“Isn’t telling about something—using words, English or Japanese— already something of an invention? Isn’t just looking upon this world already something of an invention?” --Yann Martel, Life of Pi If you’ve seen the inside cover of Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, then you've seen the enticement that claims this story can make you believe in God. The bulk of this novel is devoted to a fanciful story of a boy nicknamed Pi who grows up in a zoo in India, travels with his family and the zoo animals on a ship, and winds up stuck in a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger, an orangutan, a hyena, and an injured zebra. At the very end of the novel, however, after the boy and the tiger have survived harrowing months on the ocean and are rescued, some interlocutors who are interested in why their ship sank extract another story from Pi. This second story, taking up just a handful of pages, is more horrifying and more banal than the first. In this tale, the lifeboat contains just him, his mother, a cook, and a sailor with a broken leg. The mother resists compromising her beliefs and values, even in the face of starvation, and eventually sacrifices herself for her son; the cook immediately becomes a predator, chopping off the sailor’s injured leg for bait, eating the sailor when he dies, catching food and sharing it with the boy and the mother, and finally killing the mother; the injured sailor fades early and quickly into death. The second story is a nice opportunity for Pi to ask the question of his interviewers: Which story do you prefer? The one with the animals, a fanciful, unverifiable, entertaining, heartening, disbelief-suspending tale that provides meaning and explanations for why things happen as they do? Or the one without the animals, a short description of believable details, horrible in their probable verifiability, their ordinary human awfulness, and their complete meaninglessness and inability to explain anything in a satisfying way? (Interestingly, neither story provides an explanation for the ship’s sinking in the first place; both stories are inadequate for understanding the source of suffering.) If this question assumes that the reader will prefer the elaborate but improbable tale, then it also assumes the reader will choose to believe in the elaborate and improbable existence of God, probably along with one of the systems that are highlighted early in the story—Hinduism, Christianity, Islam, or science. But the book does not support belief in the sense that we usually understand it in religion—a kind of knowing faith that rests in opposition to doubt. This story advocates belief as an educated choice among options, a choice made for pragmatic or aesthetic reasons—because God makes for a better story than no-God does. However, the revelation of this second story bothered me in one specific way. The bureaucratic interviewers are so linear and literal that they, as characters, explicitly state which parts of the two stories match up. The reader is forced to read through their blockish dialogue explaining that the orangutan is the mother, the hyena the cook, the zebra the sailor, and thus the tiger the boy. Why do this? What reader will not already have identified those parallels, since the actions of the animals in the first story match up so closely with those of the people in the second? The reader can also see that Pi, in making himself a tiger, wants to see in himself a combination of some of the qualities of the other animal-human characters: bravery with integrity, brutality with skillful self-sufficiency, and wounded innocence and beauty. Because all the parallels are thus spelled out for us so explicitly, it ruins our enjoyment of feeling like we have figured it out. Thus, I am inclined to think that there is still a third, more banal, underlying story. This third story, which goes untold, is even more predictable and disheartening than the tale of four people fighting and killing one another on a lifeboat under the duress of hunger and exposure. It is the story of the dysfunctional family that can be found anywhere. It arises covertly in Part 1 of the novel, which provides familial and cultural backstory for the more exciting action in Part 2, where Pi struggles on a lifeboat in the ocean with wild animals. In Part 1, we see hints of brutality in Pi’s father and martyrdom in Pi’s mother as he grows up in India. The lifeboat journey of Part 2, then, can be read as a long metaphor for the horror of a martyred mother, an unfeeling father, an innocent brother, and the ways they hurt each other in an ordinary family. The two explicit stories dramatize this violence and motivate it via the dire circumstances of lifeboat survival among animals or humans, but the third unspoken story points to the ways people undermine and hurt each other even when they are not in desperate situations, not hounded by hunger and thirst. How boring that domestic story is, and how familiar! Put the virtuous martyr, the brutal provider, and the wounded innocent in a boat—and make them all animals—along with a boy who sees each of these animals in himself, and you have a literary adventure instead of another Lifetime movie. If you think my third story an overly simplistic derivation, consider who the novel is dedicated to. The dedication, written in French, is to the author’s parents and his brother. Of course, there is also the dramatic Oedipal killing of the father, with a phallic knife and repeated stabbings, no less, after the cook/father gives the boy a fair shot at it by providing one last meal of fresh meat so the boy can regain the necessary strength. Really, the cook more or less cedes his life to the boy as penance for killing the mother, and in so doing, the boy enacts his own first brutal killing. The tiger in Pi, that “awful, fierce thing that kept me alive” becomes a threat to Pi himself much more after the death of the hyena/cook/father, because Pi has internalized that brutality. It’s significant, too, that Pi is upset when they reach solid land and the tiger and he do not have a proper goodbye, providing closure to their relationship. Instead, Pi acknowledges in speaking to the receding tiger, “You will always be with me.” Just because Pi is no longer in danger of starving on a lifeboat does not mean the animal inside is gone; it will always be with him, it will always be him. He goes on to raise his own family, and we can only hope that it is different from the all-too-familiar dysfunction of his own. The novel suggests that we inflict suffering on those nearest to us no matter what the circumstances--abundance or scarcity. But it also suggests that we inflict suffering upon ourselves. Early in the novel, Pi’s father posts a sign in his zoo that reminds us that the violence is not only between us; it is within ourselves. His sign declares that the reader is looking at “the most dangerous animal in the zoo” as he gazes into a mirror. In the most fanciful version of the lifeboat story, even plants and algae and soil are carnivorous, at least on remote islands. The watery tentacled island that Pi tries to live on near the end of his ocean adventure is dreamlike, a place of the subconscious, a place that seems to eat itself as well as anything else that blunders along. Yes, if we mire ourselves here, we eat ourselves. The island reminds us that we harm ourselves as well as others on this adventure, and we would all do well to be more attentive to the stories we tell ourselves, the stories we dismiss, and the stories we aren't usually even aware of. These stories guide our choices about what to do to others and to ourselves. This novel has not convinced me of a separate, discrete God. However, it did make me more willing to choose to believe in the humanness of animals and the animal in humans. It made me consider the ways we hurt each other and ourselves when we are afraid of each other. We seem to live much of our lives believing we’re in a lifeboat that can only support one, both craving and fearing close contact with others. More than most other survival stories, Martel’s three variations in this novel—from the most elaborately unfurled and embroidered one to the most ordinary and implicit one—ask us to examine not only ourselves, but also our relationships with others. Copyright 2006 Elizabeth Silas |
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