Back in the World, Or “The Story with Animals is the Better Story”
Human evolution can be seen not as a lifting out of animal life, an act of reflective distancing and meaning-making, but as a plunging back, deeper, into the body of the world itself in an act of appreciation. To turn back to the world in an act of what the philosopher Santayana calls “animalfaith,” as a deep noticing or witnessing, rather than to delve further into ourselves in narcissistic self-interest, is to become more “animal.”
—Alan Bleakley, The Animalizing Imagination, xiv
Alan Bleakley notes that anthrocentrism, in dividing human animals from the non-human animal world, has also divided us from our holistic selves throughout Western cultural history. Reminding us of one key part of that history in his Simulacra and Simulation, Jean Baudrillard argues that “animals were only demoted to the status of inhumanity as reason and humanism progressed” (133). Such definitions of nature have been succinctly summed up in Raymond Williams’s six-page passage on “nature” in his Keywords. Williams claims that “any full history of the uses of ‘nature’ would be a large part of the history of human thought” (186). While emphasis on the social construction of nature has occluded our direct contemplation of the natural world, nature continues to exist in an increasingly threatened relationship to human culture. Kate Soper offers her clever injunction to redirect our attention outward, away from nature as a linguistic reflection of ourselves, toward the threatened status of the natural world: “it is not language which has a hole in its ozone layer” (151). Bill McKibben also stresses an ecocentric gaze, focused outwardly on the natural world: “nature’s independence is its meaning; without it there is nothing but us” (54).
The problem of literatures and literary scholarship’s failure to address the divide between human and non-human animal worlds has been exacerbated by the ambivalent effect of literary theory on our discipline in recent decades. On one hand, recent currents of thought have had the positive effect of questioning established assumptions about “nature,” as WJ.T. Mitchell points out: “A modern consensus of cultural relativism, skepticism, and historicism has made the old notion of ‘Nature’ with a capital N something of an anachronism” (76). On the other hand, the old “verities” about nature have been replaced by a plethora of new constructions, all regarded as self-evident. It has become impossible to make unmediated statements about nature, especially in literary genres that are heavily fraught with textual conventions. Laurence Coupe notes that some literary theories have employed a “heavy-handed culturalism,” indulging in “the denial of nontextual existence”: he comments wittily that literary theories have, through their preoccupation with sign systems, placed all serious readers of literature in “a time of the signs” (2).
It is necessary to escape the theoretical assumptions that literature is about nothing but language, text, or culture, and to return to the now subversive view that, textual complexities notwithstanding, fiction may make meaningful statements about the world. If we can do so, we can properly approach contemporary novels that undertake a much-needed redefinition of our relationship with nature and of our way of being in the natural world. Yann Martel’s Life of Pi helps to lead us out of our long history of human-centredness, and to take us some distance along the road to a reattachment and regrounding in the animal world of which humans are a part. Life of Pi portrays human animals as creatures both shaped by culture and part of the animal world. In taking this balanced view, the novel (and this analysis of it) does not partake of what Charlene Spretnak calls a “deconstructive postmodernism” that fosters “a nihilistic disintegration of all values”; rather, the novel situates itself within what Spretnak calls “ecological or reconstructive postmodernism” that seeks to re-establish some clear values about the external world; an understanding of how the novel accomplishes this task can be had only through careful examination and clarification of the entire fictions textual complexity (21).
The first half of this article examines the ways in which Life of Pi presents an imaginative reconstruction of the place of human animals in the non-human animal world. Through the lifeboat symbol, the novel asserts the urgent need for reconciliation between humans and other animals in a world threatened by human dominance; it suggests that responsible stewardship is part of the way out of humans’ desensitized and destructive isolation from the animal world. Avoiding shallow sentiment, Pi also depicts the affective level of non-human animal life and of relations between human and non-human animals; it suggests that there is a spiritual dimension to this re-engagement with the animal world; it posits that an appreciation of animals’ aesthetic self-expression is another vehicle for human re-entry to the natural world; and it reminds us that this aesthetic appreciation takes place in the context of the harsh realities of natural predation. As a final point in its reconstruction of the human place in nature, the novel challenges the impermeable border between culture and nature. Pi insists that both humans and animals are simultaneously moral and amoral, and that this complex and unstable reality cannot be reduced to the corresponding dichotomy of culture versus nature. The deconstruction, to be discussed in the second half of this article, counters the imagining of semiotic animals derived from Freudian theory. The novel accomplishes this deconstruction through its metafictional level of commentary, so that the fictional construction of reality by the narrator, Pi, comes under critical scrutiny by the reader, thereby shining a critical light upon the use of Freudian theory to construct a barrier between the worlds of human and non-human animals.
