(Poet, Amatortisero Ede in conversation with Booker-Prize-award-winning short story writer and novelist, Yann Martel<\/em>)<\/p>\n Amatoritsero Ede<\/strong>: It is a pleasure to have this conversation with you, especially on the heels of the filming of Life of Pi<\/em>. How does it feel to see these characters you have created take on renewed life on the big screen?<\/p>\n Yann Martel<\/strong>: I don\u2019t know if I think of them as being \u201crenewed.\u201d To the extent that I think about Life of Pi<\/em>, the characters lived on as I had first imagined them, vague in visual terms but sharply defined by words. Life of Pi<\/em> remains in my thinking a work in words. So to see the movie adaptation was to see something else. <\/em>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\u2019re 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\u2019t, usually, read it putting on an accent. Which means the Indianness of Life of Pi <\/em>gets lost. But the movie brings it very much to life.<\/p>\n A.E.:<\/strong> Recently there has been a resurgence of talk in the popular media about movie adaptations of books that would normally be considered \u2018un-filmable\u2019 due to their narrative, stylistic, thematic and structural challenges. A recent list of some of these impossible movies is David Mitchells\u2019 Cloud Atlas<\/em>, Salman Rushdie\u2019s Midnight\u2019s children<\/em>; J.R.R. Tolkien\u2019s The Hobbit<\/em>. Before that we have an experimental 1967 film, Ulysses<\/em>, based on the Jamesian novel of the same title, and an improvement, Bloom<\/em> (2003) by Irish director, Sean Walsh. And back to the present \u2013 the movie, Life of Pi<\/em>, of course. Would you have ever have considered Life of Pi<\/em> un-filmable and why, if so?<\/p>\n Y.M.:<\/strong> Nothing is unfilmable per se. It\u2019s just that some literary material doesn\u2019t lend itself naturally to filmic narration. That\u2019s where the difficulty lies, in stories that are too rooted in words and don\u2019t have obvious visual equivalencies. The \u201cunfilmability\u201d of Life of Pi <\/em>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\u2019t just use live animals. You need CGI [Computer-Generated Imagery], which makes the proposition financially very expensive. But where there\u2019s a major studio and a brilliant director, there\u2019s 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<\/em> 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\u2019s a lot to cover in a movie. But, in the arts, everything is possible, especially when you\u2019re Ang Lee.<\/p>\n A.E.:<\/strong> Now this is pure conjecture. You have probably \u2018read\u2019 James Joyce\u2019s Finnegan\u2019s Wake<\/em> \u2013 paradoxically declared by its penguin editor to be an \u2018unreadable\u2019 book. But Beatrice and Virgil<\/em> \u2013 even though and perhaps because it is \u2013 allegorical, is a much more \u2018readable\u2019 book. How would you \u2018script\u2019 it \u2013 please consider possibilities for a filmic representation of Beatrice, the Donkey and Virgil, the monkey \u2013 especially in their taxidermist forms.<\/p>\n Y.M.:<\/strong> I\u2019ve never read Finnegan\u2019s Wake. <\/em>It\u2019s no doubt lazy of me intellectually, but there\u2019s only so much work I\u2019ll do to get into a story. As for a film adaptation of Beatrice and Virgil, <\/em>I don\u2019t really see it, but only because I\u2019ve never thought of it. It would be doable, I suppose. There\u2019s certainly more unity of time, action and place than there is in Life of Pi. <\/em>Portraying the major characters could be done in two ways: in a realist mode when it\u2019s Henry the writer and the taxidermist who are speaking, and in an arresting animated mode when it\u2019s Beatrice and Virgil. Something like that. But that\u2019s for a filmmaker to contemplate, not a writer.<\/p>\n A.E.:<\/strong> A major proportion of your work, those that I have read, deploy animal characters or qualities in a fantastic way \u2013 for example, the novels, Life of Pi<\/em> and Beatrice and Virgil<\/em> or the story, \u201cWe ate the Children Last.\u201d While it is not easy to characterize them as fables \u2013 say, like Animal Farm<\/em>, 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.<\/p>\n Y.M.:<\/strong> A big question. To which I\u2019m not sure I\u2019m the best qualified to answer. You\u2019re 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\u2014and very little used\u2014metaphors. 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\u2019m mining a rich literary lode in using animals, and one, as I\u2019ve 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?<\/p>\n A.E.:<\/strong> 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?