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]

I'm also not the first to make that (or a similar) point about ridicule, fwiw. I know Nietzsche and DFW have, and who knows who else.