Author Archives: Dan Chira

Niculae Gheran
Babeş-BolyaiUniversity,Cluj Napoca,Romania,
gheran.niculae@yahoo.co.uk

Relating Romantic Monsters to Dystopian Robots. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Carel Čapek’s Rossum’s Universal Robots

Abstract: The following paper is a study case showing the way in which the debate and attitudes on creating artificial life were shaped by Mary Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein’ and how this debate was inherited by dystopian author Carel Capek in ‘Rossum’s Universal Robots’. Paralels are made at the level of simbolic topography, classic scientific discourse, its relationship with gender constructs and the growing field of disability studies. Capek’s thesis seems to be more complex than many have assumed. Rather than simply offering a radical critique of man’s endeavour to create artificial life, the author seems to favour mimesis rather than the scientific attempt at improving nature itself.

Keywords: Mary Shelley; Carel Čapek; Dystopia; Monster; Robot; Gender.

Dr. Frankenstein’s creature is probably the most well-known “monster” in all of British literature and Mary Shelley, as Joan Kane Nichols argues in her book, Mary Shelley – Frankenstein’s Creator, the first science-fiction writer. Her influence in literature is unparalleled and her work the staple piece of hundreds of university courses around the world. Courses on the Gothic Novel, feminism, disability studies are nowadays unthinkable without taking Frankenstein into consideration either as main text or important influence. As Diane Long Hoeveler notes, Shelley’s novel has become the most frequently taught canonical novel written by a woman in the nineteenth century (Hoevler 2003, 60) while Jay Clayton argues that, as a cautionary tale, “virtually every catastrophe of the last two centuries – revolution, rampant industrialism, epidemics, famines, World War I, Nazism, Nuclear holocaust, clones, replicants and robots has been symbolized by Shelley’s monster.”(Clayton 2003, 84)

In a very extensive essay entitled “Frankenstein’s Futurity: Replicants and Robots” published in The Cambridge Companion to Mary Shelley, Clayton tracks tales of robots and replicants as being direct descendants of Dr. Frankenstein’s creation. Whether these creations are portrayed in a good or bad light, as a bright step forward in human evolution or as a monstrous, potential cause for the downfall of man, Clayton believes that these texts are all related to Shelley’s novel. To this purpose, within the corpus of his essay, he discusses views from famous directors such as Ridley Scott, George Lucas or Stephen Spielberg, science fiction writers such as Nancy Kress and Octavia A. Butler; pioneers of robotics like Hans Moravec and Rodney A. Brooks; the inventor Ray Kurzweil or the feminist theorist of science studies Donna Haraway. (Clayton 2003, 85) What Clayton does is basically splitting these robotical descendants of Frankenstein in two categories on the basis of the author’s and work’s position (favourable or unfavourable) to the creation of artificial life. He discusses afterwards the minority of works, in written or cinematic form that have begun to appear and which seem to portray these creations not as monsters or, in his own words, “demons stalking popular culture” (Clayton 2003, 85) but in a positive light. The essay is very astutely written and certainly does a good job of showing the different artistic and scientific perspectives on the matter of creating artificial life while also pointing out the connections with Mary Shelley’s novel. However, I would try to point out throughout this essay that although it is true that in the last few years we have been witnessing an upsurge in productions, cinematic or otherwise, that do not portray robots or replicants as “monsters” or aberrations of science, this is not actually a new way of approaching the theme. In fact, with regards to sci-fi and the dystopian sub-genre, the origins of the idea can be traced as far back as the 1920s to the author that introduced the word “robot” into the English language, the Czech author, Karel Čapek.

The purpose of this essay is thus to build yet another bridge, this time between Mary Shelley and a twentieth century author whose fictional spaces and characters have often been regarded as dystopian. His work, R.U.R – Rossum’s Universal Robots attempts to portray a future in which science has managed to create artificial life forms which are used to replace human labour and thus create an apparent leisure utopia where man no longer needs to work. Things do not go exactly as planned and the play develops its dystopian twist. However, it is my aim to prove that, despite the play’s portrayal of universal doom at the hand of nature and robots, the issue is more complicated. The author should not simply be regarded, as many surely did, as one who is fully against the creation of artificial life because of his portrayal of the disastrous consequences that may arise. The issue at stake is far more complex, the author’s position being liminal, that is, constructing within the same work both images that would suggest an unfavourable attitude towards creating life and “monsters” as well as images that portray the potentiality of this endeavour, provided it is done right. The “right way” Čapek seems to suggest is also within the scope of this essay. What the author does in my opinion is a criticism of means and motives, rather than the end itself of creating artificial life. He portrays the things that may go wrong but also leaves images that seem to hint at how things ought to have been done, provided only if done better. We should bear in mind that Čapek’s creations are not like we would tend to imagine “robots”, that is, machines vaguely mimicking humans made of iron and bolts. On the contrary, we are talking about very close replicas of humans, closer to what sci-fi later called androids.

Because of the author’s narrative structure with regards to the creation of artificial life, this essay will be split into two parts. The first will be dealing with Čapek’s critique of sciences’ obsession with controlling nature and the environment. Issues of space and gender, Čapek’s usage of dystopian topology as well as pointing out the connections between his play and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein will be discussed in this first part.

The second section will be dealing with images in the play which are not critical of the prospect of creating artificial life. During this section I will draw on theories coming from the field of disability studies as well as Jungian psychoanalysis. Same as before, we shall be having in mind parallels with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

The Monstrous Gendered Dystopian Space and the Critique of Science’s Attempt to Subdue Nature to Reason

The first of the parallels between Čapek and Shelley that we should take into account surrounds the issue of gender. As most feminist scholars have pointed out, one of the most important images at the core of Frankenstein is the image of a male scientist attempting to create life in the absence of the female, an image also present in Čapek’s R.U.R. In our exploration of this issue we should also be aware of one of western culture’s most enduring narratives, astutely discussed by Susan Griffin in her work Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her. This narrative implies a symbolic association between masculinity and rationality/ science on one hand, while on the other, an association between femininity, nature and irrationality. According to Griffin, a hierarchy between the two terms is also part of the narrative, placing reason and masculinity above femininity and nature, the purpose of the first being achieving control over the latter. This type of gender politics was inherent to scientific thought in the seventeenth century and the Enlightenment against which Shelley partly reacted and in which Francis Bacon announced: “I come in very truth leading to you Nature with all her children to bind her to your service and make her your slave. […] Nature should be taken by the forelock. It is necessary to subdue her, to shake her to her foundations.” (Farrington 1997) These types of gender constructions in relation to science and nature are very important when discussing works like Mary Shelley’s novel or Carek Čapek’s play at the level of characters, themes but most importantly at the level of constructing symbolic geographical environments. In the case of Shelley’s novel, the repression of the feminine singles Dr. Frankenstein as a man working against nature, his “monster” being the result of an unnatural scientific experiment while the laboratory where this is achieved is constructed as a masculine space. His quest, as Anne K. Mellor notes in the essay “Making a ‘Monster’: An Introduction to Frankenstein” from The Cambridge Companion to Mary Shelley is precisely to usurp from nature the female power of biological reproduction, (Mellor 2003, 19) or, as Francis Bacon put it “to penetrate into the recesses of nature, and show how she works in her hiding places.” (Farrington 1997) She observes how such an interpretation leads to discussions of the novel as a critique of science that overreaches past the boundary of Nature. Mary Shelley worked upon several ideas and concepts related to the scientific world in her time, including Sir. Humphry Davy, the first President of the Royal Society of Science who believed that the master chemist is one who attempts “to modify and change the beings surrounding him, and by his experiments to interrogate nature with power, not simply as a scholar, passive and seeking only to understand her operations but rather as a master, active with his own instruments”. (Johnson 1802, 16) This fixation about controlling nature is portrayed by both authors as leading to terrible results. In R.U.R the same critique is underlined in a different manner. Here, the construction of a large number of robots affects the birth rate of humans:

Dr. Gall: […] maybe you would throw stones into these machines, here, that give birth to robots and destroy women’s ability to be women.

Helena: Why are there no more children being born?

Dr. Gall: Because there are robots being made. Because there’s an excess in manpower. Because mankind is actually no longer needed. It’s almost as if…er…

Helena: Say it.

Dr. Gall: It’s as if making robots were an offence against Nature.

Helena: Gall, what’s going to become of the human race?

Dr. Gall: Nothing. There’s nothing that can be done against the force of nature.

Helena: Why didn’t Domin put a limit on…

Dr. Gall: Ah, forgive me, but Domin has his own ideas. People who have ideas should never be allowed to have any influence on the events of this world.

This is an example of a way in which “Mother Earth” itself and nature fights back. This theme of nature fighting back can also be observed in Frankenstein, though here, nature’s revenge is not against humanity as a whole but seems to be focused on Dr. Frankenstein alone, who dies of “natural” causes at a very young age. (Mellor 2003, 19)

Similarly, the issue of gender resurfaces in the creation of Rossum’s robots but this construction of gender emerges not only at the level of characters (the robots being similarly to Frankenstein’s creation, motherless creations of a male scientist) but also at the level concerning the gendered spatiality of the island itself. The island on which the robots are being created is a strictly masculine space, in a sense, a twentieth century version of Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory. To further emphasize the connections between gender and space in R.U.R and also the issue of why this space may be considered monstrous as well as masculine, we must turn to some of the basic features of utopian/ dystopian space. Writers of utopias geographically constructed space as an island on which a supposed better, rational social order could be created. The island also provided the isolation from the world beyond it. In many utopias, travellers coming from other geographical environments are regarded in a negative light. This is because, from the utopian perspective, any exterior element could prove potentially destabilizing and subversive to the “perfect” utopian social order. Individual and geographical otherness is thus automatically constructed as uncanny dark continents (in the Freudian sense). Or, much more simply put, the geographical environment of the island was constructed symbolically as a positive, desirable space whilst the world beyond and its inhabitants carried a negative, undesirable symbolic value. Twentieth century dystopian authors maintained the island model at the core of their textual geography; however, they reversed the symbolic connotations of space. While much has been said about the negative space of the dystopian city, few considered discussions of the space beyond it. Its meaning too has been reversed, shifted from the former utopian construction as “dark continent” to a space endowed with positive meaning. The same can be said about the role of visitors to the “island” who bring with them a different world view challenging the main discourse central to the dystopian topos. The female gender and feminine space is of significant importance to R.U.R. The character of Helena is in this case a potentially subversive visitor who remains throughout the play the only female human character on an island populated solely by male scientists and robots. As she herself declares “I’ve come here with plans to start a revolution among your robots”^[1]. Her discourse is one that posits ethical considerations against the business oriented factory management that creates robots in order to sell them as inexpensive labor force or army personnel. Gender is also an important element in the marketing of robots themselves as Domin, the chief scientist tellsHelena:

Helena: Why do you make female robots when…

Domin: …when they don’t have, er, when gender has no meaning to them?

Helena: That’s right.

Domin: It’s a matter of supply and demand. You see, housemaids, shop staff, typists: people are used to them being female.[2]

Domin himself has a female robot secretary. This particular type of marketing also underlines issues of space and gender, though this time the focus is the workplace as gendered space. Čapek goes to considerable lengths to underline the repression and confinement of the feminine to certain areas of life while being supressed from others. While on the island, Helenais not given permission to visit all areas of the factory, in fact she is mostly portrayed as staying in a room specially designed for her, a room “of purely feminine character.”^[3] This is the room in which the original blueprints for robot creation will be burned byHelena making all further robot construction impossible. However, this happens too late to have a chance at stopping the robots who turn against their creators and the extinction of the human race.

