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Martel’s construction of spirituality in Life of Pi as accessing the infinite

At least in part, Life of Pi is a story about humans urging to reach for something broader than their own forms. The story has propelled me to look at life and religion completely different as it is an account of a search for the essence of spirituality in the extremities of human experience. The human stripped of its accoutrements, its accessories, its civilization. The human unadorned, vulnerable yet uncontained. The human pushed beyond the traditional geometry of human experience.

Fashioning a universe as a series of circles, Martel suggests the centre as the point of infinity from the divine – God. While inside this centre, humanity can absorb this infinence. According to the logic Martel presents in this story, infinity can only be realized through the transcendence of uncontained perspective. Thus, Martel’s account of Pi presents the notion of spirituality as the human approaching the unbound, transcendental and thus, infinite.

What Martel means by an “unbound” perspective to spirituality is signaled by the parallel of nonsensical human ideas of animal habituation with ideas of God (Martel 16) – both as not necessarily a direction towards happiness via freedom. By nature, Pi demonstrates eagerness towards spirituality. As an unbound individual, Pi is a precocious character that lives between the boundaries of social, cultural, and historical constructs. Pi lives in a zoo with animals, bleeds one religious practice with another, and tames a tiger in the middle of the Pacific. Breaking down these perspective barriers seems to be part of Martel’s vision of spirituality. Though this may seem to be a boundless existence, it is important to note that Martel’s assertion of spirituality is one from suffering as the story begins with mention of it (3). Martel writes “freedom” as not resulting in “happiness” (Martel 16). This freedom thus takes upon itself some other aim. Pi’s life unassigned to discourse and law is one full of suffering and discontent – a constant in religion that is put in place to remind its sufferer of the boundaries of the human form, and seek the divine for sustenance. A faith that there is life beyond death – “you may not believe in life, but I don’t believe in death” (6).

Pi’s ability to appreciate the power of this suffering, of the unbound, is highlighted in his exchange with the Japanese interrogators (322-336). Unable to accept Pi’s account of survival, they ask Pi for a different version, “…a story without animals” (336). Fact-seekers and bound by the law, Martel positions the two interrogators to act as a foil in order to highlight the digressions between reason and faith in acceptable human story. From contained thought, the interrogators are bound and unable to stray from human script, but Pi is. He can tell them a story that they will accept and one that he believes is truth. Pi says to the interrogators,

I know what you want. You want a story that won’t surprise you. That will confirm what you already know. That won’t make you see higher or differently. You want a flat story. An immobile story. You want dry, yeastless factuality (336).

Both versions of the story can co-exist within the narrative, and why Martel chooses to leave which version to believe up to the reader. Martel fashions the story with the bulk of it written in Pi’s perspective to guide the reader into the unbound and lawless in hopes the reader may be more accepting of it when the contrast of fact, reason, and “sense” (336) surfaces in the final passages.

The interrogators cannot accept the story for its proximity to the divine, and the need for a kind of faith in order to accept it. Instead, these men of law cling to their scripture of rule, reason, and fact. They must translate this story of suffering in order to understand it, so they place the animal story as allegory to comfort in their human, mortal, perspective. An established institution with sacred dimensions removing transformative powers from storytelling or at least, the transformative powers Pi is suggesting in faith. Irony presents itself within the two versions of Pi’s survival story – the fact-seekers never find their factual evidence for the sinking of the Tsitsum in both versions. This irony further illustrates the interrogators inability to see outside of a rational although admitting a preference for the story with animals (352). A transformation signaling a release, and escape from their human script as innate, but not yet realized – the ability to “[go] with god” (352). The interrogators lack the ability to see the unity in the story because of their fixed position of institution and establishment. But Pi, paralleling the two stories sees their unity and interconnectivity.

