I: Introduction
Life of Pi is a 2001 philosophical novel written by Yann Martel. Issues of spirituality and metaphysics are explored from an early age by the titular character and protagonist, Piscine Molitor “Pi” Patel, an Indian boy from Pondicherry who recognizes divine truth in all religions, focusing particularly on his Hindu faith, Christianity, and Islam.
The novel has sold more than ten million copies worldwide, after having been rejected by at least five London publishing houses, then accepted by Knopf Canada. Martel won the Man Booker Prize in 2002, among other literature awards. Ang Lee made a movie adaptation in 2012, with Suraj Sharma as Pi when a teen.
Here is a link to quotes from the book.
The story is understood to be one that will make the reader “believe in God,” as a local Indian told Martel at the Indian Coffee House on Nehru Street in Pondicherry, a small territory south of Madras on the coast of Tamil Nadu (pages xii-xiii). By the time I finished reading the novel, though, I found myself with even less reason to believe in God than when I’d started. In any case, Martel found Pi, the man who would tell him this story, back in Canada, in Toronto (page xv).
This opening information is found in the “Author’s Note,” which ends with Martel making a plea to support our artists, without whom we’ll lose imagination in favour of “crude reality,” we’ll believe in nothing, and we’ll have “worthless dreams.” This idea ties in with the notion of belief in God as preferable to atheism. Artists make things up, including mythical tales (see my Tanah chapters for examples), for these come from our imagination.
I’m convinced that Pi has made up the whole story of surviving on a lifeboat with animals, as preferred to the crude reality of being on the boat with his mother, the cook, and the Taiwanese sailor. Imagination and religious belief are our escapes from the horrors of reality, which make us believe in nothing and give us worthless dreams.
This preference of theism over atheism is linked to the philosophy of absurdism, in which we insist on giving life an artificial meaning in spite of life’s obvious, ongoing lack of it. I explored this idea in The Old Man and the Sea. In my analysis of Hemingway‘s novella, I read Santiago’s ultimately failed attempt at bringing a huge marlin ashore as an allegory of man’s ever-failing attempt to bring meaning to life. The opium of religion attempts the same thing for us. We must imagine Sisyphus happy, but how can he be?
Bear in mind, Dear Reader, that I am no better when it comes to maintaining such illusions. I plead guilty as charged when it comes to constructing comforting illusions in my posts on The Three Unities, Beyond the Pairs of Opposites, The Unity of Space, Synchronicity and September 11th, etc. I, too, have tried to make meaning in a meaningless universe, for such is the absurdity of the human condition.
II: Part One–Toronto and Pondicherry
Now begins the narrative from Pi’s own perspective. A key thing to understand about first-person narrators is that they generally tend to be unreliable. Someone who claims to have survived on a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger for months in the middle of the Pacific Ocean? We may like the story of the animals on the lifeboat better than that of him with the cook, Pi’s mother, and the Taiwanese sailor…but that doesn’t make the former story true.
Pi begins by saying that his suffering left him “sad and gloomy,” and a combination of his studies and religion “slowly brought [him] back to life” (page 3). The trauma he experienced on the lifeboat–the cook’s amputation of the leg of the injured sailor, who dies soon after and whose body is sliced into pieces for fish bait, then some pieces eaten by the cook, who later kill’s Pi’s mother before the boy’s eyes, then Pi avenges her by killing the cook and eating his body–is unbearable. This is why religion is so important to Pi. He’s begging God for forgiveness…in all religious traditions, just to be sure. As a murderer and a cannibal, he needs redemption, salvation.
How much he was interested in religion as a child we cannot know for sure, since so much of his narration is coloured with the emotional effect of the ordeal he suffered on the lifeboat. We must keep this reality in mind as we go through his narrative, for properly understood, his autobiography is presented as a myth, which in turn is a fanciful distortion of actual events. The “life of Pi” may be an entertaining story, but it is by no means reliable.
He says that “death sticks so closely to life” because of envy, jealousy, and that death is in love with life (pages 6 and 7). I’m reminded of Blake‘s line, “Eternity is in love with the productions of time.” I suspect that Pi, in his university studies, has learned the Blake quote; he’s replaced “the productions of time” with life, and “Eternity” (i.e., God) with death, which I read as a Freudian slip, revealing his true, unconscious feelings about the nature of the divine.
He was named after a swimming pool–Piscine Molitor (page 9), because Mamaji–a good friend of Pi’s family, and whom he saw as an uncle–was a champion competitive swimmer who found the Piscine Molitor to be the most glorious of all swimming pools (page 14).
The learning and practice of swimming, “doing a stroke with increasing ease and speed, over and over,” leads to a state of hypnosis, with the water coning to a state of “liquid light.” (page 12). The association here of swimming with hypnosis, a meditative state of trance, suggests the association of water with the divine, the infinite ocean of Brahman.
Such associations lead to an important point about what the protagonist’s name means symbolically. He’s been named after a swimming pool, a small enclosure of water; he’ll later be surrounded in the water of the Pacific Ocean, in the Mariana Trench, a seemingly infinite vastness of water. The swimming pool in the ocean is like Atman at one with Brahman; Piscine in the Pacific. He won’t experience nirvana there, though.
The trauma he experiences there is so overwhelming that he, as I explained above, uses religion to help him restore a sense of mental stability. And as I’ve argued in a number of other posts, the mystical experience is not one of sentimentality, all sunshine and rainbows: heaven and hell, nirvana and samsara, sin and sainthood, are in dialectical proximity, where the head of the ouroboros (heaven) bites its tail (hell). Such an extremity is what Pi experiences out there in his lifeboat with the tiger.
Since Pi grew up in a family with a father who owned a zoo in Pondicherry, he has a perspective on animals in captivity that differs from many of us who deplore the sight of caged animals. He sees zoo animals as much happier than those out in the wild (pages 20-25), and he gives a persuasive argument for this position. Animals in the wild, to him, are like the homeless. Zoos guarantee animals food, and give them security, safety, and a sense of routine and structure.