To return to Griffin’s theory examining the narrative equating masculinity with reason and femininity with nature and irrationality, the repression of the feminine can also be observed at the level of robot construction. The original aim of Rossum was creating an artificial life-form that is completely rational and efficient, constructing any other human feature as other and repressing it from the final product. Human qualities like “feeling happiness”, “playing the violin”, “going for walk” and other like these had to be eliminated because they were not needed as they interfered with the robot’s productivity. Domin considers that “a good worker” is not one that is honest and dedicated, asHelena thinks, but rather one that is cheap and has the least needs possible. Rossum therefore did not originally attempt to mimic nature in his endeavour to create artificial life but rather attempted to simplify the concept eliminating any humanlike feature that would stay in the way of the robot’s main three functions: rationality, efficiency and cost effectiveness. Because of these things, Domin believes that Rossum created something much more sophisticated than nature ever did.

This particular construction priciple contains within itself the doom of mankind for a very simple reason. If artificial life is created only to perform tasks, be rational, eliminate inefficient behaviour from the environment  and importance is not being put on any other developmental areas, it should not come as a surprise the moment when these beings turn against their creators. Both Rossum and Domin understood that humans are prone to irrational behaviour, engaged in all sorts of activities that are not productive or contributing to work efficiency and they tried building creatures that are free of such issues. One should not wonder then when the robots start to do precisely what they have been created for: rationalize and eliminate ineficiency ergo eliminate the irrational humans or as Rossum put it‚ throw the man out and put the robot in’. As Radius, the robot leader argues:

Helena: I’m so sorry about it, they’re going to exterminate you. Why weren’t you more careful with yourself?

Radius: I will not work for you.

Helena: Why do you hate us so much?

Radius: You are not like robots. Robots are able to do anything. You give mearly orders. You say words which are not needed.[4]

The irrational side of man is being rejected in favour of creating a purely rational being. Again, this turns us to the question of gender, for if masculinity is constructed asGriffinargues in relation to reason and femininity in relation to irrationality and nature, repressing the irrational equates symbolically with the repression of the female at a geographic as well as psychological level.

The otherness and alternative natural feminine space symbolized byHelenais posed as counterpoint to the masculine space of the island. She is the outsider visitor, the symbolism associated to her gender being potentially subversive to the carefully rationalized order on the island. Domin’s initial refusal to listen to Helena’s arguments ultimately leads to the extinction of the human race, first by a massive drop in human natality symbolizing nature’s reaction to his enterprise and secondly by physical elimination at the hands of the robots who basically achieve what they have been programmed for: be rational, maximize efficiency and eliminate irrational behaviour from the environment. Čapek’s point seems to be that interfering with nature and repressing the feminine is not only unnatural or unjust but extremely dangerous having the potential of causing unforeseen consequences. For this reason, through its symbolic associations, the island is constructed in my opinion as a masculine space of monstrosity.

Hope for the New Adam and Eve after the Robot Apocalypse – A Robot Love Story and Čapek’s Right Kind of Artificial Life

All being said in the previous chapter about the island as being monstrous through the repression of nature and the feminine, Čapek’s text does seem to posit an alternative to universal doom at the hand of robots and the revenge of nature. And this is precisely the part that is so often overlooked by critics who simply label him as being ultimately unfavourable to the prospect of creating artificial life when discussing his play. This alternative comes in the form of symbolic hybridization and the acceptance of the natural, irrational and feminine dimension in man’s endeavour of creating a life form in his own image.

Within this chapter I will attempt to show that rather than eliminating the natural irrational “other” from robot construction with the purpose of creating a more efficient artificial being, Čapek’s point seems to be that man must rather attempt mimesis, that is not attempt to correct nature but imitate it. The issue revolves around the seeming development of individual consciousness in the case of some robots present in the play as well as Dr. Gall’s idea of shaping a new breed of robots, a breed that starts with the creation of a very close replica of Helena. However, throughout the play, we manage to meet only two of his creations, a male named Primus and robot Helenabefore the robot apocalypse. But to understand exactly how these two function symbolically in the economy of the text we must make a further parallel with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

Having in mind the above discussion of the role of gender and gendered space we should detach a little from feminist criticism and go into the area of disability studies as well as Jungian psychoanalysis. Simi Linton argues that the purpose of disability studies is to criticize the notion that disability is primarily a medical category. Linton explains that:

The medicalization of disability casts human variation as deviance from the norm, as pathological condition, as deficit, and significantly, as an individual burden and personal tragedy. Society, in agreeing to assign medical meaning to disability, colludes to keep the issue within the purview of the medical establishment, to keep it a personal matter and “treat” the condition and the person with the condition rather than “treating” the social processes and policies that construct disabled people’s lives. […] Our goal is the reinterpretation of disability as a political category and to the social changes that could follow such a shift. (Linton 1998, 2)

Now obviously, as Diane Hoeveler notices, it is rather easy to use this definition in relation to a novel likes Frankenstein. The creature’s appearance could be interpreted as “disabled” in a society that values external beauty (as defined by the aesthetic theories of Edmund Burke), conformity and class determinacy. Frankenstein thus becomes an expression of the “otherness” of living as differently abled in a world of able, hostile or indifferent people. (Hoevler 2003, 59) Hoeveler also mentions the theory of the biologist Stephen Jay Gould who believes that “the creature becomes a monster because he is cruelly ensnared by one of the deepest predispositions of our biological inheritance – our aversion towards seriously malformed individuals”. Gould believes this is a “mammalian pattern” which needs to be tempered by “learning and understanding.” (Gould 1994, 21) Shelley’s point in constructing Frankenstein would then be that “Nature can only supply a predisposition, while culture shapes specific results … [we must all] …judge people by their qualities of soul, not by their external appearances”. Also the rejection, fear, hatred and punishment the creature faces contributes to his turning violent. This seems to point out the now common psychological insight concerning the probability and the frequency to which an abused child turns himself into an abuser.

This particular issue is reversed with respect to Čapek’s play. By this I mean that the robots are not portrayed as being ugly or physically disabled. In aspect they are near perfect copies of humans. Thus, their monstrosity does not stem from an unappealing appearance but rather the robots are perceived as monstrous or inferior by the scientists because “they don’t have a soul,”^[5] a rather hypocritical remark as we shall see. The robots are objectified as machines fulfilling the tasks for which they are created and sold on the market. The possibility that these forms of artificial life may also develop their own psychology, or, even more, that there may be ways of attempting to improve the resemblance of their psyche to that of humans is completely beyond the scope of scientists like Domin. Among those like him, not only it is commonly considered that the robots have no souls, but also that they don’t need one for the tasks they have been built for.

Domin: (laughing) Sulla isn’t a person, Miss Glory, she’s a robot.

Helena: Oh, please forgive me …

Domin: (puts his hand on Sulla’s shoulder) Sulla doesn’t have feelings. You can examine her. Feel her face and see how we make the skin.

Helena: Oh, no, no!

Domin: It feels just the same as human skin. Sulla even has the sort of down on her face that you’d expect on a blonde. Perhaps her eyes are a bit small, but look at that hair. Turn around, Sulla.[6]

This underestimation is a key factor causing the robot rebellion which ultimately leads to the destruction of the human race. Similarly to Dr. Frankenstein, Domin fails as a parent at understanding and taking responsibility for his “children”. The fact of the matter is that the robots’ violent reaction against their creators, against being used as slave labour force, their craving for independence and even their rage and bloody revenge seems to indicate a development in their individual consciousness progressing from the point where they would blindly follow orders to another, more advanced, level. However, Domin is a scientist, a biological engineer, not a psychologist. Helena comes again into focus, posing some very interesting, intuitive ideas but these are treated as preposterous by Domin or the other scientists.

Hallemeier: They’ve got no will of their own. No passions. No hopes. No soul.

Helena: And no love and no courage?

Hallemeier: Well of course they don’t feel love. Robots don’t love anything, not even themselves. And courage? I’m not so sure about that; a couple of times, not very often, mind, they have shown some resistance …

Helena: What?

Hallemeier: Well, nothing in particular, just that sometimes they seem to, sort of, go silent. It’s almost like some kind of epileptic fit. “Robot cramp”, we call it. Or sometimes one of them might suddenly smash whatever’s in its hand, or stand still, or grind their teeth– and then they just have to go on the scrap heap. It’s clearly just some technical disorder.

Domin: Some kind of fault in the production.

Helena: No, no, that’s their soul![7]

When the robots indeed do seem to act outside the proper pattern inscribed to them, the scientists merely conclude that it is due to a factory disorder or technical failure and send those that cannot be “repaired” to the scrap heap. What interests us here from the point of view of disability studies is precisely how the robots’ difference is constructed as other, as a kind of disease: “robot cramp”. Rather than admitting the possibility that the respective robots might be evolving and developing differently from the point of view of individual consciousness or developing even a “soul”, this different behaviour is constructed as a disease. Thus similarly to how Dr. Frankenstein rejects his creature, regarding it as a disabled monstrosity so do the scientists in Čapek play reject the robots that do not fit their image of the proper functioning robot, sending those that manifest the above quoted symptoms to the scrap heap. These are the robots that will eventually suceed in eliminating man.

But we might ask, how exactly are we to interpret or define the concept of “soul” within this text? The question is fundamental in order for us to understand the reason for which these artificial beings are constructed as monstrous by the scientists. What exactly does Helena mean when she argues that the robots have the capability of developing souls? To answer this question I think that Čapek has in mind a psychological definition. That is to say, he employs the word “soul” as a word related to the concepts of “anima” or “psyche” used by ancient philosophers such as Plato or Aristotle and later psychologists like C.G. Jung.

Although Čapek could not have had any contact with the works of C.G Jung, their definitions of the “soul” or “anima” seem remarkably compatible. For Jung, the anima was an antropomorphic archetype of the unconscious psyche which presented itself as the totality of the unconscious feminine psychological qualities that a male possesses. Jung considered this archetype as being responsible for creativity, sensitivity as well as other typically human features. If we understand Čapek’s definition of soul as anima following the Jungian perspective we can make several interesting observations.

First of all, we become aware of the hypocritical position of the scientists. This is because, on one hand, they construct robot identity as an ontological other, as “soulless”, “not-human” and therefore inferior and monstrous. On the other hand, when a robot does manifest actions that contradict the “soulless” paradigm, their condition, far from being considered as a sign of developing consciousness, is treated as a disease: robot cramp. We have seen through disability studies how difference can be constructed as sickness. Therefore, the only two types of identity a robot is attributed by the scientists are either “soulless and monstrous” or “defective and monstrous”. But why would the emergence of consciousness, soul or the anima would automatically construct them as “defective”? The answer to this question is simple: because the soul or “anima”, the feminine archetype that Jung believed is the source of human creativity is precisely what is eliminated in the attempt to create the perfectly rational, efficient artificial being. As Domin himself puts it, robots are supposed to be efficient not be creative or “play the violin”^[8] like humans do. As we have seen in the above quotation from the play, the signs of “robot cramp” are described to us as bursts of irrational behaviour unnacceptable from perfectly rational and efficient forms of artificial life. This brings us back to the issue of gender. Susan Griffin points out the narrative that has constructed masculine identity in relation to reason and culture while female identity was constructed in relation to irrationality and nature. The existance of an anima, of this feminine principle would undermine the prime purpouse of the robots’ existance. The issue of rejecting the probability that the robots may be developing a soul or anima is another instance of repressing the feminine on Čapek’s robot island.

