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Rebecca Frausel B.A., English Literature and Psychology Honors Thesis, Spring 2010
Life of Pi , Historiography, and Psychotherapy
Thesis Defense: March 31, 2010 Revised: April 3, 2010 Committee Members: Primary Advisor: Karen Jacobs, Associate Professor, Honors Council Representative, Department of English Janice Ho, Assistant Professor, Department of English Secondary Advisor: Mary Klages, Associate Professor, Department of English Mithi Mukherjee, Assistant Professor, Department of History
And better had they ne’er been born, Who read to doubt, or read to scorn. --Sir Walter Scott Maybe God’s silence is an appeal to get beyond factuality. Maybe God’s trick is to call us through the imagination. If you don’t have any imagination, you live a diminished life. The overly reasonable life is a shrunken life. So much alienation in Western cultures is due to an excess of reason. --Yann Martel
Abstract This thesis explores the relationship between historiography and psychotherapy through an analysis of Yann Martel’s 2001 novel Life of Pi using Hayden White’s essay “The Historical Text as Literary Artifact.” The use of historiography as a psychotherapeutic technique is a fairly recurrent theme in our culture. These two concepts are put together only superficially in Hayden White’s essay; this thesis seeks to explore and more clearly define the relationship between these two conceptual terms, particularly with regards to the notion of “truth” in the stories we tell ourselves about our lives. Life of Pi offers up storytelling as a means of coping with tragedy, both in the fictitious character Pi Patel’s life (and the two stories he offers the reader about what happened to him on his nine-month journey across the Pacific Ocean in a lifeboat with a tiger), but also for Yann Martel himself. The novel employs a variety of techniques to blur the line between truth and fiction, particularly in its narrative framing. Two recurrent motifs of the novel are also explored: the ability of storytelling to be the impetus of political change, and the use of anthropomorphism and zoomorphism to imbue the world with meaning and significance. The final section of the thesis argues that Pi’s story of surviving in a lifeboat with a tiger, the “story with animals,” was an “overemplotted” account, one that he told himself to avoid thinking about his even more traumatic reality. Ultimately, though, it doesn’t matter if the stories we tell ourselves are fictional or true; when faced with the choice, as Life of Pi advises us, we should always go with the better story. In this case, we should believe the story with animals not only because it makes Pi feel better, but because it also makes us feel better.
- Introduction Yann Martel’s novel Life of Pi was first published by Knopf Canada on September 11,
- Although it was written in a pre-9/11 world, it was read in a post-9/11 world, a time when many people experienced feelings of great hopelessness and desolation. This tragedy forever changed the world on a large scale. Its effect on world relations, politics, etc. will be forever felt. But its influence on small individual lives must not be forgotten, even those who were not directly affected by the tragedy. Individual people changed that day too, myself included, in how we view the world and our place in it. For me, it represented my awakening to the “outside world,” my political arousing—and to the knowledge that Americans are not admired by everyone. After September 11th, I watched as my parents and teachers grew more and more concerned with the state of the world, and that anxiety and fear became my default. I first read Life of Pi in the spring of 2003 when I was in eighth grade, around the time the United States invaded Iraq. This book (as well as Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird , which I read about a year later) inspired me to become an English major. It is one of my favorite books. In the novel, I found not only a great and engaging story, but a genuine and heartfelt defense of story telling itself. It offers up storytelling as a mechanism for coping with tragedy. In Yann Martel’s novella “The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios,” from his short story collection of the same name, one of the characters, Paul, is diagnosed with AIDS. The nameless narrator must help Paul deal with his imminent death. “Between the two of us we had to do something constructive,” the narrator thinks, “something that will help us make something out of nothing” (Martel, Facts 14). In a burst of inspiration, he remembers Boccaccio’s Decameron : “An isolated villa outside of Florence; the world dying of the Black Death; ten people gathered together hoping to survive; telling each other stories to pass the time ” (14, italics original). He and Paul
