Big Think Interview With Yann Martel | Big Think

Big Think Interview With Yann Martel

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A conversation with the Man Booker Prize-winning novelist.

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Yann Martel:

Yann Martel is the author of The High Mountains of Portugal and Life of Pi, the #1 international bestseller and winner of the 2002 Man Booker (among many other prizes). He is also the award-winning author ofThe Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios (winner of the Journey Prize), Self, Beatrice & Virgil, and 101 Letters to a Prime Minister. Born in Spain in 1963, Martel studied philosophy at Trent University, worked at odd jobs—tree planter, dishwasher, security guard—and traveled widely before turning to writing. He lives in Saskatoon, Canada, with the writer Alice Kuipers and their four children.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Yann Martel: My name is Yann Martel. I’m a Canadian novelist.

Question: Why do you write allegories?

Yann Martel: Because I think that’s the forte of art. What art does marvelously is it takes very complex realities and it can go to their heart, it can go to their essence, and convey it in a way that’s both very powerful and emotionally or psychologically accurate. So I’ll give you a perfect example of a great allegory, "Animal Farm," by George Orwell. Which takes on what Stalin did to the Russian people, and that’s a vast, sprawling complex story. With "Animal Farm," which is this delightful allegory, delightful fable that takes place on an English farm, you get none of the heavy facts of history, but you get the essence. So it’s a story of this commune set up by animals and slowly things go wrong. And it captures exactly in spirit what happened to the Russian people under Stalin. So it’s a very light, powerful medium for discussing very complex realities.

Question: Why look at the Holocaust in allegorical terms?

Yann Martel: Absolutely. In part, because it’s very hard to write a straightforward novel on the Holocaust. The Holocaust has tended to be resistant to metaphor. Because it was so dumbfounding, because it was a unique phenomenon, the ferocity of it, the view of the Nazis of the Jews, the sort of idea that they were a disease. Because of its newness to its consciousness, it has resisted being approached by the tools of art. We tend to look at the Holocaust in historical ways, in the mode of a witness. So in a sense, trying to approach it as if we were journalists or witnesses, which is why its representation is dominated by either survivors or by historians—which is all absolutely fine, but I think we also need to understand it using the tools of art, because art... Beyond, as I said, conveying essence, art can show something under many, many different angles, and that’s useful, because the more you look at it from many angles, you get different truths, you get a newer understanding of it, perhaps.

So I chose allegory simply because there are very few allegories about the Holocaust. It has been fiction-resistant. And I think we need to understand it, in addition to understanding it historically, we also need to understand it through the medium of art.

My feeling is that the literary arts, because they are tethered to fixed meaning... after all, words are highly conventionalized sounds, right? The word "table" has a fairly standard meaning. Well, if you increase that, words are tethered to specific meanings and if you string them together, you start being tethered to narrative, to narration. And once you’re tethered to narration, when it comes to the Holocaust, you very quickly end up on a train going to hell, you end up on a train going to Auschwitz, you very quickly end up in that narrative trope. So it’s hard to escape talking about it in the very literal, historical manner.

So I suspect that uniquely among human events, because I suspect—because I believe that nearly any human event, benefits from being treated by artists—the Holocaust may be one of those rare instances where other art forms may be more suitable, or as, you know, we need to be aware that they, too, can... their language is important, too. So to be very clear, visual arts, for example. Visual arts are not so narrative. A painting has narrative limits. Installation art has narrative limits to it. But precisely because of that, they can escape the narrative gravity of the Holocaust. So I’ve seen visual arts that have, that are surprisingly ironic, that apply the tools of irony to the Holocaust, and that’s to the benefit of the Holocaust.

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