Author Yann Martel is best known for his popular novel Life of Pi, about a boy who explores his spirituality while stranded on a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger.
Martel will give a talk called “Healing Journeys: Crossing the Pacific, Dealing with Trauma” as part of the Western Michigan University’s healing arts speaker series Thursday at 7 p.m. at Miller Auditorium. The event is free.
Finding Answers Through Storytelling
Martel says stories can give meaning to our lives. He says stories have a defined beginning, middle, and end, while our day to day lives tend aren’t as linear and can even be a little boring.
“What storytelling has the capacity to do is select out of the randomness of life key elements that do give meaning,” says Martel.
Understanding Religion
Martel says he wrote Life of Pi in an attempt to understand why people have faith. Martel says in his early 30s, he did not see religion as logical and often criticized organized religions for practicing intolerance. But when he went to India, things changed. While examining Hinduism—a religion he did not know much about—he saw religion in a different light.
“I suddenly realized those things that we hate about religion is only part of the story,” Martel says. “Not every person who’s religious is out to put women in the kitchen, put down jews and gays, etc.”
Martel says writing Life of Pi did give him faith, but didn’t necessarily bring him to organized religion. He says he feels comfortable “in any God house.” Martel says he believes that all religions have pieces that are interesting and nuggets of truth.
Animals As Animals In Story
Martel says there are several reasons why he chose to add the Bengal tiger Richard Parker into Life of Pi. Firstly, he got some inspiration from a review of a Brazilian novel where a human and an animal spend time together in a life boat.
Second, Martel says that India—where the main character Pi Patel is from—is more integrated with animals than the West. In the streets there are cows, monkeys, and other beasts roaming around large cities. Third, animals often appear in Indian mythology. And unlike in Christianity, where animals are sometimes used for their symbolic nature in the story, animals in India were merely portrayed as animals. There’s a religious reason too:
“We are all animals. We are subject to the same kinds of instincts that animals are: fear, hunger, territoriality, sex drive. All of those are part of us, but at the same time unique among animals we have this capacity to imagine, this capacity to aspire—which animals don’t. And the greatest example of those aspirations is religion.”
