I was ok with Animal Farm, but...
Jun. 23rd, 2010 02:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Yann Martel: I needed to find two animals that might represent the Jews. So trading on positive stereotypes, donkeys are held to be stubborn, they’ve endured, in a sense. Jews are historically have been stubborn in a sense, they’ve held onto their culture, to their religion, despite centuries of discrimination. At the same time, we hold monkeys to be clever, to be nimble. Well, historically, Jews have proven themselves to be exceptionally nimble and clever, they’ve adapted to all different kinds of circumstances, all kinds of different countries, cultures, and also historically, they’ve contributed enormously, disproportionately to the arts and sciences. So trading on those positive stereotypes, I chose, well, here, how can I represent Jews? Well, here, I’ll represent them as this combination, these two animals, monkeys and donkeys. It could also be that the donkey is sort of a representation of the body and monkey the representation of the mind of Jews.
David Sexton: What is one to say? Perhaps, to be kind, that Martel, not Jewish himself incidentally, is just not very bright.
Yann Martel: If he says that of me, I wonder what he feels about Art Spiegelman in Maus. In Maus the Jews are characterised as mice. But were the Jews mouse-like in the Warsaw ghetto uprising? I wonder how he feels about that characterisation.
Hey hey hey hey,or: we could not use different animal species to symbolize different groups of people, especially when you're using stereotypical animal traits to match up with stereotypical human group traits. We could not reduce huge groups of God's creatures to one or two sweeping adjectives.
Just a thought!
David Sexton: What is one to say? Perhaps, to be kind, that Martel, not Jewish himself incidentally, is just not very bright.
Yann Martel: If he says that of me, I wonder what he feels about Art Spiegelman in Maus. In Maus the Jews are characterised as mice. But were the Jews mouse-like in the Warsaw ghetto uprising? I wonder how he feels about that characterisation.
Hey hey hey hey,or: we could not use different animal species to symbolize different groups of people, especially when you're using stereotypical animal traits to match up with stereotypical human group traits. We could not reduce huge groups of God's creatures to one or two sweeping adjectives.
Just a thought!
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Date: 2010-06-23 07:46 pm (UTC)monkey the representation of the mind of Jews.
OH YANN MARTEL NO.
God, I wish I had more to contribute than that.
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Date: 2010-06-23 07:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-23 08:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-23 09:03 pm (UTC)Right?!
I hate arguments from nature so much--and applying animal stereotypes is a kind of argument from nature--because all people do anthropomorphize nature... and then apply that back onto people. Here is how this animal is like a person. Now let me talk about people in terms of this characteristic that I've read into an animal.
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Date: 2010-06-23 09:14 pm (UTC)Yeah, I just feel like "animals do not deserve our shit" in this regard. I hate that so many "allegories" pick cats to be bad guys, because we've categorized them as some kind of evil feminine antagonist to the good, loyal dog. It's all such bullshit. Cats and dogs are not biological mortal enemies. Humans don't deserve it either for that matter, and of course they're the ones who actually read the book.
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Date: 2010-06-23 09:19 pm (UTC)All people do IS anthropomorphize nature.
(The other statement I can't verify at all!)
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Date: 2010-06-23 09:55 pm (UTC)Just goes to show that if you are an established name-brand writer, you can come up with all sorts of unoriginal crap and as long as your editor believes in you, your work will be published.
Blecch. Another anthropomorphous animal book about the Holocaust. We need to turn this into a drinking game!
I'm not a fan of Martel anyway, what with that contrived tiger-on-a-raft nonsense and all. I kept wondering when Pi was going to figure out that the chicken had already eaten his sack of grain by the time he got back. :)
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Date: 2010-06-23 10:01 pm (UTC)I've never read any Martel, but I almost want to read this just to see if it's as bad as everyone says it is.
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Date: 2010-06-23 11:14 pm (UTC)I kept wondering when Pi was going to figure out that the chicken had already eaten his sack of grain :D
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Date: 2010-06-24 11:10 am (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2010-06-24 01:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-25 04:38 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-25 04:41 am (UTC)"The Jews, as mice, satirizes the Nazi portrayal of Jews as vermin. Also, this may symbolize the resourcefulness many Jews exhibited during the Holocaust and the inability of the Nazis to completely wipe out such a species. On page 42 of Maus II (page 202 of The Complete Maus), the author is questioned by an Israeli Jew, depicted as a rather stuffy mouse who has gained some weight. When asked what particular animal he would have chosen to represent the Israelis, Spiegelman answers: "I have no idea... porcupines?""