In the end, the robots do manage to rebel against their creators and in the process exterminate the whole human race. In turn, Helena destroys Rossum’s original blueprints making all further robot construction impossible. Thus, apparently both races are doomed. Only one scientist, Alquist, the head of the construction department is left alive by the robots with the hope that he can rediscover the now lost “secret of life”. His great surprise is to see in the final scene of the play two of Dr. Gall’s robots, Primus and robotHelenashowing empathy and being in love with each other acting exactly like a pair of humans would, given the circumstance. At first he cannot believe his eyes, thinking that maybe they are humans that have somehow managed to escape the robot apocalypse. This confusion destabilizes completely the symbolic line that was cast between the race of men and robots. The signs that made differences visible do not function anymore. Alquist’s first instinct is that of the scientist. He wishes to disect robotHelenaand see exactly what is the rational cause for her natural, humanlike behaviour, what makes her work different from the other robots. After encountering heavy protests from Primus who dramatically offers his life to spare the other, Alquist accepts only to encounter the same protests, this time fromHelena. However he changes his attitude abbruptly:

Primus: (holding on to her) I won’t let go of you. You’re not going to kill anyone, old man!

Alquist: Why not?

Primus: Because … because … we belong to each other.

Alquist: You’re quite right. It’s alright. Go, now.  Go on your way, Adam. Go on your way, Eve. [9]

In my opinion this last scene from the play changes radically the message of Čapek’s text. We are not dealing, as many have assumed when interpreting, with a text that simply criticizes man’s overreaching ambition at creating artificial life. The text does not resemble Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein at the level of this particular theme. Surely, as Jay Clayton argued, texts that portray favourable views towards the creation of artificial life are just as much indebted to Frankenstein as texts that do not. However, the criticism in Čapek’s play is not meant to be a clear dismssal of the attempt. One can say that the author criticizes the utilitarian logic that lead to the construction of the robots in the first place or the repression of nature, the irrational and the feminine principle both at the level of individual characters as well as geographical environment. One can say that the author criticises of the scientist’s approach to correct nature rather than work along it an mimic it, but not the prospect of creating life itself.

 These two robots with humanlike feelings for eachother are neither represented as monstrous nor are they evil or failed experiments but rather they act more human than the humans themselves did throughout the play. The play goes a long way telling us that irrationality, creativity, feelings and emotions are just as much part of human nature as rationality is and those that will or would venture unto the task of creating life-forms in our own image should definitely take this into account. The two at the end, presented as a new originary pair, a new Adam and a new Eve are a step forward in evolution. They are hibridized creatures containing the best from both worlds. In this respect Čapek’s text is among the first that portray not only what may go wrong in the creation of artificial life but also alternative possibilities. Alquist’s final optimistic remark seems to underline this.

Alquist: […] life will not perish! Life begins anew, it begins naked and small and comes from love; it takes root in the desert and all that we have done and built, all our cities and factories, all our great art, all our thoughts and all our philosophies, all this will not pass away. It’s only we that have passed away. Our buildings and machines will fall to ruin, the systems and the names of the great will fall like leaves, but you, love, you flourish in the ruins and sow the seeds of life in the wind.[10]

References

Bacon, Francis, Temporis Partus Masculus: An Untranslated Writing of Francis Bacon, trans. Benjamin Farrington, Centaurus I, (1951), 1997

Clayton, Jay, Frankenstein’s Futurity: Replicants and Robots in Schor, Esther, The Cambridge Companion to Mary Shelley, Cambridge University Press, 2003

Davy, Humphry, A Discourse, Introductory to a Course of Lectures on Chemistry, Joseph Johnson,London, 1802

Gould Stephen, Jay, The Monster’s Human Nature in Natural History, 103 (July 1994)

Hoeveler, Diane, Long, Frankenstein, feminism and literary theory in Schor, Esther. The Cambridge Companion to Mary Shelley,CambridgeUniversity Press, 2003

Jung, C.G, The Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious,London, 1996

Schor, Esther ed., The Cambridge Companion to Mary Shelley,CambridgeUniversity Press, 2003

Linton, Simi, Claiming Disability: Knowledge and Identity,New YorkUniversity Press,New York, 1998

Mellor, Anne, K, Making a ‘Monster’: An Introduction to Frankenstein from The Cambridge Companion to Mary Shelley in Schor, Esther ed. The Cambridge Companion to Mary Shelley,CambridgeUniversity Press, 2003

Notes

Niculae Gheran
Babeş-BolyaiUniversity,Cluj Napoca,Romania,
gheran.niculae@yahoo.co.uk

Relating Romantic Monsters to Dystopian Robots. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Carel Čapek’s Rossum’s Universal Robots

Abstract: The following paper is a study case showing the way in which the debate and attitudes on creating artificial life were shaped by Mary Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein’ and how this debate was inherited by dystopian author Carel Capek in ‘Rossum’s Universal Robots’. Paralels are made at the level of simbolic topography, classic scientific discourse, its relationship with gender constructs and the growing field of disability studies. Capek’s thesis seems to be more complex than many have assumed. Rather than simply offering a radical critique of man’s endeavour to create artificial life, the author seems to favour mimesis rather than the scientific attempt at improving nature itself.

Keywords: Mary Shelley; Carel Čapek; Dystopia; Monster; Robot; Gender.

Dr. Frankenstein’s creature is probably the most well-known “monster” in all of British literature and Mary Shelley, as Joan Kane Nichols argues in her book, Mary Shelley – Frankenstein’s Creator, the first science-fiction writer. Her influence in literature is unparalleled and her work the staple piece of hundreds of university courses around the world. Courses on the Gothic Novel, feminism, disability studies are nowadays unthinkable without taking Frankenstein into consideration either as main text or important influence. As Diane Long Hoeveler notes, Shelley’s novel has become the most frequently taught canonical novel written by a woman in the nineteenth century (Hoevler 2003, 60) while Jay Clayton argues that, as a cautionary tale, “virtually every catastrophe of the last two centuries – revolution, rampant industrialism, epidemics, famines, World War I, Nazism, Nuclear holocaust, clones, replicants and robots has been symbolized by Shelley’s monster.”(Clayton 2003, 84)

In a very extensive essay entitled “Frankenstein’s Futurity: Replicants and Robots” published in The Cambridge Companion to Mary Shelley, Clayton tracks tales of robots and replicants as being direct descendants of Dr. Frankenstein’s creation. Whether these creations are portrayed in a good or bad light, as a bright step forward in human evolution or as a monstrous, potential cause for the downfall of man, Clayton believes that these texts are all related to Shelley’s novel. To this purpose, within the corpus of his essay, he discusses views from famous directors such as Ridley Scott, George Lucas or Stephen Spielberg, science fiction writers such as Nancy Kress and Octavia A. Butler; pioneers of robotics like Hans Moravec and Rodney A. Brooks; the inventor Ray Kurzweil or the feminist theorist of science studies Donna Haraway. (Clayton 2003, 85) What Clayton does is basically splitting these robotical descendants of Frankenstein in two categories on the basis of the author’s and work’s position (favourable or unfavourable) to the creation of artificial life. He discusses afterwards the minority of works, in written or cinematic form that have begun to appear and which seem to portray these creations not as monsters or, in his own words, “demons stalking popular culture” (Clayton 2003, 85) but in a positive light. The essay is very astutely written and certainly does a good job of showing the different artistic and scientific perspectives on the matter of creating artificial life while also pointing out the connections with Mary Shelley’s novel. However, I would try to point out throughout this essay that although it is true that in the last few years we have been witnessing an upsurge in productions, cinematic or otherwise, that do not portray robots or replicants as “monsters” or aberrations of science, this is not actually a new way of approaching the theme. In fact, with regards to sci-fi and the dystopian sub-genre, the origins of the idea can be traced as far back as the 1920s to the author that introduced the word “robot” into the English language, the Czech author, Karel Čapek.

The purpose of this essay is thus to build yet another bridge, this time between Mary Shelley and a twentieth century author whose fictional spaces and characters have often been regarded as dystopian. His work, R.U.R – Rossum’s Universal Robots attempts to portray a future in which science has managed to create artificial life forms which are used to replace human labour and thus create an apparent leisure utopia where man no longer needs to work. Things do not go exactly as planned and the play develops its dystopian twist. However, it is my aim to prove that, despite the play’s portrayal of universal doom at the hand of nature and robots, the issue is more complicated. The author should not simply be regarded, as many surely did, as one who is fully against the creation of artificial life because of his portrayal of the disastrous consequences that may arise. The issue at stake is far more complex, the author’s position being liminal, that is, constructing within the same work both images that would suggest an unfavourable attitude towards creating life and “monsters” as well as images that portray the potentiality of this endeavour, provided it is done right. The “right way” Čapek seems to suggest is also within the scope of this essay. What the author does in my opinion is a criticism of means and motives, rather than the end itself of creating artificial life. He portrays the things that may go wrongtruct>

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Adriana Teodorescu
1 December 1918 University,Alba Iulia
adriana.teodorescu@gmail.com

How a Fantastic Novel Constructs the Enemy Figure

The Untamed Other and the Role of Fantasy in Life of Pi

Abstract: This study seeks to bring out the aesthetic means of constructing the enemy/foe figure in the fantasy novel entitled Life of Pi by the Canadian author Yann Martel, published in 2001 and screened in 2012 by director Ang Lee. The main focus is on the literary, fantastic, configuration of the Bengali tiger, Richard Parker, a fictional character often minimised by literary criticism   with reference to its cultural meanings. We posit that even though Life of Pi is a postmodern novel, the way in which the author constructs the character contrasts with contemporary postmodern paradigm through which the Other is fully interpreted as a positive value. Our perspective will be based on different methodological instruments, combining diverse fields like literary critique, cultural studies or social anthropology.

Keywords: Yann Martel; Ang Lee; Life of Pi; Postmodernism; The Other; Enemy / Foe.

Introduction. The life of Pi, the life of the tiger

The fantasy novel Life of Pi, written by the Canadian author Yann Martel, was published in 2001 and adapted for the screen in 2012 by director Ang Lee. The book portrays the story of an Indian adolescent, Piscine Molitor Patel (whose nickname will become Pi). Pi is the son of an important Zoo owner inPondicherry (French India). Raised a vegetarian Hindi, Pi is very much passionate about religion and he approaches Hinduism, Christianity and Islamism, in order to understand God, by using the benefits of all three religions. He is passionate about the animal life and, from the very first pages, we find out about the fierce and frightening Bengali Tiger, Richard Parker, whose name comes about due to a printing mistake which mixes up the tiger’s name with the owner from which Pi’s family makes the purchase.

