Alterity in the fiction of Yann Martel

Introduction

“Where are you from?” the boy asked.

“From many places.”

“No one can be from many places,” the boy said. “I’m a shepherd, and I have been to many places, but I come from only one place—from a city near an ancient castle (Coelho 19).

The conversation between Santiago and King Melchizedek throws some light on the cosmopolitan nature of English literature and that of the writer Yann Martel.

The English literature of the present era is a conglomeration of English literatures from across the globe. It is no longer literature produced only by the British or the Americans as can be seen from the inclusion into the literary canon of writers from colonies of Britain such as Africa, Asia, Australia, the Caribbean and Canada. This broadening of the English literary canon to accommodate writers from across the globe is evident from the lists for both the Nobel Prize laureates for Literature and for Man Booker prize-winners. In the last forty years, only two Englishmen have won the Nobel Prize for literature. The Booker Prize originally instituted for good writing from the Commonwealth nations is mostly won by writers from the former colonies. These two prizes have contributed greatly in creating a niche for postcolonial writers in the global market. Thus the twenty first century literature in English is not just limited to the English literature produced in England but is "a planetary affair with diversified traditions and histories in very different parts of the world" (Eckstein 13).

The reason for the popularity of postcolonial writers was the stale condition of English literature during the postmodern era. There was dearth of original writing in English literature as it had become ‘the literature of exhaustion’, a term that stands for the repetition of the same themes and motifs in literature. Many writers of the postcolonial nations were accommodated into the literary canon as these writers were mostly from the postcolonial nations and they wrote in English, the language that was given to them by the colonisers.  The following terms, ‘Commonwealth literature’ and ‘Postcolonial Literatures in English’ and ‘New Literatures in English’ English’ were used interchangeably used to refer to this growing mass of literature that was produced by former colonies of England. The fresh world-views and experiences dealt by these postcolonial writers were new reading experiences for the English reader and these writings from the colonized gained admission into the English literary canon.

Canadian Literature in English is one of the many postcolonial literatures in English that are produced by the former colonies of nations that were once colonised by the British. Though the national literature called Canadian literature in English emerged only during the twentieth century, it began to develop a national consciousness that found its expression in the works of many famous writers and led to the establishment of many literary prizes for exceptional writing in Canada. Not only are contemporary Canadian writers read across the globe, they have also achieved many literary prizes and honours for exceptional writing. Since the 1980s has seen many great writers such as as Rudy Wiebe, Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, Timothy Findley, Carol Shields, Jane Urquhart, Aritha van Herk and also Canadian writers of non-European origin such as Joy Kogawa, Kerri Sakamoto, Michael Ontaadje, Rohinton Mistry, M.G. Vassanji, Cyril Dabydeen, and Neil Bissoondath. Among the postmodern Canadian writers, Margaret Atwood, Michael Oontaadje and Yann Martel have won the Man Booker Prize for fiction.

Yann Martel was relatively unknown writer until his novel Life of Pi won the Booker Prize.However, this novel shot him into fame and made him into an literary figure in Canada and all around the world. He is a true cosmopolitan as he was a globetrotter until he finally settled down in Canada after taking up a full time career as a writer. Martel was born in Salamanca in Spain in 1963 and his parents were from Quebec. They were diplomats in Foreign Service and his childhood was spent in Costa Rica, Spain, Mexico and Canada. After finishing his studies, he travelled to India to study religion and to Turkey. He has a degree in philosophy from Trent University in Ontario, which explains the deep philosophical taste of his writing.  After graduation, he worked as a tree planter, dishwasher and security guard. Finally he took up writing as a full time career and now lives in Montreal with his long-time partner and writer Alice Kuipers and their son. Martel has travelled widely, he does not consider himself to be a citizen of the world:

I'm Canadian. I don’t believe there are citizens of the world. Everyone is from somewhere, rooted in a particular culture. We're also citizens of the languages we speak. Some people speak many languages- I speak three, I'm a citizen of English, French and Spanish- but no one speaks World. World is not a language (Sielke 19).