exclusive. History is more of a continuum of truth and invention than many people are willing to acknowledge. The dichotomy between truth and fiction is played with in the novel. The book also begs the question of why “true” stories are considered to be intrinsically more valuable than “invented” stories, as evidenced by the recent surge in popularity of the genre of memoir.^2 The book also questions the idea of whether or not there is such a thing as objective truth, especially when so many frames interfere with objectivity. As inherent storytellers, humans may not be able to tell a story without embellishment (or “emplotment,” as historiographer Hayden White calls it). Readers of Life of Pi are actually offered two stories about what happened to Pi on the lifeboat between India and North America. They are forced to make a choice about what to believe, and this choice also reflects the choice between what is possible and what is actual. 3 The book also questions what is the role of fiction and storytelling in society. The answers to these questions represents the conceptual stakes of this project. Storytelling is important because it helps us deal with tragedy; it is a kind of psychotherapy. The relationship between historiography and psychotherapy is touched on in Hayden White’s essay “The Historical Text as Literary Artifact,” and in this thesis I hope to make the connection more clear. 2 When it came to light that pieces of James Frey’s memoir A Million Little Pieces actually belonged more in the genre of fiction than nonfiction, people were outraged, and this resulted in a cross-examination on The Oprah Show that ended, almost literally, with Frey in tears. If only Frey had had Pi and Yann Martel on his side. 3 This theme is prevalent in a lot of popular culture: the movies Big Fish and Pan’s Labyrinth , for example, contain two accounts: a “true” account and an “emplotted,” less believable account. Jonathan Safran Foer’s 2002 novel Everything is Illuminated , written as Foer’s honors thesis at Princeton under advisor Joyce Carol Oates, was originally intended as a true account of Foer’s grandfather, but after coming up with little concrete data, he created a fictional account instead (Jacobson). The narrator of Everything is Illuminated is also named Jonathan Safran Foer, but we are meant to understand that the narrator and the author are distinct persons. This is also true of Life of Pi , although that point is not made directly clear at first.
This thesis begins with a summary of Hayden White’s essay; following will be a close- reading of Life of Pi , as well as some of Yann Martel’s other writing and interviews. I will begin by discussing the narrative structure of Life of Pi. Much of the book complicates the relationship between the reader and the author and makes the reader reinterpret the supposed “truth” of the novel, and the narrative structure of the novel is particularly adept at doing this. I will also explore two of the recurring motifs in the novel: the political motivations, and anthropomorphism and zoomorphism. Finally, I will explore the existence of parallel stories, both within and outside of the text. Hayden White concerns himself with the relationship of figurative language, like metaphor and metonym, to history; I wish to extend these ideas to the idea of allegory , and relate this back to psychotherapy. Storytelling offers us a mechanism for coping with disaster of all kinds. As I will show, it does for Pi; it does for Yann Martel; and it even does for me.
- Hayden White’s “The Historical Text as Literary Artifact” Historiography is inherently interdisciplinary; it explores and attempts to break down the dichotomy that exists between the study of history and the study of literature. Pi himself is also an inherently interdisciplinary person; the novel Life of Pi begins with a description of Pi’s life in Canada, where his two majors at the University of Toronto are zoology and Religious Studies. These two are not so different, in Pi’s eyes, because they both seek to explain the world; in fact, Pi tells us, “Sometimes I got my majors mixed up” (Martel, Life 5). For Hayden White, history and literature are likewise the same because both of them serve as an attempt to illuminate the world, and in both, “We recognize the forms by which consciousness both constitutes and colonizes the world it seeks to inhabit comfortably” (White 1397). Consciousness is an active entity that is always working to make sense of its
Late in Pi’s journey, after Pi has gone blind, Pi meets another blind castaway on another lifeboat in the middle of the Pacific. The account is one of the more absurd moments in the text. Pi and the other castaway surrealistically talk to each other, and Pi tells him this story: “Once upon a time there was a banana and it grew. It grew until it was large, firm, yellow and fragrant. Then it fell to the ground and someone came upon it and ate it” (Martel, Life 278). Pi is not certain at this point if the other castaway is a real person; he believes him to be a figment of his imagination (it is in fact this word, which contains the word “fig”—a fantasy to the two starving castaways—that spurs the banana conversation in the first place). The other castaway responds, “What a beautiful story,” to which Pi says, “I have another element” (278). He continues: “The banana fell to the ground and someone came upon it and ate it—and afterwards that person felt better ” (278, italics original). With this added element, we see that the banana story has a point. The banana actually caused an effect in another person, and so, the story automatically becomes much more meaningful. In response to this added element, the other castaway responds, “It