Becoming-Animal in Yann Martel’s Life of Pi
I. Life of Pi and Its Predecessors
The Canadian writer Yann Martel’s Life of Pi (2001) is a novel that revolves around how the protagonist Pi, an Indian boy, lives together with Richard Parker, a Bengal tiger, on the same lifeboat for 227 days after a shipwreck in which his parents, his brother, and nearly all of his father’s zoo animals perish.35 Although four
animals—a zebra with a broken leg, a female orangutan, a hyena, and a tiger—at first accompany Pi in the lifeboat, in the end only the tiger remains alive while the other three die in combat or of wounds; thus, the tiger becomes Pi’s only companion throughout the sea journey. The novel rewrites classical shipwreck and castaway narratives, including Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798), Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851), Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838), as well as its major intertextual reference, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (Huggan and Tiffin 189; Innes 25). In fact, Defoe’s work is mentioned in Life of Pi, with the most explicit reference appearing in the conversation between Pi and his mother.
When Pi badgers his mother to allow him to be baptized, she does not respond to his request immediately but distracts his attention by asking whether he has read the books on the bookshelf, one of which is Robinson Crusoe (Martel 73).
The intertextuality between Robinson Crusoe and Life of Pi can be observed in
35 Life of Pi is an international bestseller that has won several literary awards—including the 2002 Man Booker Prize for fiction, the 2003 South African Boeke Prize, and the 2004 Asian Pacific American Award for Literature in Best Adult Fiction for the years 2001–2003—and was adapted into a film directed by Ang Lee in 2012.
several aspects. Like Robinson Crusoe, Life of Pi blurs the distinction between fiction and reality. The preface of Robinson Crusoe attempts to validate the authenticity of Crusoe’s (fictional) adventure by stating that “[t]he Editor believes the thing to be a just History of Fact; neither is there any Appearance of Fiction in it . . .” (Defoe 3).
Similarly, the “Author’s Note” in Life of Pi is on the surface narrated by the author Martel himself, but is in fact uttered by a “semifictional” narrator (Stephens 41). This
“Martel-like” narrator-author functions as a character in the novel (Innes 26). In the Note, he talks about his journey in India, which inspires him to write the novel, and at the end he expresses his thanks to some people, including “Mr. Tomohiro Okamoto, of the Japanese Ministry of Transport, now retired” (Martel xii). Tomohiro Okamoto is a character in Life of Pi, a Japanese official who inquires about the shipwreck of the Japanese cargo liner Tsimtsum that was scheduled to carry Pi and his family to
Canada. It is at this point that Martel conflates fiction and reality. The narrator-author appears to act as an indirect witness whose role becomes part of the novel’s project because he proves the real existence of this (fictional) character, Tomohiro Okamoto, and thus implicitly asserts the truth of Pi’s adventure. Moreover, Defoe and Martel both provide specific times and locations in their novels, and this apparently purports to persuade readers to believe that their protagonists’ adventures are truthful.
Similar to Defoe, Martel—coincidentally or purposely—mentions Taiwan in
Life of Pi. In The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, Formosa (presently Taiwan)
is referred to as a temporary stopover for rest and refreshment on Crusoe’s sea route to China. As the novel describes it: “and then we steered north, till we came to the latitude of 22 degrees 30 seconds, by which means we made the island of Formosa directly, where we came to an anchor, in order to get water and fresh provisions, which the people there, who are very courteous in their manners . . .” (Defoe, FartherAdventures 165). In Life of Pi, the crew of the Japanese ship Tsimtsum is Taiwanese,
and the Taiwanese sailor is compared to the zebra in the second version of Pi’s adventure story told to the Japanese.
In terms of the plotline, both novels involve the protagonist’s childhood, survival from a shipwreck, final rescue, and recovery. Yet, in Life of Pi, the main setting shifts from an island to a lifeboat; the two protagonists, from a white man and a native to a tiger and an Indian boy. While Defoe’s Crusoe, representing the
colonial’s desire to expand colonies, is engaged with overproduction, accumulation, and property, Martel’s Pi asks mainly for basic needs of survival. Martel reworks the themes of castaway and sea voyage canonized by Robinson Crusoe, and revises the relationship between Crusoe and Friday, self and other, master and slave.
The originality of Life of Pi is suspected because its main plot—narrating the story of a male castaway who survives a shipwreck and stays in the same boat with a feline—is similar to that of the Portuguese novella Max and the Cats (1981; translated into English in 1990) written by the Brazilian Jewish writer Moacyr Scliar. Scliar accused Martel of plagiarism in 2002. When interviewed and asked by Luciana Camargo Namorato about Martel’s use of his work and his view on literary influence, Scliar says, “To be influenced by other writers is very common. . . . But to copy is something very different. It is plagiarism” (Scliar and Namorato 45). Scliar clearly thinks that Martel stole his ideas. Denying plagiarism, Martel always claims that he never read Max and the Cats but conceived of his story of Pi from John Updike’s review on this novella in the New York Review of Books (NYRB); however, according to Michael Titlestad, we cannot find this review in the NYRB (212). In the “Author’s Note” in Life of Pi, moreover, Martel implicitly admits Scliar’s influence on him because he expresses his sense of gratitude to Scliar “for the spark of life” (xii).
Although the question of whether Life of Pi is original can be debatable, it is not my concern here to discuss to what degree Life of Pi imitates the plot of Max and the
Cats. My concern is to explore the encounters and relationships among humans,
animals, and their environments in the novel. In this chapter, I argue that Life of Pi, rather than validating the line between man and animal, can be fruitfully read as a novel that calls for ecological thought, a thought that stresses coexistence—more specifically, a philosophy of interconnectedness with other living or non-living beings.Furthermore, such a philosophy reflects not only on ethical issues (concerning the encounter between man and animal, the self and the other, or in a broader sense, living beings and their milieus), but also on religious issues underlying the novel. I will start with exploring the relationship between Pi and the tiger considering the concept of friendship, with reference to Nietzsche’s and Giorgio Agamben’s philosophies of the friend. I will contend that the Other, the tiger, is not only Pi’s enemy but also his friend. It is this friendship that triggers his inner power and paves the way for reshaping the human-animal relationship. Then, I argue that Pi is
“becoming-animal” in the Deleuze-Guattarian sense. The animal’s otherness impels Pi not only to transcend himself but also to overcome humanism imposed upon him.
That is, staying with the animal and learning from nature, Pi gets closer to the Other.
Following the issue of the Other, I will also examine Pi’s relationship with the milieu, that is, his two islands. Finally, I will examine how the ecological and animal issues intersect with religion in the novel, that is, how the protagonist’s religious views have influence on his being with the Other.