by Yann Martel
The Prime Minister wishes me to convey his thanks for sending him these books. You may be assured that your thoughtful gesture is most appreciated.
Yours truly,
S. Russell
Executive Correspondence Officer
CHESTER BROWN (b. 1960) is a Canadian cartoonist who is part of the alternative comics movement and the creator of several graphic novels and comic series. His comics are generally grim, classified in the genres of horror, surrealism and black comedy and focusing on darker subjects like mental health issues and cannibalism. His best-known work, Louis Riel: A Comic-Strip Biography, was five years in the making. Some of his other works include The Playboy, I Never Liked You and the comic book series Yummy Fur and Underwater. Born and raised in Montreal, Brown now lives in Toronto.
YUKIO MISHIMA (1925–1970), born Kimitake Hiraoka, was a Japanese novelist, short story writer, poet and traditional kabuki playwright. His best-known novels, Confessions of a Mask, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea and the Sea of Fertility quartet, have insured his enduring fame in Japan and around the world. Mishima committed suicide after taking over a military base with his own private army, ostensibly as a protest over Japan’s drift away from its traditional values.
BOOK 55:
THE GIFT
BY LEWIS HYDE
May 11, 2009
To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
A gift to be shared, like all gifts,
From a Canadian writer,
With best wishes,
Yann Martel
Dear Mr. Harper,
One of the strengths of non-fiction is its ability to focus. Whereas fiction can be as broad as the humanities, non-fiction tends to specialize, like a science. Writers of fiction commonly hear from their editors that they must “show, not tell.” They must do so because fiction creates new, unfamiliar worlds that must be felt and not only described. Non-fiction, on the other hand, relies on a world already in existence, our own, with its true history and real historical figures. Of course, that history and those figures must be made to breathe with life on the page; good writing is always essential. Nonetheless, that basis in the factual world frees non-fiction writers from the cumbersome task of wholly inventing characters and situations and gives them far more liberty to straight-out tell. What is gained is an ability to cover a single topic deeply. What is lost is broad appeal. With non-fiction, the reader must be more actively interested in the subject covered. For example, a history of feudal Japan will likely attract fewer readers than a novel about feudal Japan. Such was the case, at least, with James Clavell’s novel Shogun and I don’t think it’s unusual.
The result of this specialization is that the world of non-fiction is more fragmented. A novel is more like another novel than a work of non-fiction is like another work of non-fiction. Proof of that is in the names we give to these categories: we know what fiction is, so we call it that, and under the label we comfortably place the plays, poems, novels and short stories of the world. But what about those books that aren’t fiction? Well, we’re not so sure what they are, so we define them by what they are not: they are non-fiction. The result of this lack of convention, with great non-fiction, is a high degree of originality.
A sterling example of how original non-fiction can be is the book I am sending you this week. In The Gift, Lewis Hyde looks at the meaning and consequence of a gift, that is, of an object or service that is given for nothing, freely, without expectation of a concrete or immediate return. With that single notion in mind, Hyde evokes an array of peoples, places and practices and makes a coherent whole of what would be a novelistic mess. You’ll see for yourself. The Puritans in America, Irish and Bengali folklore, the Trobriand Islanders off New Guinea, the Maori of New Zealand, the potlatch of the Pacific Coast First Nations, Alcoholics Anonymous, tales of Buddha, the Ford Motor Company, the fate of unexpected sums of money in an urban ghetto of Chicago, Martin Luther, John Calvin, the lives of Walt Whitman and Ezra Pound, to mention just a few references that I remember—all are woven together as Hyde lays out his thesis on the differences between the exchange of gifts and the exchange of commodities. The currencies involved in these trades are radically different. In the first, sentiments are exchanged; in the second, money. The first creates attachment; the second, detachment. The first creates a community; the second, liberty. The first builds capital that does not circulate; the second loses its value if it does not keep moving. These ideas are examined in the light of the many anthropological and sociological examples in the book.
Art is at the heart of The Gift. Hyde sees every aspect of art as a gift: creativity is received as a gift by the artist, art is made as a gift and then, rather awkwardly in our current economic system, art is traded as a gift. That certainly rings true with me. I have never thought of my creativity in monetary terms. I write now as I did when I started, for nothing. And yet the artist must live. How then to quantify the value of one’s art? How do we correlate a poem’s worth with a monetary value? I use the word again: it’s awkward. If Hyde favours the spirit of gift-giving over that of commercial exchange, it’s not because he’s a doctrinaire idealist. He’s not. But it’s clear what he thinks: we’ve forgotten the spirit of the gift in our commodity-driven society and the cost of that has been the parching of our souls.
The Gift is a refreshment to the dried-up soul. For Lewis Hyde, the spirit of the gift goes far beyond Christmas and birthdays. It’s actually a philosophy. And it’s hard not to adhere to it after reading hundreds of pages on gift-making and gift-giving in all corners of the world. Perhaps we have forgotten a little how good it feels to give freely, how what is given to us must be passed on, so that the gift can live on, swimming about human communities like a fish, always alive so long as it keeps moving. Perhaps that’s why the things we value the most are often those that we were given. Perhaps that is our more natural mode of exchange. At the very least, after reading this book you’ll never think of the word “gift” in the same way.