<\/p>\n Y.M.:<\/strong> 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).<\/p>\n <\/p>\n A.E.:<\/strong> I meant to say that the postmodern considers a \u2018close\u2019 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?<\/p>\n Y.M.:<\/strong> Mostly just answered that. But literal: obvious. Symbolic: variable. Moral: we mostly play within a moral sphere, animals don\u2019t. Ethical: again, we play, normally, within an ethical framework, or flaunt it knowingly, whereas animals play within an instinctual framework.<\/p>\n A.E.:<\/strong> You are quite right there about the animal and instincts. \u201cWe ate the Children Last\u201d is a good example of a blurring of the human\/animal. As a result of bio-medical curative processes gone awry, the human displays \u2018animal\u2019 behaviour exemplified in cannibalism. But there is a larger import. Kindly tell us what you were doing in that story.<\/p>\n Y.M.:<\/strong> What I was doing was telling a dystopian story. In Self<\/em>, my first novel, I explored the ideas that the body is an environment to which the mind adapts. So a male\u2019s 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 \u201cWe Ate the Children Last,\u201d how a part of us might influence our nature and character.<\/p>\n A.E.:<\/strong> 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 <\/em>(2012), which was preceded by, What is Stephen Harper reading? <\/em>(2009). Do you think he read the works you sent; does it matter, finally?<\/p>\n Y.M.:<\/strong> 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\u2019s like you\u2019ve lived an extra life. You read another good book, and again, you\u2019ve 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\u2019s one of these men who stopped reading literature in his early twenties because novels and poems and plays aren\u2019t \u201creal\u201d, and therefore their truth can only be relative. It\u2019s a sad misunderstanding of art. But what can you do? The man thinks he\u2019s understood everything, knows where we should be heading as a society, and he\u2019ll 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\u2019t read and never travelled before becoming PM know much about the human condition? So yes, it does mater, finally, if he hasn\u2019t read anything.<\/p>\n A.E.:<\/strong> It appears that you see a connection between literature, reading and nation building. Could you expound on this?<\/p>\n Y.M.:<\/strong> The connection is not literal. It\u2019s not \u201cIf you read this book and that book, you will be that much smarter and wiser.\u201d Of course not. But, as I\u2019ve 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\u2019s read plenty of books and he\u2019s 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\u2019s read the books he\u2019s read. As it is, we have a Prime Minister who\u2019s empathy has never been formed by literary tragedy, who\u2019s horizons haven\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n A.E.:<\/strong> In how far do you think that the Canada Council\u2019s funding initiatives has shaped a distinct Canadian (literary) cultural identity vis-\u00e0-vis the American or European over the past half century?<\/p>\n Y.M.:<\/strong> Greatly. Without the Canada Council and its funding of artists, we\u2019d still be a cultural colony.<\/p>\n A.E.:<\/strong> Do you find an intersection between socio-economic and political sovereignty and a nation\u2019s cultural integrity?<\/p>\n Y.M.: <\/strong>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<\/em> never saved anyone on the Titanic.<\/p>\n A.E.:<\/strong> Finally, literature can be inter-textual, without losing its uniqueness. Inspired in parts by Moacyr Scliar\u2019s Max and the Cats<\/em>, Life of Pi<\/em> generated initial controversy. On a close reading of your work against Scliar\u2019s critics found that controversy to be exaggerated. As events unfolded back then, you did speak to Scliar at some point. How did that go?<\/p>\n Y.M.:<\/strong> Exaggerated? It was made-up fluff. I had never read Max and the Cats<\/em> when I wrote Life of Pi. <\/em>You can\u2019t plagiarize a book you haven\u2019t 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\u2019s lullabies. I don\u2019t know if inter-textual is the right word. I would rather use the plainer word \u201cinfluence.\u201d I was influenced by a review I read of Scliar\u2019s novella, which is why I thanked him in the Author\u2019s Note of Life of Pi<\/em><\/p>\n A.E.:<\/strong> We thank you for taking time off your busy schedule to hold this conversation with MTLS.<\/p>\n Y.M.:<\/strong> You\u2019re welcome.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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. 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