Unhappy with the political regime of Gandhi’s wife government, Pi’s father decides to immigrate toCanada, with his entire family and the animals from the Zoo. After travelling for a couple of days aboard a Japanese ship, a powerful storm sinks the ship and Pi loses his entire family (mother, father and brother). Pi is the only one who manages to survive on a lifeboat where 4 other animals get saved as well: a hyena, a zebra, an orang-utan, and Richard Parker. The hyena kills the zebra and then the orang-utan, after which the tiger eats the hyena. Pi will travel with the tiger for 227 days in the Pacific waters. In the beginning, he builds a device, a raft from scraps where he lives and sleeps. The raft is tied to the boat which enables him to keep a distance from the boat proper, so that he should not become the tiger’s food. Taking advantage of the tiger’s seasickness and other domination and communication strategies (whistling, yelling etc), Pi will give up the raft gradually and will live with Richard Parker on the same boat.

Pi fishes and eats tortoise, manages to feed the tiger with fish, and suffers from delirium and intense weakness. They reach an island which is apparently very welcoming, an island full of meerkats. Pi is forced to leave the island, though, because of the carnivorous vegetation growing there and he takes the tiger with him. A couple more days go by and storms unleash, so that both man and animal suffer from severe dehydration until they finally reach Mexican shores. The tiger disappears in the jungle, while Pi is found more dead than alive by locals and rushed to the hospital.

The last part of the novel presents the interviews Pi gives the Japanese officials who arrive to find information on the fate of the ship. The officials do not believe Pi’s story. A different interpretation is given to the entire event, one in which the tiger is Pi’s imaginary projection, the orang-utan the mother and the hyena the cook.

Aims of this study. In search of the enemy

Our research is by no means exhaustive, a goal that would be hard to attain, given the complexity of Martel’s work. Our research seeks to bring out the aesthetic means of constructing the enemy/foe figure. We will thus focus on the literary configuration of the Bengali tiger, Richard Parker, a fictional character that literary criticism tends to label as either a fantastic animal[1] or as an element of a shrouded religious allegory[2], therefore limiting its literary outreach to narrative mechanisms and anchoring the character within the fantasy-Realism tension. However, our research is not strictly limited to its literary consequences, a subsequent objective being to identify the social and cultural outreach of the way in which the character of Richard Parker is constructed.

Starting from the observation that the tiger clearly occupies the position of the Other, we set out to show that the way in which the author constructs the character contrasts with contemporary paradigm scope and aim, namely the drive to diminish the distance between I and You. It is the same paradigm which presupposes a discursive, ideological exaltation of the difference between the two anthropological instances, the same paradigm through which the Other is fully interpreted as a positive value. The Postmodern non-typicality of the Other is all the more interesting and investigation worthy from both a literary and cultural perspective, as Martel’s work is clearly anchored in Postmodernism.

On the same line with these research aims, our perspective will be based on different methodological instruments, combining diverse fields such as literature/literary criticism, cultural studies and social anthropology. The following section will briefly analyse some of the social mechanisms of cultural Postmodernist imagery which lead to the positive portrayal of the Other. The fourth section investigates the unique way in which the enemy figure is articulated, by taking into account the two ways in which the novel can be interpreted. This will show that, despite being different as literary substance, these two views converge towards the same social imagery of the Other, an imagery which will be examined in relation to fantasy in the 5^th part of the paper part of the paper. The last section, the conclusions, insists on the positive cultural significance of the untamed Other, frequently portrayed as negative entity.

Some major postmodernist ideological tendencies of configuring the Other. A critical perspective

Despite the fact that diversity is an implicit Postmodernist desideratum, Western contemporary culture stands out in the various discourses about the Other, by massively exorcising the problematic difference that it poses. In this respect, Gary Cox[3] notices how, nowadays, under the politically correct imperative, an individual’s insufficiencies, irrespective of the type, are always motivated by putting the blame on circumstances and the socio-cultural context. Strategies of the “politically correct” type seem to lessen the intensity of the reality according to which the Other cannot be always good. This is because the Other cannot always be credited by their individual existence standing against a social background. The same strategies, of a more culturally discursive, rather than political nature, show that if Postmodernism tries to appease differences it is only in order to accept all differences as qualitatively equal.

However, as Jean-Paul Sartre explains it in multiple ways[4], the true problem lies not in differences but in resemblance. To be more exact, the problem of meeting the Other does not go away by taming differences, as this encounter is an ontological matter. Placing the Other in positive spotlight, a specific Postmodernist technique, is natural or rather explicable up to a certain point. At a certain point, however, it becomes the fundamental underpinning of the social mechanisms which manipulate and discipline individuals. The immediate consequence is that the Other becomes stereotypical. The Other is given a positive portrayal on two layers: at the level of the Other’s content and at the level of engaging with the Other. In the first case, the Other is labelled positive, irrespective of its specificity, while, in the second case, positivity is given by virtue of one’s engaging with the Other, irrespective of the specificity of the two participants. The mere existence of a relationship is a good one, it is desirable and can only be pacifying.

We stop to discuss these aspects for a while. After humanity has finally learned, as a consequence of the two world wars, that the myth of Cain and Abel is valid, on a symbolical level, as the recurring story of inter-human hate, it is no wonder a series of non-discriminatory politics and discourses have flooded commercial and mass-media spaces alike. These types of discourse have moral and philosophical consequences[5], which stress for the need for harmony and brotherhood within a community, as well as for the necessity to accept the Other. Within the fertile soil of victims and victimization, the Other acquires an intrinsic value, leaving aside or discrediting older discourses like the ones of Girard,Hobbs or Sartre, which focused on less favourable aspects of the Other. Pier Paolo Antonello, in his introduction to the dialogue-book between Girard and Vattimo, makes an interesting point:

The entire ideological horizon of contemporary culture is indeed built around the central role victims play: Holocaust victims, victims of Capitalism, victims of social injustice, war victims, politically persecuted victims, victims of ecological disasters, racial/sexual/religious discrimination victims[6].

Postmodernism has the tendency to avenge the evil of Modernism, since Modernism makes intense use of post-Christian portrayals. As Vattimo explains, this Postmodernist tendency adds to the postmodern hyper-consumerism. After all, Vattimo is an Italian philosopher who has contributed, in some degree, to the cultural portrayal of the Other in a positive manner through his concept of ‘weak thought’. Lipovetsky notices, in his work Le bonheur paradoxal (Paradoxical Happiness)[7], that the generalised access to consume weakened the tension of inter-human relations, diminished the force of Nemesis– implicitly contradicting, a portion of the assumptions of La critique de la raison dialectique (The Critique of Dialectical Reason) (specifically Sartre-like in nature) which develops the idea of an inevitable fight for food, resources leading to inter-human conflict. By the same token, Lipovetsky, in Le Crépuscule du devoir  (The Dawn of Duty)[8], explains how the Other is more and more easily acceptable since Postmodernist ethics sweetened the idea of sacrifice and self-abandonment for another being. Narcissism means lesser attention to the needs of the Other and no matter how bizarre it would seem, a greater tolerance for it, precisely because the subject is too turned on itself to become truly worried by the problems the Other may have. In addition, Lipovetsky believes that the relationship with the Other steps away from ethics because it enters the zone of a hyper-consumerism show. However, as Lipovetsky also notices, man’s happiness with his own Self and with the Other always leaves traces and eventually generates a feeling of void and emptiness.

The Other seems to pose fewer problems for Postmodernism, at least in some of its areas, alongside its ontological relaxation. The Other, often a tele-visual figure of non-problematic distance, is easier to accept. But it is not a flesh and blood Other which is accepted, but its shadow, precisely because the ontology of the Other is setting, it is coming to an end.

In La mélancolisation du sujet postmoderne ou la disparition de l’Autre[9], French psychiatrist Serge Lesourd notices one important feature of Postmodernist imagery and discourse is to get rid of the Other, a fact which has dramatic individual consequences. Disappearance, abandonment, and the destruction of the Other must be understood in a positive sense, even though the author does not use this precise word. The positive view begins by pooling the Others together under the overarching umbrella which Lesourd calls Man, mediator of the I-Other relationship. The author also reveals the way in which the Other, demoted by being reduced to object, becomes a continuous source of jouissance, in the good tradition of a consumerist age, a frustrating sort of jouissance since the subject which is looking for fulfilment cannot go beyond the inherent incompleteness of his being. This is a truth which the great religions understood and translated into morality and narrative, as Lesourd says. Happiness exists, the Other can be good and fully accessible on condition that the individual who is apt at participating in perfect relations be already dead. The Paradisiacal brotherhood images Christianity promises are based on such mechanisms. It is an aspect Postmodernism is intent on playing with its cards in sight, but which it now fails to understand.

The Postmodernist paradigm of portraying the Other in a positive way is a deficient paradigm. And, indeed, it is strange to think that, while we speak of the Other in positive terms, terrorism, intolerance and massive discrimination are just as present, even if it seems like denying them, at first sight[10]. From this point of view, Cyrille Deloro’s words are all the more profound:

The Other has become a commercial slogan: love one another, the Other ‘is good for you’…but this is not true. The more we pacify our relations, the less the Other exists. We have become “human, too human”! We thus see the other break in abstract and terrifying manners, which make the world a place of horror and transform subjectivity in a battle field. And all these others are radical Others: terrorists of the outer world, metastases of the inner world[11].

Deloro describes the way in which schizophrenics are incapable of mentally or imaginarily configuring the concept of Other. There are only Others, too many, too real, impossible to pin down under a theoretical label. Deloro explains that what is damaged in Schizophrenia is the impersonal nature of the Other, leaving the infinite and overwhelming instances of the Other untouched. The paradigm of the positive Other risks to suffer from a sort of anti-Schizophrenia, so that the Other is not portrayed as much happier. By focusing too much on the Other as an inner-impersonal structure and by applying the necessary positive corrections to it, the contemporary world risks to paralyse the free, unpredictable, difficult, cumbersome relationship with the Other. It is the same relationship which has given rise to art, culture. The Other is not an indisputable value since its meaning resides little in morality, but heavily in Ontology.

Starting from the end: two literary constructions of the enemy

We will first tackle the way in which the enemy/foe figure is configured, starting from the fantasy nature of the book, challenged only at the end of the novel by Pi Patel. By the end of the book, Pi Patel demotes the story to a mere figment of imagination by failing to assume it as narrative. If Richard Parker were an animal, a tiger, an aggressive, unpredictable animal, then it would represent not only the Difference (as qualitative diversity) we discussed earlier, but also Distance. In contrast to Piscine, Richard Parker instantiates the Distance which incorporates radical Difference. This Difference is impossible to abolish socially and ontologically, in spite of the entire range of discourses which claim to make it null. Distance is no longer established between an I and a You whose meeting possibilities are socially prescribed. We refer to a Distance type which is poorly assumed by the community. Actually, strictly speaking, community consent would be insufficient, as it would also need the consent of the animal community. The man-animal perspective can only be anthropocentric and, therefore, no matter how well intentioned (which is not always the case), it is flawed, incomplete and unilateral. Diverging a bit, in order to clear some aspects, it must be noted that Hollywood’s boundless appetite for scripts in which men discover their affinities with the animal kingdom are proof not only of the reciprocal desire of getting closer to a fundamentally different Other, but also of an exotic view which produces interest in assimilation and interpretation. Such exotic views, structurally, are nothing more than a subtle, narcissistic self-mirroring[12]. It is why, most of the times, the Animal-Other is a domestic animal, an animal over which man has already shown supremacy and domination.