All I know is what I once saw in a zoo not too far a drive from my city of residence in East Asia back in 1996: a huge gorilla in a cage in which it barely had room to roam around. All one had to do was look at its face to see how terribly unhappy it was. Its whole life was sitting there, being stared at by people. That it would come around regularly and bang on the bars was a clear sign that it wanted out. I’m not saying all, or even most, zoos are this insensitive to animals’ emotional needs (I hope not!), but clearly some have been this way, and that’s already too many.
In any case, for Pi, zoos provide the same service for animals that religions provide for man: in their limiting of freedom, they provide structure and safety (or so religions promise, at least). For many of us, though, that limiting of freedom, as for that gorilla I saw in that cage, is a problem in itself not to be trivialized. Pi’s preference of structure and security over the unpredictable wildness of freedom is the kind of thing Erich Fromm wrote about in Escape from Freedom: individual freedom can cause fear, anxiety, and alienation, whereas relinquishing freedom and embracing authoritarianism in such forms as religion can provide feelings of security.
After experiencing the tohu-wa-bohu, if you will, of months on the Pacific Ocean, Pi is starving not just for food, but for structure. The formless void that the ocean represents is, psychologically speaking, Lacan‘s notion of The Real, a state of affairs that cannot be verbalized or symbolized, because its content cannot be differentiated–hence its traumatic quality.
Religion is what has restored a sense of structure to Pi’s life, thus delivering him from psychological fragmentation and a psychotic break from reality. The God delusion has saved him from just plain delusion.
There’s an element of narcissism in the pious, despite their professed humility. In being members of ‘the one, true faith,’ of the elect, they imagine themselves to be part of an elite, morally superior group of people, regardless of how their grace may be from faith and not from good works, or if they see themselves as just submitting to God’s will. For Pi, this pious narcissism is just his defence against fragmentation.
His religious narcissism expresses itself in his identifying of himself with the divine. I’ve already mentioned how, as “Piscine,” the human swimming pool floating in an ocean of Brahman, he as Atman is united with the pantheistic Ultimate Reality. In Chapter 5, he discusses various annoyances he’s had with his name; on one occasion during his university days, he’d rather not tell the pizza delivery people his name on the phone, so instead he refers to himself as, “I am who I am.” (page 26)
In discussing changes made to his name, Pi compares his situation with characters in the New Testament: Simon to Peter, Saul to Paul, etc. This is again Pi’s narcissism in comparing himself to the great religious men of history.
Now, narcissism doesn’t come without narcissistic injury. As a child, Pi had to endure endless taunts about his name from his classmates, mispronouncing his name on purpose as “Pissing Patel!” (page 26) He compares this experience of schoolyard bullying with Christ’s Passion: one of his tormentors is a “Roman soldier,” and he goes into class “wearing [his] crown of thorns.” (page 27)
When it comes to this bullying over his name, Pi doesn’t limit the comparisons of religious persecution to Christian ones. He also speaks of “feeling like the persecuted prophet Muhammad in Medina, peace be upon him.” (page 28)
As a solution to this problem with his name, Piscine presents an abbreviation of his name to his class on the first day of the new school year; to add to the distraction away from “Pissing,” he discusses some basic geometry–3.14, which is known as both a transcendental number and an irrational one.
So his name, as representative of Atman, has gone through the Hegelian dialectic: pristine Piscine, the water of a beautiful, spotless swimming pool (thesis); Pissing, a filthy liquid (antithesis); and Pi, a transcendental/irrational number (synthesis). We’re not concerned here with the strictly mathematical denotations of “transcendental” and “irrational” numbers, but rather with the connotations of these two words and how they relate to the symbolism and philosophy behind the novel.
The decimal representation of π never ends, giving it the association of infinity that ties in with the divine connotations of Pi’s name, as does, of course, the connotations of “transcendental.” As a number that cannot be expressed exactly in normal, verbal communication, π is associated in the novel with the notion of the ineffability of the divine. Small wonder Piscine prefers this short form of his name.
“Irrational,” of course, also implies the absurdity of Pi’s attempts to attribute divinity to himself, and to attribute meaning to the chaos of his life.
At one point in his youth, Pi had a biology teacher named Mr. Satish Kumar, an active communist and avowed atheist (page 33). Young Pi is shocked to hear Kumar say, “Religion is darkness.” In Pi’s opinion, “Religion is light.” (page 35)
When Kumar was Pi’s age, he was “racked with polio.” He wondered, Where is God? In the end, it was medicine that saved him, not God (page 36). In Kumar’s opinion, justice and peace will come to the Earth when the workers “take hold of the means of production“, not when God intervenes in human affairs (page 37).
Though he sharply disagrees with Kumar, Pi respects him. Pi thinks well of both theists and atheists, but as far as agnostics are concerned, doubt should be entertained only temporarily. One should ultimately commit oneself to belief either in God or in no God (page 37).
How does one resolve this contradiction between Pi’s accepting of both belief and unbelief? Imagine how Pi must have felt on that lifeboat, hungry for months, having seen his mother murdered before his very eyes, then killing her murderer and having to resort to cannibalism to relieve his hunger. He had to have been asking himself, Where is God? He can empathize with the feelings of this atheist…though I believe the real reconciliation is deep in Pi’s unconscious.
As Pi goes on telling his story to Martel, “At times he gets agitated.” (page 56) It seems as though he’ll want to stop talking about his life, though he still does want to tell his story. I believe his conflict stems from the same place as his contradictory feelings about God, which I’ll get into later.
Pi speaks about his first religion, which of course is the Hindu faith of his upbringing. It’s an early “exaltation, no bigger than a mustard seed” (page 63)–in Pi’s mind, there’s a fusion of Hinduism and Christianity. To him, the relation between Brahman and Atman is like that of the three persons of the Trinity–a mysterious one (page 65).
Later, Pi picks up on Catholicism (Chapter 17), then Islam (Chapter 18). After this, he meets a Muslim named, of all names, Satish Kumar (page 82), the exact same name as the communist atheist. I suspect this is an example of Pi being an unreliable narrator, fabricating two people of the exact same name, but of opposing views on religion, as a personification of his own inner, unconscious conflicts about his own spirituality.