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Date: 2010-06-25 04:42 am (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2010-06-25 06:06 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-25 07:11 am (UTC)I don't know why he chose cats or dogs, although I would guess he was going for the traditional Tom and Jerry motif (mice are the sympathetic protagonists, cats are evil, dogs are allies of mice) that Western audiences are familiar with. And yeah, this is the one I dislike the most.
Granted, that doesn't take into account his quote about wanting the metaphors to self-destruct. Maybe they do; I don't know. It's hard for me to imagine how they could, but I've been wrong before. I think that classifying Jews as vermin (but in a positive light) is definitely lampooning and destroying a Nazi metaphor, but as for the other animals/characters, I don't see it. It feels more like replacing Nazi animal-human metaphors with his own.
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Date: 2010-06-25 07:11 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-25 07:33 am (UTC)That said, I usually dislike Nazi stories because they end up being heavily moralistic, but not all of them are, and often less so for people who were actually there than people who write about it with no experience of the individual nuances and hypocrisies and whatnot.
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Date: 2010-06-25 01:32 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2010-06-25 06:08 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-25 06:47 am (UTC)I know that Maus uses various different methodologies (I think the whole "bunnies would be too sweet for the French, because of all the centuries of anti-semitism" thing [paraphrased] is reminiscent of what Martel is doing, but the basis of choosing vermin is totally not), but I just don't get assigning different social groups to different animal species based on your perception of that species (often how much you like/dislike the species). Animal Farm doesn't bother me because those animals are political symbols, not ethnic/religious symbols. Admittedly, I did not know that Maus was intended to be a satire of this tendency, and that sort of confuses me, because I'm not sure how that would be accomplished by replicating the tendency.
It's not something I see as a great evil in the world, or even something harmful, since animals don't read. But I don't like it, for a lot of small reasons that add up into a dislike. And mostly I dislike it because of the way it treats the non-human animal species. I feel like it takes lazy shortcuts, trading on the audience's perception of the various animals so that various characters are quickly categorized as either "good" or "evil" according to the social perception of the animal. Which may well be totally irrational, but that is, quote, how it reads to me.
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Date: 2010-06-25 07:21 am (UTC)First of all, stereotyping is a fact of life. It's how people think. It's a shortcut for the fact that groups and categories have real social meaning, and until you get rid of the real causes for that social meaning, stereotypes will continue to exist. The best you can hope for, I think, is people recognizing that stereotypes are just that and being willing to recognize individuals as such and revise their perception to fit individuals that they meet.
Admittedly, I did not know that Maus was intended to be a satire of this tendency, and that sort of confuses me, because I'm not sure how that would be accomplished by replicating the tendency.
And this is why I think your reaction was kneejerk. You assume, based not even on having read the book, that Maus is doing the same thing. A lot of times replicating something has to be done in order to point to it at all. And I think in general, raising people's ire about this sort of thing is a better sign that you're hitting on the real issue than getting the reaction "Oh yes, that's bad, we know that's bad, let's all rant about how stupid it was to do something so stereotypical nowadays and ridicule them," because I think we're not fundamentally better. We're just as subject to stereotypes. We gain more from questioning them than pointing fingers at others.
And well, I can see the "good" and "evil" animals thing for maybe, say, Disney movies, but I think that's sort of a lazy way to read/watch such things. If the author is being that lazy, okay, but they aren't necessarily, and assuming they are is just as lazy on the reader's part.
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Date: 2010-06-25 01:26 pm (UTC)But for me, the real issue I have with the way Maus is cast is I hate that people think cats are evil, and I hate that they've been typecast as evil. And I'm not sure how to like... point to that stereotype and overcome it? So... I guess it raises my ire in that sense, but I'm not sure what the real issue therein is, other than the way our culture has coded common domestic animals. But you're right that it is a kneejerk reaction on my part. I think that my sensitivity to the cat thing has expanded over the years to include other anthropomorphizing - whereas I'm sure that Sexton (and most people) are coming at it from the angle of not wanting human ethnic groups to be represented by animals according to traits. And I honestly think that's a different issue.
You mean what we should do is look at our own stereotypes before condemning other people's stereotypes? Because see, I don't have a stereotype in this regard. Other than I don't think cats are evil. I don't really... stereotype animals in general. And I guess it saddens/angers me when people do. I've gotten to the point where I just avoid things that do it, which is probably bad.
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