To return to Richard Parker, we notice that it is the enemy throughout the story. Richard Parker carries death and murder. It is equally empowered and driven to take life. Irrespective of how man-tiger relations develop, Pi is constantly threatened by Richard Parker. This will not change throughout the story, not even after the storm, when the two are thrown at the bottom of the boat and they share a brief, semi-voluntary moment of tenderness. We made reference to the positive portrayal of the Other, which is actually equivalent to its assimilation as friend. Positive portrayal implies the denial of the dual character of any relation and, ultimately, of any human reality. However, a dissipation of the dual register would also occur whenever the Other is fully equated as a negative element. Richard Parker is not the nihilistic enemy/foe type. There is a positive thread which goes across the conflicting relationship of Pi and the tiger, a thread which cannot bring back equilibrium and cannot continually adjust the relationship towards the negative pole[13].

Pi’s relationship with the tiger develops under two contrastive signs on the boat where they manage to survive, namely through socially ontological bonding and through separation. These two means of bonding come in succession, cyclically, from the beginning of the boat experience until the tiger reaches Mexican shores and disappears without a trace. As a result, the bond between the tiger and Pi is partly social, partly ontological. It is social because it is contextually-driven, triggered by the overall social resettlement, from a normal situation in which the animal was locked in a Zoo or on the ship where both Pi and his parents kept a secure, comforting distance from the animals. After this normality is shattered as a result of the boat sinking, the chance cohabitation of Pi and Richard Parker allowed for, or better said led to an atypical form of man-animal social bonding, where the bonding process is not option-based, but context-based and mandatory.

The bonding process is ontological as well (triggered by social factors) because, once social space is reconfigured, there are major changes for the two protagonists: Richard Parker develops a greater tolerance for its urge to devour Pi’s flesh, settling for the fish offered by his boat mate and for the flesh of the fisherman they encounter at large, where the latter, the fisherman, adopts an animal-like behaviour by regressing to a non-cultural, or a cultural, restrictions-free state where survival, feeding and thirst quenching are of the utmost importance. Seen as a structure built on subjective-objective rendering processes, reality[14] becomes diluted. What remains are the things in the nearby proximity which can be touched. It is quite understandable for Pi to keep memories of the more complicated structures of reality, a fact which is very clear when he daydreams, when he thinks of his mother or he remembers symbols or has visual religious glances. When he loses the diary in which he jots down his experiences and activities, he, in fact, loses his cultural Other and sits face to face with the radical, unknown, untamed, non-human Other. Among others, bonding with the tiger illustrates the human need for relations, outside Christian ethics. There is also a slight undermining of this ethics, because the man gets closer to the animal, not to one of his fellow beings. In addition, it does not bond in a paradisiacal afterlife where differences serve a decorative, non-functional purpose, but in a fantastic life, alternative to the real one, where differences do not matter so much anymore since they are contextually-driven (tiger and man live together, eat and sleep together). However, differences are still threatening, tensed, despite being diminished on a first level of interaction.

As far as the tiger is concerned, even before the destruction of the classic man-animal habitation space, the tiger is drawn towards his human side by the Indian boy in several ways (the animal goes through a process of humanization). First, the tiger bears a human name: Richard Parker (even if everything starts from a transcription error). It is worth noting that names and naming are two important aspects for Pi Patel, as the first pages of the book show. In these initial chapters, the character names himself Pi, instead of Piscine. The name is not a simple etiquette, but an extra-personal history which gets attached to personal history, almost becoming an integral part of it. Second, this is highlighted by Pi’s attempt to bond with the tiger, an attempt punished by his father, who teaches him the lesson of the insurmountable difference between man and animal and the inherent evil nature of the tiger. Above all, his father’s lesson refers to the necessity of knowing one’s enemy, as this is a vital issue. The ultimate lesson is to mistake the Other with Another, as this sometimes poses life risks.

In any case, it is quite hard to distinguish between a strict social bond and a strict ontological one. Instead, we can consider that they intermingle as a unity, as a linguistic sign which, in its pragmatic dimension, is simultaneously the expression as well as the expressed content, the signifiant and the signifié, to use a Structuralist framework.

As one can deduce from the issues so far discussed, Distance is the other side of Pi and Richard Parker’s relation. This is present when we notice Pi’s vigilance while being with the tiger on the boat. Pi is always aware of the death the tiger might bring him. Pi, therefore, engages the tiger in domination, befriending and taming strategies[15]. Distance, as a relational mechanism, manifests itself quite strong when the tiger eats the hyena, when the fisherman they meet by chance[16] in the Pacific, is disembodied by the tiger, but even more when Richard Parker disappears without a trace.

That bungled goodbye hurts me to this day. I wish so much that I’d had one last look at him in the lifeboat, that I’d provoked him a little, so that I was on his mind. I wish I had said to him then-yes, I know, to a tiger, but still-I wish I had said, “Richard Parker, it’s over. We have survived. Can you believe it? I owe you more gratitude than I can express. I couldn’t have done it without you. I would like to say it formally: Richard Parker, thank you. Thank you for saving my life. And now go where you must. You have known the confined freedom of a zoo most of your life; now you will know the free confinement of a jungle. I wish you all the best with it. Watch out for Man.He is not your friend. But I hope you will remember me as a friend. I will never forget you, that is certain. You will always be with me, in my heart. What is that hiss? Ah, our boat has touched sand. So farewell, Richard Parker, farewell. God be with you”[17].

Practically, the end is proof of the fact that Pi’s relation to Richard Parker could never go beyond the man-tiger matrix relation and that Richard Parker did not become Pi Patel’s friend, despite their bond,. Distance alternates with bonding, as noted earlier, but the first is always stronger, exerting its effects on its counterpart. Pi’s bond with the tiger will never become a full fusion, so that they may be indistinguishable. The distance between the two is irreducible. The tiger leaves without being engaged in gestures which might suggest an anthropomorphic interpretation – the tiger is never aware that the jungle which opens up in front of him brings the freedom he never had, neither at Pondicherry Zoo, or at sea. On the other hand, Pi is too tired to behave in accordance with a typical novel-like manner. Pi does not tell the tiger good-bye, since all the tender words that he addresses the tiger are said after Pi parts with the tiger (“I wish I had said”), which makes these words to be words about the tiger. The true Other, the interlocutor, the one who is the You, is, at this point, the book’s reader. The savage nature of the Animal-Other is highlighted once again. At the same time, this goodbye which is a form of discursive regret and of the “what if” philosophy, is a corollary of Pi’s withdrawal from his relationship with an unknown and uncomfortable Other. On a Freudian note, relational libido is re-cast onto the Similar-Other figure, a situation in which death lurks less. And yet, the one who comes back from the sea voyage is not the same with the one who embarked on the voyage. The untamed Other becomes an integral part of Pi’s self, because it is an element which Pi overcomes and which is reciprocal.

If, however, we take into consideration the interpretation of the two Japanese who interview Pi, and therefore consider the entire story to be Pi’s invention and the tiger his personified Self, an imaginative by-product crated by Pi to cope with the dire life conditions on the ocean, the man-tiger relationship appears to be an internal relationship which has no roots in material reality. Regression is more of a psychical, rather than social nature and brings back a part of the reality which Pi knew until the tragic accident: the fact that there was a tiger called Richard Parker, reticent, by its own nature, to human bonding, a tiger which is tied to the Pi’s father life lesson. According to this lesson, man must not consider all animals as friends, but must, instead, know his enemy, for the sake of personal safety.

There are many examples of animals coming to surprising living arrangements. All are instances of that animal equivalent of anthropomorphism: zoomorphism, where an animal takes a human being, or another animal, to be one of its kind. The most famous case is also the most common: the pet dog, which has so assimilated humans into the realm of doghood as to want to mate with them, a fact that any dog owner who has had to pull an amorous dog from the leg of a mortified visitor will confirm[18].

If dogs and domestic animals can function as a childish alter-ego or as a mirror which flatters the one who looks in it, the tiger is not an Idealistic rewriting of the Self, but an identification with and an awareness of their negative sides, namely of those that fear and weakness regulate. No matter how necessary, knowing the tiger imposes distancing oneself from it, according to Pi’s father’s advice. Therefore, if we accept that Pi is closely connected to Richard Parker being a psycho-existential emanation of the first, it would be too simple to reduce Pi to Richard Parker. Despite sharing the same ontological substance, they are separate from one another, as there is an unsurpassable intra-ontological distance. The reason why Richard Parker exists, even if we see it as an image of the Self, is because within one entity there are distances, fractions, there is the enemy. The enemy can be the evil one, the one who saves itself in the detriment of others, the cannibal (the one who ate the hyena/the cook), but also the one which invalidates the expectations about the routine-eroded Self, the one built in accordance to a culture which imprints its traits onto those it subdues. Men are the most dangerous animals from the point of view of animals (“We commonly say in the trade that the most dangerous animal in a zoo is Man”[19]), but interpreting everything through the same chart, one might say that men are most dangerous, not only for animals, but for men as well. On the same page, Richard Parker articulates the inherently human nature of the enemy[20] on all levels: a generic level, a meta-literary level, in artistic creations and human stories alike.

The untamed other and the role of fantasy. Counteracting death

No matter if we choose the first interpretative key of Pi and Richard Parker’s relationship, according to which the tiger is a flesh and bone animal, or if we accept the second one, according to which Richard Parker is Pi’s untamed other[21], which Pi gets rid of once he ends his voyage at sea, Richard Parker remains a symbol-like figure of the enemy/foe, of the Other which cannot possibly be tamed[22]. In the first case, we speak of a perfectly External Other, whereas, in the second, of an Inner Other which still engages in ongoing tendencies to become external. Critics consider that the first variant is more likely to be chosen by readers with a developed religious spirit, who do not need proof and who do not hesitate to distance themselves from what is considered normal by common sense while the likelihood of choosing the second variant is higher for atheists or agnostics, as these rationalise everything and are more prone to believe in the miracle of a tiger-man sharing the same space for 227 days. From the point of view of the relationship with the Other, aside from the fact that there are only nuanced differences between the two possible enemies, there is a factor which is overlooked. Admitting that Richard Parker died after the boat sank, his place being taken by Pi’s illusory Self, we cannot say that the novel ceases to be a fantasy novel by becoming a realistic one which shares some fantasy elements. Realism, in this case, would be a meta-Realism, a fantasy subordinate element and nothing more. In other words, the fantasy break or rupture gives rise to the possibility of Realism, and not vice-versa. In fact, we might ask ourselves what might go best with Realism, a tiger and a boy that manage to survive together or a boy who resorts to cannibalism, who creates an imaginary enemy, becoming a schizoid, both a good and a bad person, a bad Self for which the character longs unconditionally.  It might be the case that the difference between the two possibilities is less severe, especially if we put an equal sign between Realism and Rationalism. At the end of the novel, Pi is quite ironic about the Japanese opting for the Realistic interpretation of the story. “You want a story that won’t surprise you. That will confirm what you already know. That won’t make you see higher or further or differently”[23].

We ask ourselves how much does such profound doubling meet the reader’s expectations, since it triggers the birth of the enemy/foe from within, it accepts it and admits to the invested love which makes people human. Yet, in the end, whether an animalistic or psychological emanation (criminal and irrational compared to normality) of Pi, Richard Parker is the untamed Other which proves necessary, paradoxically or not, to the character-narrator. Pi stands in front of another enemy, a stronger one, a complete one, an enemy which does not preserve the face of the one he hates (like the tiger does, in any of its two instances, by virtue of the alert state it maintains), but rather destroys and erases it. This enemy is death. Hiding death and stimulating one’s will to live (by virtue of an action-reaction response) are Richard Parker’s main merits and main reasons of the absurd love Pi carries for it, at first sight.