Pi loves both Kumars, as opposing as their beliefs are. He refers to them as if they’re indistinguishable from each other (pages 111-112). As for agnostics, though, Pi says they are “beholden to dry, yeastiness factuality.” (page 85) In his opinion, agnostics “lack imagination and miss the better story.” Consider, in this connection, the hell of doubt Pi went through on that lifeboat over that period of months; it was much longer than temporary doubt.
Recall that in Life of Pi, “the better story” is the one with the animals on the lifeboat, the mythical account suggestive of the existence of divinity, which, in spite of how fanciful it may be, is better than believing the horrible story about his mother, the cook, and the sailor. To be “the reincarnation of Sri Ramakrishna” (i.e., embracing not just Hindu traditions, but also Christianity and Islam), or being an atheist, is better than being an agnostic, forever in doubt.
Pi can hardly remember what his mother looked like (pages 116-117)–his repressed memory of her lessens the pain of having watched her murdered. Here lies the real reconciliation of his acceptance of firm belief vs firm unbelief: his insistence on believing in and loving God is really a reaction formation against his unconscious hatred of a God that abandoned him and his mother in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, where we must go now.
“Memory is an ocean and [Pi] bobs on its surface.” (page 56)
III: Part Two–The Pacific Ocean
The Noah’s ark symbolism of the part of this novel dealing with a ship at sea with animals in it is so obvious that one shouldn’t need to mention it. There are, however, crucial differences between the Biblical narrative and the Life of Pi account that ought to be mentioned.
God preserves Noah’s family and all of the animals in the ark throughout the rainy days and nights of the Great Flood. Everyone and every animal aboard the sinking Tsimtsum dies (to our knowledge, at least),…and only Pi is escaped alone to tell thee. The ark rests on the mountains of Ararat; the Tsimtsum sits at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, in the Mariana Trench. In this latter catastrophe, one must ask: Where is God?
Remember that according to the original story, the lifeboat animals are Pi’s mother (Orange Juice, the orangutan), the cook (the hyena), the Taiwanese sailor with the broken leg (the similarly injured zebra), and Pi himself (Richard Parker, the tiger). So Pi is really the only living thing that survived.
When we say that the tiger represents Pi, we actually mean the animal represents what Jung would have called the Shadow, that part of one’s personality that one rejects and wishes didn’t exist, so it is repressed and split off. This splitting-off is seen in how Pi isn’t replaced with a tiger: he’s still in the mythical narrative, unlike his mother, the cook and the sailor. The tiger’s human name is understood to be the result of a clerical error (Chapter 48)–his capturer’s name was switched with his actual name, “Thirsty”–but giving him this odd name reinforces the idea that the tiger actually represents a human being…Pi. Pi, in a lifeboat surrounded by undrinkable salt water, is the truly thirsty one, and not just for water…for salvation.
The repression of Pi’s Shadow is represented in part by the tiger’s being kept under the boat’s tarpaulin, but repression, properly understood, isn’t about pushing unacceptable, anxiety-causing feelings down into some kind of dark, mental dungeon where they hide and are unseen. The repressed returns to consciousness, but in a new, unrecognizable form–it hides in plain sight. For this reason, psychoanalysts use the term unconscious, and not the pop psychology term, ‘subconscious.’ The repressed isn’t beneath consciousness; it’s unknown, without consciousness.
By a clever mental trick, Pi has made himself forget that his mother, the cook, and the sailor were on the lifeboat with him…and he forgets his latent murderous, cannibalistic impulses. To use Lacanian language, Pi has practiced a repression of a configuration of signifiers, replacing them with signifiers of animals. As we can observe, the objects of his repression are right there in the lifeboat with him, hiding in plain sight.
He describes “Orange Juice,” the orangutan mother of two males, as arriving to the lifeboat “floating on an island of bananas…as lovely as the Virgin Mary” (pages 146-147). He calls her “Oh blessed Great Mother, Pondicherry fertility goddess…” etc. Why, naturally he will speak of her that way. This is his actual mother, of two males…himself and his brother, Ravi.
Speaking of Ravi, later on, Pi imagines his brother teasing him about filling his lifeboat with animals and wondering if Pi thinks he’s Noah (page 158). Indeed, these imagined taunts of Ravi’s are really a projection of the fact that, deep down, Pi knows he’s deluding himself.
A similar projection happens when Pi sees the orangutan looking out on the water, searching for her two young ones and grieving over their loss. Pi notes that she has been “unintentionally mimicking what [he] had been doing [those] past thirty-six hours.” (page 165). Pi really imagines his own mother, now dead and her soul in heaven, grieving not only over Ravi having perished on the Tsimtsum, but also Pi suffering on that lifeboat all alone. It’s really he who is grieving over her, his dad, and Ravi. What’s worse, the orangutan is showing no feelings at all for him, when she is representing his mother; this hurts even more.
When the hyena has killed the zebra and the orangutan, this latter dead animal is described as not only “beheaded,” but also lying with her arms “spread wide open and her short legs…folded together and slightly turned to one side. She looked like a simian Christ on the Cross.” (pages 174-175) The horrors of the cook killing the sailor and Pi’s mother (who is also beheaded) must be mitigated not only with the replacement of animal signifiers, but also with the solace of religious iconography.
The greatest terror of all for Pi, though, is the sudden emergence of Richard Parker from his hitherto hiding place, under the tarpaulin. Pi describes the tiger’s head as “gigantic…the size of the planet Jupiter to [Pi’s] dazed senses. His paws were like volumes of Encyclopaedia Britannica.” (page 175) This is when the tiger comes out and kills the hyena.
Since, as I said above, the tiger represents all that Pi abhors in himself–his potential to do evil–we can understand the real reason he’s so terrified of Richard Parker. The vastness of the tiger’s head and the violence those claws are capable of are signifiers his unconscious is using to hide the violence inside himself. He doesn’t really fear a tiger on that lifeboat: he fears the viciousness he’s capable of when put in a desperate situation.
The tiger coming out and killing the hyena is when, actually, Pi avenges his mother’s murder and engages in cannibalism. This is the real horror that has caused him to spend “the night in a state of delirium.” He imagines he’s dreamt of a tiger; this could very well be, since the tiger is from his unconscious (under the tarpaulin), a signifier to replace his actual murderous, cannibalistic impulses (page 175).
