Becoming-Animal in Yann Martel’s Life of Pi
A. Becoming-Animal
Following the previous discussion, we need to further elaborate on the concept of friendship. According to Nietzsche, one is not I but always makes the two—I and me, and “the friend is always the third person” (168). The friend is the third that prevents “I” and “me” from falling “too deep in conversation,” so the hermit expects to have a friend as his companion (167). Nietzsche’s notion of a friend as a third is thought-provoking because this idea subverts the dualistic relationship of friendship between the two. Because of this third, friendship goes beyond the I and the
friend—that is, beyond the relationship between the self and the other.
Agamben also positions the friend in the third place (although he does not use
“the third” to refer to the friend), but he goes further than Nietzsche to enunciate the relationship between the self and the other in friendship. As Agamben argues:
The friend is not an other I, but an otherness immanent to selfness, a
becoming other of the self. The point at which I perceive my existence as
sweet, my sensation goes through a con-senting which dislocates and deports my sensation toward the friend, toward the other self. Friendship is this desubjectification at the very heart of the most intimate sensation of the self. (What Is 34-35; emphasis added)Like Nietzsche, Agamben breaks the dualistic relationship between the I and the friend. “The friend is not an other I” means that the friend is not another subject, and this further suggests that friendship is not the interaction between two subjects. In friendship, the friend becomes “other of the self.” That is, the friend does not become the other but transforms himself, thus abandoning his identity or any predicate
imposed upon him. In doing so, the friend experiences the process of annihilating his subjectivity—i.e., desubjectification.
Agamben’s interpretation of the friend as “a becoming other of the self,” to some degree, echoes Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of becoming. In A Thousand
Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari claim that “[a] becoming is always in the middle; one
can only get it by the middle. A becoming is neither one nor two, nor the relation of the two; it is the in-between, the border or line of flight or descent runningperpendicular to both” (293). In other words, a becoming refers neither to A nor B, but to the vacillation between A and B. The in-betweenness of A and B creates the third
“C.” Hence, a becoming is the third “I” that refutes binary thinking (either A or B).
“Becoming” renders one’s identity deviant from one’s scheduled path and initiates a
“line of flight,” that is, an escape from the self.
Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of becoming suggests anti-anthropocentrism. As
they declare, “becomings are minoritarian [and] all becoming is a
becoming-minoritarian” (A Thousand Plateaus 291). Thus, there is no becoming-man or becoming-majoritarian but always becoming-other, be it becoming-woman or becoming-animal. For them, the notion of the human being as the subject is
problematic because it reveals an anthropocentric idea that positions man at the center of the world and thus leads to the dualistic oppositions based on human norms. The importance of the concept of becoming is that the self’s transformation toward the other can shake its fixed identity and escape from majoritarian logic.
In Life of Pi, Pi does not stick to his humanism but instead seeks to coexist with the tiger. As he once says, “It was not a question of him or me, but of him and me. We were, literally and figuratively, in the same boat. We would live—or we would
die—together” (Martel 164). At this point, Pi changes his relationship with Parker.
That is, Pi shifts his relationship with the tiger from the logic of “or” to that of “and,”
and such a shift paves the way for Pi’s becoming-animal.
When we say that Pi is becoming-animal, we do not mean that Pi becomes a tiger but that Pi gets closer to the tiger, and such a process of being closer to the tiger creates the third—neither Pi nor the tiger but something between the two. Such inbetweenness is where friendship exists. If we can understand Pi’s becoming-animal, it will make sense for us to hear Parker’s conversation with Pi (I shall explain this later). On the surface, it seems that Pi as a human being can dominate the tiger by excluding the tiger’s political way of life. As Arne De Boever contends, Pi not only announces “a state of rule, of government” to secure his survival and the tiger’s, but also develops “a relation of government between a human being and a tiger” (17); by doing so, “Pi has escaped his own situation of being barely alive by reducing the tiger
to bare life” (18).36 For De Boever, Pi is a sovereign, whereas the tiger is his subject.
However, such an interpretation not only presupposes the hierarchy between man and animal but also overlooks the fact that in the novel Pi fails to control the tiger and instead needs to rely on the tiger to survive. In fact, the relationship between Pi and the tiger is not merely governmental. Particularly as the novel progresses, Pi assumes the behavior of the tiger, gradually developing a more intimate relationship with the animal. To declare himself to be the master, Pi takes Parker’s feces on purpose and plays with them to and fro in front of the tiger. Later, in his extreme hunger, Pi even tries to eat Parker’s feces. Pi acts more and more like an animal; actually, he depends on the tiger in a psychological sense. Somewhere in the novel, Pi confesses to readers:
“A part of me did not want Richard Parker to die at all, because if he died I would be left alone with despair, a foe even more formidable than a tiger” (Martel 164). Pi’s encounter with the animal partially annuls his human identity and causes him to deviate from his human subjectivity.
In Life of Pi, Pi makes inoperative the hierarchy of man’s primacy over animal.
This renders possible, in Deleuze and Guattari’s terminology, a “line of flight” in his life story. The line of flight suspends the working of the anthropological machine that separates man from animal and allows him to free himself from the assumed
relationship between man and animal. This sets him on the path to becoming-animal that leads to the deterritorialization of his subject as a human in a Deleuze-Guattarian sense or results in the process of desubjectification in an Agambenian sense. Because of this, Pi can have a conversation with the tiger. One time when he feels that both Parker and he are going to die soon because of sickness and hunger, he “touch[es]”
36 Borrowing the concept of bare life from Giorgio Agamben, De Boever explains: “neither human life nor animal life, bare life refers to a kind of inhuman life in between all chairs, a life that has been stripped of its ethical and political ways of life, or rather whose ethical and political ways of life have become indistinguishable from the simple fact of its living, its biological life” (18-19).
Parker for the first time (Martel 240), and then he hears Parker speak to him: “I [Pi]
laughed. I knew it. I wasn’t hearing voices. I hadn’t gone mad. It was Richard Parker who was speaking to me! The carnivorous rascal. All this time together and he had chosen an hour before we were to die to pipe up. I was elated to be on speaking terms with a tiger” (246). They talk about different kinds of food and, what is more
important, the question of man and animal. When Pi asks Parker whether it kills people, Parker replies “yes” (246) and says: “It was the doing of a moment. It was circumstance” (247). Pi comments that Parker’s killing people is called “instinct”
(247). Then they continue their conversation:
“Instinct, it’s called instinct. Still, answer the question, any regrets now?”
“I don’t think about it.”
“The very definition of an animal. That’s all you are.”
“And what are you?”
“A human being, I’ll have you know.”
“What boastful pride.” (247)
Pi comments that Parker is the “very definition of an animal” because Parker does not think about the question of whether it is regretful to kill people. When asked by Parker about what his identity is, Pi replies that he is a human being. Parker
comments that his reply is of “boastful pride.” In this scene, Parker is the friend who plays the third party to challenge Pi’s position as a human being. Throughout the journey, Pi gets closer to the other; otherwise, he will not hear the tiger speak to him.