101 Letters to a Prime Minister (18 page)

I especially recommend to you the stories “Greenleaf,” “A View of the Woods” and “The Lame Shall Enter First.”

I have another matter I would like to raise with you. The cancellation of PromArt was recently announced. The program, administered by the Department of Foreign Affairs, helps cover some of the travel costs of Canadian artists and cultural groups going abroad to promote their work. The grants to individuals are small, often between $750 and $1,500. The budget of the entire program is only $4.7 million. That’s about 14 cents a year per Canadian. For that small sum, Canada shows its best, most enduring quality to the nations of the earth. To remind you of what I’m sure you already know, a country cannot be reduced to the corporations it happens to shelter. Businesses come and go, following their own commercial logic. No one feels deep, patriotic feelings for a corporation, certainly not its shareholders. They will vote where the money leads them. So while Canadians can feel proud about such global players as Bombardier and Alcan and hosts of others, we should not pin our identity to them. Canada is a people, not a business. We shine because of our cultural achievements, not our mercantile wealth. So to cut
an international arts promotion program is to vow our country to cultural anonymity. It means foreigners will have no impressions of Canada, and so no affection.

The PromArt program is a vital part of our foreign policy. I ask you to reconsider the decision to shut it down. The value-added worth of this modest program is akin to, well, the value-added worth of a paperback.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

F
LANNERY
O’C
ONNOR
(1925–1964) was an American essayist, novelist and short story writer whose work is often called grotesque, disturbing and typical of Southern Gothic literature. Her writing is characterized by blunt foreshadowing, irony and allegory, and generally explores questions of religion and morality. Among her best-known works are her novels
Wise Blood
and
The Violent Bear It Away
, and her short story collections
Everything That Rises Must Converge
and
A Good Man Is Hard to Find
. After spending time in New York City and at an artists’ colony, she was diagnosed with lupus and returned to her family farm, where she lived for the last fourteen years of her life, raising peacocks and writing. She was posthumously awarded the National Book Award for
The Complete Stories of Flannery O’Connor
.

Dear Mr. Harper,

So, more cuts in arts funding. In my last letter I mentioned only the PromArt program, not having got wind yet of the other cuts. Nearly $45 million in all. That will bite, that will hurt, that will kill. With less art in the future, I wonder what you think there will be more of. What does $45 million buy that has more worth than a people’s cultural expression, than a people’s sense of who they are?

This calls for a special book. How we administer ourselves—the people we elect, the laws they enact—finds itself reflected in art. Politics is also culture.
A Modest Proposal
, by the Irish writer Jonathan Swift (1667–1745), is a good example of an artistic reflection upon politics. It is a piece of satire, admirable for its humorous ferocity and brevity. At a mere eight pages, it is the shortest work I’ve ever sent you.

The key paragraph, enunciating Swift’s suggested solution to Ireland’s poverty, the modest proposal in question, goes like this:

The question is simple and pertinent, Mr. Harper: are you preparing a ragout?

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

J
ONATHAN
S
WIFT
(1667–1745) was an Irish satirist and essayist, and a founding member of the Martinus Scriblerus Club, whose members included Alexander Pope and Thomas Parnell. Swift was politically involved, writing pamphlets first for the Whigs, then for the Tories, before championing Irish concerns. He studied in Ireland and England, earning an MA from Oxford, and was an ordained Anglican minister. Swift’s style is playful and humorous while being intensely critical of the objects of his satire. His best-known works include
Gulliver’s Travels, A Modest Proposal
and
The Battle of the Books
.

Dear Mr. Harper,

You’ve called an election. Appropriate then to send you Ayn (rhymes with Pine) Rand, whose books are highly political. It’s very easy to dislike Ayn Rand, not only the writer, but even the person behind the writing, and many readers and intellectuals do indeed dislike her, intensely. However, more than a quarter century after her death (she lived from 1905 to 1982), Ayn Rand still has her dogged followers, a cult nearly, and her books continue to sell in great numbers. There is clearly something both attractive and off-putting about her writing. Her brief novel
Anthem
, just 123 pages, is a useful work to discuss in the context of an election. You will see in what follows that I fall on the side of those who dislike Ayn Rand.