I will tell you a secret: a part of me was glad about Richard Parker. A part of me did not want Richard Parker to die at all, because if he died I would be left alone with despair, a foe even more formidable than a tiger. If I still had the will to live, it was thanks to Richard Parker. He kept me from thinking too much about my family and my tragic circumstances. He pushed me to go on living. I hated him for it, yet at the same time I was grateful. I am grateful. It’s the plain truth: without Richard Parker, I wouldn’t be alive today to tell you my story[24].

It is easier to see now that the main fantasy entertained by the novel is that the Other, irrespective of its friend or foe quality, more of a friend rather than foe, can counteract death[25], going beyond ethics. One can even claim that the foe/enemy figure is saved from death, and what saves the foe/enemy from death is fantasy (fantasy as genre, by extension, or even literature, by an even more generous extension), fact which discretely opposes, the entire range of positive discourses regarding the Other.

In Lieu of conclusion: the untamed Other is also good for your health

Life of Pi is proof of the fact that the untamed Other, without being “good” in the ethical sense, may be “good for your health”. In relation to Postmodernist discourses which exalt the intrinsic value of the Other and exorcise problematic differences, Martel’s novel imbues a subtle pedagogy, which can be resumed as follows: literature cannot afford to lose its authentic enemies and cannot, under the imperative of humanistic ideology (drifting from classical and modern humanism), transform the Other exclusively in the friend figure, and tame it till making every tension null. By the two available readings (actually, taking into account that they are revealed at the end of the book, it would be more fair to call it re-reading), the novel praises freedom of interpretation in general, but even more so the story’s freedom which is a religion for itself and on its own, and which manages to overcome any ideological discourse. As James Wood notices, this appraisal is one of the major elements which make the novel a Postmodernist one.

Nothing marks Life of Pi as a contemporary Postmodern novel more strongly than its theological impoverishment (for all that it seems to scream theological richness): instead of being interested in the theological basis of Pi’s soul, it is really interested only in the theological basis of storytelling[26].

It is worth noting that, in spite of everything, the Other, in Life of Pi, is not, in its essence, built on the Postmodernist pattern of positive portrayal and taming. However, it is Postmodernist if we think of it as a consequence of destroying the religious imperative of vision coherence. It should be noted that Pi embraces more than one religion (Hinduism, Christianity, Islamism). An approximate way of explaining the cultural substance of the Other, as represented in Martel’s novel, would be to say that it is Postmodernist, literarily speaking, and anti-Postmodernist, ideologically speaking.

Indeed, fantasy literature and, by extension, literature, might be one of the best (and maybe the last) standpoints where the Other is concealed as a fresh, cruel, authentic, surprising and ontologically reinforced entity.  It is the kind of standpoint which might offer the discrete energy that can re-insert the Other in the culture circuit, because stories do not avoid contrast and are based on their own laws. The aesthetic dimension is not a decorative mirroring of ethics necessarily, since ethics is all too often socially manipulated.

This paper received support from the Romanian National Council for Scientific Research CNCS-UEFISCDI, grant number 54/2011 – PNII TE.

Bibliography

Berger, Peter L. and Luckmann, Thomas, The Social Construction of Reality. A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge, Garden City, N.Y, Doubleday, 1966.

Cox, Gary, Sartre and Fiction, London, New York, Continuum, 2009.

Deloro, Cyrille, L’Autre. Petit traité de narcissisme intelligent, Paris, Larousse, 2009.

Dery, Jeruen, Book Review: Life of Pi by Yann Martel, http://blogcritics.org/book-review-life-of-pi-by2/, nov. 2011, last time consulted in 05.02.2014. 

Dumitrache, Silvia, “Supravieţuirea cu sinele sălbatic. Yann Martel Viaţa lui Pi” [Surviving the Savage Self. Yann Martel “Life of Pi”], bookaholic.ro, 2012, http://bookaholic.ro/supravietuirea-cu-sinele-salbatic-yann-martel, last time consulted in 05.02.2014. 

Girard, René and Vattimo, Gianni, Adevăr sau credinţă slabă? Convorbiri  despre creştinism şi relativism [Truth or Weak Thought? Conversations about Christianism and Relativism], edited by Pierpaolo Antonello, translated from Italian by Cornelia Dumitru, Bucureşti, Curtea Veche, 2009.

Glucksmann, André, Le discours de la haine, Paris, Plon, 2004.

Greer, W. R.,  “Life of Pi is a masterful story”, 2002, ReviewsOfBooks.com, http://www.reviewsofbooks.com/life_of_pi/review/, last time consulted in 05.02.2014. 

Jordan, Justine, “Animal magnetism”, in The Guardian, 25 May 2002, http://www.theguardian.com/books/2002/may/25/fiction.reviews1, last time consulted in 20.02.2014.

Krist, Gary, “Taming the Tiger”, in New York Times, 7 July, 2002, http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/07/books/taming-the-tiger.html, last time consulted in 05.02.2014. 

Lesourd, Serge, “La mélancolisation du sujet postmoderne ou la disparition de l’Autre”, in Cliniques méditerranéennes, N° 75, 2007/1, p. 13-26.

Lévinas,  Emmanuel, La Mort et le temps, Paris, Le Livre de poche, 1992.

Lipovetsky, Gilles, Le bonheur paradoxal. Essai sur la société d’hyperconsommation [Paradoxical happiness], Paris, Gallimard, 2006.

Lipovetsky, Gilles, Le Crépuscule du devoir [The Dawn of Duty], Paris, Gallimard, 1992.

Proulx, Paul-André, Vision chrétienne de la vie, 2003, http://www.litterature-quebecoise.com/oeuvres/lhistoiredepi.html, last time consulted in 20.02.2014.

Sartre, Jean-Paul, L’être et le néant. Essai d’ontologie phénoménologique, Paris, Gallimard, 1943.

Wood, James,  “Credulity”, in London Review of Books, Vol. 25, No 22, 14 nov 2002, p. 24-25, http://www.lrb.co.uk/v24/n22/james-wood/credulity, last time consulted in 05.02.2014. 

Notes

Adriana Teodorescu
1 December 1918 University,Alba Iulia
adriana.teodorescu@gmail.com

How a Fantastic Novel Constructs the Enemy Figure

The Untamed Other and the Role of Fantasy in Life of Pi

Abstract: This study seeks to bring out the aesthetic means of constructing the enemy/foe figure in the fantasy novel entitled Life of Pi by the Canadian author Yann Martel, published in 2001 and screened in 2012 by director Ang Lee. The main focus is on the literary, fantastic, configuration of the Bengali tiger, Richard Parker, a fictional character often minimised by literary criticism   with reference to its cultural meanings. We posit that even though Life of Pi is a postmodern novel, the way in which the author constructs the character contrasts with contemporary postmodern paradigm through which the Other is fully interpreted as a positive value. Our perspective will be based on different methodological instruments, combining diverse fields like literary critique, cultural studies or social anthropology.

Keywords: Yann Martel; Ang Lee; Life of Pi; Postmodernism; The Other; Enemy / Foe.

Introduction. The life of Pi, the life of the tiger

The fantasy novel Life of Pi, written by the Canadian author Yann Martel, was published in 2001 and adapted for the screen in 2012 by director Ang Lee. The book portrays the story of an Indian adolescent, Piscine Molitor Patel (whose nickname will become Pi). Pi is the son of an important Zoo owner inPondicherry (French India). Raised a vegetarian Hindi, Pi is very much passionate about religion and he approaches Hinduism, Christianity and Islamism, in order to understand God, by using the benefits of all three religions. He is passionate about the animal life and, from the very first pages, we find out about the fierce and frightening Bengali Tiger, Richard Parker, whose name comes about due to a printing mistake which mixes up the tiger’s name with the owner from which Pi’s family makes the purchase.

Unhappy with the political regime of Gandhi’s wife government, Pi’s father decides to immigrate toCanada, with his entire family and the animals from the Zoo. After travelling for a couple of days aboard a Japanese ship, a powerful storm sinks the ship and Pi loses his entire family (mother, father and brother). Pi is the only one who manages to survive on a lifeboat where 4 other animals get saved as well: a hyena, a zebra, an orang-utan, and Richard Parker. The hyena kills the zebra and then the orang-utan, after which the tiger eats the hyena. Pi will travel with the tiger for 227 days in the Pacific waters. In the beginning, he builds a device, a raft from scraps where he lives and sleeps. The raft is tied to the boat which enables him to keep a distance from the boat proper, so that he should not become the tiger’s food. Taking advantage of the tiger’s seasickness and other domination and communication strategies (whistling, yelling etc), Pi will give up the raft gradually and will live with Richard Parker on the same boat.

Pi fishes and eats tortoise, manages to feed the tiger with fish, and suffers from delirium and intense weakness. They reach an island which is apparently very welcoming, an island full of meerkats. Pi is forced to leave the island, though, because of the carnivorous vegetation growing there and he takes the tiger with him. A couple more days go by and storms unleash, so that both man and animal suffer from severe dehydration until they finally reach Mexican shores. The tiger disappears in the jungle, while Pi is found more dead than alive by locals and rushed to the hospital.

The last part of the novel presents the interviews Pi gives the Japanese officials who arrive to find information on the fate of the ship. The officials do not believe Pi’s story. A different interpretation is given to the entire event, one in which the tiger is Pi’s imaginary projection, the orang-utan the mother and the hyena the cook.

Aims of this study. In search of the enemy

Our research is by no means exhaustive, a goal that would be hard to attain, given the complexity of Martel’s work. Our research seeks to bring out the aesthetic means of constructing the enemy/foe figure. We will thus focus on the literary configuration of the Bengali tiger, Richard Parker, a fictional character that literary criticism tends to label as either a fantastic animal[1] or as an element of a shrouded religious allegory[2], therefore limiting its literary outreach to narrative mechanisms and anchoring the character within the fantasy-Realism tension. However, our research is not strictly limited to its literary consequences, a subsequent objective being to identify the social and cultural outreach of the way in which the character of Richard Parker is constructed.

Starting from the observation that the tiger clearly occupies the position of the Other, we set out to show that the way in which the author constructs the character contrasts with contemporary paradigm scope and aim, namely the drive to diminish the distance between I and You. It is the same paradigm which presupposes a discursive, ideological exaltation of the difference between the two anthropological instances, the same paradigm through which the Other is fully interpreted as a positive value. The Postmodern non-typicality of the Other is all the more interesting and investigation worthy from both a literary and cultural perspective, as Martel’s work is clearly anchored in Postmodernism.

On the same line with these research aims, our perspective will be based on different methodological instruments, combining diverse fields such as literature/literary criticism, cultural studies and social anthropology. The following section will briefly analyse some of the social mechanisms of cultural Postmodernist imagery which lead to the positive portrayal of the Other. The fourth section investigates the unique way in which the enemy figure is articulated, by taking into account the two ways in which the novel can be interpreted. This will show that, despite being different as literary substance, these two views converge towards the same social imagery of the Other, an imagery which will be examined in relation to fantasy in the 5^th part of the paper part of the paper. The last section, the conclusions, insists on the positive cultural significance of the untamed Other, frequently portrayed as negative entity.

