Roundtable

A.E.: I meant to say that the postmodern considers a ‘close’ relationship between the animal and the human. In literal, symbolic, moral or ethical terms, where are the boundaries for you between the human and the animal, if any?

Y.M.: Mostly just answered that. But literal: obvious. Symbolic: variable. Moral: we mostly play within a moral sphere, animals don’t. Ethical: again, we play, normally, within an ethical framework, or flaunt it knowingly, whereas animals play within an instinctual framework.

A.E.: You are quite right there about the animal and instincts. “We ate the Children Last” is a good example of a blurring of the human/animal. As a result of bio-medical curative processes gone awry, the human displays ‘animal’ behaviour exemplified in cannibalism. But there is a larger import. Kindly tell us what you were doing in that story.

Y.M.: What I was doing was telling a dystopian story. In Self, my first novel, I explored the ideas that the body is an environment to which the mind adapts. So a male’s body determines to some extent the mind living atop it, and the same with the female body. I was exploring a variation of that in “We Ate the Children Last,” how a part of us might influence our nature and character.

A.E.: Apparently literature, for you, is instructive and the reading of it a redemptive act. It is in that sense that I understand that project which had you mailing our Prime Minister your recommended reading list from 2007 to 2011, accompanied by a letter introducing each recommended, or set of recommended, work. The result is the commemorative, 101 Letters to a Prime Minister: The Complete Letters to Stephen Harper (2012), which was preceded by, What is Stephen Harper reading? (2009). Do you think he read the works you sent; does it matter, finally?

Y.M.: I believe literature is instructive, but not necessarily in a didactic sense. Literature, art in general, reflects life, and just as life has its part of mystery, so does art. In looking at art, we look at life, reflected. Art, like living itself, can teach us to live. But art does it by doubling the experience of life, or tripling it, quadrupling it, and so on. You read one books, one good, and it’s like you’ve lived an extra life. You read another good book, and again, you’ve lived an extra life. By living all these extra imaginary lives, surely even the dumbest ox of a human being will be a little bit the wiser. As for whether Stephen Harper read my gifts to him, I have no idea. I doubt it. I think he’s one of these men who stopped reading literature in his early twenties because novels and poems and plays aren’t “real”, and therefore their truth can only be relative. It’s a sad misunderstanding of art. But what can you do? The man thinks he’s understood everything, knows where we should be heading as a society, and he’ll bring us there, whether we agree with him or not. I just wonder where he got his knowledge of life? How can someone who doesn’t read and never travelled before becoming PM know much about the human condition? So yes, it does mater, finally, if he hasn’t read anything.

A.E.: It appears that you see a connection between literature, reading and nation building. Could you expound on this?

Y.M.: The connection is not literal. It’s not “If you read this book and that book, you will be that much smarter and wiser.” Of course not. But, as I’ve just said, reading is a form of living. A book makes you live a life, that of the characters in that book. A book, read with an open mind and an open heart, adds years of experience to your life. Of course, you can read in a blind fashion. Look at Conrad Black. He’s read plenty of books and he’s a crook. But even there: I bet you that a Conrad Black who had read fewer books would have spent more years in prison than the Conrad Black who’s read the books he’s read. As it is, we have a Prime Minister who’s empathy has never been formed by literary tragedy, who’s horizons haven’t been expanded by literary epics, and so on. Instead, we have a pinched, little man who brushes away the complexity of the world under the rug of ideology.

A.E.: In how far do you think that the Canada Council’s funding initiatives has shaped a distinct Canadian (literary) cultural identity vis-à-vis the American or European over the past half century?

Y.M.: Greatly. Without the Canada Council and its funding of artists, we’d still be a cultural colony.

A.E.: Do you find an intersection between socio-economic and political sovereignty and a nation’s cultural integrity?

Y.M.: Yes. A people who have a sense of who they are and mechanisms for dealing with stress and change will have a better chance of riding the storms of our crazy capitalist system. But there are limits to that. Reading Hamlet never saved anyone on the Titanic.

A.E.: Finally, literature can be inter-textual, without losing its uniqueness. Inspired in parts by Moacyr Scliar’s Max and the Cats, Life of Pi generated initial controversy. On a close reading of your work against Scliar’s critics found that controversy to be exaggerated. As events unfolded back then, you did speak to Scliar at some point. How did that go?

Y.M.: Exaggerated? It was made-up fluff. I had never read Max and the Cats when I wrote Life of Pi. You can’t plagiarize a book you haven’t read. I read a review, which gave me the initial germ of an idea, that of a person in a lifeboat with an animal. I suppose Scliar got that from the Bible. Or Tarzan. Or children’s lullabies. I don’t know if inter-textual is the right word. I would rather use the plainer word “influence.” I was influenced by a review I read of Scliar’s novella, which is why I thanked him in the Author’s Note of Life of Pi

A.E.: We thank you for taking time off your busy schedule to hold this conversation with MTLS.

Y.M.: You’re welcome.

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