The blurring and mingling of stories transcends Pi into the realm of the divine. Martel’s construction of humanity encountering the transcendental is best seen within his descriptions of nature. Martel constructs the elements in some sort of interconnectivity, an entire universe with all things one. The animal and human species blurring into one story, as seen with the interrogators, is one example of how Martel uses a “language of unity” (68) to propel Pi and the reader into a wider perspective of living forms:

…at a point where the land was high and I could see the sea to my left and down the road a long ways, I suddenly felt I was in heaven. The spot was no different from when I had passed it not long before, but my way of seeing it had changed. The feeling, a paradoxical mix of pulsing energy and profound peace, was intense and blissful. Whereas before the road, the sea, the trees, the air, the sun all spoke differently to me, now they spoke one language of unity. Tree took account of road, which was aware of air, which was mindful of sea, which shared things with sun. Every element lived in harmonious relation with its neighbour, and all was kith and kin. I knelt a mortal; I rose an immortal. I felt like the center of a small circle coinciding with the center of a much larger one. Atman had met Allah (68, 69).

Pi is capable of feeling that an unbound nature promotes its unity and transcends him into the divine. The trees, wind, sun and all elements, delivering him to “heaven” (68). Pi is even capable of an unbound practice towards religion. In Pondicherry, Pi is a practicing Muslim, Hindu, and Christian. He kneels before the cross while thinking of the bags of flour from the Muslim muezzin bread (66). In the italicized descriptions of Pi’s house (49-50) more than one religious practice, ritual, and ornament is present. Instead, a variety of religious practices and markers co-exists to create a “temple” of wide perspective with one similar direction – accepting divinity and moving towards God.

Slipping and spilling into one another, Pi’s religions transcend to create something larger – a religion vast and open and uncontained in its faith. How he feels this divinity close to him however is Martel’s commentary on the spirit as one through transcendence. Pi arrives at not only a feeling proximal to heaven and the divine, but a feeling of divinity within himself – “I rose an immortal.” Pi’s expanding sense of spirituality in religion is a feeling of uncontained faith as it gives him a feeling of infinence through introspection.

Martel constructs infinence as the centre of a circle constantly rotating (69). Pi’s feeling of immortality is noticed from a point at the centre of a series of circles. This image conjures up images of the solar system – circular plants revolving around a circular orbit around the sun. The universe is an infinite space, undiscovered and historically having to be accepted as so with blind-faith until technology and fact allowed humans a different perspective. Martel is working with this principal, this feeling of infinity as a place to seek the divine, but only realized through uncontained thought and an ability to see a unified universe. Pi stands at the centre of this series of circles, feeling the infinity, and the margining of religions into a larger, and vaster universe of religions and believes.

Martel thus constructs spirituality as approaching the centre of this series of circles. Religion, law, civilization, humanity, nature, everything in orbit around on central axis, extending vertically and fixing the series in orbit (Appendix 1). The boundaries remain in the opposites, fact vs. fiction, suffering vs. happiness. However, it is in this tension that they remain and Pi can embrace spirituality. It is within the ability to transcend the boundaries that can come within these orbits that one can reach the centre as Pi does, feeling one constant infinity – the infinity of God.

This circular alignment is presented later in the narrative while Pi is marooned in the middle of the Pacific. At the centre axis of a “ballet of circles” (Martel 239), Pi observes the sea, wind, and sun as changing, yet constant around him. These observations host a series of emotions – “apathy, fear, madness, hopelessness” – that are part of suffering. Within the extremes, with his soul at its barest, these orbital opposites create tension and despair. Why does Martel suggest a castaway to be at a central position in this “ballet”?

A castaway is outside of these circles of nature, civilization, humanity, and law. Pi’s escape from these boundaries, unbound nature, transcends him to the centre of this circular system. Though he is still “trapped by geometry” (239), Pi is fixed in the centre axis and given a channel to the infinite. As being a castaway is the extreme example of an unbound and lawless nature, Martel uses the extreme to his advantage in illustrating his notion of the approach to spirituality. It is blind faith. It is unleashing contained thoughts and believes to embrace a unity of experience.