Some major postmodernist ideological tendencies of configuring the Other. A critical perspective

Despite the fact that diversity is an implicit Postmodernist desideratum, Western contemporary culture stands out in the various discourses about the Other, by massively exorcising the problematic difference that it poses. In this respect, Gary Cox[3] notices how, nowadays, under the politically correct imperative, an individual’s insufficiencies, irrespective of the type, are always motivated by putting the blame on circumstances and the socio-cultural context. Strategies of the “politically correct” type seem to lessen the intensity of the reality according to which the Other cannot be always good. This is because the Other cannot always be credited by their individual existence standing against a social background. The same strategies, of a more culturally discursive, rather than political nature, show that if Postmodernism tries to appease differences it is only in order to accept all differences as qualitatively equal.

However, as Jean-Paul Sartre explains it in multiple ways[4], the true problem lies not in differences but in resemblance. To be more exact, the problem of meeting the Other does not go away by taming differences, as this encounter is an ontological matter. Placing the Other in positive spotlight, a specific Postmodernist technique, is natural or rather explicable up to a certain point. At a certain point, however, it becomes the fundamental underpinning of the social mechanisms which manipulate and discipline individuals. The immediate consequence is that the Other becomes stereotypical. The Other is given a positive portrayal on two layers: at the level of the Other’s content and at the level of engaging with the Other. In the first case, the Other is labelled positive, irrespective of its specificity, while, in the second case, positivity is given by virtue of one’s engaging with the Other, irrespective of the specificity of the two participants. The mere existence of a relationship is a good one, it is desirable and can only be pacifying.

We stop to discuss these aspects for a while. After humanity has finally learned, as a consequence of the two world wars, that the myth of Cain and Abel is valid, on a symbolical level, as the recurring story of inter-human hate, it is no wonder a series of non-discriminatory politics and discourses have flooded commercial and mass-media spaces alike. These types of discourse have moral and philosophical consequences[5], which stress for the need for harmony and brotherhood within a community, as well as for the necessity to accept the Other. Within the fertile soil of victims and victimization, the Other acquires an intrinsic value, leaving aside or discrediting older discourses like the ones of Girard,Hobbs or Sartre, which focused on less favourable aspects of the Other. Pier Paolo Antonello, in his introduction to the dialogue-book between Girard and Vattimo, makes an interesting point:

The entire ideological horizon of contemporary culture is indeed built around the central role victims play: Holocaust victims, victims of Capitalism, victims of social injustice, war victims, politically persecuted victims, victims of ecological disasters, racial/sexual/religious discrimination victims[6].

Postmodernism has the tendency to avenge the evil of Modernism, since Modernism makes intense use of post-Christian portrayals. As Vattimo explains, this Postmodernist tendency adds to the postmodern hyper-consumerism. After all, Vattimo is an Italian philosopher who has contributed, in some degree, to the cultural portrayal of the Other in a positive manner through his concept of ‘weak thought’. Lipovetsky notices, in his work Le bonheur paradoxal (Paradoxical Happiness)[7], that the generalised access to consume weakened the tension of inter-human relations, diminished the force of Nemesis– implicitly contradicting, a portion of the assumptions of La critique de la raison dialectique (The Critique of Dialectical Reason) (specifically Sartre-like in nature) which develops the idea of an inevitable fight for food, resources leading to inter-human conflict. By the same token, Lipovetsky, in Le Crépuscule du devoir  (The Dawn of Duty)[8], explains how the Other is more and more easily acceptable since Postmodernist ethics sweetened the idea of sacrifice and self-abandonment for another being. Narcissism means lesser attention to the needs of the Other and no matter how bizarre it would seem, a greater tolerance for it, precisely because the subject is too turned on itself to become truly worried by the problems the Other may have. In addition, Lipovetsky believes that the relationship with the Other steps away from ethics because it enters the zone of a hyper-consumerism show. However, as Lipovetsky also notices, man’s happiness with his own Self and with the Other always leaves traces and eventually generates a feeling of void and emptiness.

The Other seems to pose fewer problems for Postmodernism, at least in some of its areas, alongside its ontological relaxation. The Other, often a tele-visual figure of non-problematic distance, is easier to accept. But it is not a flesh and blood Other which is accepted, but its shadow, precisely because the ontology of the Other is setting, it is coming to an end.

In La mélancolisation du sujet postmoderne ou la disparition de l’Autre[9], French psychiatrist Serge Lesourd notices one important feature of Postmodernist imagery and discourse is to get rid of the Other, a fact which has dramatic individual consequences. Disappearance, abandonment, and the destruction of the Other must be understood in a positive sense, even though the author does not use this precise word. The positive view begins by pooling the Others together under the overarching umbrella which Lesourd calls Man, mediator of the I-Other relationship. The author also reveals the way in which the Other, demoted by being reduced to object, becomes a continuous source of jouissance, in the good tradition of a consumerist age, a frustrating sort of jouissance since the subject which is looking for fulfilment cannot go beyond the inherent incompleteness of his being. This is a truth which the great religions understood and translated into morality and narrative, as Lesourd says. Happiness exists, the Other can be good and fully accessible on condition that the individual who is apt at participating in perfect relations be already dead. The Paradisiacal brotherhood images Christianity promises are based on such mechanisms. It is an aspect Postmodernism is intent on playing with its cards in sight, but which it now fails to understand.

The Postmodernist paradigm of portraying the Other in a positive way is a deficient paradigm. And, indeed, it is strange to think that, while we speak of the Other in positive terms, terrorism, intolerance and massive discrimination are just as present, even if it seems like denying them, at first sight[10]. From this point of view, Cyrille Deloro’s words are all the more profound:

The Other has become a commercial slogan: love one another, the Other ‘is good for you’…but this is not true. The more we pacify our relations, the less the Other exists. We have become “human, too human”! We thus see the other break in abstract and terrifying manners, which make the world a place of horror and transform subjectivity in a battle field. And all these others are radical Others: terrorists of the outer world, metastases of the inner world[11].

Deloro describes the way in which schizophrenics are incapable of mentally or imaginarily configuring the concept of Other. There are only Others, too many, too real, impossible to pin down under a theoretical label. Deloro explains that what is damaged in Schizophrenia is the impersonal nature of the Other, leaving the infinite and overwhelming instances of the Other untouched. The paradigm of the positive Other risks to suffer from a sort of anti-Schizophrenia, so that the Other is not portrayed as much happier. By focusing too much on the Other as an inner-impersonal structure and by applying the necessary positive corrections to it, the contemporary world risks to paralyse the free, unpredictable, difficult, cumbersome relationship with the Other. It is the same relationship which has given rise to art, culture. The Other is not an indisputable value since its meaning resides little in morality, but heavily in Ontology.

Starting from the end: two literary constructions of the enemy

We will first tackle the way in which the enemy/foe figure is configured, starting from the fantasy nature of the book, challenged only at the end of the novel by Pi Patel. By the end of the book, Pi Patel demotes the story to a mere figment of imagination by failing to assume it as narrative. If Richard Parker were an animal, a tiger, an aggressive, unpredictable animal, then it would represent not only the Difference (as qualitative diversity) we discussed earlier, but also Distance. In contrast to Piscine, Richard Parker instantiates the Distance which incorporates radical Difference. This Difference is impossible to abolish socially and ontologically, in spite of the entire range of discourses which claim to make it null. Distance is no longer established between an I and a You whose meeting possibilities are socially prescribed. We refer to a Distance type which is poorly assumed by the community. Actually, strictly speaking, community consent would be insufficient, as it would also need the consent of the animal community. The man-animal perspective can only be anthropocentric and, therefore, no matter how well intentioned (which is not always the case), it is flawed, incomplete and unilateral. Diverging a bit, in order to clear some aspects, it must be noted that Hollywood’s boundless appetite for scripts in which men discover their affinities with the animal kingdom are proof not only of the reciprocal desire of getting closer to a fundamentally different Other, but also of an exotic view which produces interest in assimilation and interpretation. Such exotic views, structurally, are nothing more than a subtle, narcissistic self-mirroring[12]. It is why, most of the times, the Animal-Other is a domestic animal, an animal over which man has already shown supremacy and domination.

To return to Richard Parker, we notice that it is the enemy throughout the story. Richard Parker carries death and murder. It is equally empowered and driven to take life. Irrespective of how man-tiger relations develop, Pi is constantly threatened by Richard Parker. This will not change throughout the story, not even after the storm, when the two are thrown at the bottom of the boat and they share a brief, semi-voluntary moment of tenderness. We made reference to the positive portrayal of the Other, which is actually equivalent to its assimilation as friend. Positive portrayal implies the denial of the dual character of any relation and, ultimately, of any human reality. However, a dissipation of the dual register would also occur whenever the Other is fully equated as a negative element. Richard Parker is not the nihilistic enemy/foe type. There is a positive thread which goes across the conflicting relationship of Pi and the tiger, a thread which cannot bring back equilibrium and cannot continually adjust the relationship towards the negative pole[13].

Pi’s relationship with the tiger develops under two contrastive signs on the boat where they manage to survive, namely through socially ontological bonding and through separation. These two means of bonding come in succession, cyclically, from the beginning of the boat experience until the tiger reaches Mexican shores and disappears without a trace. As a result, the bond between the tiger and Pi is partly social, partly ontological. It is social because it is contextually-driven, triggered by the overall social resettlement, from a normal situation in which the animal was locked in a Zoo or on the ship where both Pi and his parents kept a secure, comforting distance from the animals. After this normality is shattered as a result of the boat sinking, the chance cohabitation of Pi and Richard Parker allowed for, or better said led to an atypical form of man-animal social bonding, where the bonding process is not option-based, but context-based and mandatory.

The bonding process is ontological as well (triggered by social factors) because, once social space is reconfigured, there are major changes for the two protagonists: Richard Parker develops a greater tolerance for its urge to devour Pi’s flesh, settling for the fish offered by his boat mate and for the flesh of the fisherman they encounter at large, where the latter, the fisherman, adopts an animal-like behaviour by regressing to a non-cultural, or a cultural, restrictions-free state where survival, feeding and thirst quenching are of the utmost importance. Seen as a structure built on subjective-objective rendering processes, reality[14] becomes diluted. What remains are the things in the nearby proximity which can be touched. It is quite understandable for Pi to keep memories of the more complicated structures of reality, a fact which is very clear when he daydreams, when he thinks of his mother or he remembers symbols or has visual religious glances. When he loses the diary in which he jots down his experiences and activities, he, in fact, loses his cultural Other and sits face to face with the radical, unknown, untamed, non-human Other. Among others, bonding with the tiger illustrates the human need for relations, outside Christian ethics. There is also a slight undermining of this ethics, because the man gets closer to the animal, not to one of his fellow beings. In addition, it does not bond in a paradisiacal afterlife where differences serve a decorative, non-functional purpose, but in a fantastic life, alternative to the real one, where differences do not matter so much anymore since they are contextually-driven (tiger and man live together, eat and sleep together). However, differences are still threatening, tensed, despite being diminished on a first level of interaction.

As far as the tiger is concerned, even before the destruction of the classic man-animal habitation space, the tiger is drawn towards his human side by the Indian boy in several ways (the animal goes through a process of humanization). First, the tiger bears a human name: Richard Parker (even if everything starts from a transcription error). It is worth noting that names and naming are two important aspects for Pi Patel, as the first pages of the book show. In these initial chapters, the character names himself Pi, instead of Piscine. The name is not a simple etiquette, but an extra-personal history which gets attached to personal history, almost becoming an integral part of it. Second, this is highlighted by Pi’s attempt to bond with the tiger, an attempt punished by his father, who teaches him the lesson of the insurmountable difference between man and animal and the inherent evil nature of the tiger. Above all, his father’s lesson refers to the necessity of knowing one’s enemy, as this is a vital issue. The ultimate lesson is to mistake the Other with Another, as this sometimes poses life risks.