“We are all alone,” Pi’s mother says to him, shortly before her horrific death (340). On the personal level, Pi is deeply hurt by the scornful and damning statement. On the level of symbol or allegory, the comment delivers the verdict of guilty on an anthrocentric civilization. The way out of the emotional, moral, and spiritual dead end of human self-centredness, the way back into the animal world, begins with the counter-premise stated by Pi, when he realizes that he must save the tiger in order to survive himself: “It was not a question of him or me, but of him and me. We were, literally and figuratively, in the same boat” (181). Pi answers his mother’s despairing assertion with his own hopeful one. On a literal level, Pi speaks of the slim hope of his own survival through his relationship with the tiger. On the symbolic level, the novel here evokes the survival of the human species through an interconnection with all living beings. The lifeboat symbol is introduced deftly, in a moment that has fictional credibility: Pi is initially shocked at his rationally incomprehensible action of pulling the tiger aboard the lifeboat (109), but on the symbolic level, his behaviour proves to be prescient. Through the lifeboat symbol, the novel presents a way out of human moral isolation and hopelessness. The orange paint on the inside of the lifeboat, reproduced on the novel’s cover (the North American edition), thus represents what the text calls “the colour of survival” for life on the earth (153), and the way out of the moral and practical predicament of a destructive anthrocentrism. Pi’s conclusion that his only means of survival is to “[k]eep him alive” (183) extrapolates into the message, “Keep them alive,” with regard to animal life on earth. Pi comes to this insight after he realizes that his plan of conducting a “war of attrition” against the Bengal tiger will not work: Richard Parker has greater powers of endurance and will outlast him easily (178). Here we have the symbolic warning that if the current mass extinction of species continues uncontrolled, the animals will outlive the humans. Franz J. Broswimmer, who describes the danger as “ecocide,” states the issue clearly: “If history teaches us anything, it is that our global impact on other species and habitats can be ignored only at our peril” (104).
Pi realizes, as his castaway journey continues, that he is now in the same position as his father was: he has become a zookeeper, and the boat is his zoo: “the lifeboat was resembling a zoo enclosure more and more” (209). This is the message of the lifeboat symbol for contemporary humans: we have taken charge, and thus for the sake of ourselves and the animals, we must make the planet our zoo rather than our slaughterhouse: our rapacious dominance has left us with only these two options. In regard to this elementally simple world view, Pi comments that life on a lifeboat is “like an endgame in chess, a game with few pieces” (241). The mastery humans have acquired over non-human animals is represented by the mastery Pi achieves through training Richard Parker. His use of that mastery to foster a symbiotic relationship rather than a predatory one represents the stewardship that is really his only practical option; as he notes, he stays alive because he feeds Richard Parker (248). Similarly, the far superior predator refrains from dispatching the puny human partly because he constantly provides food, and perhaps partly because the tiger also seeks a friendly relationship; after all, Pi’s realization that he must keep the tiger alive follows right after the tiger’s expression of “prusten,” which Pi describes as “a puff through the nose to express friendliness and harmless intentions” (181). Their friendly relationship offers obvious practical benefits for both; moreover, the benefits for Pi are not only practical but also emotional and moral: as Pi puts it, his arduous service to Richard Parker brings him “peace, purpose, and wholeness” (179). Symbolically, the novel proposes these benefits for all humans through a renewed stewardship of the natural world.
The relationship between Pi and the tiger is a testament that, in certain circumstances, a human can establish close emotional bonds with an individual animal of another species. This particular bond is put in the context of Pi’s knowledge of instances of zoomorphism (95). Cross-species adoptions are, he suggests, “evidence of that measure of madness that moves life in strange but saving ways” (95). His boyhood relationship with the young orangutan, O.J., who practised her maternal skills on Pi before she had her own babies, is another relationship of this kind (143). These are relationships of love, and the fiction presents them in deftly credible ways. Pi expresses his love for Richard Parker most intensely just after a potentially rescuing oil freighter has passed them by, almost killing them. Powerful emotions have been brought to the surface by the moment, so Pi shouts an affection that might have been otherwise unarticulated or even repressed in his unconscious (262).