The cannibalism, of course, is a reflection of his extreme, desperate hunger, something plaguing the vegetarian with guilt and shame, for his starving isn’t enough for his superego and its lofty moral demands to excuse him from resorting to such a shocking diet. Paralleling this hunger is his extreme thirst, like the thirst of Richard Parker né “Thirsty,” Pi’s Shadow. Accordingly, he compares his extreme thirst to that of crucified Christ. His identification with his thirsty Saviour once again helps to mitigate his guilt (page 179).
Pi talks about how only fear can defeat life (page 214). This fear “is difficult to put into words.” (page 216) He speaks of this fear “nestl[ing] in your memory like gangrene: it seeks to rot everything, even the words with which to speak of it.” One should remember this “gangrene” in connection with the infection in the broken leg of the Taiwanese sailor, which was the cook’s justification for amputating it (page 408). Signifiers are being shuffled in Pi’s mind once again.
This fear that rots words away is the trauma of Lacan’s inexpressible Real, that realm of human experience without differentiating signifiers, like an ineffable, formless ocean of Brahman. To prevent this kind of fear from taking you over and consuming you, “You must fight hard to shine the light of words upon it. Because if you don’t, if your fear becomes a wordless darkness…you open yourself to further attacks of fear.” (page 216) The fear spreads through you, like an infection, gangrene. This is why Pi needs the zoo animal signifiers–to keep the fear at bay.
The divine is not a God of sentimentality, one that will take away all your pain in one fell swoop. It’s often terrifying. I reflected on this reality in my analysis of Moby-Dick. In Chapter 35, “The Mast-Head,” Melville warns the pantheists who are “lulled into such an opium-like listlessness of vacant unconscious reverie” and who lose their identity. If they aren’t careful while in this sleep, their feet may slip, and they may fall into that sea of Brahman, “no more to rise for ever.” (Melville, pages 162-163) As I’ve argued elsewhere, heaven and hell, or nirvana and samsara, are dialectically close to each other. Pi’s experience of God is terrifying, not edifying.
This is why “It was Richard Parker who calmed [Pi] down.” (Martel, page 216) The tiger was at first Pi’s repressed Shadow, having come out of his unconscious to kill the cook and avenge his mother, then to eat the cook’s flesh. After that, Pi’s Shadow was split off and projected from him as a hallucinated tiger, to become the replacement signifier of Pi the murderous, cannibalistic savage. This replacement signifier, Richard Parker, thus saved Pi from himself.
Pi’s fear of the tiger jumping on him and eating him is really his fear of integrating and becoming one with his Shadow. This union would force Pi to confront his unbearable guilt, and in his despair, he’d have to kill himself on that lifeboat. Hence, Pi “had to tame him” (page 218), that is, to come to terms with the Shadow that the tiger represents and calm him while keeping him separate–split off and projected from Pi.
Richard Parker couldn’t die, though, for if he did, Pi “would be left alone with despair.” (page 219) Without his projection of his murderous and cannibalistic impulses onto a hallucinated tiger, Pi would have succumbed to shame, self-hate, and suicidal despair. He went from being terrified of the tiger to needing it to survive.
A point should be made about the Tsimtsum. The Japanese ship is named after a Kabbalistic concept referring to God ‘contracting’ Himself into a vacuum during the Creation. The implication is that, on that sinking ship, God wasn’t there. It’s unlikely that teenage Pi would have heard of such an obscure word; he must have learned it during his university studies, and then fictitiously applied it to the Japanese ship. It’s further proof of how unreliable he is as a narrator. It’s also an example of his use of replacement signifiers to help him repress his trauma and unconscious hatred of God.
Recall what I said above that all Pi’s talk about loving God is really a reaction formation against his unconscious anger at God for not being there when he and his mother most desperately needed Him. “Tsimtsum,” which doesn’t even sound like typical Japanese, let alone is appropriate for the name of a Japanese ship, refers to the paradoxical absence and presence of God during the Creation. He’s there, yet He isn’t there, right when Pi’s family needs Him. He just let this failed Noah’s ark sink.
As I argued in Part IX of my analysis of the primeval history in Genesis, the Great Flood was a return to the pre-Creation state of the world, with water everywhere and no separation of opposing elements (light/darkness, water above or below, sea/land, etc.). In Tsimtsum, the paradoxically simultaneous presence and absence of God (via the vacant space) happens during Creation like the Flood as ‘second Creation’ (which is dialectically at one with God’s destruction of the world). Thus there is no separation between God vs no-God, or between creation vs destruction. This is the undifferentiated, traumatic world of Lacan’s Real.
Tsimtsum’s non-differentiation between the presence and absence of God leads us to a non-differentiation between theism and atheism: agnosticism. Recall that Pi can respect atheists, but not agnostics. Here we can see why: it’s the agony of doubt that torments Pi so much. If there’s no God, oh well: Pi’s ordeal happened because…well…shit happens. But if…if there is a God, why didn’t He help Pi?
Doubt, for Pi, is a terrifying state of limbo, trapped in between God and no-God…Tsimtsum, the sinking ship. Thus, Pi’s retroactive naming of the Japanese ship with the Kabbalistic concept is yet another replacement signifier to help him repress his agonizing doubt, something that can only be temporarily tolerated, but which if entertained long enough, might lead to Pi’s realization that he, unconsciously and perhaps only in part, hates God.
He’s far too attached to a belief in the divine to reject it, so he must not only believe in, but also love, God. Doing so requires a reaction formation of affirming religious ideas from traditions from all over the world, an intense love of God to annihilate even the suspicion of hating Him.
In Chapter 58, he gets the lifeboat survival manual and peruses it (pages 221-223). This book is like his Bible, Koran, or Vedic scriptures.
At one point, he looks down at the water and sees all the swimming fish, so many of them racing around that he contemplates how the sea is like a big, busy, bustling city (pages 234-235). The fish seem like cars, buses, and trucks. “The predominant colour was green.” This comparison of the ocean to a city, with lots of green, seems like wish-fulfillment to him. Pi is aching to set foot on land again.