takes the breath away!” (279). It is only once the other castaway is explicitly told the “point” of the story that it truly has its effect. The historian, as opposed to the student of literature, supposedly works “inductively,” trying to avoid seeing any patterns (White 1385). As White tells us, “No historical event is intrinsically tragic ; it can only be conceived as such from a particular point of view or from within the context of a structured set of events of which it is an element enjoying a privileged place” (1386, italics original). White gives us the example of two famous differing perspectives on the French Revolution, from the historians Michelet and Toqueville. Michelet and Toqueville use the exact same facts, but for Michelet, the Revolution is “a drama of Romantic transcendence,” and for Toqueville, the Revolution is “an ironic Tragedy” (1387). Although
these two men had the same information at their disposal, they had different notions of what kind of story best fitted the facts they knew. “Considered as potential elements of a story, historical events are value-netural,” White says. “Whether they find their place finally in a story that is tragic, comic, romantic, or ironic—to use Frye’s categories—depends upon the historian’s decision to con figure them according to the imperatives of one plot structure or mythos rather than another” (1386-7). The historian’s ability to configure history implies, despite the historian’s attempt to be objective and provide a truthful account of history, she cannot help but change details around in order to create a better story out of them. In Frye’s view, if the “fictional elements” or mythic plot structure becomes obviously present, then “it ceases to be history altogether and becomes a bastard genre, product of an unholy, though not unnatural, union between history and poetry” (1386). However, for White, this union is not unholy, but inherent to the human experience. We can’t help but tell stories. White refers to the work of the historian R.G. Collingwood, who believed The historian was above all a storyteller and suggested that historical sensibility was manifested in the capacity to make a plausible story out of a congeries of ‘facts’ which, in their unprocessed form, made no sense at all. In their efforts to make sense of the historical record, which is fragmentary and always incomplete, historians have to make use of what Collingwood calls ‘the constructive imagination,’ which told the historian—as it tells the competent detective—what ‘must have been the case’ given the available evidence and the formal properties it displayed to the consciousness capable of putting the right question to it. (1386) The “constructive imagination” enables what White calls “emplotment,” which is the encoding of facts with components of specific kinds of plot structures (1386). Emplotment enables the historian to make stories out of chronicles. Historical events do not inherently constitute stories, White believes; rather, the elements are made into a story by the suppression of some elements, the highlighting of others, characterization, variation of tone and point of view; “in short,” White
The parallel between the “emplotment” of historical events and psychotherapy is only touched on in “The Historical Text as Literary Artifact,” but I hope to make the connection more explicit in the Parallel Stories section of this thesis. Both Pi and Yann Martel are guilty of “overemplotment” in terms resonant of White’s psychotherapeutic analysis. The last of Hayden White’s ideas that are particularly relevant to my reading of Life of Pi is his exploration of the relationship between figurative language and historiography. For White, thinking of historical narratives as “model ships” of the past is a false notion. For model ships, we have the benefit of both the model and the real thing, enabling us to “see…in what respect the model has actually succeeded in reproducing aspects of the original” (1389). But for history, we can never go back and look at the original, and therefore, we can never go back and look at them to see how adequately or accurately the historian has reproduced them in his narrative. “If the historian only did that for us, we should be in the same situation as the patient whose analyst merely told him, on the basis of interviews with his parents, siblings, and childhood friends, what the ‘true facts’ of the patient’s early life were,” White says. “We would have no reason to think that anything at all had been explained to us” (1389). Historiography and psychotherapy’s competing interpretations of truth contradict each other. Psychotherapy assumes there is some “hidden truth,” whereas historiography imagines that “truth” is always to some extent fictionalized and thus does not exist. To deal with this contradiction, psychotherapy’s envisioning of truth needs to be revised. Historical narratives are not exact replicas; they take an entire historical event, as experienced by potentially thousands of people, each with a different perspective, and attempt to distill these experiences into a single, concrete “event.” As with the different accounts of the French Revolution, even when authors do make use of the same incidents, the incidents are rendered in different lights (1391).
