101 Letters to a Prime Minister (43 page)

The words “real” and “true” come up often in the play. They are at the heart of what the play is about. The fanciful premise of characters appearing in real life is never abandoned during
Six Characters
. On the contrary, it is insisted upon throughout. What Pirandello aims to do is blur the distinction between the real and the true, the concrete and the imaginary. Because what is real may not contain any truth beyond a base material factuality and what is true may not need the stamp of reality to be
any more true. Such insistence is not twee literary fancy. Much of life is illusion. Who you were yesterday, Mr. Harper, when you were a Young Turk of the Reform Party, has vanished. It was real, but then it vanished. Who’s to say that who you are today won’t once again disappear into a haze as you move into who you will be tomorrow? Billions of people on Earth have similarly disappeared, their reality dissipated into nothingness, first in subtle ways as they mutated from one incarnation to the next as they grew up and then grew old, and then wholly and concretely as they were swallowed up by the oblivion of death. Compare that to the literary character. A character is always who he or she is, never changing, permanent, immortal. Every audience that has seen
Hamlet
has, eventually, died, but Hamlet remains, alive and unchanging in the pages of the play. As the Father says at one point, a character “is always ‘somebody.’ But a man … may very well be ‘nobody.’ ”

More twee fancy, you might huff. But think of it this way, then: art is the essence of life. Art is life minus the humdrum, the ordinary, the mundane. In a novel, a character never wastes the reader’s time with trips to the supermarket or with the brushing and flossing of teeth, and in a play the viewer is spared the Hellos and the How-are-yous and the other banalities that pepper our daily speech. These are left out because the novel and the play are there to relate only the essential. That being so, they do indeed have a truth greater than that of much dull and inane reality. If you continue to insist that novels and plays nonetheless lack reality, shouldn’t that be said with pity rather than arrogance? Don’t we want life to be more like art? Many,
many
people would like that, I suspect. And some people actually pull it off. Isn’t that a common expression, to say of someone who makes a vivid impression upon us, that he or she is a “real character.” That’s right out of Pirandello!

Pirandello’s point, as I see it, is to question the content and appearance of reality. Reality is less real than it might appear. And truth can be hard to see, let alone accept. Another way of putting it would be to say that life is more a product of the imagination than we realize. So we too, at times, are characters searching for an author, for direction, for meaning, while at other times we are actors, consciously—or perhaps unconsciously—playing our role.

I hope you get to see
Six Characters in Search of an Author
on stage one day. I saw a modern version a couple years ago in London. It was bracing stuff.

I’m sorry the translation I’m sending you is not very good. It’s nearly sixty years old and in dated British English. One character even exclaims, “By Jove!” It makes me cringe, but it’s the only one I could find on short notice. And the book is falling apart, too. But that’s only the passing reality of an otherwise truthful work of art.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

L
UIGI
P
IRANDELLO
(1867–1936) was an Italian novelist, poet, short story writer and playwright. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1934.

Dear Mr. Harper,

The comic book is a well-established Franco-Belgian tradition. I grew up on it, having spent four years as a child in France. I adored Asterix and Obelix, Tintin, Lucky Luke, Spirou and Fantasio, Philemon and many others. When I returned to Canada at the age of twelve, I found the comic books that were most widely available here—Marvel Comics—to be compelling, but grim and humourless—and foreign, since Marvel Comics are American.

You’ve made commendable efforts to master the French language, as I mentioned in an earlier letter, so I thought I’d send
you three comic books in French,
Le Géant de la gaffe
, by André Franquin and
Le Lotus bleu
, by Hergé, both from Belgium, and
Paul à Québec
, by Michel Rabagliati, who is from Quebec.

Le Géant de la gaffe
features Gaston Lagaffe, an office boy who is nominally in charge of reader correspondence at the magazine where he works,
Spirou
. In fact, he does nothing but tend to his own interests, which vary from the artistic to the technological and never, ever involve letters from readers. He is prone to gaffes, which has the same meaning in French as in English. But Gaston’s gaffes are in a class of their own. He is the terror of his fellow office workers and, indeed, of his entire neighbourhood. Curiously, despite his many catastrophic misadventures, he’s never fired.

Each page in the album stands on its own, telling its own gag, so there is no continuous story. But the same characters appear throughout. The genius in the
Gaston Lagaffe
series is primarily visual. Take page eight, in which Gaston offers Prunelle, his boss, a ride in his ancient car. He’s just installed a newfangled device, seat belts (we’re in 1977). Prunelle is a little worried, but Gaston reassures him: he installed them himself. Alas, Gaston has accidentally attached Prunelle’s seat belt to the motor’s drive shaft, so as he drives off the seat belt starts to wind itself around the shaft, pulling Prunelle down through his seat into the frame of the car. Have a look at the middle illustration, three rows down, in which Prunelle has been completely sucked into his seat. See his raised foot, his clenched fist, hear the loud
CRRRAC
sound. It’s unspeakably funny. Even better: page twenty-nine, in which Gaston has given Lebrac, a colleague, a taste of his chili-pepper sauce to see if it’s spicy enough. Behold the effect on Lebrac. The drawings are extraordinarily expressive.

By comparison, Tintin is quite witless. The jokes, when there are any, aren’t particularly funny. And the drawing style
is more workmanlike. But the genius with Tintin lies elsewhere, in its narrative breadth. The long Tintin series—the first one,
Tintin au Congo
, came out in 1930, and the last one, the twenty-second,
Tintin et les Picaros
, in 1976—is dramatic in intent and has endeared itself to millions of readers around the world because of the adventures told within.
Le Lotus bleu
, the Tintin I am offering you this week, is an early one, from 1934 (in its original black-and-white edition), but even there the adventure sweeps you along. And some of the illustrations are nonetheless startling. Have a look at the large ones on pages six and twenty-six, for example.

