Martel’s Tribute to Silent Victims of the Holocaust

If “Beatrice and Virgil” were a piece of music, it would be an extended fugue, beginning so quietly as to be almost inaudible, and culminating in a moment of overwhelming noise followed by silence. With each new piece of his story, Yann Martel examines the form of the novel and how it functions as a means of communication. The Holocaust is his vehicle for this exploration, as he tries many different styles of writing in his attempt to find a voice to protest this act of genocide. The novel contains fragmentary portions of a play, as well as another novel, Flaubert’s “The Legend of St. Julian the Hospitalier.” It is through the fragmentary nature of his work that Martel is able to evoke the sense of fear and claustrophobia that his subject matter can leave in its wake.

Evoking the teasing style of Italian authors such as Italo Calvino or Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, Martel leads his reader on a chase through a house of mirrors. “Beatrice and Virgil” is slyly autobiographical and self-referential. It begins by telling the story of an author named Henry and his struggles to get his latest opus published. He has written a dual book and essay that seek to bring the Holocaust out of the stultifying realm of historical narrative and first-hand accounts into the realm of fiction. According to Henry, it is only in fiction that the memory can live forever and continue to grow, thus saving the Holocaust from the indignity of being forgotten. Since it is clear that this Henry in fact represents to some degree the experiences of Yann Martel himself, a curious and not entirely displeasing duality comes into play.

Henry’s book is initially denied publication. According to Henry’s publishers, corporate bookstores would not know how to classify or market what Henry calls a “flip-book,” with a novel on one side and an essay on the other. The book, therefore, would be doomed from the start. So discouraged by this, Henry goes into a period of artistic withdrawal, in which he cannot bring himself to write. It almost seems that Martel is making a private joke, as he proceeds, in the rest of “Beatrice and Virgil” to accomplish what Henry fails to do.

Martel identifies Henry’s temporary loss of an authorial voice with that of the extinct animal and those of Holocaust victims. Martel also appears to take umbrage at the idea that the Holocaust must always remain a static concept. According to Henry, first-hand accounts of past suffering cannot accomplish the same emotional and intellectual challenge that a piece of fiction can. Martel’s book is therefore a revolutionary move written in protest against the reluctance to portray the Holocaust outside of non-fiction. Yet a simple look at the corpus of contemporary Western literature shows that the Holocaust has made its way into fiction.

In both “The Life of Pi” and “Beatrice and Virgil,” it becomes evident that Martel is most comfortable with expressing himself through the voice of anthropomorphized animals. Although he insists that his animal protagonists are irrevocably non-human, in some ways his animal characters are more nuanced than the human ones. In “Beatrice and Virgil,” the animals are the hapless heroes, while the humans prove to be cold-blooded and vicious.

Eerily however, the majority of the animal figures in “Beatrice and Virgil” are dead. Martel refers often to the sound of an ancient tape recording of howler monkeys in the upper reaches of the Amazon, transforming this rather odd sound into a hauntingly beautiful melody. Moreover, the two eponymous heroes of the book, are a taxidermied donkey and howler monkey, their lively dialogues pure fantasy. Martel refers repeatedly to the image of taxidermied animals standing in a bestiary-like taxidermy shop, poised as if to move. Like the tape recording of the howler monkeys, the taxidermied animals are just a chilling memory of themselves, the consummate memento mori.

The title, “Beatrice and Virgil” refers to Dante’s sublime and venal guides through Paradise and Hell in the “Divine Comedy.” Martel evidently hopes to draw a parallel between Dante’s experiences in the afterlife with the sometimes-agonizing human experience of life on Earth. Beyond that obvious reference, “Beatrice and Virgil” is full of literary allusions. Martel borrows heavily from the mood of manic stasis in Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot,” and as Henry himself notes, his “flip-book” would have two doors, “but no exit.” This conceit is reminiscent of the hellish, locked claustrophobia of Sartre’s “Huis Clos.”

There is indeed no exit from “Beatrice and Virgil,” not even when the book culminates in its final moment of overwhelming crescendo, as Martel’s characters find themselves trapped in an eruption of hell-like flames. Like the echoing themes of a fugue, all the components of the Martel’s novel fit tightly together, leading up to one ultimate moment of terror.

—Staff writer Catherine A. Morris can be reached at morris6@fas.harvard.edu.