As such, according to White, “a historical narrative is not only a reproduction of the events reported in it, but also a complex of symbols which gives us directions for finding an icon of the structure of those events in our literary tradition” (1389). This relationship of historical event to historical narrative may be thought of as an extended metaphor (1391). The historical narrative does not reproduce the events in a same way a model ship reproduces a real ship, but instead, the narrative tells us in what direction to think about the events. Historical narratives endow historical events with meanings and are “emplotted” in such a way as to exploit the metaphorical similarities between real events and structures of our fictions (1392). The relationship of historical narratives to history can be viewed as a part/whole relationship, and figurative language is used to explore this divide. “In our account of the historical world we are dependent, in ways perhaps that we are not in the natural sciences,” White tells us, “on the techniques of figurative language both for our characterization of the objects of our narrative representations and for the strategies by which to constitute narrative accounts of the transformations of those objects in time” (1396, italics original). Human language is inherently figurative, and we rely on these tropes to engage and interact with the world. We use different modes of figurative language to achieve different ends. As White tells us, “If we stress the similarities among the elements, we are working in the mode of metaphor; if we stress the differences among them, we are working in the mode of metonymy” (1394). All historical narratives are not literal; they are inherently figurative, once again stressing the relationship of history to literature. White also explains that in historical narratives, some events are given “privileged status” (1393). He says in chronicles, events in a series can be emplotted in a number of different ways
place in a novel where the imaginary wall that exists between author and reader breaks down. The Author’s Note can be the only place where the author acknowledges he is, in fact, writing a novel, because for most of the novel, the author wants readers to suspend their disbelief. He doesn’t want to intrude on the reader’s engagement with the rest of the novel. Life of Pi , however, plays with our traditional expectations of the author’s role in the telling of a story. The Author’s Note is thus the first part of the complex narrative structure of Life of Pi and breaks down the binary opposition between “truth” and “fiction,” by leaving the reader confused as to what is fiction and what is reality. Martel begins the Author’s Note with the story of how he came to write Life of Pi. He begins with the phrase, “This book was born as I was hungry” (Martel, Life v). He is not hungry for food; what he is hungry for, we learn, is some method of explaining his world to himself. He then explains how he went to India, intending to write a novel set in Portugal in 1939, because “a stint in India will beat the restlessness out of any living creature” and “a novel set in Portugal in 1939 may have very little to do with Portugal in 1939” (Martel, Life v). He settles into a house by a hill, intending to write his novel, but the novel, in his words, turned out to be “emotionally dead” (Martel, Life vii). He gives up on the novel, and sets about exploring the South of India with what little money he has left. After mailing his notes to a fictitious address in Siberia, he leaves Matheran and finds his way to a tiny town south of Madras called Pondicherry. Here, he meets a “spry, bright-eyed elderly man with great shocks of white hair” (Martel, Life viii). Somewhere around this point, the reader begins to question the “truth” of the story, and Martel becomes “Martel,” or the Narrator. After the Narrator confesses his profession as a writer, the man tells him, “I have a story that will make you believe in God” (Martel, Life viii). The man, whose name is Francis Adirubasamy,
tells the Narrator a story, the elements of which are not revealed just yet. Mr. Adirubasamy also tells him, “You must talk to him [the main character]…I knew him very, very well. He’s a grown man now. You must ask him all the questions you want” (Martel, Life x). Later, in Toronto, among the “nine columns of Patels in the phone book,” the Narrator finds “him, the main character” (Martel, Life x). The main character, we come to learn, is named Pi Patel, who now lives in Canada after emigrating from India. However, his journey from India to Canada was not the most pleasant. Pi’s family owned a zoo, and due to difficult financial times in India in the 1970’s, when Pi was a teenager, the Patel family decided to sell the animals and the zoo and move to Winnipeg. The Tsimtsum , the cargo ship carrying Pi’s family as well as a variety of animals that had been sold to zoos in the Americas sinks, and Pi is trapped on a lifeboat with a hyena, a zebra, and orang- utan, and a 450-pound adult male Royal Bengal tiger named Richard Parker. Soon the tiger dispatches all the animals but Pi. Pi knows he will not be able to kill Richard Parker, and knows he cannot win a war of attrition against him. He decides the only way for them both to survive their journey is to keep him alive. Pi survives a nine-month journey across the Pacific Ocean in a lifeboat with a tiger. We are meant to understand this is the story Mr. Adirubasamy was referring to, that will inspire a belief in God. The Narrator hears the story firsthand from Pi in Canada, but he wants more proof. He seeks out a supposedly impartial third party, the company that owned the Tsimtsum , to corroborate this incredible story. The Narrator tells us, “After considerable difficulties, I received a tape and a report from the Japanese Ministry of Transport. It was as I listened to that tape that I agreed with Mr. Adirubasamy that this was, indeed, a story to make you believe in God” (Martel, Life x).