The format of the novel is even Martel’s assertion of humanity’s realization of the spiritual as reaching a centre. Pi’s survival narrative is placed in the midst of two pieces of reason and fact: the introduction and the interrogation. The story goes into revolution, placing the divine (or that which is approaching the divine) in the centre of the book. It is a circle with a series of conceptual circles in it’s midst. The reader is thus brought into divinity in the centre of the stories’ circle. A postmodern usage of reader-response in which the reader decides whether they return to the story’s centre, or to reason and factuality. This remains the reader’s test their faith in infinence – in God.

At the centre of the Pacific, Pi talks of death (241). This signals the introspective part of Pi’s divine enlightenment. Within himself, Pi finds God, synonymous with infinity, synonymous with the divine. From Pi’s exchanges with his Zoology Prof, Mr. Kumar, at the beginning of the narrative, the reader is told where god lies – “in a man” (31). And so, Martel shows the reader that it is within this path to our centre, one reaches a larger centre aligned with God. Spirituality surrenders death to another circle, and transcendence into infinity. So Pi, stripped of his circles, a castaway, at the centre of it all, contemplates his own infinity, just as he does when he feels heaven and immortality in Pondicherry (69). Introspection, part of his travel within the spiritual, is saves Pi from a “darkness” (30) of disbelief and the death of God or the infinite.

Martel tells the story of Pi as an uncontained soul able to travel to the centre of divinity. Martel uses Pi’s name as an illustration of one’s spiritual path. Pi first transforms the finite and confronts the infinite through his name change. Pi is a mathematical number that is classified as irrational and uncontained (just as Pi’s nature). The number Pi is also used within circular theory (Martel’s construction of the universe and the controlling infinence). But Pi’s journey to the centre is derived by his own desire – this is of the utmost importance. His birth name, Piscine, is limited to a fixed object and not an abstraction in of itself like “Tara” of “Paul”. Piscine Molitor is also a finite space, and by changing it to Pi, a mathematical number of infinite continuity, he finds “refuge” (27). Pi uses the universe’s geometry to find a space to breathe. He removes himself from a pool, from boundaries, and faces and in part becomes, infinity.

Pi is the embodiment of a spiritual being approaching infinity. Pi is capable of appreciating the power of unreality and irrationality. In his name, absurd spiritual practices, story, suffering, lawlessness, and perspective of unity, Pi chooses the path of spirituality towards the infinite. Martel doesn’t preach to the reader however. The reader is allowed to believe any of the versions of story: with or without animals. The story becomes, in essence, a story of faith powered by multiple gods, influences, and beliefs. The stripped soul further solidifies Martel’s assertion of spirituality as something approaching infinence.

Some could be offended by Martel’s notion of spirituality and religion as some religious rituals practiced over centuries seem somewhat glossed over. The merging of different religious practices could be even considered blasphemous to some purists. Can you kneel at the cross and pray to Vishnu? Martel isn’t unifying these faiths in order to create one that best suits his preference, Martel is making the point that no matter what the particulars, with faith there is some sort of “God” — one infinite and one realized through the acceptance of guiding rituals such as storytelling. In essence, Martel is asserting the notion that spirituality has no religion. Religion is a human construct, and another circle in the series revolving around the infinite.

In the introduction to the novel, Martel writes, “this book will make you believe in God” (VIII). If in the very least, the book unleashes the question of spirituality and faith in its reader, Life of Pi hosts the possibility of transformation. Humanity in relationship with its infinite nature is the basic backbone of all religious practice. Whether through reincarnation or acceptance to a heaven, Martel suggests humanity as becoming immortalized and continuing a journey towards the centre of ourselves and the universe. In faith, therein lies infinity. Spirituality without dogma, and instead moving outside of the human story.

Reference:

Martel, Yann. Life of Pi. Random House: Toronto. 2001.

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