My God, look what he’s doing now. . .
Nevermind. Lest I begin to sound like a one-trick pony, I’m taking a
break from politics. Let’s talk about books. Oh don’t worry, I’m still going to
complain – you wouldn’t want me to go all kum-bai-ya
on you, would you? But it will be complaining of a far less earth shattering
variety.
Thinking I needed to make some tentative outreach to the modern world
(and finding it readily available on my school’s shelf), I went for a book from
2001 – practically this morning by my standards. Yann Martel’s Life of Pi was one everyone went ga ga
over back in the day, winning slavering critical reviews, a Man Booker prize,
and becoming a major motion picture directed by Ang Lee (who got a bleedin’
best Director Oscar for it. . .). So, people really freakin’ loved this book.
What can I say? The Mob Rules.
I suppose it’s all a very cute adventure story and survival tale, and I
particularly liked the mysterious island chapter (I’ve always been a sucker for
Mystery Island
stories). True, the whole first thirty
six chapters felt kind of superfluous - more like abandoned plot threads then
rich background detail - and the italicized narrator switch rather half-baked
(what was the point exactly?). But I like adventure stories and survival tales,
and I’ve always been a sucker for Mystery Island stories, and Martel’s got a
friendly prose style, so I was happy to go along for the ride and had would
have had a gay ol’ time. . .
If only. . . .
If only it didn’t read so much like a dopey New Age apologia. Granted,
the narrator is highly unreliable – how seriously are we supposed to take the
rantings of some delirious kid with an admitted penchant for mysticism? – but I
am still stuck in the proverbial elevator with him, and don’t have the luxury
of shouting back at him. Authors make choices. Martel might have had his
narrator simply tell his tale, and
left it a lost-at-sea adventure story with bits of fantasy
and sf thrown in (or “magic realism” as the snotty literati like to call it).
Which would have been fine by me. But this narrator, “Pissing” Pi Patel, isn’t
content to tell his tale – he insists that we believe it.
On several occasions he attacks skeptical thinking with
arguments only a delirious teenager would find compelling, yet Martel allows
for no rebuttal; only idiots get to challenge his narrative. When these idiots
tell Piscine that they “believe what we see”, his response is textbook new
age/pseudo science/crypto zoologist: “So
did Columbus. What do you do when
you’re in the dark?”
Well, I certainly don’t let my faith guide me
Piscine. And unlike you Mr. Patel, Columbus
could point to his “new land” on a chart, and send other people to look for
themselves. But of course, the idiots aren’t allowed to say that – they just
stumble and mutter. When they tell him
that his island is “botanically impossible”, his response is pure teenaged
smart ass:
“Said the fly just before landing in the Venus
Flytrap.”
Of course the idiots don’t patiently but politely point out
this is what we call a “false analogy”; that Venus flytraps and bonsai trees
have been extensively documented and independently verified and explained by
scientists, unlike his island of bloodsucking seaweed. Bringing me to the
kicker:
“ No scientist would believe you.”
“Those would be the same who dismissed Copernicus and
Darwin.”
Woh, how many fallacies can we fit into one line? Kind of
like his Columbus statement, this
is the classic cry of pseudo-crytpo-claimant: “crazy things have been
discovered before, therefore my crazy thing must be true”. Or: “they laughed at Galileo, and they’re
laughing at me, therefore, I must be Galileo”. Piscine forgets (and the idiots
neglect to remind him) that Copernicus and Darwin had to prove their
findings with empirical evidence. They weren’t accepted on faith.
I suspect that many botanists would be quite intrigued by
Piscine’s story, for the same reason
they read science fiction. They’d be tickled by the possibility, and speculate
how it might work. That does not mean they would accept it blindly; not without
physical evidence, which he has neglected to provide. The scientist does not
have the luxury of the religious mystic; he or she cannot believe something
just because it makes a “better story” (unlike Piscine, who pretty much admits
later that’s the entire basis of his cherry-picked faith – kinda like Trump’s
politics).
Let’s put it this way: maybe I tiger could hide undetected
in the Mexican wilderness. But if we find some delirious kid adrift in a life
boat, ranting about talking tigers and flesh eating trees, are we supposed to
take his word for it?
One of the main responsibilities of any author is to the
consistency of his/her characters, and I suppose Martel is doing no more than
putting words in Piscine’s mouth which Piscine would actually say. In a
first-person narrative which the narrator spends almost entirely in isolation, it
is entirely reasonable to provide only that narrator’s perspective – indeed,
isn’t that rather the point? To be fair, Martel does throw a bit of a bone to
skeptics like me: Piscine admits the use of a “dream rag”, a saltwater-soaked
rag he suffocates himself with. Deprived of oxygen, he “would be visited by the
most extraordinary dreams, trances, visions, thoughts, sensations and
remembrances”. A couple pages later the tiger starts talking to him. I think
it’s an entirely to interpret the whole novel as a product of the dream rag.
Martel allows for this interpretation, but I bet dollars to
donuts most readers (and viewers of the Lee film) will miss that detail
completely and go for mysticism, taking from the novel Piscine’s false
analogies and nonsensical aphorisms. I suppose they make for a “better story”.
But I refuse to be drawn in by this kind of thinking. And if I have to sit in a
boat with this quack for three hundred and fifty four pages, you’re damn right
I’m going to yell back at him.
Especially when confronted with this howler:
“It is not atheists who get stuck in my craw, but agnostics.
. .to choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a
means of transportation.”
Bullshit! Seriously. Not all of us need a dream rag to make
sense of life. On the contrary, I would argue that the here and now, the solid,
the tangible, the actual, slowly and painfully revealed by science, offers a
much richer life experience than Patel’s fever dreams. Why is reasonable doubt
– the simple act of admitting what we don’t know – a less viable philosophy
than making it all up? Pretending you have special insight into the mind of the
(necessarily invisible) creator? On this point, Pissing should piss off.