Life of Pi than he is for The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios. It is the Implied Author, according to Chatman, that makes the unreliable narrator possible, for it is the Implied Author who establishes the norms of the narrative (150). The third layer is the Narrator , the part of the novel told from Pi’s perspective. Then comes the Narratee , a role filled in Life of Pi by the Narrator/“Martel”/Implied Author hearing Pi’s story; it would also filled, for example, by the person listening to Charlie Marlow telling the story in Heart of Darkness. The Narratee is the device by which the Implied Author tells the real reader how to perform as the Implied Reader. The Implied Reader , the counterpart to the Implied Author, is the audience presupposed by the narrative itself. As Chatman says, “The ‘you’ or ‘dear reader’ who is addressed by the narrator of Tom Jones is no more Seymour Chatman than is the narrator Tom Fielding” (150). Finally comes us, the Reader. The narrative structure of Life of Pi is summarized below: The fact that the Author and the Implied Author of Life of Pi are different is never explicitly stated, and the function of the Author’s Note serves to make us question this fact. The other interesting part of this model is the function of Chatman’s Narrator; Martel complicates the layers here, because the person whose narrative voice we recognize as Pi in the book is really “Martel”/the Implied Author (who I’ve been calling the Narrator). We are also privy to “Martel’s” real-time reactions to Pi’s story in the role of the Narratee, written in ten italicized chapters dispersed throughout the book; this represents almost a reversal of the relationship between Pi and “Martel” embodied by Chatman’s Narrator role. Martel gets us to believe in the story by himself playing the Narratee, who tells the Implied Reader how to behave. He pretends Real Author [Martel] Implied Author [“Martel”] Narrator [Pi, through “Martel”] Narratee [“Martel,” hearing Pi’s story firsthand] Implied Reader [The “you” that an author speaks to, or “Us”] Real Reader [Us] (Chatman 151)
to be the “disbelieving listener” to the tale, before finally being convinced in the end, which is what he wants us to be, too. 4 The book is divided into three sections (not including the Author’s Note): Part I is “Toronto and Pondicherry,” and takes up about one hundred pages; Part II is “The Pacific Ocean,” the longest part, about two hundred pages; Part III is “Benito Juárez Infirmary, Tomátlan, Mexico,” and is the shortest section, at about thirty pages. Three is obviously a very significant number for a variety of reasons, particularly in religion. Chief among them is the Holy Trinity, a significant aspect of Pi’s religion of Christianity. In addition to Christianity, Pi also practices Islam and Hinduism, bringing his tally of practicing religions to three. The story is told in the first person from Pi’s perspective because, as the Narrator explains, “It seemed natural that Mr. Patel’s story should be told mostly in the first person, in his voice and through his eyes. But any inaccuracies or mistakes are mine” (Martel, Life x). The reader is also meant to understand the text represents an intimate conversation between Pi and the reader. When he discusses the carnivorous island he happens upon, he says, “I made an exceptional botanical discovery. But there will be many who disbelieve the following episode. Still, I give it to you now because it’s part of the story and it happened to me” (284). Pi is going to hold nothing back from us. However, the “me” holds three levels: Pi, the Narrator, and Martel. Who exactly is not holding back? 4 Another famous survival narrative, Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe, follows this exact same narrative structure. Perhaps there is some inherent quality in the fantastical castaway story that requires an additional layer between the author and the reader, establishing a creative space. It's just hard to believe a story about a man on the ocean for an extended period of time. Martel must realize how implausible this is, too. He is playing off something that is clearly unbelievable as believable, and the way he does that is through the framing technique of himself, as the skeptical Narratee.
