGV Jewish Book Festival and Vancouver Holocaust Education Society salon. Instead of reading from the novel, Martel addressed the controversy head on, explaining why he wrote the book, pointing out the complexities of artistic representation, the place of art in representing history, and the power of allegory in revealing the essence of human experience. In addition to his public talk, Martel spoke with the Independent, sharing some additional insights on his process as a writer and the impetus behind the book.

Raised in several foreign countries as the son of a diplomat, Martel was originally drawn to writing while at university and was not, at first, concentrating on publication. While Life of Pi took on a “straight line” and became wildly successful, Beatrice and Virgil proved to be a difficult novel to write, he said. Martel took nearly seven years to complete the book: “The drafts were countless. More than that: I reshaped the novel several times…. It’s not obvious, at least to me, what art can be squeezed out of a wholesale genocide.”

Martel first encountered the Holocaust while at school as a child in Europe. He was struck by the unfairness of the Holocaust; wars were one thing, having good and bad guys, but genocide hovered above his understanding.

“Kids play war,” he said, “but you wouldn’t play the Holocaust…. It always stayed with me as a drama that I was interested in. For no real reason that I knew, just that it startled me – horrified me. Eventually, I decided that I wanted to write about it. There was no particular day, I just, at one point, made the decision. So, after Life of Pi, I set about doing that.

“You cannot talk about the Holocaust without knowing something about it,” he continued. “There’s no theory of the Holocaust, there’s only the history of it. I proceeded to read more about the Holocaust. I intended to read the fiction plus the historical texts … I had already been to Auschwitz once … stayed about three days there and I went back another two times. I also went to Yad Vashem … and, essentially, I just sat in my room and thought, ‘What can I do about this?’ And, one of the early decisions I came to was the approach I wanted to take.”

He explained, “When I started becoming interested in the Holocaust and thinking out what I could write about and, of course, being non-Jewish, non-European [Martel’s family has been in Quebec for 200 years], I was very much on the outside. I said, ‘What can I do? Well, let’s see what other people have done.”

He spoke about the overwhelming body of non-fiction Holocaust literature and the fact that most Holocaust novels are completely rooted in history. The “fear of metaphor” and of “bearing artful witness to the Holocaust” is based, according to Martel, on the “misunderstanding that art does change the facts…. Art never denatures the essence of something – not if it’s a great novel. And, if it does, you have to then ask yourself the question of irony…. [Perhaps] it’s making a political statement, an existential statement, but using humor.”

As an outsider, the non-literal format suited him best for Beatrice and Virgil, and he turned once more to the animal allegory. “Using such a clear literary device, of talking animals, immediately, to my mind, signals to the reader that this is not a work that attempts historical realism,” he said. “This is clearly a literary story that tries to use the tools of literature to discuss the calamity that befell the Jews of Europe.”

By naming his two talking animal characters Beatrice and Virgil, after Dante’s guides through hell in Inferno, he added, he was emphasizing his allegorical intent.

According to Martel, art is capable of rescuing historical events from the annals of history. “The problem with the non-fictional approach is that it’s so rooted in history, in a particular context, a particular time, as time goes by, it seems to disappear further and further down the river [of time]. It will start gathering dust. What’s great about art is, art is one of the few things that floats on the river of time. We still read novels from the 17th century, people still read Jane Austen and they love it even though it was written donkey’s years ago. Social mores have completely changed, English society has radically changed … the position of women is totally changed, really it’s a different universe, but because they’re great novels, carried by great characterization, great plot, great writing, we read it now with a freshness, a closeness.”

Martel proposed, “There’s an immediacy to art and a timelessness that there is not to non-fiction. So, the one problem I find with historical documentation on the Holocaust is that, the more time passes, the older it feels…. [W]hen you see video testimony, some of which may be very powerful, it’s often of people who are quite elderly. So, if you’re 15 years old, you associate the Holocaust with elderly people when, in fact, one quarter of the victims of the Holocaust were children. The Holocaust took place in color, like we’re living in right now, with people who were young, who had vim and vigor, who had lives, it was real life, but 60 years ago…. What art can do is represent it in a way that speaks the language of today while going back to the essence of what happened then.”

One difficulty in representing the Holocaust, he said, is dealing with the reality of millions of victims. “Once you get to hundreds of thousands of deaths, once you get to the level of genocide, once you know it’s no longer fictional, once you know a quarter of the victims are children, all that fictional pleasure totally evaporates and you end up in this massive historical morgue and it is profoundly story killing, in many literal ways. Six million victims. Among [them] would be writers, painters, poets, there would be musicians, there would have been people who would have been capable of, as Virgil says, ‘How are we going to talk about this once it’s over?’ They would have been capable, [but] they were killed.”

In an e-mail to the Independent, Martel delineated the roles played by historian and storyteller. “I don’t know if art/literature has a role in recording or telling history, if by that you mean proper, factual history. That is the domain of the historian. Art is there to react. History tells us what happened; art tells us what it means. Art interprets. That interpretation can be at variance with the facts. As for trauma, art is very good, I’d say, at recording trauma, its meaning and it effect. I’d go so far as to say that all art starts with a feeling, if not of trauma, which is perhaps putting it strongly, then at least of discomfort with the world.”

One of the striking things about Martel’s Beatrice and Virgil is their strength and their ability to cope – together – and the place of friendship in the face of unimaginable horror. In their resilience, this novel is at its most powerful.

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