In Chapter 60, Pi wakes up in the middle of the night and, awed by the brightly shining stars, contemplates his tiny place in the infinity of space above and the ocean below. He feels like the Hindu sage Markandeya, who also had a vision of the universe and everything (pages 236-237), and who also saw a deluge that killed all living things. As always, Pi is using religion and myth to give his suffering meaning and structure.
Some time after, he tells of the first time he’s killed a flying fish (page 245). He claims, “It was the first sentient being I had ever killed.” Oh, really, Pi? Are you sure there wasn’t any sentient being before this fish that you killed out of desperation for food? Abel killed sheep for sacrifices before his brother murdered him; with your killing of a fish, shouldn’t you feel as guilty as Abel, rather than as Cain? Or is there the memory of a human killing that you’ve repressed and replaced with this flying fish signifier, causing you to equate yourself with the older brother, rather than the younger one?
Indeed, Pi survives 227 days, with a daily routine that includes prayer five times a day (pages 254-256), and he “survived because [he] made a point of forgetting.” (page 257) He’s used religiosity and repressed memory, blotting out his traumas and replacing human signifiers with animal ones in his unconscious, to help him go on living.
He speaks of his clothes having disintegrated from the sun and the salt (page 257). “For months [he] lived stark naked,” as sky-clad as a Jain. He lost everything, just like possessionless Hamlet when he returned to Denmark after being on a ship to England with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern…naked (i.e., without possessions–Act IV, Scene vii, lines 49-58) and betrayed.
Pi speaks of having “looked at a number of beautiful starry nights,” and of gaining spiritual guidance from the stars (i.e., the stars as symbols of heavenly gods). They have never given him geographical direction, though, as he so desperately needs now, on the lifeboat in the watery middle of nowhere (page 259). Once again, he speaks of religion as a great guide, when his Heavenly Father isn’t helping this lost soul at all.
He thinks of himself as “a strict vegetarian” (page 264), and perhaps that aspect of his autobiography is reliable; but in resorting to the killing of animals for food, such as sea turtles, he claims to having “descended to a level of savagery [he] never imagined possible.” One can understand the moral argument of vegetarians, but I think it’s the eating of the cook’s flesh that he truly finds an unimaginable savagery. Replacing the signifier of human flesh with that of animal flesh, as distasteful as that may be to him, is nonetheless bearable.
Recall how I described the lifeboat survival manual as his holy scripture. I say that because of what Pi says at the beginning of Chapter 73: other than salvation, he wishes he had a book. He has “no scripture in the lifeboat,” hence he has to make do with the survival manual, which is essentially what scripture is meant for, anyway–the salvation and survival of the soul. He lacks Krishna‘s words (page 279). A Bhagavad Gita would have been handy.
In Chapter 74, he speaks of doing “religious rituals” in an attempt to lift his spirits. He wants to love God, but it is “so hard to love.” He’s afraid his heart will “sink to the very bottom of the Pacific”…just like the Tsimtsum, symbol of the present/absent God that sank, Noah’s failed ark (page 280).
He speaks of what’s left of his clothes as “GOD’S HAT!” and “GOD’S ATTIRE!” He calls Richard Parker “GOD’S CAT!” and his lifeboat “GOD’S ARK!”, etc. (page 281) Since these things are all Pi’s possessions, we can see that he’s once again narcissistically identifying himself with God, or using narcissism as a defence against fragmentation, as I described above.
Soon after, though, he realizes he’s been fooling himself. God’s hat is unravelling. His pants are falling apart, His cat is a danger to him, and His ark is a jail. All of Pi’s attempts to exalt God, and himself in his narcissistic association with Him, are failing because they’re all just a reaction formation against his unconscious anger at a God that has failed him.
“God’s ark [is] a jail” because the Tsimtsum was also a jail of an ark.
Pi goes on and on about his battles with hunger, and how they are driving him mad. He can feel remotely good only with a full belly; he needs turtle meat just to smile. At one point, he even tries to eat the tiger’s shit, his hunger is so desperate. Such an excess should be seen as yet another unconscious replacement for his eating of the cook’s flesh (pages 286-287).
In Chapter 83, Pi describes a sea storm (page 303). His choice of words to depict the scene is fascinating: “landscape,” “hillocks of water,” “mountains,” and “valleys” of ocean waves. He’s demonstrating wish-fulfillment again, as with the ‘city-sea’ and the ‘cars,’ ‘trucks,’ and ‘buses’ of busy, swimming fish in a water ‘predominantly green.’ He wishes, quite urgently now, of course, that he were on land.
He says, “the boat clung to the sea anchors like a mountain climber to a rope.” The huge crest was like a “mountain [that] would shift, and the ground beneath [Pi and Richard Parker] would start sinking in a most stomach-sickening way.” (pages 303-304)
In the storm scene in the film, Pi at first tries to show reverence to God while he’s pelted with rain and tossed about by the pitiless storm. He calls out, “Praise be to God! Lord of all worlds! The compassionate, the merciful!” (surah 1:2-3) He tells Richard Parker to come out from the tarpaulin and see God’s lightning flashing in the sky–“It’s beautiful!” This is the desperate madness of someone trying to reconcile himself to a world that is utterly indifferent as to whether he and the tiger live or die. Pi appears to be suffering from some kind of Stockholm Syndrome, as far as ‘God’ is concerned.
Only later, as the storm continues on in its ruthless battery of the lifeboat, does Pi finally express his frustration, saying he’s lost his family, he’s lost everything, and what more could God possibly want of him? Yet in his anger, he still mustn’t risk blasphemy, so he includes in his rant, “I surrender!” like a good Muslim.
Symbolically, this storm represents the traumatizing, inexpressible, undifferentiated world of the Real. The danger to him and the tiger represents the threat of psychological fragmentation, and so Pi’s stubborn faith in God is his way of retaining his sanity.
