I was ok with Animal Farm, but...

[intertribal]

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!

Comments

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

Then how can you ridicule the both of them for being stereotypical and whatnot?

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

I do think that Spiegelmann is still dealing in human and animal stereotypes, although he goes about it differently (and inconsistently - it depends on the animal). The vermin one is the Nazi stereotype of Jews (and that's the most interesting one). Frogs is a worldwide association with French cuisine, plus his own assessment of French people's un-sweetness. Gypsy moths are... word association. The Swedish reindeer appear to be regional association. The pig one I'm not sure, because the wiki page is a little vague. I mean, it's very hard not to deal in stereotypes of some kind if you're going to make an allegorical shortcut that people will immediately "get."

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.

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

*Spiegelman, that is

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

I don't really care how he chose the animals so much as how the characters actually act. I don't think you can judge the choice of characters just based on how he chose what animal for who. Then you're pretty much limited to assuming it's a stereotype because you're looking for what the animals represent to people, which has already been defined by you as a stereotype.

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.

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I suppose I am limiting myself there. I guess I look at it and think, "this is not going to end in a way that doesn't make me mad," which, you're right, I shouldn't assume. Maybe it turns out there are other cats that are not Nazis!

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

haha

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

Maybe Sophie Scholl is a good tabby.