One last point, made in the spirit of Hyde’s book. I have now sent you fifty-seven books of all types, and there will be more to come, as long as you are Prime Minister. I imagine these books are lying on a shelf somewhere in your offices. But they won’t be there forever. One day you will leave office and you’ll take with you the extensive paper trail that a prime minister creates. That trail will be placed in hundreds of cardboard boxes that will end up at the National Archives of Canada, where in time they will be opened and the contents parsed by scholars. I would feel sad if that were the fate of the books I have given you. Novels and poems and plays are not meant to live in cardboard boxes. Like all gifts, they should be shared. So may I suggest that you share what I have shared with you. One by one, or all together, as you wish, give the books away, with only two conditions: first, that they not be kept permanently by each recipient but rather passed on in a timely fashion, after they’ve been read, and, second, that they never be sold. That would keep the gift-giving spirit of our book club alive.
Yours truly,
Yann Martel
P.S. Could you please thank S. Russell on my behalf for his or her reply for the last books I sent you, the Mishima and the Chester Brown. [See the REPLY section of Books 53 and 54.]
REPLY:
May 22nd, 2009
Dear Mr. Martel,
On behalf of the Right Honourable Stephen Harper, I would like to acknowledge receipt of your recent correspondence.
Thank you for writing to share your views with the Prime Minister. You may be assured that your comments have been carefully noted. For more information on the Government’s initiatives, you may wish to visit the Prime Minister’s website, at www.pm.gc.ca.
Yours sincerely,
L. A. Lavell
Executive Correspondence Officer
LEWIS HYDE (b. 1945) is an American poet, translator, essayist and cultural critic. He has edited a book of essays
by Henry David Thoreau and translated the poems of the Nobel Prize–winning Spanish poet Vicente Aleixandre. He has also written a work of cultural criticism, Trickster Makes This World, and a collection of poems, This Error Is the Sign of Love. Formerly an instructor at Harvard University, Hyde now teaches writing at Kenyon College and is a Fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society
BOOK 56:
THE STRANGE CASE OF
DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE
BY ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
May 25, 2009
To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
Good luck with your Mr. Hyde,
From a Canadian writer,
With best wishes,
Yann Martel
Dear Mr. Harper,
A story can sometimes capture in an image what might otherwise float around unexpressed. You must have had that experience yourself, in which a book or article or movie said cogently what you had been thinking in a vaguer way. A perfect example of a story that brings this sort of clarity is Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. First published in 1886, it was an instant success, read by everyone who read (including Queen Victoria and Prime Minister Gladstone), and it has become an enduring classic. The moral categories of good and evil have been known since the beginning of time, and each one of us comes to know them formally as a result of instruction by our parents and our teachers, and intimately as a result of direct experience. But I suspect that most of us would claim that we long ago gave the keys to the house to good, and threw out evil. In other words, we live with good and evil by thinking of ourselves as good, not perfect, perhaps, but good enough, certainly better than our neighbours, and we use whatever rationalizations are necessary to maintain this self-image. Evil we consider as something essentially external. Other people are evil: criminals, bad cops, corrupt politicians, loitering youths, and so on. We find plenty of evil in the world, just not in ourselves.
The brilliance of Stevenson’s tale is in the way he portrays the forces of good and evil: he incarnates them as two full-blooded characters in the body of one duplicitous person. Because as I’m sure you know, even if you’ve never read the short novel, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde are not two people but one. Each is the embodiment of one of the moral extremes battling within the same person, different not only in character but in appearance. Tall, handsome Dr. Jekyll, of impeccable reputation, is the good incarnation of this tortured person, while the shrunken, heartless Mr. Hyde, of unremitting ill repute, is the evil incarnation. But they are in dialogue. That’s the genius of the tale. Living within the same soul, the two are aware of each other and in ceaseless conflict. And we know which one is destined to win. If Dr. Jekyll won, if good went on being good, that would be matter for an inspiring sermon, but not for a ripping yarn. We need Mr. Hyde to win the day—but only briefly, don’t worry—to feel the frisson that is horror fiction’s specialty.
The novel is told in ten chapters. The first eight are effective but conventional. Strange, terrible events take place, the telling is partial and puzzling, suspense keeps us reading—it has all the trappings of a fine Gothic horror story. Then, in Chapter 9, we learn from a minor character, a fellow doctor friend of Dr. Jekyll, that the evil Mr. Hyde, a brute and a murderer, is none other than a transmogrified Dr. Jekyll. That would have been a stunning revelation to a reader who knew nothing beforehand of the story. But the reason The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde rises above the standard horror story is to be found in Chapter 10, the last and longest, told in the racked voice of Dr. Jekyll himself. In that chapter lies the greatness of the novel. To speak of good and evil as they usually are, with a smile of self-satisfaction and a censorious finger pointing outward, is tiresome. None of that here. In Chapter 10, “Henry Jekyll’s Full Statement of the Case,” we have a man openly acknowledging and discussing his evil side and what he seeks to do with it. His idea is to give body to his evil side so that the good side might be more purely good, untroubled by the siren call of evil. Mr. Hyde is created, then, to make Dr. Jekyll better. But oh, the temptation of evil! Dr. Jekyll looks on in fascinated horror at the outrages his alter ego commits. Slowly the fascination consumes him. While at first he alchemically switches back to Dr. Jekyll with ease, in time the efficacy of the potion that allows him to do so wears out. The dominant Dr. Jekyll begins to lose ground to Mr. Hyde until the natural being of the man is Mr. Hyde.