Having a sound sense of psychological structure, as Heinz Kohut understood it, is through maintaining what he called the bipolar self. One pole is of the grandiose self, that of mirroring and ambitions, one’s narcissistic aggrandizement of oneself; and the other pole is of the idealized parental imago, of idealizing another, an authority figure (Mother or Father, essentially) as an affirming, validating mirror of oneself. For Pi, the grandiose self is Atman; his idealized parental imago is Brahman, or his Heavenly Father. The loss of his parents has necessitated their replacement with God, a father figure.
He’s seen his mother murdered before his eyes; with his father already gone, she was all that was left of his idealized parental imago. This trauma has already weakened his bipolar self to the point of a dangerously brittle fragility. His killing and eating of the cook, something he couldn’t help doing, is still a heinous sin whose narcissistic injury would have shattered his grandiose self, the only remaining pole of his bipolar self, causing him to be at the very brink of fragmentation, a psychotic break from reality.
He can restore his sanity only by replacing his parents with a new idealized parental imago: God the Father. Repudiating his Heavenly Father would be, in Lacanian terms, foreclosure, a dismissing of the Name of the Father and the Symbolic Order of language, culture, society, and customs, treating them as if they’d never existed; this would lead to psychosis. Hence, Pi must believe in God to stay sane.
In Chapter 84, Pi sees a number of whales further off in the water, and they seem to him to be “a short-lived archipelago of volcanic islands.” Again, it’s the wish-fulfillment of seeing supposed land (page 309). Then, he sees six birds, imagining “each one to be an angel, announcing nearby land.” (page 310) More wish-fulfillment.
In Chapter 86, Pi spots a ship, and he tries to draw the crew’s attention to him by shouting and firing off a rocket flare, but all to no avail: “it was salvation barely missed.” (page 317) The ship sails away.
In Chapter 88, “One day, [they] came upon trash.” Among the foul-smelling things of this island of rubbish is a refrigerator; he opens it, letting out a “pungent and disgusting” smell (page 391). His hunger is further frustrated with all the rotten remains of food inside: “dark juices, a quantity of completely rotten vegetables, milk so curdled and infected it was a greenish jelly,” and a dead animal.
By Chapter 90, he starts to go blind. He feels near death, and it’s like a harrowing of hell for him (pages 324-325). The tiger is dying, too–naturally: Richard Parker is Pi, his Shadow.
He’s also concluded that he’s gone mad, and in his madness, blindness, and weakening to the point of near death, he hears a voice, and there begins a conversation (pages 326-327). Remember Pi’s extreme hunger as the context for all of this. He speaks, to the voice, of “someone else” as a “figment of your fancy” (page 326). Then he notes the word fig as the first syllable of figment (i.e., as in ‘figment of one’s imagination,’ or “fancy”). Pi is “dreaming of figs,” and the voice speaks of wanting a piece, for the owner of the voice, like Pi, is starving (page 327).
If Pi can hallucinate about animals on his lifeboat, as signifiers in his unconscious to replace those of his mother, the cook, and the sailor, then he can certainly, in his madness and blindness, have auditory hallucinations about another starving man on a neighbouring boat.
Later on, when the voice rejects the offer of a carrot, Pi concludes that it’s been Richard Parker who has been speaking with him, the “carnivorous rascal.” (page 330) As insane as this sounds, on the surface, to be hearing the voice of a talking tiger, when one considers the root cause of Pi’s madness, such foolish reasoning begins to make a kind of weird sense. Both the tiger and the other man, this double of Pi’s, his “brother,” who as it turns out is also blind (page 336), are projections of himself. In his madness, Pi is fusing both projections, the tiger and his “brother,” into one entity, if temporarily.
Later, his “brother” asks for cigarettes, whose nicotine is an appetite suppressant, something a starving man may crave for relief of his hunger (page 337). As it turns out, Pi has eaten his supply of cigarettes, but left the filters. Well, Pi doesn’t smoke (page 338).
By the end of Chapter 90, Richard Parker has attacked and killed Pi’s “brother” (page 342). Since both are figments of Pi’s imagination, his Shadow and a double of himself, then this killing is really a wish-fulfillment. Pi wishes he could end his suffering by dying…to sleep, no more…a consummation devoutly to be wished. And to die violently, as he imagines the tiger killed the hyena, but it was really he who killed the cook, is really just him mentally atoning for his bloody revenge on the killer of his mother.
His use of his ‘brother’s’ arm as bait is, of course, another example of replacing the signifier of the cook using the sailor’s leg for bait (page 343). And that Pi “ate some of his flesh” is the closest he can come to confronting his actual eating of the cook’s flesh.
In the very long Chapter 92, Pi has reached the island of algae (page 343). He knows many will not believe this part of his story. Of course not. It’s utter mythological nonsense, to take it literally.
‘”Look for green,” said the survival manual.’ (page 345) Just as with the ‘predominantly green’ city of fish swimming under the lifeboat, this hallucination of Pi’s is just more wish-fulfillment for him, his craving to find land. As a vegetarian, he also craves green to eat.
Naturally, he “babble[s] incoherent thanks to God” (page 346), comes onto the island, and bites into the green, “tubular seaweed” (page 347). The inner tube is “bitterly salty–but the outer…[is] delicious.” (page 348) What’s more, the taste is sweet, sugary. The algae’s sweetness is a pleasure and a delight one wouldn’t normally associate with such a food, and this sweetness ties in with everything else about this island: it’s a fake paradise.
This island is like Spenser‘s Bower of Bliss (from The Faerie Queene), a place of superficial, sensual pleasures one would indulge in to excess, yet it’s a trap. It lulls one into a state of idleness and torpor, distracting one from one’s quest or purpose; it would change a man into an animal.
Another apt literary comparison is Calypso‘s island, Ogygia, from Book V of The Odyssey, where Odysseus is kept to be the nymph’s eternal husband, with promises for him of eternal life and physical pleasures. Still, he knows he must return to Ithaca and to his wife, Penelope, and so after seven yers as Calypso’s reluctant lover, he is finally set free with the gods’ help. Pi, too, must leave his algae island.
Pi’s discovery of “hundreds of thousands of meerkats” on the island of algae is particularly interesting (page 356). This mongoose species is native to Southern Africa, so their presence on this Pacific island is most curious, and it only reinforces how mythical and improbable this place’s existence is, outside of Pi’s imagination.