In the lexicon of the novel, love is closely associated with faith. In his boyhood, when Pi cannot understand the Christian myth of God sacrificing his only son for humanity, Father Martin brings him to the religion by thrice repeating the reason for this sacrifice: love, love, love (61–62). “It is my heart that commands me,” says Pi, in recalling what brought him to Hinduism as a young boy (52). When he interviews Pi in Toronto, twenty years after his ordeal at sea, the fictional Yann Martel records his impression of the essence of Pi’s hard-won wisdom: in Pi’s words and character, he finds “a realization that the founding principle of existence is what we call love, which works itself out sometimes not clearly, not cleanly, not immediately, nonetheless ineluctably” (70; italics are the text’s). This conjuncture between love and faith lies behind Mr. Okamoto’s affirmation in the Mexican infirmary where he has just heard Pi relate first his story with animals and then his story without animals. The Japanese insurance investigator is a man of facts who has first doubted the credibility of Pi’s story with animals. Yet when asked which is better, he affirms that “the story with animals is the better story” (352). The story with animals foregrounds Pi’s loving faith in the animal world, while the story with humans foregrounds the brutal realities of physical survival. The symbolic implication is that, by approaching the natural world with a love that becomes a kind of faith, humans can link the individual soul to the world soul or the divine.
This sentence—“the story with animals is the better story”—is the text’s emphasis upon an alternative kind of spirituality based on the recognition of animal souls—the kind of awareness found in shamanistic societies. This emphasis must be deliberately uncovered and stressed by a careful rereading, for it is usually overshadowed, in critical discussions, by an emphasis upon Pi’s follow-up comment, “And so it goes with God.” This statement, inserted into the novel’s second Canadian edition but absent from the original British one (Canongate 312), redirects the reader’s attention to the topic of God as conceived in traditional Christian terms.1 In the context of a narrative about a man who is Hindu, Muslim, and Christian rolled into one pluralistic lover of God, the statement can be taken as supporting all formal religious belief. In countless reviews and interviews, Martel has chosen to emphasize this interpretation of the novel’s climactic moment of dialogue. Some reviewers have characterized Martel as taking a renegade stance in a predominantly secular Western world: one newspaper story by Rahul Jacob, headlined “It’s the better story,” asks: “Why does Life of Pi author Yann Martel feel the need to plead the unfashionable cause of religion in his work and in his life?” (Bio).2
A similar kind of affirmation appears in another key scene, at once comic and profound. The two Mr. Kumars praise the physical perfection of the zebra in the Pondicherry zoo, voicing their love through different forms of worship, one through a faith in Allah and the other through faith in science (93). Pi’s comment on the zebra—“It’s very pretty” (93)—appears mundane and insignificant but is full of pathos, as can be understood by placing it in the context of his frequent statements of appreciation for the aesthetic self-expression of animals and of the natural world. As a boy in Pondicherry, he has an overwhelming sensory awareness of the biodiversity of animal life, finding it “so bright, loud, weird, and delicate as to stupefy the senses” (16). In the moments just before the ship sinks, he is amazed by nature’s “thrilling show” (113). “What art, what might!” he exclaims, after watching the tiger kill the hyena (167). His greatest sense of wonder and happiness during his castaway experience comes from watching lightning strike the open sea (258–259).
These descriptions (avoiding the word “beauty” and its associations with conventionally beautiful images of animals and nature) form the other side of the coin to Pi’s extensive use of the usual anthrocentric metaphors of war, territorial-ism, and competition for survival in order to explain animal behaviour. Such functional interpretations of animal behaviour are favoured by our enculturation; thus, Pi’s comments on the aesthetic self-expression of animals could easily be overlooked or dismissed by the reader as insignificant. But in fact our reading must give deliberate priority to them as one of the novel’s depictions of a way back to our place in the animal world. Alan Bleakley suggests that this shift from a view of animal behaviour as functional to an appreciation of the aesthetic self-expression of animals will be revitalizing for human beings: Bleakley urges us to pay attention to the aspects of animal behaviour that are not fully explained by functionality but are at least partly a matter of an aesthetic self-representation that springs from individual or species identity (36). If we pay such attention to animals, he claims, “they will awaken us through their sensitivities, their aesthetic presence, to our self-imposed numbness to the world” (37). Pi expresses the wish to lay before us in words his boyhood awareness of the “perfection” of animals in the zoo: “I wish I could convey the perfection of a seal slipping into water or a spider monkey swinging from point to point or a lion merely turning its head” (16). Yet he confesses that he cannot make the necessary imaginative leap for us, leaving us to make it on our own: he adds that “language founders in such seas,” directing the reader to “picture it in your head if you want to feel it” (16). Here the novel emphasizes the reader’s responsibility for reimagining relations between human and non-human animals, and for taking our cues from a close observation of the aesthetic presence of the animals themselves.