In any case, it is quite hard to distinguish between a strict social bond and a strict ontological one. Instead, we can consider that they intermingle as a unity, as a linguistic sign which, in its pragmatic dimension, is simultaneously the expression as well as the expressed content, the signifiant and the signifié, to use a Structuralist framework.

As one can deduce from the issues so far discussed, Distance is the other side of Pi and Richard Parker’s relation. This is present when we notice Pi’s vigilance while being with the tiger on the boat. Pi is always aware of the death the tiger might bring him. Pi, therefore, engages the tiger in domination, befriending and taming strategies[15]. Distance, as a relational mechanism, manifests itself quite strong when the tiger eats the hyena, when the fisherman they meet by chance[16] in the Pacific, is disembodied by the tiger, but even more when Richard Parker disappears without a trace.

That bungled goodbye hurts me to this day. I wish so much that I’d had one last look at him in the lifeboat, that I’d provoked him a little, so that I was on his mind. I wish I had said to him then-yes, I know, to a tiger, but still-I wish I had said, “Richard Parker, it’s over. We have survived. Can you believe it? I owe you more gratitude than I can express. I couldn’t have done it without you. I would like to say it formally: Richard Parker, thank you. Thank you for saving my life. And now go where you must. You have known the confined freedom of a zoo most of your life; now you will know the free confinement of a jungle. I wish you all the best with it. Watch out for Man.He is not your friend. But I hope you will remember me as a friend. I will never forget you, that is certain. You will always be with me, in my heart. What is that hiss? Ah, our boat has touched sand. So farewell, Richard Parker, farewell. God be with you”[17].

Practically, the end is proof of the fact that Pi’s relation to Richard Parker could never go beyond the man-tiger matrix relation and that Richard Parker did not become Pi Patel’s friend, despite their bond,. Distance alternates with bonding, as noted earlier, but the first is always stronger, exerting its effects on its counterpart. Pi’s bond with the tiger will never become a full fusion, so that they may be indistinguishable. The distance between the two is irreducible. The tiger leaves without being engaged in gestures which might suggest an anthropomorphic interpretation – the tiger is never aware that the jungle which opens up in front of him brings the freedom he never had, neither at Pondicherry Zoo, or at sea. On the other hand, Pi is too tired to behave in accordance with a typical novel-like manner. Pi does not tell the tiger good-bye, since all the tender words that he addresses the tiger are said after Pi parts with the tiger (“I wish I had said”), which makes these words to be words about the tiger. The true Other, the interlocutor, the one who is the You, is, at this point, the book’s reader. The savage nature of the Animal-Other is highlighted once again. At the same time, this goodbye which is a form of discursive regret and of the “what if” philosophy, is a corollary of Pi’s withdrawal from his relationship with an unknown and uncomfortable Other. On a Freudian note, relational libido is re-cast onto the Similar-Other figure, a situation in which death lurks less. And yet, the one who comes back from the sea voyage is not the same with the one who embarked on the voyage. The untamed Other becomes an integral part of Pi’s self, because it is an element which Pi overcomes and which is reciprocal.

If, however, we take into consideration the interpretation of the two Japanese who interview Pi, and therefore consider the entire story to be Pi’s invention and the tiger his personified Self, an imaginative by-product crated by Pi to cope with the dire life conditions on the ocean, the man-tiger relationship appears to be an internal relationship which has no roots in material reality. Regression is more of a psychical, rather than social nature and brings back a part of the reality which Pi knew until the tragic accident: the fact that there was a tiger called Richard Parker, reticent, by its own nature, to human bonding, a tiger which is tied to the Pi’s father life lesson. According to this lesson, man must not consider all animals as friends, but must, instead, know his enemy, for the sake of personal safety.

There are many examples of animals coming to surprising living arrangements. All are instances of that animal equivalent of anthropomorphism: zoomorphism, where an animal takes a human being, or another animal, to be one of its kind. The most famous case is also the most common: the pet dog, which has so assimilated humans into the realm of doghood as to want to mate with them, a fact that any dog owner who has had to pull an amorous dog from the leg of a mortified visitor will confirm[18].

If dogs and domestic animals can function as a childish alter-ego or as a mirror which flatters the one who looks in it, the tiger is not an Idealistic rewriting of the Self, but an identification with and an awareness of their negative sides, namely of those that fear and weakness regulate. No matter how necessary, knowing the tiger imposes distancing oneself from it, according to Pi’s father’s advice. Therefore, if we accept that Pi is closely connected to Richard Parker being a psycho-existential emanation of the first, it would be too simple to reduce Pi to Richard Parker. Despite sharing the same ontological substance, they are separate from one another, as there is an unsurpassable intra-ontological distance. The reason why Richard Parker exists, even if we see it as an image of the Self, is because within one entity there are distances, fractions, there is the enemy. The enemy can be the evil one, the one who saves itself in the detriment of others, the cannibal (the one who ate the hyena/the cook), but also the one which invalidates the expectations about the routine-eroded Self, the one built in accordance to a culture which imprints its traits onto those it subdues. Men are the most dangerous animals from the point of view of animals (“We commonly say in the trade that the most dangerous animal in a zoo is Man”[19]), but interpreting everything through the same chart, one might say that men are most dangerous, not only for animals, but for men as well. On the same page, Richard Parker articulates the inherently human nature of the enemy[20] on all levels: a generic level, a meta-literary level, in artistic creations and human stories alike.

The untamed other and the role of fantasy. Counteracting death

No matter if we choose the first interpretative key of Pi and Richard Parker’s relationship, according to which the tiger is a flesh and bone animal, or if we accept the second one, according to which Richard Parker is Pi’s untamed other[21], which Pi gets rid of once he ends his voyage at sea, Richard Parker remains a symbol-like figure of the enemy/foe, of the Other which cannot possibly be tamed[22]. In the first case, we speak of a perfectly External Other, whereas, in the second, of an Inner Other which still engages in ongoing tendencies to become external. Critics consider that the first variant is more likely to be chosen by readers with a developed religious spirit, who do not need proof and who do not hesitate to distance themselves from what is considered normal by common sense while the likelihood of choosing the second variant is higher for atheists or agnostics, as these rationalise everything and are more prone to believe in the miracle of a tiger-man sharing the same space for 227 days. From the point of view of the relationship with the Other, aside from the fact that there are only nuanced differences between the two possible enemies, there is a factor which is overlooked. Admitting that Richard Parker died after the boat sank, his place being taken by Pi’s illusory Self, we cannot say that the novel ceases to be a fantasy novel by becoming a realistic one which shares some fantasy elements. Realism, in this case, would be a meta-Realism, a fantasy subordinate element and nothing more. In other words, the fantasy break or rupture gives rise to the possibility of Realism, and not vice-versa. In fact, we might ask ourselves what might go best with Realism, a tiger and a boy that manage to survive together or a boy who resorts to cannibalism, who creates an imaginary enemy, becoming a schizoid, both a good and a bad person, a bad Self for which the character longs unconditionally.  It might be the case that the difference between the two possibilities is less severe, especially if we put an equal sign between Realism and Rationalism. At the end of the novel, Pi is quite ironic about the Japanese opting for the Realistic interpretation of the story. “You want a story that won’t surprise you. That will confirm what you already know. That won’t make you see higher or further or differently”[23].

We ask ourselves how much does such profound doubling meet the reader’s expectations, since it triggers the birth of the enemy/foe from within, it accepts it and admits to the invested love which makes people human. Yet, in the end, whether an animalistic or psychological emanation (criminal and irrational compared to normality) of Pi, Richard Parker is the untamed Other which proves necessary, paradoxically or not, to the character-narrator. Pi stands in front of another enemy, a stronger one, a complete one, an enemy which does not preserve the face of the one he hates (like the tiger does, in any of its two instances, by virtue of the alert state it maintains), but rather destroys and erases it. This enemy is death. Hiding death and stimulating one’s will to live (by virtue of an action-reaction response) are Richard Parker’s main merits and main reasons of the absurd love Pi carries for it, at first sight.

I will tell you a secret: a part of me was glad about Richard Parker. A part of me did not want Richard Parker to die at all, because if he died I would be left alone with despair, a foe even more formidable than a tiger. If I still had the will to live, it was thanks to Richard Parker. He kept me from thinking too much about my family and my tragic circumstances. He pushed me to go on living. I hated him for it, yet at the same time I was grateful. I am grateful. It’s the plain truth: without Richard Parker, I wouldn’t be alive today to tell you my story[24].

It is easier to see now that the main fantasy entertained by the novel is that the Other, irrespective of its friend or foe quality, more of a friend rather than foe, can counteract death[25], going beyond ethics. One can even claim that the foe/enemy figure is saved from death, and what saves the foe/enemy from death is fantasy (fantasy as genre, by extension, or even literature, by an even more generous extension), fact which discretely opposes, the entire range of positive discourses regarding the Other.

In Lieu of conclusion: the untamed Other is also good for your health

Life of Pi is proof of the fact that the untamed Other, without being “good” in the ethical sense, may be “good for your health”. In relation to Postmodernist discourses which exalt the intrinsic value of the Other and exorcise problematic differences, Martel’s novel imbues a subtle pedagogy, which can be resumed as follows: literature cannot afford to lose its authentic enemies and cannot, under the imperative of humanistic ideology (drifting from classical and modern humanism), transform the Other exclusively in the friend figure, and tame it till making every tension null. By the two available readings (actually, taking into account that they are revealed at the end of the book, it would be more fair to call it re-reading), the novel praises freedom of interpretation in general, but even more so the story’s freedom which is a religion for itself and on its own, and which manages to overcome any ideological discourse. As James Wood notices, this appraisal is one of the major elements which make the novel a Postmodernist one.

Nothing marks Life of Pi as a contemporary Postmodern novel more strongly than its theological impoverishment (for all that it seems to scream theological richness): instead of being interested in the theological basis of Pi’s soul, it is really interested only in the theological basis of storytelling[26].

It is worth noting that, in spite of everything, the Other, in Life of Pi, is not, in its essence, built on the Postmodernist pattern of positive portrayal and taming. However, it is Postmodernist if we think of it as a consequence of destroying the religious imperative of vision coherence. It should be noted that Pi embraces more than one religion (Hinduism, Christianity, Islamism). An approximate way of explaining the cultural substance of the Other, as represented in Martel’s novel, would be to say that it is Postmodernist, literarily speaking, and anti-Postmodernist, ideologically speaking.

Indeed, fantasy literature and, by extension, literature, might be one of the best (and maybe the last) standpoints where the Other is concealed as a fresh, cruel, authentic, surprising and ontologically reinforced entity.  It is the kind of standpoint which might offer the discrete energy that can re-insert the Other in the culture circuit, because stories do not avoid contrast and are based on their own laws. The aesthetic dimension is not a decorative mirroring of ethics necessarily, since ethics is all too often socially manipulated.

This paper received support from the Romanian National Council for Scientific Research CNCS-UEFISCDI, grant number 54/2011 – PNII TE.

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Notes