He sees the meerkats all ‘turning to [him] and standing at attention, as if saying “Yes, sir?”‘ (page 357) Then they lose interest in him and all bend down at the same time, to nibble at the algae or stare into the ponds (evenly scattered and identically sized). All bent down thus, they remind him of prayer time in a mosque. They’re gentle, docile, and submissive.
Indeed, in meerkat, we can discover such puns as meek, mere, and cat. Though the animal is a kind of mongoose, we can play around with these four words for psychological purposes. Since this whole place and all of the animals here, including Richard Parker, are figments of Pi’s imagination, we can understand the meerkats to be ‘mere cats,’ or ‘meek cats,’ if you will.
In his mind, these animals have become a replacement signifier for the tiger, which recall is Pi’s Shadow, the dark, dangerous part of his personality that he has split off and projected from himself because he can’t accept it. The emergence of meerkats allows him to replace Richard Parker as a more acceptable signifier in his unconscious for his Shadow.
Instead of a ravenous tiger in his unconscious, he has ‘mere cats’ there…’meek cats’ that shall inherit the Earth. Richard Parker can kill and gobble up as many of them as he likes, and because they’ve lived on this island without predators for so many generations, they’ve no longer had any need of fear. They’re unruffled as the tiger kills them (page 361).
Since the tiger represents a rejected part of Pi’s mind, and the meerkats signify a more acceptable version of the tiger, then its killing and eating of them represents Pi’s integrating of his Shadow, and it’s also a kind of autocannibalism, which leads to another point.
I’ve discussed many times in other posts how I use the ouroboros as a symbol for the dialectical relationship between opposites: how the serpent’s biting head represents one extreme, the bitten tail is the opposite extreme, how at the point of biting, the one extreme phases dialectically into its opposite, and every intermediate point between the opposites corresponds with every place on the serpent’s coiled body, which is a circular continuum. One thing I’ve never discussed until now, however, is how the ouroboros engages in autocannibalism, or what the implications of this autocannibalism are.
The extreme of Pi’s ordeal (bitten tail)–his extreme starvation, blindness, and madness, causing him to project not only his Shadow onto Richard Parker, but also his very identity onto his similarly starving “brother,” then imagining the tiger killing and eating much of his “brother,” then Pi himself eating some of his ‘brother’s’ flesh–is a hell immediately preceding his discovery of the algae island paradise, the heavenly opposite extreme (biting head).
The tiger and his “brother” are projections of Pi himself, as I’ve described above, so the eating of his “brother” is symbolic autocannibalism. The tiger’s eating of the meerkats, also a projection of Pi (a meerkat and thus a more acceptable version of Richard Parker), is thus also symbolically Pi’s autocannibalism. We later learn that the island is carnivorous (page 378) once Pi has found teeth in the centres of the plants he’s peeled (page 377).
Pi has eaten algae from the island, Richard Parker has eaten many meerkats, and Pi has learned that if he and the tiger stay too long on the island, it will eat them. Since the island is obviously a figment of his delirious imagination, a wish-fulfillment of green land, full of vegetarian food for him and meek meerkats that the tiger can ingest, integrate into himself, and thus calm his wildness, then his and the tiger’s relationship with the island is also an autocannibalistic one.
In terms of my ouroboros symbolism, the island is at the exact point where the serpent’s teeth are biting into its tail, the very point of autocannibalism. Extreme heaven is meeting extreme hell. Biting the tail can symbolize self-mastery–heaven, nirvana–yet being eaten by oneself is also self-destruction–hell, samsara. This is the bizarre, paradoxical world that Pi has found himself delivered to, yet also trapped in.
After spending so many days eating and drinking, Pi has found himself returning to life (page 362). If a storm approaches the island, Pi has no fear of it “preparing to ride up the ridge and unleash bedlam and chaos” (page 363). The hell of a sea storm would stop at the green shore of Pi’s heavenly island. And just as Pi returns to life, so does Richard Parker. Naturally: the boy and the tiger are one and the same being. Richard Parker’s eating of meerkats has brought his weight up, it’s made his fur glisten again, and he’s looking healthy (page 365). Such is the effect of taming and nourishing the Shadow. Yet just as the two are reviving, they’re also in danger of dying again, so they must leave.
When Pi finds a tree that seems to have fruit (page 374), and these ‘fruits’ are what hold teeth in their centres, we find yet another literary and mythological allusion in this algae island. The tree isn’t in the centre of the forest, nor is there anything particularly remarkable about it, but in the centre of the tree’s ‘fruits’ is a knowledge of something that will force Pi to leave his island paradise. This is a Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil on his deceptively Edenic island. For Pi, the place will be a paradise lost.
His peeling off of the leaves of the plant balls he believes to be fruit is a disrobing of the teeth inside, making them naked, as Adam and Eve discovered themselves to be upon eating the forbidden fruit. And just as their discovery caused them to be expelled from their paradise and to enter the painful world, so has Pi’s discovery caused him to expel himself from his paradise and to return to the painful world.
He imagines the teeth were from some “poor lost soul” who got to the island before him (page 379), and that after weeks or months or years of loneliness and hopelessness, he or she died there. After all that, Pi imagines “the tree must have slowly wrapped itself around the body and digested it” (pages 379-380). Only the teeth have remained for Pi to find them, but they will eventually disappear, too. Since the island is a figment of Pi’s imagination, though, this imagined person is yet another projection of himself, just like his “brother” who was eaten by Richard Parker and Pi, yet another dream of autocannibalism, an unconscious wish-fulfillment that Pi would be ‘justly punished’ for his own sin of cannibalism of the cook.
Finally, he and the tiger leave the island, and after some time on the Pacific Ocean, they reach the shores of Mexico (Chapter 94, page 381). Richard Parker wanders off and leaves him “so unceremoniously,” without even a look of goodbye in the tiger’s eyes. Since Richard Parker represents Pi’s Shadow, and the tiger has eaten his fill of meerkats (those meek, mere cats, if you will, that in being ingested have tamed the Shadow’s wildness and ferocity), then Pi’s Shadow has returned to his unconscious, it’s lost in the darkness there, and the boy’s sadness stems from no longer having an animal to split off and project what he doesn’t like about himself.