This is not to suggest that learning from observing the aesthetic self-expression of animals in any way denies the realities of survival in nature. Any idealization of nature that blinds us to what Kate Soper calls “the dependence of life on the destruction of life” is unworkable, since it ignores “the compromised nature of all biotic relations to nature” (258). Pi must use his knowledge of animal territoriality in order to tame the tiger and to survive; though a fifteen-year-old vegetarian, he becomes an efficient killer in order to avoid becoming the tiger’s prey. Yet when he kills his first fish, he weeps over this “poor little deceased soul” (203). Although he admits in his story with animals to eating part of the body of the blind man, he also notes, “I pray for his soul every day” (284). This spiritual awareness of the soul of each being is similar to the spiritual practice of the Inuit hunters, as so powerfully presented in John Houston’s film, Diet of Souls. Here we find another suggestion that Pi’s spiritual awareness resembles that of shamanistic societies. Killing does not destroy Pi’s awareness of the creature’s soul or of its aesthetic appeal. In the very act of clubbing a dorado to death, he is intensely aware of its “death-knell iridescence”: in an evocative simile, he comments that killing the dorado was “like beating a rainbow to death” (205). A loving faith in the perfection of animal self-expression is thus part of an acceptance of the violent realities of natural life.
This inclusive world view provides a context for understanding, by contrast, the novel’s most mysterious and puzzling episode. On the level of plot, the algae island is a stock-in-trade element of the castaway potboiler: it is the apparent refuge that becomes a danger. On a symbolic level, the algae island appears, at first, with its dual capacities to nurture and to destroy life, to be an embodiment of the monstrously beautiful nature of life. Certainly, Pi is horrified by his discovery of the perfect set of thirty-two human teeth in the fruits of the tree, proving the island to be carnivorous (311). Yet he does not decide to leave the island because he is emotionally overcome by horror, or because of the physical dangers it poses. Since Pi has learned how to evade these dangers, he could stay on the island indefinitely, sleeping in the trees each night to avoid the landscape’s deadly poison and feasting on the plentiful algae each day. He chooses to leave because of a spiritual rather than a physical danger: as he puts it, the island offers a combination of “physical comfort and spiritual death” (313). On closer examination, the island is perhaps (among other things) the symbolic embodiment of a place akin to modern cultures: it is a place within nature where one can find a comforting escape from awareness of nature’s brutal laws. It is like modern cities, where millions are distanced from the violent realities of survival in nature and also from any spiritual understanding of those realities.
The ultimate message delivered by the novel about the nature/culture divide is that it is not an unbridgeable gap: it can be leaped by imagination, heart, and loving faith. Several passages deliberately blur the border between what we conventionally think of as the dichotomy of the “wild” versus the “civilized.” Pi points out that animals in the wild are not free, as popular mythology has it; rather, their behaviour is guided by the rules of their community and the laws of survival; hence, animals are conservative in outlook rather than essentially free, as we like to think (17–18). The novel suggests that humans also are much more constrained by convention (or herd behaviour) and necessity than we prefer to admit. In the novel’s first section, witness the passionate objections to Pi worshipping God in different religions at the same time; in the second, note how necessity dictates his every move. Metaphors reinforce the point that nature and culture are alike: the animal life of the sea is described in human terms as a city of multi-layered “submarine traffic” (194); the microcosm of sea life that establishes itself on the bottom of the lifeboat is “an upside-down town” (119). Similes blur the border between nature and culture for comic or evocative effect: Pi’s spicy food makes Martel feel “like a boa constrictor that has swallowed a lawn mower” (47); Pi tells readers that when he first drank water on the lifeboat, “blood started flowing through my veins like cars from a wedding party honking their way through town” (158). For Pi’s father, being a zookeeper has similarities to his former occupation of being a hotelkeeper (14–15).