Anthem
, first published in 1938, is a dystopia with a utopian heart, a portrayal of a future where everything has gone wrong but where the reader is shown how things can be made right. The
novel starts well. The language is simple, the writing understated, the cadence engaging. The story is told entirely from the point of view of the main character, whose name is Equality 7–2521. (Ayn Rand gives her characters names that clearly indicate the notions, the ideals, she wishes to debunk.) Equality 7–2521 does not live in good times. He has no significant freedoms. He has chosen neither where to live nor what to do for a living. He has no family and no real friends. In that, he is like every other man he knows, living a life of rigid conformity that is socially useful but grinding. The reader accepts this premise willingly because of a clever and effective linguistic device on Ayn Rand’s part: the complete absence of singular personal pronouns. Equality 7–2521 does not speak as an “I,” nor is anything ever his with a “my” or a “mine.” Such individualistic concepts are banned from his society and he is a “we,” as is everyone else, and all are at the service of the collectivity. As Equality 7–2521 says:

Union 5–3992 and International 4–8818, fellow street sweepers, manage to endure such conformity, but:

As for Fraternity 9–3452, Democracy 4–6998, Unanimity 7–3304, International 1–5537, Solidarity 8–1164, Alliance 6–7349, Similarity 5–0306, and especially Collective 0–0009 (they are a nasty one), they are the oppressive system’s prime defenders, and they will collide with Equality 7–2521, who is pushed irresistibly to think on his own and pursue his ideas, no matter where they lead him.

There are women. They live separately. Only once a year, for a single night during the “Time of Mating,” do men and women come together, in pairs matched by the “Council of Eugenics.” It is not then, but earlier, on the City’s limits one work day, that Equality 7–2521 meets Liberty 5–3000. He falls in love with her, committing “the great Transgression of Preference.” He calls her—they call them—“The Golden One.”

This love of his, combined with his independent thinking, eventually forces Equality 7–2521 to flee the City for the Uncharted Forest. The Golden One joins him there. Far from dying in the forest, as he had expected, they find pastoral relief from the oppression of their urban lives. Better yet, they come upon an abandoned house in mountains beyond the forest and they find happiness. They find it because of books left in that house, relics from the ancient times before the “Great Rebirth.” Equality 7–2521 begins to read and he comes upon a word, a concept, a philosophy, that gives expression to all the confused mental yearning he has been going through, the word “I.”

That discovery—it is revealed on page 108 in the edition I am sending you, fifteen pages before the end of the book, the
very beginning of Chapter 11, starting with the words “I am. I think. I will”—is where
Anthem
goes to pot. The point of Ayn Rand’s fiction, as I’m sure you will have seized, is a critique of collectivism, typified at its most terrible by the horrors of communism under Stalin in Russia, the country of Rand’s birth (she became an American citizen in 1931). And there, the reader, certainly this reader, is with her. Bloodthirsty dictatorships are repulsive to every sane human being. But Ayn Rand makes two mistakes in her allegory of life in the Soviet Union. First, she sees only the worst in collectivism, throwing out wholesale the good with the bad. To her, the Gulag and socialized health care, for example, were instances of one and the same evil. Second, in rejecting Stalin and his damnable system, she goes to an absurd opposite libertarian extreme. Rand posited that humanity would be happiest if we lived as autarkic individuals, beholden to no one, unbounded, unfettered, free, free, free. The virtue of selfishness, that’s what Ayn Rand is all about. It’s even the title of one of her books. No wonder Rand appeals mostly to two disparate groups of readers: adolescents in the throes of carving out their individuality, and right-wing American capitalists bent on making and keeping too much money.

Back to the novel. Equality 7–2521, on page 108, has bust free thanks to the word “I.” What follows is an orgy of I-ism, of me, me, me, mine, mine, mine:

You know you’re in trouble when someone claims to own the sky. As much as Equality 7–2521 was appealing when he was oppressed, once he is free he becomes annoying, pretentious, repelling. While his strange speech in the City—we this, we
that—came off as noble and incantatory, his free speech in the mountains is dull and pompous. The struggling hero whom we cheered on has become just another self-righteous, domineering male who thinks he knows everything. We sympathized with his plight, but now we shudder at his solution:

You are a religious man, Mr. Harper. You will know that the essence of every religion, of every god, is precisely the opposite of what Ayn Rand is speechifying about: God is about the abandonment of the self, not its exaltation. But that is an aside, a minor point. The main problem with Rand’s libertarianism, this über-Nietzschean cult of the heroic individual standing on a mountaintop, is that it makes not only society unworkable, but even simple relations. An example jumps out in Rand’s own novel. Equality 7–2521, now drunk with his own uniqueness, has naturally tired of his name. He says to the Golden One:

Prometheus, the nice guy formerly known as Equality 7–2521, goes on:

What if the Golden One rather fancied herself as a Lynette or a Bobbie-Jean? Who is this Prometheus to tell her what her name should be? And what if she doesn’t want to be the mother of a screaming gaggle of kids? What if one child will do, and a girl if possible, thank you very much?

But, headstrong as Liberty 5–3000 seemed to be in the City, as Gaea she is passive and submissive, doing as she is told, because nothing and no one should get in the way of Ayn Rand’s romantic Superman, especially not his woman.

And what does Prometheus intend to do with his new-found freedom? He’ll raid the City for “chosen friends” and conquer the world!