Roundtable

Art and the Man

(Poet, Amatortisero Ede in conversation with Booker-Prize-award-winning short story writer and novelist, Yann Martel)

Amatoritsero Ede: It is a pleasure to have this conversation with you, especially on the heels of the filming of Life of Pi. How does it feel to see these characters you have created take on renewed life on the big screen?

Yann Martel: I don’t know if I think of them as being “renewed.” To the extent that I think about Life of Pi, the characters lived on as I had first imagined them, vague in visual terms but sharply defined by words. Life of Pi remains in my thinking a work in words. So to see the movie adaptation was to see something else. Having said that, it was a pleasure to see this odd echo of my creation. For example, I never describe Pi in the novel, because it was of no importance to the narrative what he looked like. I left it to the reader to imagine Pi as they wanted to. In the movie, of course, we know what Pi looks like because we’re looking at him for two hours. Pi is Suraj Sharma. That was odd. But not unappealing. What the movie did bring to me is how Indian the story is. When you read a book, you don’t, usually, read it putting on an accent. Which means the Indianness of Life of Pi gets lost. But the movie brings it very much to life.

A.E.: Recently there has been a resurgence of talk in the popular media about movie adaptations of books that would normally be considered ‘un-filmable’ due to their narrative, stylistic, thematic and structural challenges. A recent list of some of these impossible movies is David Mitchells’ Cloud Atlas, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s children; J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit. Before that we have an experimental 1967 film, Ulysses, based on the Jamesian novel of the same title, and an improvement, Bloom (2003) by Irish director, Sean Walsh. And back to the present – the movie, Life of Pi, of course. Would you have ever have considered Life of Pi un-filmable and why, if so?

Y.M.: Nothing is unfilmable per se. It’s just that some literary material doesn’t lend itself naturally to filmic narration. That’s where the difficulty lies, in stories that are too rooted in words and don’t have obvious visual equivalencies. The “unfilmability” of Life of Pi was of a double nature: technical and narrative. The second was the most challenging. Technically, to make a movie featuring a boy stranded in a lifeboat with a tiger makes for a perfect moviemaking nightmare because it brings together the three taboos of the art: filming with children, filming with animals, filming on water. Worse still: you can’t just use live animals. You need CGI [Computer-Generated Imagery], which makes the proposition financially very expensive. But where there’s a major studio and a brilliant director, there’s a way. Hollywood can pretty well pull off any technical challenge now. The real difficulty, I feel, was telling a story in two hours that so ignores the Aristotelian notion of a story as having a unity of time, action and place. Life of Pi is a unified whole that is scattered in its elements. One part takes place in India, another in the middle of the Pacific on a lifeboat, and a third in a Mexican holiday resort, with additional bit parts in Canada. That’s a lot to cover in a movie. But, in the arts, everything is possible, especially when you’re Ang Lee.

A.E.: Now this is pure conjecture. You have probably ‘read’ James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake – paradoxically declared by its penguin editor to be an ‘unreadable’ book. But Beatrice and Virgil – even though and perhaps because it is – allegorical, is a much more ‘readable’ book. How would you ‘script’ it – please consider possibilities for a filmic representation of Beatrice, the Donkey and Virgil, the monkey – especially in their taxidermist forms.

Y.M.: I’ve never read Finnegan’s Wake. It’s no doubt lazy of me intellectually, but there’s only so much work I’ll do to get into a story. As for a film adaptation of Beatrice and Virgil, I don’t really see it, but only because I’ve never thought of it. It would be doable, I suppose. There’s certainly more unity of time, action and place than there is in Life of Pi. Portraying the major characters could be done in two ways: in a realist mode when it’s Henry the writer and the taxidermist who are speaking, and in an arresting animated mode when it’s Beatrice and Virgil. Something like that. But that’s for a filmmaker to contemplate, not a writer.

A.E.: A major proportion of your work, those that I have read, deploy animal characters or qualities in a fantastic way – for example, the novels, Life of Pi and Beatrice and Virgil or the story, “We ate the Children Last.” While it is not easy to characterize them as fables – say, like Animal Farm, their allegorical force is subtle but nevertheless deeply etched, even if those writings appear to merely entertain. Please give our readers an idea of the moral and philosophical grounding for your aesthetics.

Y.M.: A big question. To which I’m not sure I’m the best qualified to answer. You’re asking me to look in on myself. More naturally, I look out of myself. But I can tell you why I use animals. I use animals because they make for great—and very little used—metaphors. An animal can be itself, what it is naturally, a tiger, say, or a chimpanzee, and it can be something else, a symbol. That versatility is very useful for a writer, especially when it is carried by an entity that fascinates. We are drawn to wild animals, in large part because we project so much onto them, notions of beauty and freedom, among others. I feel I’m mining a rich literary lode in using animals, and one, as I’ve just said, that very few writers of adult fiction use these days. We seem, for some reason, to believe that animals belong to the realm of childhood. Puzzling that. What, exactly, is childish about a wild animal?

A.E.: Postmodern thinking more and more contests our separation of the animal world from that of the human. Can we say that the novelist has intuitively been doing the same through fables or animal characters as moral allegories for human action?

Y.M.: I suspect most postmodern thinkers live in large urban centers and hardly ever venture into the animal world. To my mind, we are linked, animals and us, in the sense that we share one fragile planet, but beyond that we inhabit very different territories, with an impassable border between us. The human and the animal are very different. To argue against that flies in the face of a thousand differences to dwell on a few similarities. Be that as it may, we humans can learn in many ways, including through animal allegories. I remain, you see, very much in the human camp. I am a homo sapiens sapiens. I never forget that. The closest I get to an animal is when I take on the disguise of a home sapiens metaphoricus (as it might be put in pig latin).

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