Life of Pi asserts that both human and non-human animals are simultaneously free and constrained. In varying degrees, depending upon the actions of the individual animal in the specific instance, human and non-human animal behaviour spans the spectrum from the morally self-governed to the amorally impulsive. The narrative conveys the kind of complex but irreducible truth that Barry Lopez praises in Inuit stories of nature, while he points out that the complex truths of these stories are often dismissed by scientists: “The Eskimos’ stories are politely dismissed not because Eskimos are not good observers or because they lie, but because the narrative cannot be reduced to a form that is easy to handle or lends itself to summary” (300). Within literary criticism, similar misreadings occur because of the same desire to reduce texts to what Barney Nelson calls “another troublesome dichotomy.” Nelson insists that in his essay “Walking,” Thoreau “does not define the domestic and the wild as polar opposites.” Correcting current readings of the essay, Nelson insists that it cannot be reduced to a plea for wilderness preservation any more than Thoreau’s “sublime nature” can be illuminated through comparison with current television depictions of nature as “a safe, nurturing, and passive place.” Nelson insists that Thoreau wrote his essay in praise of the “wild beauty” that is ineradicable in all humans and other animals; as Nelson puts it, Thoreau argued that this wildness “cannot be bred out, beaten out, preached out, or domesticated out of any animal, including the human” (6–7).
The border we have drawn between culture and nature is constantly crossed and recrossed in actual experience; moreover, this border must also be constantly redefined or redrawn. Idealistic representations of nature that deny this complex reality are, as Kate Soper argues, “cautionary tales against the temptation to suppose that human relations to nature can be resolved from a position of moral absolutism” (258). While Pi utters a generalized warning against the human tendency to invent oversimplifying dichotomies of nature versus culture, Pi’s dual narrative also presents a deconstruction of one specific dichotomy that has dominated 20th-century Western culture. Alan Bleakley suggests that the most influential anthrocentric concept to emerge in the 20th century was Freud’s famous assertion, in Civilization and its Discontents, that culture originates in the repression of the instincts of unbounded sexuality and aggression. Bleakley reminds us that Freud went on to insist that “a country that has attained a high degree of civilization” is one in which “wild and dangerous animals have been exterminated” and “the breeding of tamed and domesticated ones prospers” (qtd. in Bleakley 33). For Freud, the one necessary and unavoidable precondition of a higher form of human culture, something that could be called a “civilization,” was the human taming of the wild instincts of sexual desire and aggression through ego defence mechanisms. In the wake of Freud, non-human animals have come to represent the “wildness,” meaning either sexuality or aggression or both, that must be repressed or sacrificed by human animals in order to be fully civilized and therefore not animal.
The powerfully self-reflective level of the novel’s depiction of the human animal/non-human animal divide is announced when Pi recalls that in the Pondicherry zoo, just beyond the ticket booth, his father, the zoos manager, had placed a sign in bright red letters: “DO YOU KNOW WHICH IS THE MOST DANGEROUS ANIMAL IN THE ZOO?” Below the sign hung a curtain, and behind the curtain, a mirror. Pi goes on to say that his father believed in an even more dangerous species, “Animalus anthropomorphicus, the animal as seen through human eyes” (34). The danger of the anthropomorphized animal is that it robs us of an accurate view of the world, and, in so doing, of a proper basis for our knowledge and morality. It could also be said that the author who anthropomorphizes is even more dangerous, since she or he creates the anthropomorphized animal and thus perpetuates the misleading metanarrative.
Pi attests that “[t]he obsession with putting ourselves at the centre of everything is the bane not only of theologians but also of zoologists” (34). His story shows him to be true to this awareness, but only partially. The strength of his dual narrative is its portrayal of the dilemma of Pi as an author (of his own survival story) who sees beyond his culture’s preconceptions of nature but is also limited by them. Pi’s story with animals introduces him to the reader as the visionary thinker who is able to see the animal world in an imaginative and saving way. His story without animals reveals, through the complex series of Freudian correspondences it establishes with his story with animals, that Pi is also the unwitting voice of an anthrocentric world view. In this reading, the story with animals is an elaborate fabulation, framed for the purpose of sheltering Pi’s consciousness from his repressed memories of his brutal aggression: in Freudian theory, neurosis is the human condition. By imagining Richard Parker as an aesthetically appealing, admired, and loved expression of his id, Pi both accepts his aggression and distances himself from its ungovernable essence, represented in the story with animals by the reprehensible and ugly hyena, which, in turn, represents his own inadmissible actions.