IV: Part Three–Benito Juárez Infirmary, Tomatlán, Mexico
The two Japanese men who question Pi in the Mexican infirmary about why the Tsimtsum sank in the storm–Tomohiro Okamoto of the Maritime Department in the Japanese Ministry of Transport, and his assistant, Atsuro Chiba–are in the role of psychoanalysts, as I see it, being in an attitude of skepticism toward what they hear from their ‘analysand,’ if you will, Pi (pages 391-393).
Mr. Okamoto tells Pi, in all bluntness, that neither he nor Chiba believes Pi’s bizarre story (page 393). Pi’s stubborn insistence that everything he’s told them is true, including the floating bananas, is like the resistance an analysand puts up before his doubting analyst.
Still, Pi’s Japanese investigators are even more stubborn in their insistence on an alternative story, a believable one, one that won’t make the two look like fools when they present it to the Maritime Department. This forces Pi to tell them the truth.
There is a long silence, then Pi tells “another story” (page 406). Pi has to present the truth as a mere ‘other story’ so that at least in his mind, he can pretend that it isn’t the truth. Such an attitude is the only way he can bear it.
As they have been discussing the two stories, Pi in his eternal hunger has been asking the two men to give him their cookies. The Japanese men, in having traveled nonstop to this infirmary, are rather hungry, too. Hunger, of course, is a constant theme in this novel. Pi would have us believe that he’s among the blessed, who hunger and thirst after righteousness (Matthew 5:6); actually, he’s just hungry.
His mother brought some bananas to the lifeboat (page 407), rather than floating on them as an orangutan. The cook “was a brute. He dominated [Pi and his mother].” (page 408) Pi acknowledges, however, that the cook was ” a practical brute. He was good with his hands and he knew the sea. He was full of good ideas.” (page 414) Pi acknowledges that it was thanks to the cook’s resourcefulness that they were able to survive thus far. In other words, the cook’s dominance and helpfulness are comparable to those of God [!].
His point of comparison reinforces what I said earlier: all of Pi’s talk about wanting to love God is really a reaction formation (the professing of the diametrically–emphatically–opposite attitude of that which truly exists in one’s unconscious) against his repressed hatred of God. Part of Pi’s hatred of the “brute” cook is a displacement of this hatred of God that he’ll never admit to.
The cook, a provider of the one thing needful–food–was crucial to the survival of Pi and his mother, as God is supposed to be for all of us. Yet the cook amputated the sailor’s leg, allowed him to die, cut his body up into pieces, ate some of the flesh, hit Pi for failing to catch a turtle, then killed Pi’s mother for hitting him, in turn for having hit her son. He hacked off her head and threw it at him. The head and the body were thrown overboard, food for the sharks.
And ‘God’ allowed the whole thing to happen.
Whenever good things happen, theists will praise and thank God for the good luck; but when bad things happen, they don’t blame God for either causing or allowing the bad luck. The fear of committing blasphemy makes cowards and hypocrites of theists like Pi.
It is the very horrors of modern history, such as the tens of millions whom ‘God’ allowed to die in WWII, including the victims of the Holocaust, six million Jews and millions of non-Jewish victims, that are among the reasons so many people have stopped believing in God. Yet Pi still insists on believing.
If the cook is comparable to God, then Pi’s killing of the cook is comparable to deicide, and his eating of the cook’s flesh is like taking Communion. The cook’s allowing of Pi to kill him–knowing that in having killed Pi’s mother, he went too far in his brutishness–is like Jesus having allowed Himself to be crucified in spite of His divine omnipotence. Pi imagines himself, as Mel Gibson did in personally hammering a nail into Christ’s hand in his film, The Passion of the Christ, as confessing his sin in committing his ‘deicide’ on the passive, willing cook, and in so doing, he hopes that he has successfully atoned for his sin.
If eating the ‘god’ cook’s flesh is like partaking in the Eucharist, then in unconsciously associating the cook with God as Christ, Pi is hoping he isn’t eating that flesh unworthily (1 Corinthians 11:27), as mere cannibalism. So in associating, however unconsciously, the cook with God, Pi is once again using religion to mitigate his guilt.
Though the cook, in knowing he’d gone too far, allowed Pi to kill him, he never said sorry. Pi wonders, “Why do we cling to our evil ways?” (page 416) In focusing on the cook’s evil ways, which were every bit as motivated by desperation and hunger as Pi’s were, Pi is trying to deflect his own guilt onto the cook.
Finally, Pi asks the two Japanese investigators which story they prefer, which is the ‘better’ story, when neither story can be proven true or untrue (in the film, he asks Martel this question). The two men prefer the one with the animals (page 424), as does Martel (played by Rafe Spall) in the film. Indeed, in their report, the Japanese men say that Pi amazingly “survived so long at sea…in the company of an adult Bengal tiger.” (page 428) Pi thanks them for validating his…let’s face it…delusional version of what happened, saying “And so it goes with God.”
V: Conclusion
The story is meant to make us believe in God. In my case, at least, it failed to do so. If this story is to make us believe in God, we must prefer the version with the animals…the fanciful, mythological one.
That Pi could survive alone on the lifeboat for so long is certainly amazing, but it isn’t impossible. To survive with a tiger is a kind of amazing that swings the pendulum towards the impossible, almost surely necessitating a belief in God and His miraculous works.
To be sure, we like the story with the animals better, for its mythological charm and for not including the horrors of the story with the cook, Pi’s mother, and the injured Taiwanese sailor. But it isn’t a matter of which story is more likable; it’s a matter of which story, as ugly as it may be, is more plausible.
And this is the thing about whether or not to believe in God, Brahman, the Tao, or whatever: shall we go for the more pleasant, but less rational, belief, or shall we go for the more rational one, but the one that makes us feel lonely and helpless under the uncaring stars? Here is where philosophical absurdism comes in. In a meaningless universe, we nonetheless cannot help but impose meaning on it–not out of logic, but for our comfort in a painful world.
Yann Martel, Life of Pi, Edinburgh, Canongate Books, 2001
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