Becoming-Animal in Yann Martel’s Life of Pi
B. Pi’s Two Islands
The figure of the Other is not only manifest in the tiger but is also implicit in the island that Pi temporarily stays on. The attraction of using islands as fictional background settings, Rebecca Weaver-Hightower writes, is “more deeply rooted,
stemming, in fact, from the island’s ability to enable a fantasy that colonization writ large is ‘natural,’ or oriented in organic systems of the body and natural world” (xvii).
The appeal of literary islands lies in the vantage point they offer for imagining “the other” world, which brings reality and imagination on the same level and summons up romance and anxiety at the same time. As she notes:
We are fascinated with islands, both real and imaginary, mysterious and elemental. Combining the allure of sexy sunset beaches with the
titillation of risk, islands evoke romance and danger. This lure of islands permeates literature. Particularly popular are stories, written during fifteenth- through early twentieth-century Europe’s colonization of much of the world, which typically tell of a person—most often a single man—stranded on an island, a castaway. He is forced to survive, usually on wits and coconuts alone, the perilous situations that island life often brings: hunger, loneliness, madness, fierce weather, cannibals, pirates, and monsters, real or imagined. (ix)
Weaver-Hightower best summarizes the features of castaways and their islands in literary representations. Underlying their attraction, literary islands attract castaways to experience risks and possible dangers on the islands, which may come from interior factors, such as survivors’ personal breakdowns, or from external factors, such as cannibals.
Cannibalism is a frequent theme that is used to characterize savages, offer an imagined picture of the alien, and reveal imperialistic superiority. Cannibalism has become a staple of castaway narratives, among which a notable example is, of course,
Robinson Crusoe. As Jennifer Brown points out, “Robinson Crusoe represents the
imperialist desire for mastery over all that is foreign, summed up by the need to incorporate rather than be incorporated” (23). After discovering a man’s footprint,Defoe’s Crusoe is obsessed with the fear of “being murther’d and devour’d” by cannibals (Defoe, Robinson Crusoe 119). Savages’ cannibalism serves as a contrast with Crusoe’s civility, and such a contrast inspires many later writers—in particular those who write “colonial romances,” including R. M. Ballantyne, H. Rider Haggard, and other adventure writers (J. Brown 22).
In Life of Pi, the theme of cannibalism also occurs but is presented in a different fashion. While Defoe’s Crusoe feels dreadful about being consumed by cannibals, Pi also experiences a similar fear of being consumed—not by his fellow human species but by a tiger as well as an island. Whereas Crusoe takes advantage of his weaponry to overwhelm cannibals and further control the natural environment on the island, Pi fails to dominate the island because the island is not Crusoe’s static, passive island but a dynamic, active one.
Unlike most islands, Pi’s island has no soil, no sand, no pebbles, no beaches, and appears to be composed of “an intricate, tightly webbed mass of tube-shaped seaweed” (Martel 257). This island, Pi describes, is “a chimera, a play of the mind”
(257). It is not a conventional island, for it is “a free-floating organism, a ball of algae of leviathan proportions” (271-72). That is, the island is not made of soil but of vegetation. The trees on this island are not rooted to soil but to the whole algae island.
As Pi observes, the relationship between the trees and algae is not parasitic but
“symbiotic” and mutualistic or, more appropriately, the roots of the trees join and become part of the algae (271). In a sense, the trees are becoming-alga; the algae are becoming-tree.
Different from Crusoe’s island, Pi’s is a lively figure—animate and voracious.
As the novel describes it:
The island was carnivorous. This explained the disappearance of the fish in the pond. The island attracted saltwater fish into its subterranean
tunnels—how, I don’t know; perhaps fish ate the algae as gluttonously as I did. . . . Whatever the case, they found themselves trapped in fresh water and died. Some floated up to the surface of the ponds, the scraps that fed the meerkats. At night, by some chemical process unknown to me but obviously inhibited by sunlight, the predatory algae turned highly acidic and the ponds became vats of acid that digested the fish. . . . This was why I had never seen anything but algae on the island. (Martel 281-82; emphasis added)
This description of the island troubles the binary opposition of animal and plant as well as the idea that the milieu must be a non-living being. Pi’s island is both an animal and a plant, for it consists of meat-eating algae. While the Eden myth in Crusoe’s island is utopian, its counterpart in Pi’s case is dystopian. The myth is
“reconfigured in a chilling biological reversal where trees consume men” (A. Brown).
The carnivorous character of the island evokes cannibalism in Robinson Crusoe, yet the threat posed to Pi is not by the cannibals but by the island itself.
Accidentally discovering an unknown adult’s thirty-two teeth wrapped within the leaves of a tree that appears to have fruit, Pi speculates on the reason behind the death of fish in the ponds and further finds out that the island is carnivorous. The teeth suggest the trace of an explorer who arrived on the island before him. This trace left by a human being is reminiscent of the one in Robinson Crusoe, i.e., the footprint of Friday. Both Crusoe and Pi feel no joy but dread when they discover the trace of the Other; however, they have different reasons. For Crusoe, the sovereign of his island, the trace of the Other suggests that his sovereignty and power will be challenged, and his life is thus threatened. In the case of Pi, the trace of the Other means that he may follow in the previous explorer’s footsteps, that is, to die. Although both fears are associated with death, Crusoe’s fear comes from a possible encounter with the Other
(more specifically, cannibals) that poses potential threat at the present time, whereas Pi’s fear comes from his connection with a dead traveler through human teeth, the remains of the past. After finding that the island is a carnivore, Pi leaves the place. To put it succinctly, Pi’s island is an animate milieu beyond man’s control.
The island under Martel’s pen reveals a trajectory moving from the
(post)colonial theme in Robinson Crusoe to the ecological one in Life of Pi. Because Crusoe can dominate, subject, and conquer the island as well as outsiders like cannibals, his island appears to be created to fulfill the colonist’s presupposed vision of a colony. Conversely, Pi’s island focuses on a survival-of-the-fittest milieu in which living beings need to adapt to their conditions and learn how to coexist with other living beings or they will die. If cannibalism in Robinson Crusoe suggests the
superiority of colonists over cannibals, the revision of cannibalism in Life of Pi brings in an ecological mindset—a reminder that we human beings are part of the ecosystem and that we are no better than other living beings. Therefore, we can say that Martel rewrites Crusoe’s anthropocentric and utopian island into an anti-anthropocentric and dystopian one.
Pi has two islands: one is the aforementioned carnivorous island; the other is the lifeboat. As Christopher Palmer notes, “Pi’s island is a small boat . . ., and we have a reassessment of the castaway’s life in nature” (96). While most Crusoe stories are set on an island, Martel’s use of the boat as a literary island is an unusual case. In contemporary Robinsonade narratives, we can find several examples that are not set on an island in the conventional sense. For instance, James Gould Cozzens’s