The Freudian assumption that the story without animals is the one that matters is associated with Western culture’s reverence for factual truth over artistic truth.3 In this interpretation, the story with animals represents “art” or “fiction,” while the story without animals represents “reality” or “fact.” In this view, when the insurance investigators express a stunned inability to believe his animal story, Pi is able to reach into his repressed memories and to access the “reality” or the “facts” of his experience. The interpretation draws attention to “facts” that arouse painful emotions of guilt, shame, shock, and remorse. In the story without animals, Pi admits to actions that had been fictionalized or disguised in his story with animals: that he watched helplessly while the cook killed his mother (343); that he held his mother’s severed head in his hands before dropping it into the sea (344); that he killed the cook, tore out his heart and ate it, and then consumed much of his flesh (345).
In order to deconstruct the Freudian interpretation, the novel must first give it some detailed credibility, so that we know exactly what is being deconstructed. This building up of evidence for a Freudian interpretation is accomplished partly by establishing Pi’s longstanding emotional fragility. In his student days in Toronto, he is “sad and gloomy,” with a “shattered self” that is soothed only by studying the sloth, an animal that attempts nothing and risks nothing more than a minimal subsistence, and therefore represents a comic alternative to Pi’s hard-won experience (3). In photographs of those student days, Pi has “a smile every time, but his eyes tell another story” (96). He has begun to hoard food in the Mexican infirmary, and still does so in the present: visiting his home, Yann Martel finds that “his cupboards hold a reserve of food to last the siege of Leningrad” (27). Though he loves Canada, he is not fully adapted to its climate after a twenty-year residence, wearing a large winter parka in mild fall weather (8). Food aplenty and comfortable warmth are obsessive elaborations or “reaction formations” that help repress his disturbing memories of their opposites: the starvation and deadly tropical heat that marked Pi’s 227 days as a castaway (Badcock 172–173).
Lending further credibility to the Freudian view, the novel suggests that Pi’s story with animals has been an effective means of salvaging his traumatized superego and preserving a sense of himself as a moral being. While in the process of interviewing Pi in his Toronto home, Yann Martel has a salient impression of a man who possesses “a trusting sense of presence and of ultimate purpose” and a keen awareness of “an alignment of the universe along moral lines” (70; italics are the text’s). In a Freudian sense, Pi has managed to live out the maxim of his boyhood school in Pondicherry, Nil Magnum Nisi Bonum, “No Greatness without Goodness” (96), and he has accomplished this feat by using his story with animals as his ultimate survival tool.
Having established ample evidence for a Freudian interpretation, the novel provides four clues that this reading is to be questioned. The first clue is found in a significant stylistic detail: the second of Pi’s two stories is not referred to in the novel as “the story with humans”; rather, it is called “the story without animals” (352). This phrasing suggests, contrary to the Freudian view, that the story about humans is the one that is lacking because it focuses upon the inner world of human emotion rather than on the outer world of natural reality. The second clue is in the suggestion that the Freudian assumptions about fact versus fiction may be inverted: the story without animals may be the invention, provided by Pi when Mr. Okamoto, after admitting that the two investigators liked the story with animals very much, insists that “we would like to know what really happened” (335). Pi replies with a statement that questions their expectations and assumptions: “You want a story that won’t surprise you. That will confirm what you already know. That won’t make you see higher or further or differently” (336). Prefacing his narration with this disclaimer, he proceeds to relate the story without animals. This comment suggests that the story without animals may be the invention, presented merely to satisfy the investigators’ assumptions, and that therefore the story with animals is the “true story” within the fiction, despite its incredible elements.
