Beatrice and Virgil is about yet another Western journey into the heart of darkness. Subsh Jeyan
(Published in The Hindu Literary Review on June 19, 2010.)
Beatrice and Virgil, Yann Martel’s second full-length novel that comes nine years after his Man Booker Prize winning Life of Pi, is a curious beast. Highly self-reflexive, it is a novel about representation that seeks to travel to the heart of one of the 20th century’s horrors, the Holocaust (never forget the capital H) and seeks to find an imaginative narrative and a metaphor for it that would preserve it in the cultural imagination (of the West?). Apart from the politics of the Holocaust, the politics of its memorialisation in contemporary Western literature and narratives, a fair approach to the novel would be to see if it succeeds on its own terms in creating an artful metaphor for evil, to see whether it manages to carry us along on yet another Western journey to the heart of darkness…
The central character, Henry, is a kind of fictionalised Martel himself: the son of widely travelled Canadian diplomats, a polyglot and a novelist with two highly acclaimed novels behind him, who has just written his third book, on the Holocaust. He is also the vehicle for much of the self-reflexivity in the novel. There is a curious imbalance, Henry feels, in our verbalisation of the Holocaust. The world is full of factual, historical, documentary and testimonial accounts of the event, but very few imaginative takes. Henry feels the need to rescue the event from the clutches of historians and to inscribe it in popular memory through fiction: “In addition to the knowledge of history, we need the understanding of art. Stories identify, unify, give meaning to. Just as music is noise that makes sense, a painting is colour that makes sense, so a story is life that makes sense” (p.14).
Henry’s novel is rejected by his publishers (“Wasn’t that what every Holocaust book was about, aphasia?….For his part, Henry now joined the vast majority of those who had been shut up by the Holocaust” p.18), he stops writing altogether, moves to a different, unnamed city with his wife and is trying to put his life together again on slightly different premises when he meets an old man, a taxidermist, who is also (you guessed it) writing a play on the Holocaust, with a howler monkey (Virgil) and a donkey (Beatrice) as the two central characters, who is suffering from writer’s block and seeks Henry out to help him get over it…
Thus begins Henry’s, and the novel’s, exploration of irrational hatred and evil through the character of the taxidermist who is also, curiously, called Henry, and its terrifying impact on ordinary lives through the characters of Beatrice and Virgil. The taxidermist has his own terrible secrets, Beatrice and Virgil are his guides through his own personal hell and the play is his shot at redemption (a redemption without remorse, feels Henry) and he does eventually find it as the novel tumbles towards its predictable ending with its terrible revelations.
Web of words
At one point in the novel, Henry, speaking through Beatrice, says, “Words are like muddy toads trying to understand spirites dancing in a field – but they are all we have. I will try.” (p.85). For an attempt at trying to understand the ogres in our subterranean depths, Beatrice and Virgil, finally, is not too bad a try. Beatrice and Virgil, in their bare, Beckettian sparseness and pathos are two memorable characters that linger on long after one has put down the novel. Not so much the taxidermist as the two Henrys face off and bear the burden of carrying the weight of the novel’s self-reflexivity, as they become emblematic of a too-easy opposition between heady, impulsive creativity (novelist) and plodding, methodical, joyless science (taxidermist). The layers of sometimes tedious self-consciousness around the moral core of the novel is also what gives it a tinge of pretentiousness and leaves one in two minds about the true worth and success of the novel.
Part of the book’s self-consciousness is its concern with reality and truth. Works of art succeed, Martel says, because they are concerned with truth, not reality which is a 100-million details. Beatrice and Virgilpartly succeeds, for me at least, because it brings home the fact that ‘truth’ can be as partisan as anything else, that truth is not a monolithic universal entity, that there can be a 100 million truths out there, and by privileging a particular truth, the novel has already taken sides and therefore forces you to take yours…
Beatrice and Virgil,Yann Martel, Hamish Hamilton, 2010. p.190, Rs. 450
Man Booker Prize winner Yann Martel’s second novel, Beatrice and Virgil, is in many ways a book of memory and remembrance. The artful metaphor is our only ally againstforgetfulness, he says. Excerpts from an interview…
(Published in The Hindu Literary Review on June 19, 2010.)