And we should place Hergé in his historical context. He practically invented the illustrative language of comic strips. The way the stories are told frame by frame so that the narrative is clear and fluid, with close-ups and wide shots; the details to convey emotion, for example stars circling the head for pain or beads of water for anxiety or wonderment; the ambition to tell entire stories that are memorable and gripping—all this started with Georges Rémi (he inverted his initials to create his pen name). I don’t want to venture too far, not being a historian of the subject, but I do believe that Tintin is the grandfather of the Franco-Belgian narrative comic strip. He is the giant upon whose shoulders subsequent artists stood, including Franquin and, on our side of the Atlantic, Michel Rabagliati, the author of
Paul à Québec
.

Paul à Québec
is the sixth in a series. It tells a sad story, of the illness and dying of Paul’s father-in-law. It’s very moving. I doubt you’ll be able to finish the story with your eyes still dry.
Paul à Québec
speaks with a confidence that shows how the comic book has come of age, capable of telling stories as serious as any told using solely written language, with illustrative details that are as powerful as the well-chosen metaphors of
an accomplished novelist.
Paul
is entirely rooted in the language and culture of Quebec. I read it with a degree of nostalgia, recognizing many of the elements (the strange restaurant in the opening scene, for example, that stands between Montreal and Quebec). This is where I come from, I thought. These are my people, these are my stories.

I wish you and your family a merry Christmas.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

A
NDRÉ
F
RANQUIN
(1924–1997) was a Belgian comics artist who contributed to
Spirou et Fantasio
(as part of the “School of Marcinelle” in the 1950s and ’60s) and
Tintin
, and created his own strips
Gaston
and
Isabelle
.

H
ERGÉ
(1907–1983), the
nom de plume
of Georges Remi, was a Belgian comics writer and artist. He is best known for creating the Tintin comic books. He continued to write the Tintin series during World War II. He is the recipient of the Order of the Crown.

M
ICHEL
R
ABAGLIATI
(b. 1961) is a Canadian cartoonist and author of the Paul series of books (
Paul in the Country, Paul Moves Out
, et al.). Though he read and created comics as a child, he worked as a graphic designer and illustrator for many years before drawing comics again.

Dear Mr. Harper,

Why not start the new year, which we hope will be good, with something old and most certainly good? A few weeks ago I happened to bump into Doug Thorpe, the genial head of the English Department at the University of Saskatchewan. He’s very knowledgeable about Sir Walter Scott, so I asked him if he didn’t have a short Scott to propose for our reading purposes. He shook his head. “There are no short works by Sir Walter Scott. He was terribly long-winded. Every tome he wrote has at least six hundred pages.” So much for Sir Walter Scott and our busy-busy-busy-short-book club. Did he have anything else to propose, off the top of his head, I asked. He thought for a second. “Have you sent him
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
?” I hadn’t. Doug invited me into his office and fished around his bookshelves for a few moments. “Here you go,” he said, handing me a copy of the book in question.

Indeed, here you go. I was doubly touched by the gift in that a name on the front cover jumped out at me: James Winny, the
editor and translator. James Winny taught at Trent University, in Peterborough, Ontario, where I did an undergraduate degree in philosophy. He was my tutorial leader in a first-year introductory English course I took. I’m sure Professor Winny entirely forgot me the moment our course ended, but I still remember him clearly. Once a week, eight or so of us students would troop into his office, where he would lead us into discussion on a work of literature. He was a patrician figure in his sixties, with a resonant voice and an elegant English accent, and he was friendly in a phlegmatic way. Times have changed. Now, in a university system in Canada more geared to producing economically useful workers than critically thinking citizens, it’s unimaginable that eight first-year students would have hour-long weekly meetings with a full professor, but so it was at the time, in the early 1980s at Trent University. Those tutorials marked me. Once Professor Winny read aloud T. S. Eliot’s
Four Quartets
. He mastered a range of English accents and he brought the poems to life for us, did he ever. I remember another discussion we had about Joseph Conrad’s
The Secret Agent
, which he deemed—with an authority that nonetheless felt like a suggestion—a perfect novel. With each meeting, he made us see more in a work than our immature minds had first seized. It was a thrill to be led on such an intellectual ride.

I remember James Winny clearly, but I hadn’t thought of him in ages, and here, twenty-five years later, his name and his work were suddenly before me. It’s been a pleasure to be in the orbit of his mind again. I wish I had been in a class in which he discussed
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
.

Sir Gawain
was composed by an anonymous poet in the late fourteenth century “in a regional dialect characteristic of northwestern England,” as Winny’s introduction informs us. The
advantage of the Broadview edition I’m sending you is that it’s a bilingual one, with the original text printed on the even pages, on the left, and the translated text on odd pages, on the right. To me, the Middle English dialect is nearly opaque, and I have no patience for this kind of linguistic game. To every language I don’t speak I’m ready to grant all the beauty and subtlety the human mind can come up with, and a cultural content greater than any museum could fit in its galleries, but the first thing
I
notice is the barrier of incomprehension. I might as well be talking to a clarinet—except a clarinet is meant to be beautiful, while a language is meant to communicate, with beauty a bonus. I find that my eyes, looking at the Middle English text on the left, jump about, seeking words or phrases it can understand, and they quickly grow weary of the exercise, whereas the pages on the right, in modern English, shatter and grip with their clarity. I don’t so much see the words as the images they convey. But see for yourself. Perhaps you’ll find enjoyment in deciphering the Middle English.