Author Talk: April 16, 2010
AUTHOR TALK
April 16, 2010
Amidst themes of truth, deception, life and art, the Holocaust takes center stage in Yann Martel’s latest novel, BEATRICE AND VIRGIL. In this interview, Martel traces his fascination with this tragic historical event back to his childhood in France, and describes how he was able to artistically approach such challenging subject matter. He also discusses the allegorical use of animals in his novels, reflects on the freedoms of utilizing fiction to portray emotional and psychological truth, and shares what he hopes his audience will gain from reading this book.
Question: How close is Henry --- a successful author struggling with his new book --- to Yann Martel?
Yann Martel: Close and not so close. I did struggle, but there was no knife at the end of it. Only a greater understanding, and a hope that readers will have travelled with me.
Q: How did the idea for BEATRICE AND VIRGIL first come to you?
YM: I’ve been fascinated by the Holocaust since I was told about it as a ten-year-old child living in France. As an adult, I’ve been wondering for years what I could say fictionally about an event that so repels the imagination’s attempts to approach it. This matters to me because I'm a writer of fiction, of invented tales that tell the truth. LIFE OF PI, with its use of animals, helped me see one way. If I could not approach the tragedy in human disguise, then perhaps I could in animal disguise. After that, BEATRICE AND VIRGIL involved a lot of reading, writing, and rewriting. It was a challenging book to write artistically.
Q: In both LIFE OF PI and BEATRICE AND VIRGIL, you use animals to tell a story and to communicate universal themes. Tell us about this decision.
YM:I find it easier to suspend my reader's disbelief if I use animals as characters. We are cynical about our own species, less so about wild animals. There's also the fact that animals in fiction are mostly confined to children's literature, which puzzles me. What exactly is childish about a tiger or a monkey? At any rate, it leaves me with the sense of not feeling crowded in my field.
Q: Did you do any specific research on the Holocaust?
YM:You can't write about the Holocaust without starting with a sound knowledge of it. In addition to books I read earlier in my life, I read about eighty new books before writing a word of BEATRICE AND VIRGIL. I also visited Auschwitz three times, the last visit lasting two weeks. And I went to Israel to explore Yad Vashem. All this despite the fact that my novel does not deal with the Holocaust on a factual level. But I wanted to be in the right place spiritually. I remember spending hours wandering about Auschwitz-Birkenau. It was a bitterly cold winter, the ground covered with a thick layer of snow.
Q: You use an incredible variety of fictional devices in BEATRICE AND VIRGIL --- a novel, a short story, a play, “Games for Gustav.” What are the limitations of nonfiction, especially when examining subjects like the Holocaust and human suffering, and what alternative can fiction offer a reader?
YM:Non-fiction is limited by having to stick to known facts. Fiction, on the other hand, has a duty to stick to emotional or psychological truth, which may or may not conform to factual truth. This difference allows great freedom of form in fiction and a compactness that non-fiction can never match.
Q: You traveled to India and visited numerous zoos while you were writing LIFE OF PI. What research did you do for this book to learn about what tools taxidermists use and their process?
YM:A fire that destroyed a famous taxidermy firm in Paris, Deyrolles, in 2008, gave me the idea to use taxidermy in BEATRICE AND VIRGIL. Taxidermists are a dying breed. They still exist here and there in rural areas or in places where people hunt, but with rare exceptions, they've vanished from urban consciousness. Deyrolles was a relic from a past age. The taxidermy elements of BEATRICE AND VIRGIL came from the only place where taxidermy still lives on, in books. I spent weeks at the British Library, which rivals the Library of Congress in the number of books it has. There I found books tracing the history and practice of giving lifelike form back to animal whose spirit has gone.
Q: When you were interviewed for LIFE OF PI, you mentioned that at the time of writing you “had neither family nor career to show for [your] 33 years on Earth.” Since LIFE OF PI, you have had a young son --- has this changed how you write or how you approach your characters?
YM:No. I write the same. I just have less time for it. And if writing fails me, I will have my family to lean on.
Q: Why did you choose to set the book and the play within it in unspecified or abstract locations?
YM:Because to locate in is to distance from. So a Holocaust story set in Berlin, for example, takes place somewhere else and involves someone else if one doesn't live in Berlin. That specificity may be true of the actual Holocaust, but it's not true of the origin of great evil, which can emerge anywhere. Each one of us today perhaps rubbed shoulders with a Hitler-like character.
Q: Why did you choose to name both of the central characters “Henry”?
YM:For the same reason that the novel and play are set in undisclosed locations. I didn't want distance between the subject (Henry the writer) and the object (Henry the taxidermist).
Q: In the book, both Henry the protagonist and Henry the taxidermist say they are attempting to “bear witness” through their respective crafts. Tell us about the concept of bearing witness and using art to do it.
YM:I think art is unmatched in bearing witness because art provides its own context. A novel, a musical composition, a painting stands on its own, without need of external explanation. So art endures long after history is forgotten. Take as an example George Orwell's ANIMAL FARM. Common knowledge of 20th-century Russian history may fade, but Orwell's fable, using the language of allegory, will stand as a concise explanation of what happened to Russians under Stalin. Art has an amazing ability to get to the heart of things. Art is the ultimate suitcase, conveying the essential.
Q: Writers from Flaubert to Orwell, Dante to Lessing play their parts in BEATRICE AND VIRGIL; Beckett and Diderot seem particular influences on the play-within-a-book. What is their influence on you, and on this novel?
YM:Each showed me that horror can yield artful words.
Q: Henry says that he hopes to expand our range of possible responses to the Holocaust. Is this your aim with BEATRICE AND VIRGIL? What do you hope readers will take from the book?
YM:Absolutely it’s my aim to expand our range of possible responses to the Holocaust. I see BEATRICE AND VIRGIL as a mnemonic novel, a novel that helps remember, but remember in a new way, so that a reader who’s read it will now think of the Holocaust when he or she sees a donkey, say, or eats a pear, or puts on a shirt, or sees a red cloth, and so on.
© Copyright 2010, Yann Martel. All rights reserved.
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