Photo: Macarena Yanez
Yann Martel’s second novel has been a long time coming. Recently released in Canada and the US, Beatrice and Virgilhas received polarised reviews. That it has been trashed as well as praised, he says, is a sign that it has elicited active engagement, not indifference, from the readers. The controversial reception is a sign that it is getting people to think and act, he says from San Francisco where he is on a promotional tour. Excerpts from a telephonic conversation…
Are you planning on coming to India to promote the book here?
I have a nine-month-old son. Before I can promote it — I am not going to Australia, New Zealand — I want to get back and be with my son. So, as much as I would love to return to India, for any reason, not just to promote my books, just to be in India — I haven’t been there for about nine years now — I don’t know when that’ll be. India has changed a lot, I would love to go back and see that.
Is this novel about the primacy of the imagination? You think we live in a world where the profusion of facts is working against making sensible meaning out of it?
Reality is a 100 million details. Right now where you are, if you think about it, you are surrounded by 100 million details on which you could focus your attention. Everything, from chemical, scientific details to cultural details to personal emotional details… now some of that has to be lost. Time, you know, is an eraser. It all goes. [We need] something we can hold on to. It’s called history. But even history has hundreds of thousands of details and sometimes it’s overwhelming and it’s hard to get to. The forte of the arts, the forte of the imagination is that it can take some of those details and give them immortality. A painting, a story, a song can float across the ocean of time like a lifeboat. So you can get to the essence of an event and convey it in the form of art. It can be like a suitcase, taking the essential and preparing you for a trip to elsewhere…
Does ‘getting to the essence’ necessarily bring a moral perspective that is lacking in mere facts?
It can be but art isn’t necessarily moral. Art could be immoral too. Art is witness. But in some stories, yes, it can also have a moral edge. It can also, in telling a story, convey certain moral situations. Which is what my novel does at the very end — In “Games for Gustav” are these 12 situations that are morally, existentially difficult. So, yes, it can make a moral situation fresh again…
You dwell at length in the initial stages of the novel about the concrete, everyday circumstances around writing /publishing that are usually glossed over. Is it autobiographical and are you saying that though there is a market built around imagination, it is essential to our being and identity?
I didn’t do it because I wanted it to be autobiographical, it was more because of the idea of a writer who stops writing, whose message has stopped, suited me because I was discussing the Holocaust. And any great horrific event, the Holocaust, war, has a tendency to erase language, to make us at a loss for words. You know, famously, when people encountered the Accounts, their language was full of clichés to do with “there are no words to describe”, “I couldn’t believe what my eyes were seeing”. So, to have a writer who is at a loss for words and then to meet the taxidermist who is also in some ways at a loss for words suited my purpose when discussing the Holocaust…so that’s why I have that theme.
I did indeed have a meeting with my publishers, I did want to do a flip book with them but their argument was different. They were saying, “listen, an essay is a specialised product. A novel is not.” They were afraid the essay would drag down the novel.
You keep coming back to the notion that is art is about joy. The taxidermist is shown as someone who is joyless, cheerless, who plods through his play. “My story has no story. It is based on the fact of murder,” he says at one point. You think the character of the taxidermist is too steretypical, he and the novelist falling easily into opposite sides of a too-easy divide?
Art is joy in a general way. Any art, music, dance, painting, to create at that level is deeply joyful, it involves your whole being. Art and religion are the two ways in which we fully engage with life. In this particular case, I enjoyed wrestling with that subject. I wanted to make the taxidermist ambiguous. He clearly has some sort of a creative impulse, he is working on a play, he is quite rude with the writer. I wanted someone whom we wouldn’t understand why he was doing the things he was doing until the very end and even then we are not sure what his intent was.