To have this battle told from the inside, in the very voice of the tortured double combatant, is gripping reading, one that magnifies to an appalling degree the struggles each one of us, if we are morally lucid, must go through. This is the reason for the ongoing appeal of the story. We are all Dr. Jekylls and the moral question put to each of us is the same: what will you do with the Mr. Hyde lurking in you?
By my reading of the original tale, the evil that torments Dr. Jekyll is quite clearly a sexual one, the Victorian repression of a homosexual urge. See what you think, see if you find the hints pointing to the same conclusion. But the tale, like any great story, can also be read in a way that mirrors each reader’s personality. You, a politician, for example, must feel every day the inner tensions between the public good you desire to bring about and the evil that you must commit to do so. To have those opposing urges clothed in the vivid, contrasting frames of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde should help you in your struggle to become Prime Minister Jekyll.
A last observation: rarely has a story been so well served by its title. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde—the words roll off the tongue with such ease, the counterpoint of the titles Dr. and Mr. pleasing and the names highly unusual yet easy to remember. Curiously, the reader is never given an explanation as to how Mr. Hyde gets his name. Dr. Jekyll takes his potion in his laboratory, turns into another being, steps in front of a mirror, and “I saw for the first time the appearance of Edward Hyde.” Clearly, Stevenson knew the names worked. Medicine is held to be a profession that does good, but the second syllable of the good doctor’s name rhymes with “kill.” As for Mr. Hyde, he is what Jekyll wants to “hide.” It all works so well that anyone who has read the story remembers it fully just by recalling the title.
Yours truly,
Yann Martel
P.S. I have received yet another reply from S. Russell, your executive correspondence officer, this time for the gift of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. [See the REPLY section of Book 51.] That’s two letters in short order, after a silence of two years. I can see why in the case of Julius Caesar. In the letter that accompanied the play, I spoke about my concerns over new guidelines for the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and the Canadian Periodical Fund. That’s political stuff, the very fodder of a correspondence officer in a prime minister’s office. But a response to my gift of Chester Brown’s Louis Riel (Book 53) and Yukio Mishima’s The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea (Book 54) came as a surprise. But I guess anything to do with Riel is political, still, and merits a response from you, however indirect. I wonder if I might receive a reply directly from you one day. There’s quite a choice of books you can write to me about, that’s for sure.
REPLY:
June 16, 2009
Dear Mr. Martel,
The Office of the Prime Minister forwarded to me a copy of your letter on May 5, 2009, regarding the Budget 2009 decision to allocate the temporary increase of Canada Graduate Scholarships (CGS) awarded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) to students pursuing business-related degrees. I regret the delay in replying to you.
The Government of Canada recognizes that talented, skilled and creative people are the most critical element of a successful national economy, and has committed to strengthening Canada’s People Advantage in our Science and Technology (S&T) Strategy, Mobilizing Science and Technology to Canada’s Advantage. Our government has not only maintained, but increased the level of ongoing federal support for graduate students in Canada. In Budget 2007, we expanded t
he CGS program to support 5,000 students annually across all areas of study. Of these recipients, 2,600 are supported by SSHRC, 1,600 through the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), and 800 through the Canadian Institutes for Health Research (CIHR).
Budget 2009 announced a further, temporary increase in the number of CGS awards that will be granted in 2009–2010 and 2010–2011 as part of Canada’s Economic Action Plan. This increased funding will help students deepen their skills through further study at a time when they face a weakening labour market. Of the 2,500 additional scholarships made available through Budget 2009, 500 will be awarded by SSHRC to students pursuing business-related degrees.
The S&T Strategy addresses the need to foster more advanced business training in Canada as a means to improve innovation and the overall health of the economy. Our focus on business-related studies will provide additional support and encouragement to students pursuing advanced training in an area critical to Canada’s future economic success.
This government recognizes the important contribution of all social sciences and humanities disciplines to a vibrant economy and society. Research in the social sciences and humanities advances knowledge and builds understanding about individual groups and societies. Knowledge and understanding informs discussion on critical social, cultural, economic, technological and wellness issues. They also provide communities, businesses and governments with the foundation for a vibrant and healthy democracy. SSHRC will continue to award Canada Graduate Scholarships across the full range of social sciences and humanities disciplines through the ongoing CGS program. Over the next three years, SSHRC will award an expected 5,700 Canada Graduate Scholarships, and 5,200 of these—more than 90 percent—will be available in all areas of the social sciences and humanities.