Life of Pi
A while back, some guy on AppleInsider (there’s really nowhere better if you’re looking for a good old-fashioned bar-room brawl) recommended in a thread there that had (de)evolved into the usual religious rant/bashfest that people read Yann Martell’s Life of Pi
I didn’t take it too seriously at first because I have been a bit disillusioned with modern fiction for some time but recently I was in a bookshop here in Barcelona and I saw it so I picked it up for the beach. All I can say is Wow! A life changing book (for me) and so I feel duty bound to credit Midwinter and AI as the source of my revelation.
I don’t really intend to post a review here (there’s plenty at the Amazon link above) but rather explore what I see as the esoteric themes of Martell’s book. I will focus on the Islamic/Sufi/Fortean aspects as this is what I am most familiar with but I’m sure those knowledgeable about Hinduism and Buddhism could find equally interesting parallels.
A central theme (that is never fully explored) is that the meta-story (this is in itself a link to the famous stories within stories of the Arabian Nights) has a specific intent: it is a tale that will make you believe in God. In the opening sections of the book, Pi has himself resolved this issue on his personal level and sees no contradiction in defining himself as a Muslim, a Hindu and a Christian simultaneously. This is clearly the position of the Classical Sufism (if not necessarily of some of the contemporary Islamocentric tariqas) and Pi’s Muslim teacher is stated as being a follower of the Sufi path.
The book hinges around the shipwreck which results in Pi being castaway in a lifeboat adrift on the pacific with a 450 pound Bengal tiger on board. The shipwreck is again a Sufi motif and is paralleled by a developmental contemplation theme stated by the great Jurist, theologian and Sufi, el Ghazali where he said:
You only possess that which will not be lost in a shipwreck.
Clearly, Pi in some sense ‘possesses’ the Tiger (Richard Parker) as he has not been lost and here the tiger motif may be seen as in line with the Sufi conception of the ‘Commanding Self’ - the base animal aspect of us as humans that must be pacified. Note: the Sufis do not aim at ‘killing’ or eradicating this animal nature (technically referred to as the nafs) but rather pacifying it and rendering it harmless - or, more specifically, preserving the essential inner self of the person from it’s depredations.
As an interesting aside, there is a nice Fortean aspect to the name of the Tiger, Richard Parker. In 1838 Edgar Allan Poe published a book “The narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket “ which featured the motif of four men adrift in a boat who kill and eat the cabin boy whose name is Richard Parker. Nearly fifty years later, in 1884, a yacht called the Mignonette, was wrecked in the South Atlantic. Four men survived and after drifting for 19 days, the Captain killed the cabin boy who was then eaten by the surviving three - this cabin boy was also called Richard Parker. An interesting exploration of these coincidences for those inclined to these things can be found at the site of Craig Hamilton Parker.
The motif of the castaway as a symbol for the journey to God is an apt one. It has a near precedent in Sufi mystical literature in the classic work Hayy ibn Yaqzan (lit: Alive, son of Awake) by the 12th century Sufi poet Ibn Tufayl. Tufayl’s work, which has been seen as a major influence on Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. In Tufayl, the theme revolves around the question “would one believe in God if one grew up alone on a desert island and spent life utterly alone without human contact?”. Tufayl’s answer is a resounding ‘yes’ - although the implications of this knowledge are more complex than might be assumed - and clearly Hayy’s life on his desert island IS the journey to God, just as Pi’s months adrift in the Pacific are a similar journey: a journey to something which cannot be conceived, perhaps must not be conceived as the only way to survive the days adrift is to abandon hope. To expect rescue each and every day is to undermine any possibility of survival - one must act as if already dead in order to survive, strip everything down to its bare essentials and avoid fantasies of hope and rescue - “to die before you die” in another paradoxical Sufi phrase.
There are many more fascinating parallels with the mystic quest in the story and if this topic generates any comments it might be interesting to explore some of them.
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