The third means of questioning the Freudian interpretation is by accepting its assumptions about factuality and fictionality, but insisting that both are crucial aspects of Pi’s reality and thus essential to the meaning of the overall narrative. We may accept the story with humans as the ugly truth of Pi’s experience, and the story with animals as his defence mechanism, his means of protecting himself from conscious pain. We may accept his story with animals as his psychological survival tool. Yet, even if his story with animals is an invention, it is an effective way for Pi to survive as a moral being; it is a splendid story that allows Pi to see higher and further and differently. The same is true, moreover, for readers of the novel: the story with animals allows readers to participate in an imaginative re-envisioning of animals and in an important redefining of the culture/nature divide. Unless we invent and imagine, the fictional Yann Martel says in his Author’s Note, “we end up believing in nothing and having worthless dreams” (xi). Fourth, the many parts of the novel that present to the reader a hopeful, varied, and sensible portrayal of the human re-entry into the animal world (as outlined in the first half of this article) constitute the most persuasive evidence for the novel’s deconstruction of the Freudian reading. Considering these many parts, we must conclude that the novel as a whole encourages us to give priority to this reimagining of the world as a home to human and non-human animals.
Rather than urging us to accept either the story with animals or the story without animals as “the truth” within the fiction, the novel may advise us to try to understand the equal and necessary places of both stories within the overall narrative. It is noteworthy that our fictional author, Yann Martel, does not immediately believe the promise of Mr. Adirubasamy that Pi’s story “will make you believe in God” (viii). Even after a year of interviewing Pi in Toronto, Martel does not consider Pi’s story to have this inspirational power. Only after the insurance investigators send him the audio tapes, including Pi’s spoken versions of both the story with animals and the story without animals (the second of which Martel has not yet heard), does Martel begin to believe that Pi’s story has such a strong inspirational quality (x). Only when he hears the overall narrative, enclosing the two stories with their intricate correspondences, does Martel understand the choice to be made, and the inspirational power of making the right choice. For Martel, the better story entails a belief in God and formal religion; for readers, it may affirm the many dimensions (including the spiritual) of an imaginative reorientation to the human and non-human animal world.
Similarly, both the Freudian overview and what we might call the “ecological” interpretation are sketched in detail, so that the novel can advise the reader that it is time in the history of the world for humans to reject the former and to accept the latter. The novel points out that the Freudian interpretation is anthrocentric: as Alan Liu puts it, “Nature is the name under which we use the non-human to validate the human” (38). In the Freudian dichotomy of human civility versus animal wildness, the validation of “the human” takes the form of a vindication of some specific and partial aspects of the human. By finding nature to reflect these limited elements of the human, we create inadequate definitions of both nature and human nature. While the Freudian view emphasizes a “wild” human aggression and our neurotic cultural controls upon it, coupled with the corollary that non-human animals are absolutely other in their amoral brutality, the novel deconstructs this view by asking what this analysis gains for us. Alan Liu’s notion that our constructions of nature allow us “to interpose a mediation to make humanity more easy with itself” is applicable here only in a specific sense, for Pi is not “comforted” in any commonly expected sense by his knowledge of the dark side of the psyche. Rather, the emotional payoff of giving credence to the Freudian view of nature and culture seems to be in the acquisition of an authentic knowledge—often depicted as a descent into darkness. Like Conrad’s Marlowe or Coleridge’s ancient mariner, Pi has immersed in the destructive element and gained a dark wisdom that counterpoints his enlightened or civilized values. Pi’s tiger is deliberately in the tradition of Blake’s “Tyger”: going further than simply admiring the animal’s “fearful symmetry,” Pi has befriended and loved the elemental energy of Richard Parker. In his troubled mind, he has married heaven and hell, culture and nature.
Yet the novel urges a reassessment of this now-familiar journey motif, because it may be false, distancing, and mutually destructive for both human and other animals. We need an understanding of all animals, including human ones, that is more multi-dimensional, more imaginative, more a matter of feeling and faith—an understanding that is also a more sensible and practical response to our historical predicament of having taken control of the natural world, and now being in danger of destroying it and ourselves.
