Yann Martel’s Life of Pi and Poe’s Pym (and “Berenice”)

Abstract

T races of Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838) in other literary texts are not hard to discover. Jules Verne’s Le Sphinx des glaces (1897), Charles Romyn Dake’s A Strange Discovery (1899), and H. P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness (1936) are all sequels to Pym. In Henry James’s Golden Bowl (1904), Prince Amerigo recalls the conclusion of Poe’s narrative. And while Melville does not so specifically acknowledge the influence of Pym on Moby-Dick (1851), most informed readers are now comfortable with that assumption. Following in latter-day succession, the Canadian author Yann Martel (born in Salamanca, Spain) has acknowledged, in a limited way, the influence of Pym on his successful 2001 novel Life of Pi, but the full extent of that influence has not been recognized. This essay aims at establishing the homage-style presence of Pym throughout Martel’s novel, which emerges as a kind of palimpsest text: Pym is recurrently visible beneath its surface. Martel’s novel is about a sixteen-year-old Indian boy named Pi who survives the sinking of a cargo ship (with zoo animals aboard) on a lifeboat— in the company, at first, of a spotted hyena, a zebra, an orang-utan, and a 450-pound Royal Bengal tiger named Richard Parker. But after the hyena has eaten the orang-utan and the zebra, and the tiger has eaten the hyena, Pi and Richard Parker are the sole occupants of the lifeboat, left to drift for over seven months in the Pacific. (Pi’s ex-zoo-owner father and his mother and brother went down with the cargo ship.) This narrative was the deserving winner of the prestigious Man Booker Prize in 2002, and the resultant publicity was swiftly accompanied by a plagiarism controversy. In the last paragraph of his “Author’s Note,” Martel affirms of his novel, “As for the spark of life, I owe it to Mr. Moacyr Scliar” [Life of Pi (Edinburgh: Canongate Books Ltd., 2003), xiv]. The Brazilian novelist’s Max e os Felinos (1981, published in English as Max and the Cats in 1990) is about a Jewish-German refugee who crosses the Atlantic in a boat shared with a jaguar. Martel claims not to have read Scliar’s novel before writing Life of Pi, but he had read at least one review of it. The most important source of Life of Pi—Poe’s Pym—is not mentioned in the “Author’s Note” or (in any direct way) in the novel of which the note is a part. My