Considering the alternative: Bakhtin’s carnivalesque and convergence of worlds of animals and humans in Yann Martel’s Life of Pi

Susan Marais

doi:10.4102/lit.v39i1.1460

Abstract

Yann Martel’s Life of Pi recontextualises the traditional castaway narrative’s rationalist and reductivist worldview by incorporating carnivalised writing, or the carnivalesque, to examine alternative or ‘non-human’ ways of encountering the world. It is this subversive and liberating approach towards dominant cultural forms and beliefs that is manifested in Life of Pi through grotesque realism. Grotesque realism, as defined in Mikhail Bakhtin’s Rabelais and his world, is relevant to Martel’s novel, as this convention purports that animals embody the raw physicality of existence through their instinctual and amoral nature. In the context of the novel, carnivalesque writing contributes to the blurring of boundaries between human and animal in a way that also reveals the transformative abilities of storytelling. The dissolution of boundaries that separate humans from animals and the rational from the irrational emphasises the redeeming potential in alternative – or imaginative – ways of interpreting existence and, ultimately, casts light on uncanny spaces of existence such as loss, suffering and deprivation.

Highlights

Winner of the Man Booker prize in 2003, Yann Martel’s Life of Pi (2002) is a story of survival against all odds that explores the nature and the extent of the kinship that exists between humans and animals while contextualising the animal–human relationship as being integral to the survival of both
Grotesque realism as defined in Bakhtin’s Rabelais and his world (1984 [1968]) is especially applicable to Life of Pi, as this convention emphasises the body as a physical manifestation of existence in a wildly exaggerated way that destabilises spatial and temporal boundaries to conflate human and animal modes of being
Animals, the tiger, become important symbols for the physical aspects of survival, such as instinct, intuition and a fierce will to survive at all cost

Summary

Introduction

Winner of the Man Booker prize in 2003, Yann Martel’s Life of Pi (2002) is a story of survival against all odds that explores the nature and the extent of the kinship that exists between humans and animals while contextualising the animal–human relationship as being integral to the survival (whether physical or psychical) of both. The first story, which makes up most of the novel, is overtly preoccupied with the way in which humans and animals co-exist – at a physical level and a spiritual one.

Results

Conclusion