Contrary to Freud’s theories, animals do not represent the wildness of humans (any more than they are merely walking larders for us to use at our convenience), and humans do not need to deny their wildness in order to be civilized; rather, both animals and humans are simultaneously wild and civilized. This can be seen in Pi’s dual narrative when we examine the human and non-human characters who are marginalized by the Freudian emphasis upon the “wildness” in its most extreme form of the hyena. We have both the orangutan and Pi’s mother, representing the brave, vigilant, and self-sacrificing morality of nurturing that is found in both human and non-human animals. We have the natural beauty and dignified suffering represented by both the zebra and the Taiwanese sailor. We have both Pi and the tiger, representing the morality of killing only out of necessity (except for Richard Parker’s “running amok” with the meerkats on the algae island). In the light of these other representations, the Freudian dichotomy between the civilized human and the wild animal breaks down: we are forced to conclude that both human and non-human animals are simultaneously wild and civilized.
The same recognition of a more complex reality also serves to deconstruct the dichotomy between the social construction of nature and the direct observation of the real thing. As Peter Barry notes, the fact that nature is regarded differently in different cultures doesn’t call its reality into question: Berry says comically, “I can point to my own bald head as evidence of the over-arching grand narrative of nature which contains us all in the cycle of growth, maturity, and decay” (254). No concept can deny nature’s undeniable “grand narratives.” No social construction of nature can ever be the single totalizing truth about nature, nor can any direct observation of nature posit an objective truth that supplants all concepts (or even all other observations). As Michael Branch wisely insists, ecocritics must accept the paradox that “‘nature’ is both a cultural construct and a grounding in reality” (50). Pi’s narrative is located at sea in order to dislocate its themes from national, regional, and local cultural conventions of animal depiction. Extirpated from such soil (indeed, from all soils), the narrative enables readers to voyage outward from their cultural moorings. The novel’s deconstruction of the 20th-century Freudian dichotomy of nature versus culture is another means of freeing us from our preconceptions, so that we can begin to move away from the assumption that the story with humans is the only story. We can move toward the recognition that, given the choice of stories set before us by the novel, “the story with animals is the better story.” Having chosen the more inclusive and inspired story, we can begin to live out our choice in action, undertaking a journey back into the world that is not only personal and psychological but also practical and cultural.4
1. In the original Canongate edition, three lines of dialogue are not present at this point in the story. Pi does not ask the insurance investigators which story they liked better, Mr. Okamoto does not say that he thinks the story with animals is the better story, and Pi does not direct attention to God and religion by saying “And so it goes with God.” These additions to the North American edition clearly convey the author’s decision to give greater emphasis, at this key point in the plot, to the novel’s affirmation of formal religion.
2. The phrase “in his life” may be somewhat misleading here. It is not certain that Martel does plead the cause of religion in his everyday life *—that is, his life as it exists outside of conference speeches and newspaper interviews relating to this novel. It is clear that he is a nonreligious man and a non-believer, as he admits to Jacob and has stated many times. This is a surprising contrast, for there is usually some consistency between an author’s personal position on religion or faith and the thematic position advocated in his or her fictional texts. One can offer only informed speculations about the possible reasons for this contrast. First, by having a narrator/hero who is Christian, Hindu, and Muslim all at once, Martel is able to create a text that challenges religious exclusivity, prejudice, and inter-religious conflict. Second, he is also able to explore in this text the challenging parallels between faith in narrative or art and faith in God: the novel is explicit about these thematic parallels. Third, since the text does firmly support the world’s three leading religions, and by extension all formal religion, it points out that religions may lead the way to a proper understanding of the environmental issues currently besetting the globe, as my argument demonstrates. Since Martel admits that he is a non-believer in his personal life, his pleading the cause of religion in relation to Life of Pi is probably motivated by the desire of the renegade thinker to give fictional voice to these important themes associated with religion in the text.
3. In a reading at Grant MacEwan College on Feb. 12, 2003, Martel stated his awareness of this reverence. In answer to a question about whether Pi is a real person, Martel commented that he did not wish to answer the question, for fear that an answer of “no” would play into our cultural preference for fact over fiction and thus lead us to take the novel less seriously.
4. The difficulty of making this journey is acknowledged in the novel’s reference to Ganesha, the Hindu god of good luck, overcomer of obstacles, and patron of literature and learning, whose framed picture hangs in the entrance to Pi’s Toronto home (50). In the Hindu story, Ganesha is given an elephant’s head in place of his own (Knott 52), expressing symbolically the dramatic (and fantastical) shift in perspective needed for humans to come back into the animal world. The fictional Yann Martel reminds us that the shift begins with compassion when he praises Ganesha as representing “Sympatico in the Highest” (50).
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