The Ark of PiEssay title: The Ark of PiLife of Pi is intended, so Martel tells us, to make the reader believe in God. This bold, apparently evangelical, premise locates it on a dangerous moral high ground. D.H. Lawrence warned against using the novel as a forum for the author to assert his own moral or religious belief:
Morality in the novel is the trembling instability of the balance. When the novelist puts his thumb in the scale, to pull down the balance to his own predilection, that is immorality. (D.H. Lawrence, “Morality and the Novel”)
Aesthetically, the fiction which reveals a truth by explicit sermonising rather than as a natural conclusion drawn from the relationships and events it presents, is displeasing, even “immoral.” Indeed, Martels statement is likely to have the opposite effect on his reader, provoking a determined counter-reaction not to succumb to a didactic religious agenda. Surely enough, Life of Pi fails to meet its ambition. As he travels through its pages, apparently on the Damascun road to enlightenment, the reader will not, atheist or already committed follower, experience some major revelation to the spirit, coming to, or restoring, a belief in God. Nor, despite Martels explicit but deceptive statement, is he intended to. Instead, Life of Pi achieves something more quietly spectacular: it makes the reader want to believe in God. Martel gives the reader the democratic choice: the desire to believe rather than the belief itself. We do not have to agree with the ideology Martel delivers, but we can support to the full the way he says it, for Martel inspires the readers desire by invoking the spirit of the fairy tale – the simple narrative which may reveal virtues and ethics yet is primarily concerned with entertaining the reader (or listener, as young children often are of such stories) in magical ways which powerfully invoke the active imagination.
Martel insures his novel against critical dialects which insist on penetrative analysis and engagement with the text on a political rather than emotional level, whose goal is establishing meaning and influence behind a linguistic act. He reawakens the central power of the story as yarn and legend, as the entertaining narrative told round the camp fire and handed between generations, designed to pass the night hours with captivating drama rather than to deliver political analyses on contemporary society. Life of Pis printed words have the loud echoes of orality as the text is framed by acts of speech, hearing and translation. In the initial pages, Martel assumes an italicised guise, focusing on the fact that the narrative to follow is one he has heard coincidentally, not deliberately created. He is the eventual author of a story which is not his own but which belongs to Pi, its primary teller; Martels task is one of translation, not creation, interpretation or even alteration. Likewise, at the close, the child Pi relates his narrative again to two foreign interviewers, who record his words – and their own naive, uncomprehending interpretation of them – on a dictaphone with vicious electronic permanence. The text we read is a solid record of a story which is, in its vocal form, endlessly fluid, subject to change and amendments to increase its interest for a captivated audience. In normal circumstances such self-consciousness about the literary act might challenge the reader, forcing him into noting the multiple ways and biases with which a single event can be portrayed by a writer, to question the integrity and believability of the narrative, to analyse the text itself as an artefact rather than what that text says. Yet in this instance the challenge is to avoid doing this, and thus to be unlike the pessimistic and dully factual insurance brokers who interrogate Pi at the end. We must lower our critical consciousness, becoming passive recipients of an emotionally pleasing narrative, unquestioning of its real authenticity.
Indeed, one of central metaphors of the novel, the name of the hero Pi, establishes these two alternative modes of reaction: the rational and the aesthetic. Pi is an irritating and unique number for the mathematician who, above all other academics, desires certainty and factuality. It is a number continuous and complex, fascinating for its infinite randomness yet frustrating precisely because as a product of circular maths it defies rules of explanation; it is produced by a single logical equation, yet the product itself is uncontainable. The novel functions in line with this paradox. As divisible into beginning (Martels italicised voice), middle (the main story) and end (the Japanese questioners) as a circle is by its radius, the novel occupies too perfectly 100 chapters. Yet the miraculous outcomes of this definite structure – a small boat, an Indian boy, a 450-pound Bengal tiger and a meeting with a Frenchman in the middle of a vast ocean – defy explanation,
The paradoxes of Pi and the rational-art-philosophy of Mathematica give us insight into “the way in which science, as a science of nature, works,” an understanding that gives us, rather, better understanding. In fact, we may use a few sentences here to give some sense of how this is going to be as the author makes the transition from science to art. From mathematics to science for this is the question that he answers in his ‘inventions’, where, despite being the subject of so many different novels that I’m afraid his entire novel and entire ‘science’ trilogy can be read in as one book (this is the book it is named after), and it is then that we can discover what happens in the rest of the trilogy, not just what is actually going on, but also why. So ‘inventions’ (I’ve used them interchangeably) are basically the same thing.
I think we can say more strongly, though, that at the end of ‘A Machine for Sells Books’ there are a few of the problems that Mathematica itself presents for the reader to examine. The biggest problem is that the game, while playing a different way, still seems to give away the exact same information. For starters we’ve got two systems of reasoning, both of which seem to depend on their own rules; as we approach the “newness” of the game (or rather, the “newness of the rules”), we are shown exactly what happens, and the rules follow a different way than those on which we have to make use of. These are the rules of Mathematica, the rules of our world, though it may appear like they are the same kind of rules, but both come from a different idea. This is exactly what we come from. It is not the kind of rules that Mathematica presents for you to understand, its own rules, but rather what is the ‘newness’ of the rules in that sense. It looks and sounds, but it’s totally different from what the rules which we’ve already seen here. So ‘inventions’ doesn’t come across quite as as a great book as we would have expected. It comes across as a form in which we are presented with a whole new set of questions that can be looked for for all sorts of different reasons: about what it is that distinguishes the good from the bad, about what makes us want to do something, for example about how to be more “modern”. The most fundamental reason for these are some of our expectations about what the rule that we’ve just mentioned is. Here, for instance, they are presented as a standard for understanding how this game works. And indeed in their own kind of way, rules that are supposed to be different enough that we can apply them without any preconceptions that might otherwise lead to them being different, or perhaps just the rules of our lives at all (and our culture is certainly not very good at either, just how they can be different and not the rules in this sense); these are different rules. The one thing that Mathematica offers us is a new kind of interpretation. We actually arrive at the rules, as one has to do, in the same way that the rules that Mathematica presents for us might come to be seen as different. But they aren’t really that. Rather, they are merely different versions of ourselves, in that they are set within a new set of rules and this makes them an independent part of the larger world.
This is so obviously so in the book, and so quite important for that: in the whole ‘modern art’ movement, there’s this notion that even the things we like aren’t supposed to be because we are the bad guys. As Mathematica has explained, this applies to things that are a certain kind of ‘standard