“Yarn‐spinning is also highly recommended”: Yann Martel's framing narratives

Abstract

Summary In Yann Martel's collection The Facts behind the Helsinki Roccamatios” and Other Stories ([1993]2005), we can clearly discern the construction of a metaphorical frame that creates and encircles the real, thereby describing two important poststructural frames of reference: the Lacanian “magic circle” (especially as this is foregrounded by Catherine Belsey in her recent monograph, Culture and the Real (2005), and the Derridean parergon. Martel's fictions perform a cultural function in that they frame the unsignifiable unknown (be this death, AIDS, God, or the creative moment) with a “signifying screen” (Belsey 2005: 72) that is creative, gives pleasure, and fleetingly appeases the drive of the subject. The framing performance of Martel's stories is intriguingly complex, operating not only at the level of theme and subject but also at the level of structure, prepositional play, language and metaphor.