The Horror Of It All

As a means of escape,Henry moves with his wife to a great city Perhaps it was New York. Perhaps it was Paris. Perhaps it was Berlin where he learns to play the clarinet,acts in amateur theatre productions and works in a chocolateria. And then one day,along with his usual adulatory fan mail,comes a package containing a copy of Flauberts The Legend of Saint Julian Hospitator (with passages describing Julians massacre of wild animals highlighted),the draft of an unfinished play and a plea for help.

Henry answers that plea,locating the sender of that package in the same city,his namesake,a dour proprietor of Okapi Taxidermy. Stepping into that fascinating yet disturbing menagerie of the stuffed and the mounted,a Noahs ark of dead creatures,Henry almost enters the realm of allegory. His task,the taxidermist says,is to bear witness; his working on a dead animal is like extracting and refining memory from death. The protagonists of the taxidermists play,Virgil and Beatrice,the anthropomorphised howler monkey and donkey respectively,are mounted and displayed in his shop as well. The use of animals for reasons of craft rather than of sentiment is a technique familiar to both Henry the writer and his creator Martel,the latter having made Pi Patel in Life of Pi drift on a lifeboat on the Pacific with a zebra,hyena,orangutan and a Bengal tiger. The animals,for Henry and Martel,are useful in conveying the greater truth. As the taxidermist says: To ruin an animal with shoddy taxidermy is to forfeit the only true canvas we have on which to represent it.

Henry begins his regular visits to collaborate on the play (called A 20th Century Shirt) and help the taxidermist navigate his creative block. The similarity of their enterprise the application of the imagination to create a Holocaust metaphor soon strikes him,as Beatrice and Virgil talk about themselves in a Beckettian landscape,gradually revealing the unspeakable Horrors they have escaped,yet unaware that more ominous events are round the corner. But the lack of a consistent plot or rising action confounds Henry; we are,after all story animals. The central moral conundrum of the play is articulated by Virgil: How can there be anything beautiful after what weve lived through? Its incomprehensible. Its an insult…Oh Beatrice,how are we going to talk about what happened to us one day when its over?

That necessity to communicate lived experience and felt emotions,overcoming the limitations of the factual,documentary,anecdotal,testimonial,literal,is what makes Henry/Martel take up this literary exercise,for as Henry says,A work of art works because it is true,not because it is real. Martels book (it comes nine years after Life of Pi was published) might appear thin and fragmentary at places,with Henrys account interspersed with extensive excerpts from the taxidermists play. But its lack of a clear artistic resolution,or the failure to create an effective metaphor for the Holocaust,indicates an attempt to initiate a dialogue,a process that is nascent but capable of being taken to its logical conclusion. That open-endedness of content and technique is confirmed in the end,where certain metaphysical queries of universal dimension are posited for the reader,to convey the horrors of experience and the greater horror of living to talk about it.