And that to me was the parallel of the encounter of the Jews of Europe with the Nazis who did not see it coming. By the time they realised fully what the Nazis’ intents were, it was too late, they couldn’t escape and that’s why so many died.
How has the novel been received?
It’s been very interesting and very polarised. Some critics absolutely hated it. I got absolutely trashed by The New York Times, The Washington Post, and there’s some blogger on the Internet named Edward Champion who absolutely hated it. And then you have reviewers who absolutely loved it. The USA Today thought it was positively a masterpiece. There were very positive reviews in Newsweek and the LA Times. So it’s been very polarised, which is good. The one thing you don’t want with art is indifference. You don’t want people to shrug. Even when people hate it, they are engaging with it.
Is there some sort of thematic continuity or evolution between Life of Pi and Beatrice and Virgil? If the former was about God, faith and religion, the latter is about imagination and art, isn’t it?
In some ways they are very different books. Yes, they both feature animals but that’s just on the surface. In Life of Pi hopefully the reader loses himself looking at those animals. Forget may be his humanity. In Beatrice and Virgil those animals are anthropomorphised and are meant to bring us back to our humanity.
And as for the role of the imagination, to me it’s something more immediate like life itself is an interpretation. We cannot choose the reality we live in, but we can choose how we interpret it. In that sense, imagination is not something whimsical, fairy-tale like, I am simply saying that reality is a co-creation, reality is something which is out there but it is also how you take it. To that extent, I suppose there is a similarity between the two novels in the sense that how you represent reality will speak of how you see it, of what that reality is. A person of faith reads transcendendance into the world, sees a divine plan; I suppose it is the same with reading history. You are representing an event that is past, and in that representation there is an element of interpretation, of imaginative reading. In that way there is a thematic link between the two novels.
To me this novel seems to come behind a line of books from the West dealing with the Holocaust. Why this obsession in the West about the Holocaust? There are historical continuities to the Holocaust in the contemporary world like what is happening in Palestine, Gaza today, injustices, perhaps of equal magnitude. Nobody seems to talk about them much…
Well, aside of the politics of West Asia, which poisons everything, just looking in terms of history, the Holocaust still remains unique: every other genocide before and after has to some extent been politically expedient. The Armenians in Turkey were killed because they were in the way of the Turks who were trying to start their nation. Excesses in Gaza were committed because of political enmity between the Palestinians and the Israelis. In both cases you killed people who were in the way, who bothered you but the ones beyond a certain border were irrelevant to you. But the Nazis were obsessed with killing the Jews everywhere, as if they were a disease. That does remain unique. And the reason I think it is still relevant, not a piece of historical arcana from several years ago in the backwaters of Poland, is because what led to the Holocaust is still absolutely contemporary.
The act of hate, the thinking of hatred, the disrespect in the mind of an individual that eventually in Germany led to the Holocaust, that little beginning, that seed of hatred is found everywhere. The Holocaust is not rooted in Auschwitz, in Poland. It is rooted in the human heart. And that applies to India too. There are people in India with holocaustal thinking, for example the BJP, the Shiv Sena, you know, that kind of hatred of the other whom you don’t even know, who is just a construction in your mind to relieve tension, to relieve whatever… that is holocaustal. Now because India is democracy, there is a free press, it is unlikely that there will ever be a genocide but the roots are there…
The thing about this novel is that it is not an orthodox Holocaust novel. There is no history in there, there are no Germans, there is minimal reference to the Holocaust yet it is soaked in it.
So I do choose the Holocaust but not just as a historical artefact, I am looking at what is to me relevant. At the very end, there are 12 more situations where there is no historical colour or detail that put you at the heart of it. And those 12 situations could take place in India. You could be in a line of people about to be executed and you could be holding your grand daughter’s hand and she asks you a question. And what might that question be? What would a child be thinking when it sees people being massacred? That completely fits in with realities in India today. That’s why I think it’s still relevant…
Tales I tell myself 