Yann Martel is a typically postmodern writer and his works are characterised by the same elements of postmodernism that dictate the fiction of many of the contemporary writers. Postmodernism in fiction meant the existence of metafiction that talk about the act of writing, fragmented view of reality, lack of spatial or temporal time, self-referentiality, use of magic realism, combination of extracts, essays, lists, facts, history and biography within the same text of fiction, experimentation with language, use of paradox, use of pastiche that collages different styles and genres, split subjects, alternate versions of reality, subversion of existing systems such as government, religion and. Capitalism. Like most of the postmodernist writers, Martel also raises certain issues but does not offer any closure on any of them. Instead his works have a dialogic quality and the various components interact together to create a continuous discussion on the themes. The postmodern in Canada as seen in Martel is:

an expression of democratic spirit against the authoritarian, upon naturalness of language, and upon fragment-structures of thought and feeling without undue anxiety about the absence of reconciliatory and conservative structures of meaning” (Stacey 314).

But looking at the influences on Martel’s writing and his favourite books, he belongs to the tradition not just of Canadian literature but that of European, English and American literatures. He uses many postmodern techniques to subvert conventional viewpoints.

Martel claims to have an eclectic way of reading. He was inspired by great literary giants such as Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Gogol, Thomas Hardy, Charles Dickens, Joseph Conrad, Hemingway, Faulkner, Sinclair Lewis, Willa Carther and J.M. Coetzee. But the writer who has influenced him the most is Dante Alighieri as can be seen from his names of the characters as Beatrice and Virgil. Similarly George Orwell’s Animal Farm has had a great impact on Martel, who was impressed by the way in which Orwell has portrayed the Russian life during the time of Stalin through the use of an allegory of the life of animals in a farm. Orwell has used the details of an animal commune instead of historical facts to transform the essence of the Russian Revolution into art and Martel aims to do the same transformation.

During the academic year 2002 to 2003, Martel acted as the Samuel Fischer Professor of Literature in the Department of Comparative Literature, Free University of Berlin, where he offered a seminar titled “Meeting the Other: The Animal in Western Literature”. This seminar studied the animal figures that occurred in Western literature, a technique that has had a considerable influence on Martel. The texts that were dealt in the seminar ranged from the Bible to J. M. Coetzee. He talks of the difference between Judaism and Christianity in the treatment of animals. Judaism showed humanity as guardians of the animal world and had a personal relationship with each animal as they tabulated all animals into clean and unclean for eating. Similarly, the Jews gave a lot of emphasis to the Holy Land and had a strong sense of place in that their Holy Land was real with real geographical features, real trees and flowers and real animals. However, Chrsitainity is focused on Christ who moves from one place to another. There are animals in the New Testament such as the donkey on which Christ rides or the cock that crows when Jesus is betrayed. But Martel is of the opinion that these are symbolic animals. He also points out the absence of animals in Shakespeare’s plays that were concerned entirely about human nature.

Martel is of the opinion that all human beings are story animals and that animals have no stories unlike human beings:

Leopards, pandas, koalas, lizards are not story animals, they have no stories. We have stories and that makes us unique and that’s what we’re entirely about.  We are not economic animals, although we do have economies, we’re not political animals, although we do have politics.  At the saddest, saddest thing in human terms, is to have a human being who has no stories.  Because the human who has no stories is someone who has not been loved and has not been able to love.  As soon as you engage yourself in being human, you start developing stories. These stories may not be good stories but they define your identity in a few words. (Martel).

For Martel, storytelling is a way of bringing various concepts such as the relation between the self and the Other.

        The main feature of almost all of Martel’s works is the idea of alterity or the Other.Other means anyone who is separate from one’s self.  The existence of the Other is essential in defining normalcy and also for locating one’s own identity in the world. It was used by the existentialist philosopher Sartre to define the relations between Self and Other in creating self –awareness and ideas of identity. The Otheris also used in the sense used since Foucault consists of people such as homosexuals, the insane, women, non-Europeans and prisoners, who are excluded from positions of power, victimised and denied their political rights by the powerful. The Other occurs in Martel’s works as the sexual Other in Self, that of the religious Other in Life of Pi and that of the racial Other and animal Other in Beatrice and Virgil. Martel advocates the need to have an empathetic imagination as it can become a psychotherapeutic tool: