When reality is too traumatic

A celebrity author and a celebrated tragedy — this is Yann Martel writing about the Holocaust. The protagonist of Beatrice And Virgil is Henry, an award-winning author whose experimental work on the Holocaust has been rejected — with much adverse criticism and plain abuse — by publishers and editors.

Exhausted by his literary battles, Henry and his wife Sarah move to an unnamed city. One day, in his mail he receives, from somewhere in this same city, an intriguing document, a Gustave Flaubert story dealing with the massacre of animals, along with an extract from an unstaged, unpublished play, also about animals. Tracking down the address, Henry meets another Henry, a taxidermist and playwright.

Were it not for taxidermy, says the expert, “animals that have disappeared from the plains of their natural habitat would also disappear from the plains of our imagination”. Henry is also writing a play, starring a monkey, Virgil, and a donkey, Beatrice, whose stuffed bodies sit quietly by during the writer Henry’s visits.

The writer is intrigued by the taxidermist’s play, which lacks a plot or any kind of action, but seems symbolic of something larger. As the play proceeds, the taxidermist reads out portions of it to the writer. Henry the writer begins to discern a shape, a subtext emerging from the apparently pointless dialogue. The shape is of something unimaginably vast, horrific: “how can there be anything beautiful after what we’ve lived through … how are we going to talk about what happened to us one day when it’s over?” The answer is ‘I don’t know’: there is no language adequate to the task because language cannot capture what the animals in the play finally describe as the ‘Horrors’.

The writer and his wife meanwhile have a baby, Theo. Months later, he returns to the taxidermist hoping to see the conclusion of his play, and find out what it really is about. The play is, predictably, an allegory about the massacre of the Jews in the Holocaust, the deaths of the innocents and the role of particular people in this massacre. How Beatrice and Virgil die, the role of the taxidermist (a possible Nazi collaborator in his boyhood) and Henry’s own shocking experience in the store all hurtle towards a chilling, if melodramatic, climax.

Beatrice And Virgil is about representing something horrific. Martel does not seem to get it right — an animal fable that is at once a deeply philosophical meditation (about the Holocaust, no less) in tones varying between quietude and exuberance, telegraphic notations and pathos-filled drama, falls between both.

There is much Samuel Beckett-esque dialogue. Beginning as an over-subtle novel it then climaxes in a kind of traumatic realism that does very little. The symbolism — massacre of the innocents, the preservation of their memory — works very well, and then Martel throws it all away. Admittedly, it is difficult to write a mysterious, subtle novel about something as astronomically catastrophic as the Holocaust, but Martel does give it a good try before backing down.

The best parts are the animal dialogues, in which they discuss how exactly they can remember all the cruelties inflicted and yet survive those memories — a theme we see unrelentingly pursued in Primo Levi, Elie Weisel and the hundreds of Holocaust memoirs, video testimonies (the Yale Fortunoff  and the Spielberg ones) and films. In some ways Martel denies the Holocaust its expansive tragedy here, but he also asks us to focus on comparable instances (animal massacres, for example).

The novel is a failure but it re-presents — if one were to be kind to Martel who, I personally thought, after The Life Of Pi, a highly overrated writer — a problem that has haunted historians of the Holocaust: what is the appropriate form to capture something so traumatic? What is the language of unspeakable horror, from the Holocaust to Rwanda to Darfur? We have a tentative answer: it is not Martel’s language, at any rate.

Pramod K Nayar teaches English at the University of Hyderabad